If the British general election of July 5, 1945 had gone differently, Winston Churchill would have stayed at Potsdam for the entire conference. As it happened, Churchill was replaced on July 28 — mid-summit — by the incoming Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee. The Potsdam Conference (July 17 – August 2, 1945) was otherwise the third and final meeting of the “Big Three”: President Harry S. Truman, on his 80th day in office; Premier Joseph Stalin, determined to translate the Red Army’s position into political gains; and Churchill for the opening ten days before flying home to defeat. Each leader brought a substantial delegation of foreign ministers, military chiefs, and policy advisors.
President Harry S. Truman
Truman was in his 80th day as president when he arrived in Potsdam on July 15, 1945. He had been kept in the dark about most major foreign-policy initiatives by Roosevelt, who had served barely three months with his vice president before his death on April 12. Truman had moved quickly to assert his own direction: he had announced the policy of unconditional surrender at a press conference in May, replaced Henry Stimson and Henry Morgenthau at key positions, and committed the United States to the new United Nations.
Truman’s principal delegation included Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, the former senator from South Carolina who had been a close political confidant of Roosevelt and a key player in domestic Democratic politics; Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall; and Admiral William D. Leahy, the White House chief of staff. Truman also brought Joseph E. Davies, the former ambassador to Moscow, as a personal advisor; Charles Bohlen, the State Department’s senior Soviet specialist, served as interpreter.
Truman had a decisive piece of information that no one else at the table fully grasped: news of the successful Trinity test of the atomic bomb reached him on July 16, the day before the conference opened. He mentioned it to Stalin in carefully oblique terms on July 24. Stalin, whose intelligence had tracked the project, feigned indifference.
Premier Joseph Stalin
Stalin had led the Soviet Union through the most destructive war in its history. The Red Army had driven the Wehrmacht from Soviet territory and had advanced to the Elbe, occupying the Balkans, eastern Poland, and eastern Germany. Stalin was determined to translate the Soviet military position into political and economic gains.
Stalin’s delegation included Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been a Soviet diplomatic fixture since the 1920s and would continue in various senior positions into the 1970s; General Georgy Zhukov, the hero of the Battle of Berlin, who commanded the Soviet occupying forces in Germany; and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, who attended only briefly. The Soviet delegation was large — several hundred in total — and included military, economic, and party specialists. The Soviet interpreters and note-takers worked in a different register from their American and British counterparts: the formal Soviet minutes of the conference, made public in the 1990s, often read more like political directives than the diplomatic transcript that the British and American teams produced.
Churchill and Attlee
Churchill was the principal British representative from July 17 to July 28. He brought Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who had returned to the position in 1940; Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who had served since 1938; Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff; and Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (Lord Inverchapel), the ambassador to Moscow. The British delegation was the smallest of the three and was affected by the economic exhaustion that had brought Britain close to the edge in 1945.
The British general election of July 5 had taken place with Churchill in Potsdam. The results reached the conference on July 26: the Labour Party had won a decisive parliamentary majority, and Attlee would be prime minister. Attlee flew out to Berlin and took over as principal British representative on July 28. He handled the transition with dignity but deferred to Churchill in plenary sessions. The substantive business of the conference continued without interruption.
The Conferees Together
The full delegations, including the diplomatic, military, and economic staffs, numbered roughly 700 people. The conference met at the Cecilienhof Palace, a former Hohenzollern residence in Potsdam, in a ring of buildings prepared by the Soviet occupying forces. The plenary sessions of the conference produced the formal communiqués, including the Potsdam Declaration of July 26 and the Potsdam Agreement of August 2. Working committees met concurrently on reparations, German administration, the Polish question, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, and the treatment of political refugees. For the substantive decisions the conference produced, see the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.