Brave New World
Chapter 2 (Part 3 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Planning for the Aftermath
Throughout the second half of 1944, delegates and planners
representing the
Big Three powers continued their discussions in the U.S.
capital. Secretary of State Stettinius assembled a strong team of
negotiators, supported by a staff of experts in various economic
specializations and foreign policy. British and Soviet delegations
submitted their own plans, and a conference was scheduled for late in
August at Dumbarton Oaks, an estate in the District of Columbia owned
by Harvard University. During the discussions, the Soviet Ambassador,
Andrei Gromyko, demanded that each of the sixteen Soviet republics
must be admitted separately, eliciting a reaction from Roosevelt that
the application of such a principle could be extended to each of the
forty-eight states comprising the United States. Roosevelt undoubtedly
gave little or no thought to the domestic socio-political implications
of such a possibility. Membership in the United Nations would lend
significant credibility to the argument that each of the United States
of America were, in fact, sovereign and members in a voluntary
federation. Interestingly, Churchill's references to the United States
were always in the plural, suggesting he consciously thought of the
United States in terms of a federation. After some discussion, Gromyko
conveyed to his U.S. and British counterparts that his government had
agreed that the question would be withdrawn until the United Nations
was formally established. A second proposal the Soviets objected to
centered on a fundamental difference in the socio-political
philosophies of U.S. and British leaders versus their Soviet
counterparts -- namely, a stipulation requiring withdrawal from voting
on Security Council issues where the outcome directly affected that
Council member. Hull records that during a meeting between Roosevelt
and Gromyko to discuss the matter Roosevelt stressed this to be a
principle "imbedded by our forefathers in American law."[64]
However that might be, Stalin adhered to another principle -- that of
unanimity; he held firm to the power of the absolute veto by any of
the permanent members of the Security Council, so that any actions
taken to settle disputes would require full agreement. Resolution of
this issue was put on hold until Roosevelt and Churchill were to meet
with Stalin in February of 1945 at Yalta.
Real concern was now developing over the postwar behavior of the
Soviets toward the social democracies and other peoples. General J.C.
Smuts, a senior British military officer, wrote to Churchill: "Should
a World Organisation be formed which does not include Russia she will
become the power centre of another group. We shall then be heading
towards a third World War."[65] To reduce the risk of future
conflict, Smuts urged a concessionary stance toward Soviet demands.
Within Roosevelt's own cabinet, Vice President Henry Wallace went even
further. He publicly expressed his fear that "World War No.
III will be inevitable ... if we fail to demonstrate that we can
furnish full employment after this war comes to and end and fascist
interests motivated by anti-Russian bias get control of our government."[66]
By late 1944, these views made Wallace a political liability for the
Democrats, and he was dropped from the Presidential ticket in favor of
Harry S. Truman -- a decision destined to have a significant impact on
U.S. foreign policy decisions in the months and years to follow.
Although fearful of Soviet policies so long as Stalin or his close
collaborators remained in power, both Churchill and Roosevelt
considered Soviet participation in the United Nations as essential to
postwar stability. For the moment, however, they also felt compelled
to urge on Stalin the commitment of Soviet troops to an offensive
against the Japanese in Manchuria. In October, Churchill flew to
Moscow to work out with Stalin other questions of territorial
prerogative. A decision was also reached by the Big Three to
recognize Charles de Gaulle as head of a Provisional French
Government.
Churchill had no sooner returned from Moscow than he was asked by the
French to come to Paris for discussions on the role of French forces
in the remaining campaigns against Germany, as well as the future
occupation of German territory. Charles de Gaulle was determined,
first, that Germany should be divided and demilitarized; and, second,
that France should take its rightful position as a first line state in
the postwar era. Informed of French overtures, Roosevelt wrote to
Churchill that "any attempt to include de Gaulle in the
meeting of [Stalin, you and I] would merely introduce a complicating
and undesirable factor."[67] Meanwhile, the French First Army
was fighting with a vengeance and had reached the Rhine River just
north of the Swiss border. All along the rest of the broad front
stretching northward through the Ardennes to Arnhem (Holland), the
Allied advance had slowed in the face of relentless rains and
over-extended supply lines. Generals Montgomery and Bradley had each
argued for a massive, concentrated attack through the German defenses;
Eisenhower, however, decided upon the more cautious strategy of first
establishing his supply lines, then pushing ahead along the entire
front. After the war, Montgomery criticized Eisenhower and suggested
the war could have been won months earlier:
We did not advance to the Rhine on a broad
front; we advanced to the Rhine on several fronts which were
unco-ordinated. And what was the German answer? A single and
concentrated punch in the Ardennes, when we had become unbalanced
and unduly extended. So we were caught on the hop.[68]
More objective military historians generally acknowledge the wisdom
of Eisenhower's tactics. His strategic priority was to first seize
enough territory to protect the port facilities of Antwerp from
counter-attack. Until this was accomplished, he reasoned, any deep
penetration -- even by Montgomery -- would expose the troops to heavy
casualties. The Germans were soon to demonstrate they still possessed
considerable fighting capabilities and that Antwerp was indeed the
most important piece of territory held by the Allies.
On December 16, with foul weather grounding the Allied air forces,
Hitler unleashed everything the Germans had left in an effort to
recapture Antwerp. German panzer divisions burst from the Ardennes
toward Liege and Bastogne, initially surprising the U.S. forces
holding these sectors. The U.S. ground troops put up a strong
resistance until reinforcements could be brought up. Bastogne held,
denying to the Germans essential supplies of petrol and exposing them
to air and armored counter-attack. General Patton's 4th Armored
Division relieved Bastogne after completing a seventy-five mile
advance in only forty-eight hours. Forced to abandon their panzers and
much of their equipment, the German troops began their final retreat.
In the end, the loss of this equipment softened German resistance from
then on. Early in March, the U.S. 1st Army captured a bridge over the
Rhine at Remagen, just south of Bonn, and poured across into the heart
of Germany.
