Word: yalta
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Running through all the MacArthur hearing testimony was one official Administration explanation for the Yalta concessions to Russia. The justification was military: the U.S. had to coax Russia into the war against Japan, and at the earliest hour, to reduce what were expected to be large U.S. casualties in assaulting the Japanese islands...
...Conceding that the bargain at Yalta was dictated by military considerations, the fact remained that the rights of an ally had been bargained away behind his back...
Acheson had been warned over & over by his advisers to keep his temper at all costs, and he kept it. Only once did he show a flash of personal emotion, when one Senator charged that U.S. authorities knew Japan was licked at Yalta and that the concessions to Russia were unnecessary. Said Acheson: "My own son was out there in the Navy at the time of Yalta, believing the [Japanese] could take an awful lot of chances...
...Administration's long-standing explanation for the secret Yalta deal was not a pretty story, but it was nicely detailed. Yalta was pictured in subsequent official communiques and speeches as the place where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, sitting together as brotherly men concerned with establishing enduring world peace, drew the blueprint for the United Nations. Stalin, a friendly fellow at heart, needed a little encouragement to make sure that he would help out in the war against Japan. Hence the West's generosity* at Yalta to the U.S.S.R...
This week Dean Acheson dropped a bombshell-an explanation of Yalta that was a strange and startling contradiction of the "brotherly-fellows" theme of the older story. "The grave danger," said Acheson, ". . . was that [the Russians] would really wait until the [Pacific] war was over and until we had expended our effort and blood to win the war, and [then] they would come in and do what they wished...