Book Write-Up: I Saw Poland Betrayed, by Arthur Bliss Lane

Arthur Bliss Lane. I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People. Western Islands, 1965.

Arthur Bliss Lane was U.S. ambassador to Poland between 1944 and 1947. His book, I Saw Poland Betrayed, was originally published in 1948. It was later republished by the ultra-conservative John Birch Society as part of its Americanist Library.

I expected this book to be a right-wing attack on the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, alleging that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets. This right-wing view was challenged by William F. Buckley, Jr., who pointed out that the Yalta agreement actually affirmed that Poland would be independent and would have free elections. Stalin, however, double-crossed Roosevelt, to Roosevelt’s chagrin.

Lane’s book differed from my expectation. Lane acknowledges that the Yalta and Potsdam conferences agreed that Poland would be free and independent. The problem was that these agreements had significant loopholes. The Soviet presence in Poland was already established and significant after World War II, and Yalta and Potsdam did nothing to counter that. Poland was also deprived of its richest land, compromising its independence and economic viability. When the Communists triumphed in Poland’s corrupt election, even over progressive competitors, the U.S. accepted the results.

Why did the U.S. betray Poland, according to Lane? Essentially, it was a failure of nerve. FDR did not want to go to war with Russia over Poland. Lane never mentions Communist infiltration in the U.S. Government, but he does bemoan that liberals do not take Communism as seriously as they did Nazism. Communism and Nazism are totalitarian ideologies pursuing world domination, but liberals saw the latter, not the former, as a threat to be stopped. Lane sees the Soviets as sinister and untrustworthy: they even let the Nazis slaughter Poles to weaken Poland and make it vulnerable to a Soviet takeover.

Lane is slightly unclear about what the U.S. should have done instead. He shrinks back from suggesting that the U.S. should have gone to war with the Soviets, for there were diplomatic options. One such option was to cut off aid to Poland, as long as it supported Communism. At the same time, Lane observes that the U.S. had military superiority shortly after World War II and asserts that it should have used it to protect Poland from the Soviets.

Lane’s discussion of Hitler, the Holocaust, and Jews stood out to me, in light of Alt-right people I have been reading and hearing. Hitler is portrayed as a brutal despot seeking world domination, whereas Alt-right thinkers tend to assert that he merely sought land that formerly belonged to Germany or that contained a significant number of Germans. Lane notes that the Jewish population of Poland declined precipitously after World War II, and he attributes that to Nazi gas chambers. Lane accepts a former Nazi’s testimony that the Nazis used Jewish corpses to create soap, a charge that mainstream historians have since disputed. Lane also disagrees with anti-Semitic accusations that were made in Poland, such as the idea that the Communists in Poland were mostly Jews coming from Russia and that Jews were preferred by the Soviet-influenced UNRRA.

The book is not exactly an on-the-ground account of Poland’s fall to the Soviets. It takes place mostly in the backrooms, among movers and shakers. It could get technical, but it is useful in that it lucidly lays out objections to the Yalta and Potsdam agreements.