A quarter of a million German soldiers had perished since June 6;
organized resistance was by this time rapidly eroding. By the end of
April, Soviet troops were on the outskirts of Berlin. The Allied
armies pushing through the Ruhr Valley surrounded and captured a force
of some 320,000 German troops. Die-hard Nazi officials were moving, at
Hitler's direction, to destroy the German industrial plant and
infrastructure before the Allies or Soviets arrived. Those now
thinking of the postwar and reconstruction, such as Albert Speer,
worked hard to deny these zealots the explosives and gasoline demanded
by "the Gauleiters' demolition squads."[69] In his
last frenzy of despotic orders, Hitler declared that any soldiers
caught out of uniform were to be executed as deserters, and officers
who failed to hold positions were subject to the same treatment. In
the meantime, U.S. divisions had come within sixty miles of Berlin
before being redirected by Eisenhower toward the southeast, leaving
the taking of Berlin to the Soviets. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and
(following the Nuremberg trials) Goering escaped execution for war
crimes by choosing death. In the end, only a handful of Nazi leaders
were executed for the vast crimes committed against humanity; most of
the others brought to trial received sentences that were eventually
commuted. Only Rudolf Hess, the details of his actions shrouded in
mystery, remained in prison until he committed suicide (or was
murdered) in 1987 at Spandau prison. Speer, who was sentenced to and
served twenty years at Spandau, made an effort to put into context the
full depth of the tragedy imposed on the world by the Nazi regime:
Hitler's dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an
industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship
which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to
dominate its own people. ...By means of such instruments of
technology as the radio and public-address systems, eighty million
persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. ...The
instruments of technology made it possible to maintain a close watch
over all citizens and to keep criminal operations shrouded in a high
degree of secrecy. ...Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of
high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership also -- men who
could think and act independently. The authoritarian system in the
age of technology can do without such men. The means of
communication alone enable it to mechanize the work of the lower
leadership. Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is
created.[70]
Eric Hoffer would later add, that "[d]ying and killing seem
easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance
or game." Thus, "[i]t is one of the main tasks of a
real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking
in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a
grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance."[71]
Hitler and Goebbels had perfected their craft, and the German people
as a whole had followed in virtual disregard for their own
preservation as individuals. The price they and others paid continues
to astonish our sensibilities. Finally, by the Spring of 1945 the
odyssey and the nightmare was over. War continued in the Pacific;
however, the most serious socio-political confrontations appearing on
the horizon involved the surviving empire-builders, new and old. The
basis for even nominally cooperative relations between the private,
landlord dominated social democracies and the Stalinist regimes was
fast disappearing.
The first crisis point arose in Poland, where Poles had organized a
widespread nationalist resistance movement. Its leadership came from
the government-in-exile established in London. Stalin had stood by
while the retreating Germans used the last of their destructive
energies to crush the Poles, then moved in to force Soviet occupation
and establish a regime directly accountable to him. Two hundred
thousand Polish soldiers were fighting alongside U.S. and British
empire troops in the liberation of Europe. Their homeland was free of
Germans but was immediately threatened by Soviet domination. These
soldiers would be viewed as enemies of the State upon their return,
and many would be executed or imprisoned. Solzhenitsyn, in chilling
fashion, eventually revealed to the world many of the details of the
Stalinist onslaught against humanity. In this, the U.S. and British
governments of the time are to be chastised -- even condemned by
history -- for their duplicity, knowing full well the fate to befall
repatriated anti-communists:
All during 1945 and 1946 a big wave of genuine,
at-long-last, enemies of the Soviet government flowed into the
Archipelago. ...Some of them had acted out of conviction; others had
been merely involuntary participants.
Along with them were seized not less than one million fugitives
from the Soviet governmentt -- civilians of all ages and of both
sexes who had been fortunate enough to find shelter on Allied
territory, but who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied
authorities into Soviet hands.
A certain number of Poles, members of the Home Army, followers of
Mikolajczyk, arrived in Gulag in 1945 via our prisons. ...[72]
It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot
be kept long, ...the secret of this particular act of
betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and
American governments.[73]
As the Allied armies approached one another from opposite ends of the
German Reich, the last meeting of the Big Three took place at
Yalta in the Crimea. Here, during February of 1945, the fate of the
Poles was foremost in the minds of each participant. Although Stalin
agreed to the formation of a Provisional Government that included
representatives from all groups to serve until national elections
could be held, his actions assured that the Soviet-backed faction
experienced no effective opposition. Only as information slowly leaked
out of Poland, however, did U.S. and British authorities finally come
to understand the depth of Stalin's determination to turn Poland into
a dutiful satellite. Churchill later wrote that, "[a]s the
weeks passed after Yalta it became clear that the Soviet Government
was doing nothing to carry out our agreements about broadening the
Polish Government to include all Polish parties and both sides."[74]
There were other signs that a polarization of interest between the
victorious powers was in the making.
Switzerland was now the center for U.S. intelligence operations in
Europe, under the direction of Allen Dulles. With the end closing in
on the Germans, Dulles and his staff had more than their share of
contacts with partisans, exiled German socialists and communists, as
well as Nazis and other Germans eager to surrender to the western
Allies rather than be caught in the grasp of the Soviets. Early in
March Dulles agreed to meet with General Karl Wolff, commander of the
SS forces in northern Italy, to discuss the surrender of his army.
Himmler somehow learned of the meeting and threatened the lives of
Wolff's wife and children. At the same time, Stalin -- though kept
informed at every stage of these negotiations -- angrily accused the
U.S. and Britain of secretly engaging in negotiations with agents of
the Nazi occupation force in Italy for surrender. Then, on April 12 a
very ill Franklin Roosevelt died. Roosevelt's Vice President and
successor, Harry S. Truman, had been in the administration for only
three months and included in almost no meetings of a critical nature.
Although Truman had proved himself to be high-minded in the U.S.
Senate, his experience and knowledge in the foreign policy arena were
far from extensive. Now, as President, he was charged with nurturing
Roosevelt's objectives through the mine fields of postwar
negotiations.
