Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART SEVENTEEN
Part Seventeen: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: American Atomic Supremacy: 1945-1950
Chapter 62: The Factors
Historically, the period 1945 to early 1963 forms a unity. During this period a number of factors interacted upon one another to present a very complicated and extraordinarily dangerous series of events. That mankind and civilized life got through the period of almost two decades may be attributed to a number of lucky chances rather than to any particular skill among the two opposing political blocs or among the neutrals.
The period as a whole is so complex that no successful effort has been made by any historian to present it as a unity. Instead, it is usually treated as a series of separate, relatively isolated, developments, such as events in the Far East, United States domestic history, Soviet domestic history, developments in science and technology, the rise of the neutrals, and other developments. Such a presentation is not adequate because it falsifies the historical fact that these (and other) developments occurred simultaneously, and constantly reacted upon one another. Moreover, the central fact of the whole period, and the one which dominated all the others, was the scientific and technological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, because this rivalry formed the very foundation and core of the Cold War, which was recognized by everyone to be the dominant political factor of the period.
Unfortunately, the Cold War is almost always described in terms which put minor emphasis on, or which may even neglect, the role of Soviet-American technological rivalry. This is done because most historians do not feel competent to discuss it; but chiefly it is done because much of the evidence is secret. Because of such secrecy, the story of this Soviet-American technological rivalry falls into two quite distinct, and even contradictory, parts: (1) what the real situation was and (2) what prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be. For example, in 1954-1955 the Soviet Union had a thermonuclear so-called H-bomb many months before we did, when public opinion believed the opposite; again, in late 1960 there was a widespread belief throughout the world in a so-called "missile gap," or American inferiority in nuclear missile weapons, when no such inferiority existed; and finally, for a period of several years, from 1957 to about 1960, the Russians were in advance of the United States and the free world generally in missile technology and in missile-guidance mechanisms, although this was not reflected, then or later, in any superiority in nuclear missile weapons, because of their simultaneous inferiority in nuclear warheads for missiles, an inferiority by a wide margin both in numbers and in variety of such explosive weapons.
In dealing with this central factor of the world situation, the historian is prevented by secrecy on both sides from making any assured or final judgments, and must simply make a judicious estimate of the situation on the basis of available information. Unfortunately, the influence of this factor is so central, and thus so all-pervasive, that inability to be sure of the facts on this matter brings a fair amount of uncertainty into many other areas, such as, for example, the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles or the real significance of the so-called "atomic espionage cases." Such uncertainty, however, is always present in historical analysis of the recent past, and most historians, knowing that the documents and thus the facts are unavailable for contemporary history (say, the last twenty years), usually leave the most recent past to others, to political scientists, journalists, or biographers.
In the history of the period 1945-1963 there are six chief factors: (1) the Cold War and the nuclear balance; (2) demobilization and re-mobilization, with special emphasis on inter-service rivalries and the pressures from industrial complexes; (3) partisan political struggles in the United States, centering on the rise and decline of unilateralism; (4) personal political struggles in the Soviet Union, centering on the succession to Stalin; (5) intra-bloc discords, centering on the relations between the United States and its allies on one side and the relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites on the other side; and (6) the role of neutralism, revolving around backward nationalisms and anti-colonialism. The history of the period can be understood only in terms of the interplay of these six factors, in all their complexities, treated simultaneously, but before we attempt to do this we must make a brief examination of each factor separately in order to define our terms and to establish secondary chronological sequences.
The Cold War, as we shall see in the next chapter, was an inevitable consequence of the defeats of Germany, Japan, France, and Italy, and the collapse of Nationalist China, but it was raised to an acute and sustained crisis by the existence of nuclear weapons and the development of rocket missiles. The combination threatened the survival of man as a civilized being, although it probably did not threaten his continued existence, after a nuclear holocaust, on a degraded social level as a distinct species of living being. The fear of human extermination was spread by many well-intentioned, mistaken, or mercenary people, and reached its peak, perhaps, in the commercial success of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, both as novel and as motion picture. The annihilation of man, as shown in such works, is technically possible, but will certainly not result from the weapons which would be used in total thermonuclear war. However, there is always a remote possibility that a madman such as Hitler might decide to destroy the human race as revenge for the frustration of his insane ambitions. This could be done in a number of ways, of which the simplest would be to encase a large number of thermonuclear bombs in thick layers of cobalt; the ensuing fallout of radioactive cobalt 60 could extinguish all animal life on earth (excluding most plants, insects, and other invertebrates). No sane policy would use such a bomb, since cobalt 60 is 320 times as radioactive as radium, and it would require at least four hundred such bombs, each at least one ton in weight, to release enough radioactivity to extinguish all animal life on earth.
However, even without a cobalt bomb, any extensive nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of human beings and would release sufficient radioactivity to inflict such extensive genetic damage that subsequent generations of human beings would produce a substantial percentage of monsters; this fact, added to the genetic damage to bird-life, might create a situation where men would be unable to compete successfully with insects (who are much more immune to genetic damage from radioactivity ) .
