The Potsdam Conference: July 28th 1945 – The New Big Three

In the days leading up to the British delegation’s departure from Potsdam on July 25th, it is safe to say that the uncertainty regarding the country’s elections had been weighing rather heavily on their minds and adding extra anxiety to the already tense rounds of negotiations. While sitting at the roundtable in Cecilienhof, they all knew that the British people had voted and that they had already selected a leader, but no one knew the outcome yet.

Almost everyone at the conference expected the Conservatives to win, but the margin of victory and the exact composition of the new government remained unknown. The Soviet delegation could not imagine a scenario under which the British people would vote Churchill out of office, and so they continued to overlook and ignore Attlee.

Ironically, Attlee had defied his own party and supported Churchill’s initial desire to postpone the election until after the defeat of Japan. A postponement would have kept the national unity government together through the end of the war and also into the crucial period of setting the foundations of peace. However, several of Churchill’s advisors not only urged him to go forward with the elections – citing that he was at the peak of his power and that the Conservatives would claim a landslide victory – but there were also several senior members in the Labour Party who were urging immediate elections in order to begin the process of implementing the party’s postwar program for the introduction of domestic reforms. Churchill’s decisions to move on with the elections in the end upset several Conservatives who had hoped to keep the stability of the coalition government in place until war had come to an end in the Pacific.

The outcome of the elections spawned a historic shock as it was, instead, Attlee’s Labour Party that claimed a landslide victory. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons disappeared as their number of seats plummeted from 585 to 213. Labour, with 393 seats, now emerged as the dominant party, meaning that Clement Attlee would return to Potsdam as the new Prime Minister of Great Britain.