One of Truman's first decisions -- to rebuff Wolff's overtures for
surrender of his troops in Italy -- seems, in hindsight, to have
unnecessarily caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers on both sides
and gained nothing from the Soviets. He would later justify his
actions in the context of East-West relations:
As our military plans continued to develop with
unrivaled speed, frightened Nazi leaders began seeking deals with
the Western Allies. The thought of falling into Russian hands drove
them into a panic. As the lesser of two evils, they turned to us.
One of these attempts at a separate deal had already made some
trouble for us with the Russians. In March, General Karl Wolff ...
had started parleys with American OSS agents in Switzerland with a
view toward the possible surrender of Kesselring's German army in
Italy. Nothing ever came of these parleys except to make the
Russians highly suspicious of our motives.[75]
It is hard to imagine that Stalin or many of his inner circle cared
at all about the sacrifice of so many millions at the hands of the
Germans. After all, they were equally responsible for the deaths of
millions of people subject to their rule. What Stalin actually cared
about is pure speculation. Yet, Adam Ulam writes that while Roosevelt
was still alive, Stalin was "seized by a panic. …[S]uddenly
it occurred to him that [his allies] were fooling him" and "were
about to make a separate arrangement with Germany."[76]
Through Molotov, Stalin demanded that the negotiations with Wolff be
broken off. Roosevelt became extremely angered over Stalin's charges.
"He tried to compose a statesmanlike reply, and couldn't,"[77]
writes Jim Bishop. He finally received assistance from a host of
others and constructed a detailed response to Stalin dispatched only
days before his death:
For the advantage of our common war effort against
Germany, which today gives excellent promise of an early success in
a disintegration of the German armies, I must continue to assume
that you have the same high confidence in my truthfulness and
reliability that I have always had in yours. ...
I have complete confidence in General Eisenhower, and know that he
certainly would inform me before entering into any agreement with
the Germans. He is instructed to demand, and will demand,
unconditional surrender of enemy troops that may be defeated on his
front. Our advances on the Western Front are due to military action.
...
Finally I would say this: it would be one of the great tragedies of
history if at the very moment of the victory now within our grasp
such distrust, such lack of faith, should prejudice the entire
undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material, and
treasure involved.
Frankly, I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your
informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my
actions or those of my trusted subordinates.[78]
Truman later wrote that the decision to break off negotiations with
Wolff was urged upon him by Churchill. If Stalin was no longer trusted
as a wartime or postwar partner, the lives of U.S. and German troops
were apparently perceived by Truman and Churchill as a small enough
price to pay to protect the facade of the Grand Alliance. Moreover,
after years of war against the Germans, Italians and their subordinate
states, the need for peace was real. This did not mean the U.S. and
Britain would simply allow Stalin's agents to seize power. Within
Italy, for example, the Anglo-American forces denied both the French
and the Soviets more than a token presence. After the resignation of
Cordell Hull, U.S. officials in Italy openly pursued a more aggressive
anti-communist policy. This was most difficult in the north, where
communist partisan forces had participated in the fighting and enjoyed
widespread popular support.
Hitler, as ever, acted in Italy with absolutely no strategic
consistency. He ordered several divisions moved from Italy to slow the
Soviet advance into Germany. On April 8, the U.S. forces launched
their final offensive against the remaining Germans, and within a week
had pushed the Germans out of their mountain defenses and across the
northern Italian plain. What soon emerged was a rough coalition
between Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats -- their
competition for power kept peaceful by the presence of a British
occupation force. Italy was in this way protected from violent
upheaval, its government permitted to find its own balance between the
forces for socio-political change and those upholding the status quo
in support of ancient privilege.
As the war in Eurasia drew to its anticlimactic finish, Churchill
pondered the immediate future, and on April 29 in great candor wrote
to Stalin, admitting, "[t]here is not much comfort in looking
into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the
Communist Parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side,
and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their
associates or Dominions are on the other."[79] Churchill
added that history would not treat well those deemed responsible for
polarizing humanity after all the sacrifices made to defeat Fascism.
Stalin was unmoved. At the same time, we are told by Adam Ulam that
Stalin "was very conscious that in the struggle for peace
Russia would find herself face to face with the enormous power of
America, supplemented by the still not inconsiderable assets of the
British Empire."[80] By comparison, all the resources that
could be marshalled by the Soviets would be needed to rebuild their
nation. In 1962, Louis Aragon summarized just how extensive the damage
had been:
In this country where 1,710 towns had been destroyed,
more than seventy thousand villages, forty thousand miles of railway
and 1,135 mines which had given more than a hundred million tons of
coal a year before the war; in this country which had lost seven
million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, et cetera ... and
in which there were twenty-five million homeless people, the victory
that had been won by the energy and the spirit of sacrifice of a
great nation did not for that great nation mean a time of rest.[81]
The accomplishments of the Soviet peoples against the German
onslaught are indeed remarkable, particularly given the type of system
they were forced to live under and the despotic nature of their
leadership group. Stalin convinced himself that only under his
direction could the energy of the Soviet people be harnessed to
exploit the nation's natural resources, employing a rapidly
constructed industrial capacity to establish the Soviet Union as a
permanent global power. The stability of his regime -- and the ability
of Stalinism to flourish without exposure to corrupting Western
influence -- required an encircling buffer zone. Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Rumania and Bulgaria were all
essential to this mission.
Once Stalin's intentions were clearly demonstrated, those in the West
who were on record as supporting a rapprochement with the Soviets were
increasingly subjected to charges of being communist sympathizers.