The balance of nuclear weapons is a central factor in the Cold War, since no agreement on cessation of nuclear testing, nuclear disarmament, conventional disarmament, or relaxation of tension can occur until both sides recognize that a nuclear balance of equilibrium (the so-called "nuclear stalemate") has been achieved. This came close to achievement early in 1950, when both sides had atomic weapons, hut was destroyed at that time by President Truman's order to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb. It was not achieved again until the end of 1962, because when both sides had achieved the H-bomb by 1956, that balance was disturbed by the missile race, which reached its widest disequilibrium with the Soviet success with "Sputnik" in October 1957. This led to the subsequent race to obtain an intercontinental ballistic missile with nuclear warhead (ICBM) in 1957-1962.
By 1963, w hen both sides had these weapons, the balance of terror was established and negotiation was possible. As a matter of fact, the balance was not equal, since the American total capability in nuclear war was far superior to that of the Soviet Union in 1963, but weapons development had reached approximately the same point; the United States was more vulnerable to Russia's fewer weapons because a larger part of its population was industrial and urban, and the Soviet Union had growing problems in other areas, notably its alienation from Communist China. At the same time, gross fissures began to appear in the Western bloc from De Gaulle's efforts to turn Europe out of the American camp and into a Third ("neutralist") Force. About the same time, the Cuban Crisis of October 1962, somewhat like the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, by bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the edge of a war that neither wanted, revealed to both the mutual balance of error and the need to do something about it. All this marked the end of the historical period which began in 1945.
The chief subdivisions of the history of nuclear balance over the period 1945-1963 are as follows:
1. The American Atomic Monopoly from Alamogordo in June 1945 to the first Soviet atom bomb ("Joe I") in August 1949.
2. A brief nuclear balance from 1949 to 1950.
3. The Race for the Hydrogen Bomb from January 1950 through the first American hydrogen fusion at Eniwetok in November 1952 and the first Soviet H-bomb explosion of August 1953 to the American achievement of a practical thermonuclear weapon in March 1954. This contest continued for two more years as each side tried to perfect the new weapon as an aerial bomb. The United States made its first successful air drop of a fusion bomb on May 21, 1956—almost certainly later than the comparable Soviet test.
4. The Race for the ICBM from 1956 to 1962 has been widely misunderstood because propaganda falsehoods from both sides sought to conceal the true situation and often confused even themselves. Basically the problem was, at the beginning, how to combine the American Nagasaki bomb, which weighed 9,000 pounds, with the German V-2 rocket, which carried a warhead of 1,700 pounds only 200 miles. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the Americans, over the opposition of the air force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet government acquired a series of very powerful rocket boosters ranging in thrust from 800,000 pounds to l.5 million pounds, and capable of hurling capsules from one to over seven tons in weight. These were demonstrated to an astonished world from October 1957 onward.
These Soviet successes in space made the American effort in rocket boosters look very second-rate, but this impression was rather misleading. It was perfectly true that the United States in 1957-1960 had no powerful rocket boosters capable of hurling large space vehicles into orbit or past the moon (as was done with the 3,245-pound Soviet Lunik I in January 1959), but the United States in this period had a large number of fission and fusion warheads in a great variety of sizes, and was rapidly developing moderately powerful rockets able to carry these great distances. In fact, the first American ICBM was fired from Cape Canaveral in December 1957, two months after Sputnik I, and went full range in November 1958.
By 1961 the United States had a varied assortment of missiles, troth solid- and liquid-fueled, some able to be fired in minutes, and capable of carrying nuclear warheads, whose explosive power was equivalent to as little as 750,000 tons of TNT (thus forty-three times the force of the Hiroshima A-bomb) to 5,000,000 or more tons of TNT. These could be delivered distances from l,000 to over 6,000 miles and with such accuracy that at least half could be landed in a circle within 3 miles of a target.
These developments left the Soviet Union with a much smaller number of giant rockets able to carry 20-megaton (20,000,000 tons of TNT) warheads, but so large that their locations were soon spied out by American high-flying U-2 photographic planes. To remedy this overemphasis on size, the Soviet Union, in October 196r, broke the moratorium on nuclear explosive testing which had existed since October 1958, and exploded a great variety of small bombs from I to 5 megatons, as well as a gigantic one of 25 megatons and a colossal one of 58 megatons; the latter, the largest bomb ever exploded, was equal to one-third the total of all previous nuclear explosions from 1945 to the end of previous testing in December 1958.
Even before these final tests, in 1960 elaborate calculations on the giant electronic computers in the Pentagon were estimating the consequences of a hypothetical total nuclear war in June 1963. Two answers were: (1) If the Soviet Union struck first and the United States retaliated, the war would be over in a single day with a Russian victory in which they lost 40 million of their 220 million population dead and 40 percent of their industrial capacity, while America would have 150 million of its 195 million people dead and 60 percent of its industry destroyed. (2) If the United States struck first with a nuclear attack, in reply to a Soviet advance of ground troops into Germany, 75 million Russians and 110 million Americans would be killed, half the industry of both would be destroyed, and neither could win. On this basis, some relaxation of tension became imperative, as soon as the Soviets could be satisfied they had achieved stalemate by their 1961-1962 nuclear tests.
