Quotes on Yalta

                                   

 

 

"I just have a hunch, that Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wouldn't try to annex anything and will work with for a world of democracy and peace."

  -President Roosevelt to Wlliam C. Bullitt prior to Yalta  

 

 
 

"Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler.  He was wrong.  But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.”

  -Prime Minister Churchill after the Yalta Conference

 

 
 

""It is impossible to imagine that humanity has suddenly become blind and has really lost the consciousness of a mortal danger.""

  -General Anders after the Yalta Conference

 

 
 

"Here (at Yalta) was signed the death warrant of the young men who are dying today in the hills and valleys of Korea. Here was signed the death warrant of the young men who will die tomorrow in the jungles of Indochina."

  -Senator Joseph McCarthy on Sept. 23, 1950 after the North Korean invasion of South Korea
 

 
 

"Stalin was even better informed about his allies at Yalta than he had been at Tehran.  All of the Cambridge Five, no longer suspected of being double agents, provided a regular flow of classified intelligence of Foreign Office documents in the run-up to the conference....Alger Hiss [NKVD spy working for the U.S. State Department] actually succeeded in becoming a member of the American delegation."

  -From "The Sword and the Shield" by Vasili Mitrokhin (formerly an employee of the KGB). Basic Books 1999. page 133    

 

 
  "Although the principal responsibility for Poland's fate must be placed on the Nazi and Soviet governments, certainly the United States and Great Britain cannot escape a share in the tragic betrayal.  Both Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, undoubtedly to maintain close relations with Stalin in a critical period of the war, agreed at Tehran in December 1943 to the dismemberment of the eastern part of the country.  This executive action of Roosevelt's part was never embodied in a treaty and hence did not receive the consent of the Senate, as required by the Constitution....At Yalta again we lost an opportunity to stand firm.  Perhaps the aid which the Soviet Union could contribute in winning the war was overestimated.  I cannot pretend to judge.  Yalta, however, was the deathblow to Poland's hopes for independence and for a democratic form of government....But the blame for appeasement cannot justly be placed entirely on Mr. Roosevelt.  The Department of State must share the onus.  The optimistic utterances of Secretary Stettinius in April 1945; the directive given orally to the United States delegates to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco--to take pains not to irritate the Soviet delegation--and the continued naive belief in Soviet good intentions, even during the first year of Mr. Byrnes' tenure as Secretary of State, were all factors of encouragement to the Soviet Government and its satellites to keep on flouting their international engagements.

In fact at a time when, over my repeated protests, the Department of State had approved credits to the Polish Provisional Government totaling ninety million dollars, a credit of one billion dollars for the Soviet Government was under serious consideration."

  -Arthur Bliss Lane, United States Ambassador to Poland, 1944-1947.  From: I Saw Poland Betrayed:  An American Ambassador reports to the American people.  Western Island Publishers, 1948, page 257-8.