Memories were to become extremely short in the months and years to
come. In this atmosphere, even the crowning achievement of Roosevelt's
foreign policy, the establishment of the United Nations -- with power
to resolve global conflicts -- was far from secure. One of Truman's
first decisions as President was to confirm to the Cabinet members
that the conference on the United Nations scheduled for April 25 in
San Francisco would proceed as planned. In rapid succession, he was
briefed by Secretary of War Stimson on the Manhattan Project and then
provided with a detailed foreign relations report summarizing the
problems arising in U.S.-Soviet affairs, a portion of which stated:
Since the Yalta Conference the Soviet Government has
taken a firm and uncompromising position on nearly every major
question that has arisen in our relations. ...In the liberated areas
under Soviet control, the Soviet government is proceeding largely on
a unilateral basis... The Soviet Government appears to desire to
proceed with the San Francisco Conference but was unwilling to send
their Foreign Minister. They have asked for a large postwar credit
and pending a decision on this matter have so far been unwilling to
conclude an agreement providing for the orderly liquidation of
lend-lease aid. In the politico-military field, similar difficulties
have been encountered in collaboration with the Soviet
authorities.[82]
The same report suggested that Yugoslav forces might attempt to
occupy part of northeastern Italy. Churchill, deeply troubled by these
developments, had already exerted as much influence as possible on
Eisenhower to press eastward. "I deem it highly important,"
he wrote Eisenhower on April 2, "that we should shake hands
with the Russians as far to the east as possible."[83]
Eisenhower responded that his primary objectives had to be those of
military importance and that any actions dictated by purely political
considerations were beyond his prerogative and authority. Orders to do
other than what he thought best for the conduct of the war would have
to come from Washington. While Truman re-evaluated the situation,
Soviet forces captured Vienna on April 13 and prepared for the final
assault on Berlin. By the end of the month the city was surrounded by
General Zhukov's army; Hitler, already entombed in the Chancellory
bunker, committed suicide. Churchill and Truman (with support from
Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew) wanted Eisenhower to balance
the scales by liberating Prague and occupying as much territory in
Czechoslovakia as possible. Eisenhower responded that his decisions
would continue to be guided by military necessity. The German
surrender came on May 7, to the relief and excitement of millions of
people throughout the countries of Eurasia. In Britain, however,
Churchill allowed his people only a few days to celebrate the peace.
He warned the British and the peoples of Europe against the rise of "totalitarian
or police Governments," of the battles yet to be waged
against the Japanese and of the need for a strong and democratic
United Nations. The objectives of the Soviets were, he was now
convinced, wholly imperialistic and a certain threat not merely to the
establishment of social democracies for Eurasia's liberated peoples
but to the vestiges of empire for Britain as well.
Writing from a purely Soviet perspective, V.G. Trukhanovsky concluded
that Churchill's efforts to gain concessions from the Soviets amounted
to "suppression of the revolution that had been developing in
[eastern Europe] and retention of the capitalist system."[85]
Without doubt, those who sought to overthrow the ancient regimes were
socialist and communist true believers who had little
understanding of or faith in social democracy. In Poland and other
countries of eastern Europe, there were few measures softening the
tyranny of agrarian, urban and industrial landlordism. Even in Prussia
many of the elements of agrarian landlordism and aristocratic rule
were deeply-rooted and preserved under Nazism. Sovereignty combined
with socialism offered the masses in Soviet-held territories the
prospect of something heretofore denied to them. The serious
structural flaws attached to state socialism (e.g., a reliance on fear
rather than individual initiative as the motivation to produce wealth)
were not widely appreciated; however, there was nowhere an upsurge of
mass support for Soviet-style communism as the new system of choice.
Destruction of fascism opened the door for competition between
old-line socialist and communist factions. With Soviet forces in
occupation, there could be little doubt which group would emerge
victorious.
Astonishingly, there were still some in the West (not all of whom
were communists or socialists) who thought or hoped the Soviets would
emerge from the war united behind a progressive socialist agenda. As
late as 1947, the British historian K.W.B. Middleton suggested that
the Churchillian view of Soviet policies as "ruthless and
self-regarding" were "palpably exaggerated and
unfair," while in the same breadth he recounted how Soviet
forces left those conquered without means of support:
The Russians, having overrun as much country as they
could, appeared determined to exploit their position by every
possible means from the point of view of Russian security and
profit, before the Western Powers could obstruct them. They, or
governments under Communist influence set up by them, drove out
German populations from Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and
stripped Germany and Austria bare of machinery, cattle, stocks of
clothing, fuel, household furniture and all kinds of movable
property, even dismantling and packing up whole factories for
dispatch eastwards.[86]
One must, of course, view the Soviet transfer of wealth out of
Germany in the context of the scorched earth practices of the German
armies and their allies against the Soviet peoples. With good reason,
the Soviet troops sought not only victory but revenge and retribution
for the suffering they and their people had endured. The Soviet
soldier or citizen had good reason to demand the fruits of a hard won
victory. It was, after all, the Germans who were responsible for their
own fate. Roosevelt himself had in 1944 told Henry Stimson that "[t]he
German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the
whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the
decencies of modern civilization."[87] Inasmuch as the Soviet
people (on a par with the Poles and Eurasian Jews of all nations)
suffered so heavily at the hands of the Germans, justice demanded that
out of whatever material wealth remained in Germany the Soviets ought
to have first claim. At issue was how much to leave the Germans so
they could feed themselves and begin rebuilding. Stalin apparently did
not immediately give consideration to the development in eastern
Germany of a client Soviet state.
Over the months leading up to the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt had
been pressed hard by Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary, to
adopt a harsh postwar policy toward Germany. At the State Department,
Edward Stettinius and others warned this policy would thoroughly
jeopardize any hope of democratic elements in Germany coming to power.