Closely related to this four-stage sequence of nuclear capability is the quite different four-stage sequence of strategic planning. This is concerned with what we plan to do as distinct from what we are able to do. From the American side it has four stages, as follows:
1. "Great Power Cooperation" within the United Nations Organization, 1945-1946
2. "Containment of" Soviet expansion by all means available, including economic aid to others (the Marshall Plan), conventional forces (as in NATO), and nuclear weapons, 1946-1953.
3. "Liberation," "Massive Retaliation," and the "New Look," 1953-1960. This period, associated with the influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, sought to deal with foreign crisis by the use of slogans and quite unrealistic policies which could never have been used. Our allies, the neutrals, and even the Russians were ignored and often despised, while the State Department engaged in what Dulles himself called, in January 1956, "going to the brink" of war. This policy sought to reduce government spending and balance the budget by reducing expenditures for all local or conventional wars and to base our strategy and our foreign policy on the threat that any Soviet advance of any kind anywhere of which we disapproved would be stopped by our "massive retaliation" with all-out nuclear attack anywhere we judged appropriate, on a unilateral (without consultation with our allies) and on a "first-strike" basis (that is, we would do this even if the Soviet Union had not attacked us and had not used nuclear weapons). This policy was hopelessly irresponsible and not only alienated allies (such as France) and neutrals (such as India), but could not be used, since we would never adopt such suicidal and ineffective tactics to reply to a Communist local advance in Korea, southeast Asia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yugoslavia, or most other places on the periphery of the Soviet bloc. This policy abandoned NATO, in fact if not in theory, and meant that we had publicly adopted a policy we would never carry out; because even if we were willing to accept the full consequences of the Soviet nuclear counter-blow to our "massive retaliation" we could not ever win in such a war, since Soviet ground forces, with their 125 divisions in Europe, could easily overrun NATO's 25 divisions and would occupy all Europe except Britain and Spain. The Kremlin leaders, moving to Paris or Rome (perhaps in the Vatican) would he beyond our reach and could hold London under nuclear threat, while both the United States and the Soviet Union were devastated. The Dulles doctrine was not a doctrine of action but solely a doctrine of threats, since it expected that the threat alone would stop Soviet advances and that it would never he necessary to carry out the threat. The policy worked, in the sense that the world and the United States lived through it, only because the Soviet Union, at the same time. was in the "interregnum" between the death of Stalin (March 5, 1952) and the accession to full power of Khrushchev (July 4, 1957 to March 27, 1958). The last two years were occupied by the Eisenhower administration's efforts to get back to a more workable defense policy based on a variety of responses to Soviet actions and to do so without either repudiating Dulles or excessively unbalancing the budget.
4. "Graduated deterrence," from 1960 onward, was really an effort to get back to the polices of 1950 as advocated by the National Security Council paper NSC 58 of March 1950, and generally to the advice given by Robert Oppenheimer before his public career had been destroyed by the "massive retaliation" advocates in 1953. This revived doctrine called for a graduated and varied strategic response to Soviet aggression combined with cooperation with our allies, recognition of the rights of neutrals to be neutral, increased economic and cultural aid to both groups, and relaxation of tension with the Soviet Union by cultural and scientific cooperation. This broad and varied progran1 had at its core development of at least four levels of possible war: (1) war with conventional weapons; (2) addition of tactical nuclear weapons; (3) strategic nuclear attack on a "no cities" basis (with attacks aimed only at Soviet military bases and installations); and (4) the "total-devastation response." Each of these had sub-gradations and gave rise to unsolved problems such as "escalation," that is, the possibility that one level would develop gradually into a more intense level in the heat of combat. Moreover, such complex responses required immense outlays of money, even if the achievement of the whole was spread over many years. But this cost, it was felt, would be worthwhile, since nuclear warfare on a "no cities" basis would save about 100 million American lives in the first week of war in comparison with war on the "total-devastation" level. One element in this whole strategic shift was the shift of the emphasis of our response from Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bombing to conventional army forces and to the navy's nuclear submarines with Polaris missiles. The former would reduce the temptation to the Soviet Union to instigate local "brush-fire" wars, while the latter would be even more successful in preventing any Soviet nuclear "first strike," since such an attack would be much less able to find and destroy Polaris submarines than it would be to wipe out fixed SAC bases.
The next great aspect of postwar history was the partisan political struggles within the United States, centering on the rise and decline of unilateralism and neo-isolationism. As we shall sec in a later chapter, the party struggle in the United States took the form of a struggle between the party of the middle classes, the Republicans, and the party of the fringes, the Democrats. This lineup, with its multitude of exceptional cases, found the intellectuals (including the scientists), the internationalists, the minorities, and the cosmopolitans in the Democratic Party, with the businessmen, bankers, and clerks in the Republican Party. The isolationism of the latter, combined with their inability to cope with the world depression or with the international crisis arising from Hitler, kept the Democrats in the White House for twenty years (1933-1953). The defeat of Dewey by Truman in 1948 was a particularly bitter pill, and the Republican partisans after that event were ready to adopt any weapon which could be used to discredit the Democratic administration. They found such a weapon ready at hand in the neo-isolationist forces within the Republican Party which were entrenched in the Congress by the seniority system of committee controls which operated there. Since either party in the United States wins a presidential election on a national (and not on a local) basis and by appealing to the moderate middle-group people who are willing to shift their vote and to consider the issues presented, a party which is long out of the White House will be reduced to the control of its local, narrow, ignorant, and extremist core which is unwilling to consider issues or the national welfare, or to shift their party stand and votes. For these reasons, the Republican Party had fallen into congressional control (represented by Senate figures such as Senators Robert Taft, Kenneth Wherry, Styles Bridges, and William Jenner) ....
