on behalf of Britain, and Roosevelt personally
acquiesced too, to the Soviet Union’s retaining
eastern Poland as far as the Curzon Line (the
armistice line between Poland and Russia pro-
posed by the British foreign secretary Lord
Curzon in 1920) and that Poland should be
compensated with German territory east of the
rivers Oder and Neisse. At the Yalta Conference
more than a year later (4–11 February 1945),
with Poland by then overrun by the Red Army,
despite some ambiguities in the official declara-
tions Stalin secured his territorial ambitions at
Poland’s expense. For his part Stalin promised
that he would allow all the liberated peoples in
Eastern and central Europe to choose their own
governments freely and democratically. Power
had passed to a Polish provisional government
which was based in the Soviet Union and which
some ‘London’ Poles were permitted to join. At
Teheran and Yalta, military needs and realities, as
well as hopes for post-war cooperation, decided
Churchill and Roosevelt to accept Stalin’s
demands that Soviet conditions concerning the
future frontiers of Russia be met in all but formal
treaty form before the conclusion of the war.
Until 1945 there was little link between the
war waged in Europe and Africa and the war
waged by Japan, Britain, China and the US in
eastern and south-eastern Asia. The Soviet Union
was not a party to the Pacific war until shortly
before its end. Japan and the Soviet Union signed
a neutrality treaty in April 1941 and the two coun-
tries remained at peace until Russia declared war
on Japan just one week before Japan’s surrender.
Roosevelt and Churchill never wavered from their
early determination after Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor in December 1941 that despite the mili-
tary disasters in eastern Asia the defeat of
Germany must come first. Japan’s victories came
as a tremendous shock to British and Dominion
public opinion. The Western empires of the
Dutch, French and British and the American hold
on the Philippines collapsed in just a few weeks
and the whole region fell for the first time under
the control of one power, Japan.
In Malaya, Britain had constructed the
Singapore naval base and Churchill had insisted
on sending to it two battleships, the Prince of
Walesand the Repulse, intending thereby to deter
the Japanese from going to war. In Malaya the
British commanded 89,000 troops, including
37,000 Indian, 19,000 British and 15,000
Australians. In the Dutch East Indies 35,000
Dutch regular troops were stationed. The
Americans had posted 31,000 regulars to the
Philippines. But the British, Dutch and American
troops were poorly equipped. Air defence in
particular was inadequate, which gave the
Japanese a decisive advantage. Almost immedi-
ately after the outbreak of the war the Japanese
sank the Prince of Walesand the Repulsefrom the
air. There were now no battleships left to oppose
them. The attack on Pearl Harbor had knocked
out the capacity of the US fleet to challenge
Japan’s offensive. The capture of Guam and Wake
Islands denied the US naval bases beyond Hawaii.
In Malaya the well-equipped and skilfully led
Japanese army began the invasion on 8 December
and, though only 60,800 in strength, over-
whelmed the British defence forces, which finally
capitulated in Singapore on 15 February 1942.
Some 62,000 troops under British command
surrendered, a stunning military defeat when
added to the shock provoked by the sinking
of the Repulseand Prince of Wales. The fall of
Singapore was also a great psychological blow
which undermined the faith of Asian peoples in
‘white’ superiority.
General Douglas MacArthur defended the
Philippines. The Japanese gained air control and
their invading army defeated the Americans, who
withdrew to the Bataan peninsula in January
1942; the Americans finally had to surrender their
last fortress defence on 9 April with 70,000
troops, a disaster comparable to Singapore, except
that the defence had been long drawn out and
skilfully conducted. Simultaneously with the inva-
sion of Malaya, another Japanese army crossed
from Thailand into Burma and by the end of April
had driven the weak British forces into India. The
Dutch East Indies were captured between January
and March 1942. Throughout these five months
of victorious campaigns the Japanese had suf-
fered only some 15,000 killed and wounded and
had taken more than ten times as many Allied
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 285