They argued that an industrialized Germany was central to economic
growth and political stability in Europe, which meant that whatever
reparations were imposed must be reasonable and made in the form of
goods or services rather than gold or currency. At Yalta, the Soviets
agreed to this formula -- up to a point. With many of their own people
starving, the Soviets were less than anxious to commit agricultural
goods from their zone to feed Germans. Back in Washington, Morgenthau
reasserted his views upon Roosevelt only weeks before the President's
death, leaving Truman with the difficult decision of whether or not to
extend U.S. credit to the postwar German government. In May, Truman
made his feelings known; he was, he later wrote, "opposed to
what was then loosely called the Morgenthau Plan -- that is, the
reduction of Germany to a wholly agrarian economy."[88] On
the eve of the meeting at Potsdam, Morgenthau, knowing of Truman's
decision, decided to resign. Truman, it seems, had already developed
his own vision of how the Old World could be transformed into a
cooperative network of producing nations:
The problem ... was to help unify Europe by linking up
the breadbasket [with Hungary a cattle country and Rumania and the
Ukraine as the wheat area] with the industrial centers [Western
Germany, Northern France, Belgium, and Britain with their coal,
iron, and big industries] through a free flow of trade. To
facilitate this flow, the Rhine and the Danube could be linked with
a vast network of canals which would provide a passage all the way
from the North Sea to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. This
would constitute free waterways for trade, while each country
bordering on the waterways would have the riparian rights it should
have. In addition, it would be possible to extend the free waterways
of the world by linking the Rhine-Danube waterways with the Black
Sea straits and making the Suez, Kiel, and Panama canals free
waterways for merchant ships.[89]
All this would require an enormous amount of cooperation between
nations, including the Soviet Union, of course. Truman was in for some
rude awakenings.
On the 7th of July, 1945, Truman boarded the heavy cruiser U.S.S.
Augusta for the trip to Europe and the conference at Potsdam.
Two days earlier, the British elections had been held; the results
would not be known until the conference was well underway. Two weeks
into the conference, negotiating over the disposition of Prussia's
agricultural lands, Stalin informed Truman and Churchill there were no
longer any Germans in the area. Truman recalls as well that "Stalin
asserted that the less industry there was in Germany the greater would
be the market for American and British goods. Germany was a dangerous
business rival, he said, unless we kept her on her knees."[90]
Beyond keeping Germany weak, Stalin was most concerned about receiving
an equal share of the surviving ships in the German fleet,
reparations, who would govern in Poland and what to do about the
fascist regime in Spain. Among other things, Churchill was far less
anxious than Truman to embrace Italy as a rehabilitated postwar
partner. They touched on (and then delegated to a council of their
foreign ministers) the immediate fates of Greeks, Yugoslavs,
Bulgarians, Rumanians, Hungarians, Finns, Czechs and Slovaks.
Churchill was also keenly concerned over the future of North Africa
and the Mediterranean states. Stalin also had on his mind the securing
(from Turkey) of permanent access to the Mediterranean. Other
questions of territorial integrity and sovereignty surrounded
discussions on Syria, Iran and Lebanon.
For Truman, the one other matter of great importance to be discussed
was primarily military and involved the strategy for future operations
against the Japanese. The U.S. and British military staffs had been
meeting daily since their arrival at Potsdam; and, on July 24th
presented their recommendations to Truman and Churchill. Senior Soviet
officers were later brought in to coordinate plans for engaging the
Japanese in Manchuria, scheduled for late August. The next day, after
exchanging details on the shortages and desperate conditions being
experienced by the British and Soviet peoples, Churchill and Eden
returned to Britain.
The Sun Sets on Japanese Ambitions
Beginning with the Japanese withdrawal from Guadalcanal in February
of 1943 the strategic advantage in the Pacific War shifted
irretrievably to the Allied forces. General MacArthur then assumed
overall command of the combined naval, air and ground forces. The size
and fighting capability of this force was growing each and every day
by more than any of the military planners had dreamed possible. One
Japanese minister reported in 1943 to his superiors that the U.S. was
outproducing Japan in strategic areas by "
a ratio of one hundred to less than one"[91] and
predicted total ruin for the Japanese nation if the war continued.
U.S. losses were being rapidly replaced, while the Japanese High
Command was forced to adopt a defensive posture they hoped could be
sustained until their air and naval fleets could be strengthened.
MacArthur was not about to give the Japanese forces a chance to catch
their breath.
The Japanese had established their strongest Southern Pacific base at
Rabaul on the island of New Britain. As a step toward neutralizing
Rabaul, in September of 1943 U.S. and Australian forces were landed on
the northeastern coast of New Guinea. After securing these positions,
MacArthur dispatched another strike force to the far western coast of
New Britain. The Japanese defenders were drawn from Rabaul to meet
this challenge, allowing a second and stronger force to be put ashore
behind them. Not only were reinforcements prevented from reaching the
Japanese attack force, the base at Rabaul was pounded relentlessly
from the air until the Japanese were forced to withdraw their air and
naval fleets northward to Truk, in the Caroline Islands. Left isolated
and essentially unable to threaten the Allied advance, the Japanese
army on Rabaul was then by-passed. In early April of 1944, MacArthur's
forces took Los Negros and Manus in the Admiralty Islands,
establishing a new base of operations closer still to the next U.S.
objective -- the Philippines.
U.S. naval and marine operations commanded by Admiral Chester Nimitz
were at the same time concentrating their efforts in the island groups
north of New Guinea and directly east of the Philippines -- the
Gilberts, Marshalls, Carolines and Marianas. Virtually every Japanese
position on these islands was either taken or destroyed, then
abandoned. At the end of this campaign, U.S. forces were poised for a
combined assault on the Japanese in the Philippines and for air
strikes on the main islands of Japan. In the process, Japanese air
power and carrier-based attack forces were decimated. In Japan,
General Tojo and the war cabinet resigned in disgrace.
MacArthur was now determined to fulfill his commitment to the people
of the Philippines. The invasion was preceded in September by the
bombardment and destruction of Japanese airfields. A month later,
MacArthur and Nimitz sailed unopposed into Leyte Gulf at the head of
an invasion force rivaling that which earlier landed at Normandy. When
the remainder of the Japanese fleet finally did respond a week later,
their impact was minimal. After experiencing heavy losses, the
survivors retired. Despite the introduction of the kamikaze to the
naval battle, a tactic that delivered considerable damage on Allied
forces, by the end of January 1945 the Japanese force in the
Philippines was running out of planes and pilots to put into the air.
On the other hand, a ground force of between 370-400,000 troops
prepared to take on MacArthur.
