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.