The fate of Poland has been central to much of the history of the twentieth century, though the Poles themselves have seldom had any say in that fate. The immediate cause of World War II was the Nazi German invasion of Poland in September, 1939, and the ensuing British and French declaration of war against Germany.
Poland was also central to the sequence of events and reactions that brought on the Cold War between the United States and its Western allies on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other. Poland was a central issue on the table at Yalta, the conference that has gone down in popular American legend as the point at which a naive and ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt "gave away" Eastern Europe to the Soviets. It was also Poland that was the immediate trigger of Harry S Truman's tougher line towards the Soviet Union, and of the broadening fissure between the two superpowers which culminated in the overt outbreak of the Cold War a few years later: the Berlin Airlift, the deployment of U.S. "atomic bombers" to Britain, the Soviet inspired coup in Czechoslovakia, and similar events that would shape the world scene for the next four decades.
What were the central considerations that made Poland a flash point for relations between the superpowers? What did Soviet and American leaders perceive to be their respective national interest requirements with respect to Poland? What actions did they take (or fail to take) that shaped the development of the Polish question? Were Soviet and American policies fundamentally unalike, or (with the context of differing national interests) did their policies towards Poland share underlying similarities? These are the questions addressed below.
Long before World War II ended; indeed, before the Allies could be altogether certain of eventually winning, efforts to shape the order of the postwar world began, both through regular diplomatic interchanges and through a ...