Under Japanese direction, the puppet regime of Philipino
collaborators (most of whom were among those who had the most to lose
personally should they antagonize the Japanese) was forced to declare
war on the U.S. and Britain. Philipino partisans, whose leadership
included a number of dedicated revolutionaries committed to Marxist
ideology, were fighting not simply for liberation from Japanese
occupation but for liberation from control of the entrenched landed
class that for centuries had kept them landless and impoverished. One
of the saddest commentaries on U.S. involvement in the Philippines is
that MacArthur's own liaison with the partisans, lieutenant colonel
Courtney Whitney, was a person who had significant personal
investments in the Philippines and had been close to many of the
Philipino elite who collaborated with the Japanese. Whitney did his
best to ensure that meaningful participation in the postwar government
would be denied to Philipino peasants and the partisans.
To hold the Philippines the Japanese committed their entire naval and
air reserves. Loss of the Philippines meant the fleet would be cut off
from its only remaining source of oil and become useless anyway. On
October 18, MacArthur's invasion force of some 200,000 seasoned troops
landed on the island of Leyte. In addition to land based aircraft from
Luzon committed to the battle, the Japanese converged on the
transports and other ships off Leyte with everything they had. One
Japanese group managed to lure the U.S. fleet away from its position
then double back in time to surprise the invasion force. A major
setback was avoided, however, when the Japanese admiral turned
cautious and retreated, fearing his ships would come under heavy
aerial bombardment. From this point on, the Japanese threat from the
air and sea almost disappeared; the Japanese military was augmented,
however, by terrible monsoons that rendered airfields useless.
Protection of the ground troops fell to carrier-based planes, which
proved themselves to be highly effective. In mid-November, U.S. naval
planes intercepted a Japanese reinforcement convoy, resulting in the
deaths of some ten thousand Japanese troops. Leyte had already been
reinforced with thirty thousand troops from Luzon. Now, all of these
men were sacrificed in little more than a delaying action. More than
sixty-five thousand Japanese casualties were suffered in the battles
for control of the islands of Leyte and nearby Mindoro.
By the beginning of 1945 MacArthur's force was ready to drive the
remaining 275,000 Japanese from Luzon. Although the bulk of the
Japanese force retreated into the northern mountains, the Japanese
naval commander in Manila, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabachi, decided to
defend his position to the last man. In the process, Manila was almost
totally destroyed while the Japanese military committed mass murder of
the Filipino population. Manila was finally cleared of Japanese early
in March, and by mid-April remnants of the once enormous Japanese army
were being flushed out of the mountains. Elsewhere, Saipan and Iwo
Jima fell to the U.S. Marines, becoming the forward bases for
continuous bombing raids on Japanese cities. During one raid alone
over Tokyo -- that of March 9-10 -- more than 80,000 people were
killed. Japanese production was nearing a standstill, and the people
of Japan began to yearn for their own nightmare to end. In April over
110,000 Japanese (including nearly 2,000 kamikaze pilots) were
killed in a desperate and fruitless struggle to prevent U.S. forces
from capturing the island of Okinawa. The end of the war was clearly
in sight; the only question was whether the Japanese military would
force on the people of Japan the complete destruction of their nation
in a grotesque mass suicide.
MacArthur now began the process of building the invasion force which
would have the unenviable task of annihilating a defensive force of at
least several million Japanese troops. Some 10,000 kamikaze
pilots were being hastily trained for their final battle. A certain,
terrible but brief calm settled over Japan. The people prepared for
the worst, none suspecting that the force about to be unleashed
against them was of a wholly new and terrible sort.
PLANNING THE PEACE
Conquered Lands, Sacrificed Peoples
While the Japanese dug themselves in for what most expected would be
a direct assault on their homeland, people in many other parts of the
globe were beginning to think about problems exacerbated or brought
into the open by the war. For Harry S. Truman and other leaders in the
United States, in particular, the immediate challenges were whether to
make permanent the centralized functions of the national government
concerning wealth production and distribution. Fighting the Axis
powers had cost the British a sum never accurately calculated, yet
British leaders had very similar -- if even more immediate -- issues
of societal change and demands for shifts in wealth distribution
facing them. They also owned the added burden of an empire beset by
impatient nationalists determined to secure independence for their
peoples. Political division and economic chaos plagued all efforts to
restore order in France. A real question was whether the French would
follow Britain on the path to greater social democracy, fall under the
grip of extremism, or simply return to the socio-political
arrangements and institutions that had repeatedly thwarted the rise of
French
liberalism. Jean Monnet later placed in the context of postwar
Europe the consequences of any course but that of real reform:
If, as I believed, the Provisional Government proved
capable of preventing anarchy or a Communist takeover, there would
soon be a tendency to return to the old order. In that case, the
greatest danger would be that of rebuilding a Europe made up of
sovereign States, each exposed to the facile temptations of
protectionism.[92]
During the years before the Second World War, the wealthy in France
sought safer harbors outside the country for their financial reserves.
Within the government, French nationalism went only so far as having
to absorb losses in purchasing power either through devaluation of the
currency or increased taxation. As in Britain, the preservation of
privilege remained a primary concern of conservative elements as they
contemplated the postwar rebuilding effort. Monnet had the wartime
experience of working in Washington, D.C. with U.S. officials on
armament production needs, and had then been sent by Harry Hopkins to
Algiers early in 1943 to assist in the negotiations to arm and bring
the free French forces into the war. Dealing with his own country's
military and political leaders, much discussed ensued over the future
of France itself. As Monnet recalled:
I had never a moment's doubt about what that struggle
meant; but so long as the physical prerequisites for Liberation were
not attained, I had always refused to imagine what France's
political future might be after the war. …On the other hand,
however, every day brought new and more worrying evidence of
political confusion about the future of France. The ensuing
dissensions were dividing ally from ally, Frenchmen from Frenchmen,
and the Allies in general from the French themselves. I realized
that we must go further than simply stating very general principles,
further than I had imagined when I was in Washington, and further
perhaps than the Allies thought necessary and sufficient from the
immediate conduct of the war.[93]
From that point on, Monnet participated in the newly-established "French
Committee of National Liberation" that would create the blueprint
for a postwar France. At de Gaulle's urging, Monnet returned to the
United States in mid-November of 1943 to do what could be done to
represent French - and what he perceived as European -- interests. "If
… the Provisional Government proved capable of preventing anarchy
or a Communist takeover," he wrote in his memoirs, "there
would soon be a tendency to return to the old order. In that case, the
greatest danger would be that of rebuilding a Europe made up of
sovereign States, each exposed to the facile temptations of
protectionism."[94] Yet, not even Monnet dared to think in
Physiocratic terms -- of ridding European societies of the entrenched
privilege enjoyed by the "old order" and adopting a program
of reform based on laissez-faire, laissez-aller (i.e., a fair
field with no favors). Instead, in December of 1945 he approached
Charles de Gaulle with a proposal for cooperative national planning
subsequently adopted by the French Cabinet. Already, under this plan
the nation's energy production and coal mines were being nationalized.