This group, to whom we often give the name "neo-isolationist," knew nothing of the world outside the United States, and generally despised it. Thus, they gave no consideration to our allies or neutrals, and saw no reason to know or to study Russia, since it could be hated completely without need for accurate knowledge. All foreigners were regarded as unprincipled, weak, poor, ignorant, and evil, with only one aim in life, namely, to prey on the United States. These neo-isolationists and unilateralists were equally filled with suspicion or hatred of any American intellectuals, including scientists, because they had no conception of any man who placed objective truth higher than subjective interests, since such an attitude was a complete challenge to the American businessman's assumption that all men are and should be concerned with the pursuit of self-interest and profit.
At the end of the war, it was but natural that many Americans should seek to return from foreign and incomprehensible matters, including countries, peoples, and problems which were a standing refutation of the American neo-isolationist's ideas of human nature, of social structure, and of proper motivations.
Neo-isolationism had a series of assumptions which explain their statements and actions and which could not possibly be held by anyone who had any knowledge of the world outside American lower-middle-class business circles. These beliefs were at least seven in number:
1. Unilateralism: the belief that the United States should and could act by itself without need to consider allies, neutrals, or the Soviet Union.
2. National omnipotence: the belief that the United States is so rich and powerful that no one else counts and that there is, accordingly, no need to study foreign areas, customs, or policies, since America's policies can be based exclusively on its own power and its own high moral principles (which have no real meaning to anyone else).
3. Unlimited goals (or utopianism): the belief that there are final solutions to the world's problems. This assumes that American power permits it to do what it wishes and that demonstration of this power to trouble-making foreigners will make them leave the United States alone and secure forever. This idea was reflected in its crudest form in the belief that America's power could be applied to the world in one final smash after which everything would be settled forever. Upholders of this view refused to accept that America's security in the nineteenth century had been an untypical and temporary condition and that constant danger and constant problems were a perpetual condition of human life except in brief and unusual circumstances. This kind of impatience with foreign problems and danger was clearly stated by Dulles in his article "A Policy of Boldness" in Life magazine, May 19, 1952. There he insisted that the Truman policy of containment must be replaced by a policy of "liberation," since the former was based on "treadmill policies which at best might perhaps keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted." These policies, he argued, would lead to financial collapse and loss of civil liberties, were "not designed to win victory conclusively," and did not seek to solve the problem of the Soviet Union but to live with it, `'presumably forever." His solution was to refuse to recognize Communist control either in the European satellites or in China, to deny the existence of the Iron Curtain, and to free millions enslaved by Communism. Although the only way these millions could be freed was by war, Dulles refused to advocate preventive war, and established no method of achieving his goals except his belief that, if he refused to face reality, reality would change. However, he did accept preventive war in the form of massive retaliation if the Communists made any further advances, and he established the argument that the Truman policy of containing the Communists was a policy of refusing to defeat them, from softness or fear or sympathy. This became the basis for future partisan Republican charges that Democratic administrations were "soft on Communism" and pursued "no-win" policies.
4. The neo-isolationist belief in American omnipotence and foreign inferiority led, almost at once, to the conclusion that continuance of the Soviet threat arose from internal treason within America and that the Russian nuclear successes must be based on treason and espionage and could not possibly be based on foreign science or Soviet industrial capability. The neo-isolationists were convinced that the only threat to America came from internal subversion, from Communist sympathizers and "fellow travelers," since no foreign threat could harm our omnipotence. All opposition to neo-isolationist views was branded as "un-American," and was traced to low motivations or corruption of American life by such non-American innovations as economic planning, social welfare, or concern for foreigners. Henry Wallace and Mrs. Roosevelt, w ho were the special targets of these isolationists, were accused of conspiring to give away America's wealth (in order to weaken it): "a quart of milk to every Hottentot."
5. Since the chief "high moral principle" whicl1 motivated the neo-isolationists was their own economic self-interest, they were especially agitated by high taxes, and insisted that Soviet Russia and the Democrats were engaged in a joint tacit conspiracy to destroy America by high taxes by using Cold War crisis to tax America into bankruptcy.
6. Since the neo-isolationists rejected all partial solutions or limited goals, and were unwilling to pay to increase America's military power (sine' they insisted it was already overwhelmingly powerful), there was little they could do in foreign affairs except to talk loudly and sign anti-Communist pacts and manifestos. This explains Dulles's verbal bluster and "missile rattling" and his pactomania which kept him running about the world signing documents which bound people to pursue anti-Communist policies.
