Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [147]
The Communists, from the other side of the fence, were equally suspicious of developments. The Franco-British pact which they opposed so resolutely came into effect on 4 March as the Treaty of Dunkirk, a place chosen by Bidault to symbolize the darkest moment of the war. For Socialists such as Blumand Depreux, it signified a counterbalance to the Franco-Soviet pact signed by de Gaulle. Afterwards Duff Cooper, who had worked long and hard for this expression of friendship between the two countries, felt able to write in his diary: ‘Nunc dimittis’. He had achieved his principal aimin his last job.
Six days later the foreign ministers of the Big Four – General Marshall, Bidault, Bevin and Molotov – met in Moscow. Only Marshall and Bevin knew that post-war relations were about to take a decisive turn. For Bidault, the Moscow conference represented a Soviet betrayal. He felt he had behaved most correctly with Molotov, but the Soviet Foreign Minister, having encouraged his hopes that the Saar would be given to France, refused to support her claim in a volte-face which humiliated Bidault personally. He did not forget this. Molotov was equally unforgiving. He regarded the Treaty of Dunkirk as a move aimed directly against the Soviet Union.
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General George C. Marshall, one of the most honest and selfless of all American public servants, had become Secretary of State on 21 January 1947. He was not a ‘hawk’, but he was more resolute than James Byrnes and a thorough pragmatist. He expected ‘brutal candour’ from his staff, and assured them that he had no feelings ‘except those which I reserve for Mrs Marshall’.
At the end of February, the State Department was warned by the British ambassador in Washington that the collapse of Britain’s economy meant that no further support could be provided to Greece, then in the midst of civil war, or to Turkey, still threatened by Soviet probing on its north-eastern frontier. President Truman summoned a conference with Congressional leaders in the White House on the morning of Wednesday, 26 February. As a mark of how far things had changed, the most passionate advocate of American intervention to thwart the Soviet threat came from Marshall’s deputy, Dean Acheson – the same man who had been appalled by the plan to move troops into France the previous May. ‘When we were convened to open the subject,’ Acheson wrote dramatically, ‘I knew we were met at Armageddon.’
‘Soviet pressure on the Straits [the Dardanelles],’ he told the Congressmen, ‘on Iran and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.’ After Acheson had finished speaking, ‘a long silence followed’. Then Senator Vandenberg said solemnly, ‘Mr President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.’
Predictions of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union were developing into a self-fulfilling prophecy on both sides. Few in Washington doubted that ‘a major turning point in American history was taking place’. On 12 March, President Truman