Allocation of these resources would be determined jointly by planning
commissioners representing industry, labor and government. A new
generation of economists would be kept busy gathering data and
statistics on all crucial resources. And, in their move to build a
uniquely planned economy, the French reformers looked not to the
landlords receiving unearned income from their control over
agricultural lands, urban locations or natural resource-laden lands;
rather, and contrary to Monnet's desires, they would once again adopt
protectionist measures to reduce competition from external producers.
In the interim, financial support would have to come from the United
States. "Without them," Monnet concluded, "the
economy would founder; in which case anarchy, already latent, would
become rife."[95] Monnet knew what he was talking about. As
in Britain, French workers were demanding higher wages, better working
conditions and greater security when they were no longer able to work.
Moreover, both the communists and socialists would be strongly
represented in the coalition government.
At the far eastern end of the Eurasian continent, the nationalist
revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh was ready to test the French will to
preserve their empire. To the Vietminh there was little distinction to
be made between foreign oppressors. Although Japanese imperialism had
been broken, the French telegraphed their intention of returning and
Chiang Kai-shek's forces had moved into the northern regions of
southeast Asia. In the chaos of the Japanese withdrawal, Ho seized his
opportunity. Late in August, the Vietminh marched into Hanoi, then
moved troops into Saigon. Ho was proclaimed president of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam and sought international recognition.
From Ceylon came the French response. General Leclerc, commander of
the French Asian forces, declared that France had no intention of
relinquishing control over Indo-China. Mountbatten, who as Supreme
Allied Commander in Southeast Asia was in a unique position to
recognize the strength of the Vietminh, attempted to warn the French
that any effort to restore colonial rule would be costly and in the
end fruitless. The French were not about to relinquish control over
territories they viewed as their natural right to exploit as one of
the world's great powers.
With hostilities against the Japanese ended on the Asian mainland,
the role of the United States -- which had few colonial or imperial
responsibilities to resurrect -- became confused. Command of U.S.
forces in China had been turned over to General Albert Wedemeyer late
in 1944. Although Wedemeyer would later criticize Stilwell's "dictatorial
attitude" in working with Chiang Kai-shek, his own assessment
of conditions in China did not differ markedly from that of Stilwell:
The history of China reveals that it had never been a
political entity in the sense that we understand a nation. The
Generalissimo's position was not secure. There were ambitious,
self-seeking Chinese generals who continued to oppose his regime.
The Communists represented a group of revolutionaries with a private
army and with an ideology wholly untraditional in the Chinese sense,
both inspired and supported by the Soviet Union. There were many
intellectuals who opposed the one-party system as represented by the
Kuomintang and yet were strongly opposed to communism. The common
enemy, Japan, had served to unite many recalcitrants, at least for a
time, but it was evident that the Generalissimo did not exercise
full control. ...Americans imagined that Chiang Kai-shek could
simply give an order and it would be carried out. I realized that
the Generalissimo, far from being a dictator, was in fact only the
head of a loose coalition, and at times experienced great difficulty
in securing obedience to his commands.[96]
Moreover, just as the defeat of Japan had opened the door for the
Vietminh in southeast Asia, all of China was fast returning to its
prewar struggle between competing factions. The disintegration began
well before the Japanese surrender, which placed an incredible strain
on Wedemeyer as military liaison. "It took me some months to
get oriented to the realities of the power struggle between the
Chinese Nationalist Government and the Communists," he
admitted. In his opinion, "the political advisers provided by
the State Department had been seduced for one reason or another into
an undiscriminating, almost emotional, revulsion against the
Nationalist Government."[97] Chiang Kai-shek was pressed to
somehow establish order and control over a territory greater in size
than the entire United States, with little more than a primitive
transportation network, communications systems in disarray and
widespread official corruption. The Chinese were facing not only civil
war but almost certain Soviet aggression on the frontier over disputed
territory.
When the Second World War ended, a million Japanese remained in
Manchuria and an equal number were scattered throughout the Chinese
mainland. General Chu Teh, commander of the communist troops in
northern China, had moved quickly to disarm the Japanese and occupy as
many cities and towns as possible. Both Wedemeyer and U.S. Ambassador
Patrick Hurley urged that the Japanese be instructed to surrender only
to Nationalist forces. For the foreseeable future, however, that was a
practical impossibility. To gain time for the Nationalists, Truman
directed MacArthur to dispatch representatives to all areas where
Japanese forces remained in concentrated numbers. MacArthur, already
on record with the view that Manchuria, Korea and much of northern
China were lost to the Communists, refused to commit troops to support
Chiang Kai-shek's efforts to consolidate Nationalist territorial
positions. MacArthur understood his primary responsibility to be the
occupation and administration of Japan, and Truman's own directive was
that Japanese troops in Manchuria and in Korea north of the 38th
parallel surrender to the Soviets. MacArthur accepted the formal
Japanese surrender on the 2nd of September, aboard the U.S.S. Missouri
anchored in Tokyo Bay.