7. The unrealistic and un-historic nature of neo-isolationism meant that it could not actually be pursued as a policy. It was pursued by John Foster Dulles, with permanent injury to our allies, the neutrals, and the personnel of American government, but it was not followed in the Pentagon and was followed only halfheartedly by Eisenhower in the White House. The President sought to keep the moderate middle group of voters in his camp by radiating his personal charm around the country, but the Pentagon refused to follow Dulles's tactics of appeasing the neo-isolationists by refusing to defend their departmental employees. When Senator McCarthy turned his extravagant charges of subversion and treason from the State Department to the army, the employees of the latter were defended by Secretary Robert Stevens, and McCarthy's downfall began. The neo-isolationist forces, although defeated at the ballot box in 1960 and 1962, still continue in an increasingly irresponsible form under a variety of names....
Much less obvious to the public eye than neo-isolationism, but equally in creating the history of 1945-1963, was the struggle within the American defense services as to what use would be made of the nuclear weapon. In 1945 the atom bomb was at once hailed as the "absolute weapon" against which there was "no defense." If true, this would have meant the end of the army and navy, since the existing bomb, shaped like a hen's egg, 10 feet 8 inches long, 5 feet in diameter, and weighing 10,000 pounds, could be handled in the B-29 only by modifying its bomb drop to widen the opening, and could not be handled by the ground forces or by navy guns or carrier planes. Morever, the range and intensity of its destruction gave rise to immediate claims from the advocates of air power that massed ground forces, slow-moving armored equipment, and all naval vessels, especially the expensive carriers and capital ships, were made obsolete by the new weapon. These extravagant claims were made more critical in their impact by the Strategic Bombing Surveys of World War II and the demobilization problems at the war's end.
The advocates of air power from at least 1908 had made extravagant claims, usually based on future rather than on presently available equipment, that the airplane provided the final supreme weapon which made all other methods of warfare unnecessary. This was seen in the arguments of General Giulio Douhet of Italy, General "Billy" Mitchell of the United States, and the refugee Russian airplane designer Alexander de Seversky. Douhet as early as 1921 preached that the next war would be ended in the first twenty-four hours by the total destruction of all enemy cities from the air; Mitchell in the mid-1920's raised a great furor with his claims that land-based planes had made battleships and lesser naval vessels obsolete; and Seversky, before, during, and after World War II, claimed that air power had made other arms needless. We have seen how these claims had a considerable and pernicious influence on men's actions before and during World War II. Many airmen who did not believe these claims nevertheless felt that they had to support them in order to obtain a large slice of their country's defense funds from civilian politicians who w ere in no position to judge the merits of sucl1 claims.
The experience of World War 1I did not, at first glance, support the claims of the advocates of air power. On November 3, 1944, the United States Secretary of War, on order of the President, set up a committee of twelve to conduct a Strategic Bombing Survey to examine the contribution of strategic bombing to final victory by evaluating bomb damage, assessing captured German and Japanese documents, and interviewing the leaders of the defeated countries. The German survey, which came out in 208 parts over several years, beginning in 1945, did not, on the whole, support the claims of the air enthusiasts, but rather showed that the air-force contribution was much less than had been anticipated or hoped and had become substantial, chiefly in transportation and in gasoline supplies, only after October 1944, when Germany was already beaten (with tactical air-force help) on the ground.
These conclusions were very unwelcome to the army air-force officers devoted to strategic bombing, and especially to the airplane-manufacturing industry, which had reached the multibillion-dollar size and hoped to retain at least some of its market after the war's end. In the last few months of the war against Japan, at least $400 million worth of Boeing B-29's and parts were in action in the Pacific. Loss of faith in strategic bombing would expose air-force officers and the air-force industry to a grim and poverty-stricken postwar world. Accordingly, it became necessary to both groups to persuade the country that Japan had been defeated by strategic air power. The Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan did not support this contention, although by concentrating on strategic bombing it helped to cover up the vital role played by submarines in the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine, the equally vital role played by the early Marine Corps work in amphibious warfare, and, above all, in the magnificent job done by naval supply forces for all arms, including the strategic bombing bases themselves. The protection and supply of these bases in the Marianas was in sharp contrast with the loss of B-29 bases in continental China to Japanese ground forces, and showed to any unbiased outsider the need for a balanced distribution of all arms in any effective defense system. In such a balanced system the role of strategic bombing and of large long-range planes in general (as contrasted with tactical planes and fighters) would obviously be less than either the air-force officers or the airplane industrialists considered satisfactory.
Accordingly, it became urgent for these two groups and their supporters to convince the country (1) that the atom bomb was not "just another" weapon but was the final, "absolute," weapon; (2) that the atom bomb had been the decisive factor in the Japanese surrender; and (3) that nuclear weapons were fitted only for air-force use and could not be, or should not be, adapted for naval or ground-force use. The first two of these points were fairly well established in American public opinion in 1945-1947, but the third, because of atomic secrecy, had largely to be argued out behind the scenes. All three points were largely untrue (or true only if hedged about with reservations which would largely destroy their value as air-force propaganda), but those who used them were defending interests, not truth, even when they insisted that the interests they were defending were those of the United States and not merely those of the air force. In this controversy, the scientists, most of whom were naively defending truth, were bound to be crushed. On the other hand, any dissident scientist could obtain access to money and support by making an alliance with the air force.
