What did Churchill do at Potsdam?

Nothing useful, is the super short answer.

I won't give the fully long answer, because this is not my era of history. But the York notes of the whole thing:

The Potsdam Conference of 1945 was the official meetup of the three big winning global powers of WW2 to map out what post-war peace would look like. They had a similar thing after WW1 in Paris, but fucked it so badly they basically set the stage for fascism to sweep Germany and Hitler to rise to power, so Potsdam was about, you know, Not Doing That Again.

The major players were therefore the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin), the US (Harry Truman), and of course, the UK (Winston Churchill). But there were two big issues really:

Issue Number One

The Conference ran from 17th July to 2nd August, but the British General Election results, astonishingly, were announced on the 28th, which meant Churchill had to nip back home to deal with that. Regardless of where you stand on Winston Churchill and the Tory party, that is an absolute buckwild clownshoes thing to do. Especially because, and I am not making this up, the GE had actually been held on the 5th July, two weeks earlier than the start of Potsdam.

Why the delay in results?

Because they had to wait to receive the postal votes of army members still abroad, and add them to their home constituencies; not an easy thing to do using war-ravaged postal lines in 1945.

Why not delay until after one of the world's most important conferences ever held, if you're delaying anyway?

Who the fuck knows.

Anyway the kicker is he went and lost. He wasn't expecting it. He and his aides were so convinced they'd win, one of them even left his luggage in Potsdam, convinced he'd be back for it the next day. It was one of the Tory party's biggest landslide losses. Labour became the new ruling party, and Clement Atlee had to immediately take over at Potsdam, halfway through the fucking conference. Absolutely fucking buckwild clownshow scenes even from a country known for absolutely fucking buckwild clownshow scenes.

Issue Number Two

So, he wasn't there for the final five days. But for the first nine, Churchill - accompanied by his deputy PM, Anthony Eden - was the man in charge.

But, the whole thing is, um, Baffling. Churchill's positions going into Potsdam were:

1. He wanted an alliance with Truman against Stalin to stop the spread of communism in Europe
2. He really liked Stalin and had been very happy ganging up with him against Roosevelt, and now Truman
3. Pre-Potsdam, he wanted a meeting with Truman so they could work out a common position on the Soviet Union before facing Stalin
4. Truman told him he didn't want the Soviets to think they were ganging up on them and so refused

CAN YOU SPOT THE CONTRADICTIONS

Anyway; he was grumpy about several things, and so going into Potsdam, he decided he didn't want to read any briefings and would just do what had worked for him for the past five years, which was to just deliver a nice big eloquent speech that would get everyone onside :)

Deputy PM Anthony Eden later described his opening address in a letter:

W. was very bad. He had read no brief and was confused & woolly & verbose. We had an anti-Chinese tirade from him. Americans not a little exasperated... Alec & I & Bob have never seen W. worse... he is again under Stalin's spell. He kept repeating "I like that man" & I am full of admiration of Stalin's handling of him.

YIKES

What Did The Others Do?

In the interests of fairness before I close this off, I should mention the one really monstrous thing from Potsdam, and credit Churchill for not being involved, as far as we know (admittedly I doubt he'd have opposed it).

If you know your WW2 dates, you'll have spotted the significance - Germany had surrendered nine weeks before, but Japan had yet to do so. At Potsdam, Harry Truman hinted to Stalin that America had created a new weapon of unusual destructive force; Stalin, of course, already knew thanks to spies in the Manhattan Project, so presumably tried to look surprised.

But he told Truman he hoped he would "make good use of it against the Japanese".

On the 26th July - two days before Churchill's frankly embarrassing flop from power - the Potsdam Declaration issued an ultimatum to Japan to surrender unconditionally or be completely destroyed. Japanese PM Kantarō Suzuki sent negotiators to surrender, but the US did not respond, and thus claimed Japan had refused to surrender.

Potsdam finished on the 2nd of August. Four days later, America dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Three days after that, they dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. To date, America retains the mantle of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons.

And, the Soviets went on to create an empire that would last until another nuclear-related incident - the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986, which pulled the trigger on the USSR. Very unclear if Churchill would have approved or not, since he hated communism but loved Stalin. Love the sinner, hate the sin, maybe? We'll never know, he died of his final stroke in 1965, aged 90.

Anyway, that's Churchill at Potsdam.