Office of the Historian

860C.00/6–445: Telegram

The British Prime Minister (Churchill) to President Truman

[Extract]76
London, 4 June 1945.

72. 1. I send you in my immediately following the text of a message prepared in the Foreign Office, with which I am in general accord, dealing principally with the views and wishes; put forward by Mr. Mikolajczyk. As these are set forth in considerable detail, I am also sending them to Lord Halifax for transmission to the State Department. This fulfils my undertaking to you in my No. 67 replying to your No. 53.77

2. I agree with you that Hopkins’ devoted efforts have produced a breaking of the deadlock. I am willing that the invitation should be issued to the non-Lublin Poles on that basis, if nothing more can be gained at this moment. I also agree that the question of the 15 or 16 arrested Poles should not hamper the opening of these discussions. We cannot, however, cease our efforts on their behalf. I will therefore join with you, either jointly or separately, in a message to Stalin accepting the best that Hopkins can get, provided of course [Page 321] that our Ambassadors are not debarred from pressing for further improvements in the invitations once conversations have begun again.

3. While it is prudent and right to act in this way at this moment I am sure you will agree with me that these proposals are no advance on Yalta. They are an advance upon the deadlock but we ought by now, according to Yalta and its spirit, to have had a representative Polish Government formed. All we have got is a certain number of concessions on outside Poles to take part in preliminary discussions out of which some improvements in the Lublin government may be made.

I cannot feel therefore that we can regard this as more than a milestone in a long hill we ought never to have been asked to climb. I think we ought to guard against any newspaper assumptions that the Polish problem has been solved or that the difficulties between the Western Democracies and the Soviet Government on this matter have been more than relieved. Renewed hope and not rejoicing is all we can indulge in at the moment.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  1. Other portions of this telegram are printed in Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), vol. i, p. 92.↩
  2. Of June 2 and June 1, pp. 317 and 314, respectively.↩