At the center of this problem was the struggle for control of nuclear reactions within the United States, but the ultimate objective of the struggle was the right to exercise influence on the subdividing of the national defense budget. Thus, the struggle centered on the personnel of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and especially of its scientific advisory panel of outstanding scientists, the so-called General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC. And at the center of the whole struggle was Robert Oppenheimer.
Robert Oppenheimer, wartime director of the Los Alamos laboratory which made the A-bombs, was not a great scientist of the class including Einstein, Bohr, or Fermi, but his knowledge of the subject was profound, and wider than most. He was very well educated in cultural matters, especially literature and music, and could quote Homer in Greek and the Bhagavad-Gita in Sanskrit at appropriate occasions. His social and, to a greater extent, his political education did not begin until about 1935, when he was thirty-one and already a full professor at California Institute of Technology and at the University of California. His political naivete continued until after the war. He had always been a persuasive talker, got along very w-ell with a wide diversity of people, and during the war he discovered he was an excellent administrator. By 1947 he was the chief scientific adviser to most of the important agencies of the government, informally, if not formally, since other scientists frequently consulted with him before giving their decisions on problems. From 1947 on, he was chairman of the GAC, as well as a member of the Atomic Energy Committee of the Defense Department's Research and Development Board; of the National Science Foundation; of the President's Scientific Advisory Board; chairman of the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; and consultant on atomic energy to the CIA, to the State Department, to the National Security Council, to the American delegation to the United Nations, and to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy (the congressional watchdog over the AEC)—in all, he was on a total of thirty-five government committees..
In spite of Oppenheimer's exalted positions in 1947-1953, which included the directorship of the great Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (American copy of All Souls College at Oxford), there was a shadow on Oppenheimer's past. In his younger and more naive days he had been closely associated with Communists. Certainly never a Communist himself, and never, at any time, disloyal to the United States, he had, nonetheless, had long associations with Communists. Partly this arose from his political inexperience, partly from the prevalence of Communists among the intellectual circles of the San Francisco Bay region where he spent the years 1929-1942 as a professor, and partly from his sudden and belated realization of the terrible tragedy of the world depression and of Hitler about 1936. At any rate, his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and the latter's wife were Communist Party workers in San Francisco at least from 1937 to 1941, while Oppenheimer's own wife, whom he married in 1940, was an ex-Communist, widow of a Communist who had been killed fighting Fascism in Spain in 1937.
The Oppenheimers continued to have friends who were Communists, and Oppenheimer contributed money until the end of 1941, through Communist channels, to Spanish Refugee Relief and to aid for migratory farm workers in California. As late as 1943 he had some kind of remote emotional relationship with a girl, daughter of a fellow professor, who was a Communist. All of this "derogatory" information was known to General Groves and to Army Intelligence, G-2, before Oppenheimer was made head of Los Alamos in 1942. The appointment was made because his talents were urgently needed, and there was no reason to feel that he was a Communist himself or that he had ever been, or would ever be, disloyal to the United States.
For the next four years Oppenheimer was kept under constant surveillance by M-2; his conversations secretly recorded, telephone calls and letters monitored, and all his movements shadowed. In 1954, under oath, General Groves testified to his belief in Oppenheimer's discretion and loyalty, and he repeated this in his memoirs, published in 1962. The significance of all this is that this ancient evidence, plus Oppenheimer's alleged opposition to efforts to make the H-bomb in 1946-1949, was used by the advocates of air power, the neo-isolationists, the exponents of massive retaliation, and the professional anti-Communists in 1953-1954 to destroy Oppenheimer's public reputation, to end his opportunity for continued public service, and to discredit the preceding Democratic administration in Washington. It was an essential element in the massive retaliation, neo-isolationist, McCarthyite, Dulles interregnum of 1953-1957, which ran almost exactly parallel to the post-Stalin interregnum in the Soviet Union during the same years.
The last significant factor in this postwar period of eighteen years was provided by the events in the Far East. In this factor also there are three sub-periods, of which the most significant was the middle one from "the loss of China" to the Communists late in 1949 to the Geneva "Summit Conference" of July 1955. In this period the Far East was in confusion over the Chinese victory in mainland China; the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950; the Korean armistice of July 1953; the Indo-Chinese war and armistice in 1953-1954; and the threatened Chinese Communist attack on Quemoy, if not on Formosa, in the winter of 1954-1955. The earlier period of Far Eastern history saw the slow decay of the Nationalist Chinese regime of Chiang Kai-shek and the revival of Japan, while the later, third, period centered upon the growing strength and dangerous pugnacity of "Red" China. This third period ended with the Chinese attack on India in October 1962 and the break between Communist China and the Soviet Union at the end of 1962.
The interweaving of these six factors makes up a major part of the history of the period 1945-1963. In each case we can discern three stages, of which the middle one is the most critical. The dates of these stages are not, of course, the same for all six factors, but they are close enough so that the whole eighteen years can be examined successfully as three consecutive sub-periods organized around the central core of the nuclear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Accordingly, we can examine this whole period in the three stages: (1) American atomic supremacy, 1945-1950; (2) the race for the H-bomb, 1950-1957; and (3) the race for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (IBM) from 1957 to early 1963.