With Japan finally defeated, the British, French and Dutch were
equally determined to hold on to their imperial outposts in Southeast
Asia. Truman was in the unenviable position of searching for a
principled expression of the U.S. commitment to ending the Old World
subjugation of other peoples even though there were few, if any,
sincere democratic initiatives to support. At home, U.S. voters
expected demobilization and the return of their loved ones. Few
Americans were prepared for the rapid deterioration of the Grand
Alliance and the atmosphere of Cold War soon to be thrust upon them.
Navigating these waters without triggering renewed warfare - this time
with the Soviet Union as the adversary - presented an enormous
challenge for Truman's administration and the U.S. foreign policy
establishment.
As one surveys the global picture, the United States was one of only
a handful of nations whose socio-political structure was not under
siege by socialist, communist or nationalist factions. Moreover, as
armies retreated and were pursued across the Eurasian continent,
peasant populations were devastated and vast areas of agricultural
land forced out of cultivation. Despite the best efforts of the United
States and other food exporting nations, famine held millions of
people around the globe in a terrible grip. Even in the United States,
the list of shortages in basic foods was growing in the face of global
demand. Lend-Lease agreements with Britain, the Soviet Union and
France had been designed to last only until the end of hostilities;
and, without serious consideration of the consequences, senior U.S.
government officials recklessly issued an order for the flow of goods
to stop. Drought in the Ukraine, a breakdown of collective
agriculture, as well as the virtual absence of adult males or
machinery all added up to widespread famine throughout the Soviet
Union. Once these facts were set before Truman, he immediately
announced that all commitments to U.S. allies would be fulfilled and
humanitarian assistance expanded to the extent possible. Herbert
Hoover, who had coordinated U.S. food relief efforts after the First
World War, was enlisted by Truman to make a global tour and report
back on conditions. Truman then announced above-market prices would be
paid for corn, wheat and other cereals targeted for export and U.S.
producers responded with increased output. As a result of timely
intervention, although famine during 1945 was to remain widespread,
the problem did not erupt into a breakdown of order. Little thought
was given, however, to the potential for drought to occur in the U.S.
where fragile prairie grasslands or semi-arid deserts had been brought
into cultivation using intensive irrigation. The consequences of
environmentally destructive practices were the concern of as yet a
small number of concerned citizens. What most others were concerned
with was a return to normalcy and to the task of providing goods for a
civilian population eager to finally enjoy some of the fruits of their
labor and the benefits of peace.
The Old World's socio-political institutions were severely damaged,
if not quite ready to be overthrown entirely. Welfare states were in
the process of being created - to some extent on foundations of social
democracy - moving toward natural resource nationalization, greater
public control over energy production, transportation and other goods
and services deemed too essential to leave in private hands.
Elsewhere, uprisings against colonial or imperial tyranny were
dominated by individuals committed varying degrees of socialism. The
truly revolutionary teachings of cooperative individualists such as
Thomas Paine or Henry George - or even the early twentieth-century
speeches made by Churchill and other Liberals against landlordism as
the cornerstone of privilege and oppression -- were unknown to or
ignored by these radical leaders. In the best instances, they were
guided more by long-delayed quests for sovereignty and by a desire to
return to communitarian societal organization. Rhetoric aside, none of
the individuals holding or seizing power to decide for others how they
ought to live offered a program in any sense based on just principles.
At issue was whether primarily private or primarily statist forms of
landlordism would prevail. Each relied on significant elements of
legislative and regulatory corruption, of privileges sanctioned and
protected by law and enforced by the police powers of the state. And,
each depended upon the use of the military to prevent the have nots
from disrupting the status quo. Each had at its service a growing
cadre of intellectuals and bureaucrats schooled to perpetuate
conventional wisdoms consistent with prevailing -- or revolutionary --
institutional arrangements.
Within the social democracies the controls, though well-established
and deeply entrenched, were more subtle and mitigated by decentralized
layers of government and judicial oversight. The intellectual
wilderness abounded with individuals whose writings could be pointed
to in celebration of free expression. Yet, there were few who could
legitimately claim to have dedicated themselves to a postwar structure
built on equality of opportunity, on a fair field with no
favors or the principles of cooperative individualism. At
best, policy makers in the West acknowledged the need for incremental
moves toward the welfare state and the use by government of
incentives, subsidies, tax exemptions and direct spending to mitigate
the boom-to-bust characteristics of the so-called business cycle. The
challenge would eventually become how to accomplish these objectives
in an era of the multinational corporation and knowledge transfers
yielding decentralized wealth production. Economic growth and
stability would demand a level of voluntary, international cooperation
among governments for which there was no precedent. Reflecting on the
predicament in which the people of the U.S. found themselves, Walter
Lippmann warned that "[w]isdom always lags behind power, and
for the newcomer, which is what we are, the lag is bound to be greater
than in an old established state where the exercise of world power is
a matter of long experience and settled habit."[98] He might
have also observed that those same old established states had brought
the world to its current desperate condition. Notwithstanding this
sentimental historical note, Lippmann did offer his fellow citizens
one piece of relatively good advice:
Great as it is, American power is limited. Within its
limits, it will be greater or less depending on the ends for which
it is used. It is, for example, altogether beyond the limits of any
power we possess to dictate to any one of our allies, even the
smallest, how it must organize its social and economic order. We can
preserve our own order if we improve so that it produces
progressively that greater freedom and plenty which we believe it
can produce. By proving the results, not by declaiming generalities
and making threats, we can offer an example which others may wish to
follow if and as they have the means to do so.[99]
In truth, no one was very sure what might happen in the United States
once the government curtailed its demand for war goods and several
millions of young men returned to compete for employment. Four years
of continuous full employment had generated an enormous pool of
individual savings. Wartime production controls denied people many
consumer goods, particularly automobiles. For four years the nation's
construction industry had built very few houses, and wartime marriages
set the stage for a tremendous demand for new homes. Truman's analysts
told him there was already a shortage of more than five million
housing units. At minimum, government was obligated to nurture a
smooth transition to peacetime production before dismantling its
central planning apparatus.
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