Chapter 63: The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1949
The surrender of Japan left much of the world balanced between the mass armies of the Soviet Union and the American nuclear monopoly. It was an unequal balance, because the United States would not have used its atomic weapon against the Russians for anything Russia was likely to do. Stalin realized this, and largely ignored the atom bomb, although his designer, Andrei Tupolev, successfully copied four B-29's captured by the Russians in the Far East in 1944 and brought these to production (as Tu-4's) in 1947. Otherwise, the Kremlin's assessment of the situation was quite mistaken.
Stalin assumed that the United States would soon relapse into isolationism, as it had done after World War I, and would be fully occupied witl1 a postwar economic collapse like that of 1921. Accordingly, he regarded Britain as the chief obstacle to his plans, and, seeing that it was both small and weak, with most unpromising economic prospects, he proceeded to carry out his designs with relatively little attention to the reactions of either English-speaking Power. These plans involved the creation of a Soviet-controlled buffer fringe of satellite states on the Soviet frontiers in all areas occupied by Soviet armies, and Communist coalition governments beyond these areas. In both cases the local Communists would be controlled by leaders of their own nationality who had been trained under Comintern auspices in the Soviet Union. In some cases, these Communist leaders had been exiles in Russia for more than twenty years.
The chief error in Stalin's postwar strategy was his total misjudgment of President Truman and, on a wider stage, of the American people as a whole. Some of this error undoubtedly arose from Stalin's ignorance of the world outside Russia and from the fact that his terrorist tactics in Russia in the 1930's had made it difficult for him to get reliable foreign information from his diplomatic corps, which was shielded from contact with foreigners and was more concerned with sending Stalin the information he expected than with that derived from independent observations. In any case, the Kremlin misjudged both Truman and the American people.
Truman, in spite of a natural suspicion of the Russians, ended the war with every intention of trying to carry out Roosevelt's original plans for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union. In addition, having learned much from the 1920's, he intended to make every effort to avoid either a postwar economic depression or a relapse into isolationism. His success in avoiding these events made it possible to reverse his inherited policy of cooperation with Russia when Stalin's actions in 1946-1947 made it clear that cooperation was the last thing the Kremlin wanted. These actions appeared most clearly in regard to Germany.
We have already noted the Soviet subversion of Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria by native Communists returning from Russia under the protection of the Soviet armies. The same thing occurred, but more gradually, in eastern Germany. There the Communists at first pretended to cooperate with any "anti-Fascist" groups, but their unwillingness to cooperate with the Western Powers in the administration of Germany appeared almost at once. They gradually closed off their occupation zone and refused to carry out the earlier agreements to treat Germany as a single administrative and economic unit. This meant that the usual economic exchange within Germany of food from the agricultural eastern portion of the country for the industrial products of western Germany was broken. Instead, East German food was drained to the Soviet Union. To prevent starvation of the West Germans, the United States and Britain had to send in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of food and other supplies. On May 3, 1946, General Lucius D. Clay, head of the American Military Government in Germany, informed the Russians that no future agreements would be made to ship West German industrial equipment as reparations to Russia until the Russians agreed to treat Germany as an economic unit and to give some accounting of their reparations plundering of East Germany. Both points referred to open violations of the Potsdam Agreement regarding the treatment of Germany.
The Soviet Union justified these and other violations of earlier agreements on the urgent need for their own economic rehabilitation. There can be no doubt that the Soviet Union had suffered great economic damage from the war, possibly the loss of a quarter of its prewar wealth, more than all the other victor countries combined, but the Kremlin could have obtained much more by continued cooperation with the United States than it did from its postwar policy of studied enmity. This enmity was based on a number of factors: In the first place, Stalin was misled by the false ideology of Marx and Lenin which spoke of the inevitable struggle of capitalism and Communism, of the inevitable economic breakdown of the capitalist system, and of the capitalist endeavor to avoid such a breakdown by militarist aggression. On this basis, Stalin could not believe that the United States was prepared to be generous and cooperative toward the Soviet Union.
Moreover, Stalin was worried by the weakness in depth of the Soviet system from economic damage and from ideological dissent. The war had been fought on an ideology of patriotism and nationalism, not as a Communist ideological struggle, and the Kremlin by 1946 was eager to get back to its Communist ideology, partly as justification of the new hardships of reconstruction under the fourth Five-Year Plan (March 13, 1946) and partly to overcome the Russian soldiers' admiration for what they had seen of the West. These soldiers, for example, were amazed to discover that the "exploited" German workers of whom they had heard so much had standards of living several times higher than those of the ordinary Russian. The discovery that ordinary Germans had watches, even wristwatches, was an astounding revelation to the Russian soldiers, who proceeded to seize these wherever they saw them.
A third factor guiding Soviet behavior was the discovery that there was no mass support for Russia or for Communist ideology in eastern and central Europe, especially among the peasants, and that the buffer of Communist states along Russia's western border would have to be built on force and not on consent. The governments of these states could be recruited from men of the respective nations who had been living in the Soviet Union for years under endless Communist indoctrination, but the un-indoctrinated masses in each country would have to be held in bondage by Soviet military forces, at least until local Communist parties and local secret-police organizations subservient to Moscow's orders could be built up. The urgent need for this, from the Kremlin's point of view, was shown, when Austria and Hungary, although under Soviet military occupation, were permitted relatively free elections in November 1945. Both resulted in sharp defeats for the local Communist parties. Because such an outcome could not be permitted in the buffer satellites farther east, elections there had to be postponed until the local governments were sufficiently communized and entrenched to be able to guarantee a favorable outcome to any election.
It was this situation which made it impossible, in Russia's view, to carry out the promises made at Yalta and elsewhere about free elections in Poland or other countries neighboring on Russia. The United States, through Secretary of State Byrnes, assured the Kremlin that it wanted these neighboring states to have "democratic" governments "friendly" to the Soviet Union. The Kremlin knew, although Byrnes apparently did not, that these were mutually exclusive terms. They insisted these governments must be "friendly," while he insisted that they must be "free" and "democratic" in the Western sense. Since the Kremlin assumed that Byrnes knew as well as they did of the contradiction in terms here, they assumed that his insistence on "democratic" governments in eastern Europe indicated that he really wanted governments unfriendly to the Soviet Union. They were willing to call any governments which were friendly "free" and "democratic," but Byrnes refused to accept this reversal of the ordinary American meaning of these words..
These disputes over Germany and eastern Europe, which u ere regarded in the West as Soviet violations of their earlier agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, were regarded in Moscow as evidence for Stalin's conviction of the secret aggressive designs of the West. By the winter of 1945-1946, the Russian peoples were being warned of the dangers from the West. This began in 1945 with attacks on ''cosmopolitanism'' and prohibitions of Soviet soldiers "fraternizing" with aliens, especially soldiers of the United States or Britain, in the course of their occupation duties. Early in November 1945, Molotov warned the Moscow Soviet that Fascism and imperialist aggression were still loose in the world. Similar speeches were made hy other Soviet leaders, including Stalin. B,, the spring of 1946, xenophobia, one of the oldest of Russian culture traits, was rampant again. In September 1946, and again in September 1947, Andrei Zhdanov, the Kremlin's leader of the international Communist movement, made speeches which were simply declarations of ideological war on the West. They presented the Soviet Union as the last best hope of man, surrounded by prowling, capitalist beasts of prey seeking to destroy it.
On this basis the Soviet Union found it impossible to cooperate with the West or to accept the American economic assistance in reconstruction which was offered. The American Congress in the last renewal of the Lend-Lease Act in 1945 had forbidden use of these funds for postwar rehabilitation, but other funds were made available. For the transitional period these amounted to about $9 billion. These transitional funds were made available on a humanitarian and economic basis and not on political or ideological grounds. Accordingly, they were available to the Soviet Union and other areas under Communist control in accordance with the provisions of each fund. For example, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), was an international organization which handled goods worth $3,683 million, of which 65 percent was provided from the United States, 15 percent from Britain, and 3.5 percent from Canada. Its grants went to 17 countries with China first ($518 million), Poland next ($478 million), Italy with $418 million, Yugoslavia with $416 million, and the Ukraine, seventh, with $188 million.
Beyond the primary, humanitarian aim of most United States assistance was the desire to get local economies functioning, and efforts to further America's basic conviction of the value of a high level of international trade on a multilateral basis. The United States was opposed to all restrictive trade measures such as autarchy, bilateralism, or quotas, and had as its ultimate aim the restoration of multilateral trade at the highest possible level, with freely convertible international monetary exchanges. It was convinced that such a system would be advantageous for all peoples, and did not see that it was anathema to the Soviet system, which had restrictions and quotas on economic life, even within the country, so that, while most Russians lived in poverty, a privileged minority, buying in special stores with special funds and special ration cards, had access to luxuries undreamed of by the ordinary person.
In the American plans for economic recovery, Great Britain, as the world's greatest trader, had a special role. The United Kingdom could not exist without very large imports, but it could not pay for these without large exports. Such exports had to be much larger than before the war, even to pay for the prewar level of imports, because many of Britain's prewar sources of overseas incomes from investments, shipping, insurance, and so on, had been drastically reduced by the war. In 1945 the British balance-of-payments deficit was about 875 million pounds sterling, and in 1946 it was still 344 million pounds. To tide over this deficit until British exports could recover, the United States in July 1946 provided Britain with a credit of $3,750 million, with interest at 2 percent and repayment in fifty annual installments to begin on December 31, 1951. The interest was to be waived whenever the British trade balance would not pay for imports on her 1936-1938 level. In return for this, Britain gave rather indefinite promises to work to reduce its bilateralism in trade, especially imperial preference, and to release, as soon as feasible, its blocked sterling accounts.
Lend-Lease was ended in September 1945, with the Japanese surrender, and all claims were settled with Britain under an agreement of December 1945. This canceled the American grants under Lend-Lease of over $30,000 million and gave Britain permanent establishments on British soil, with supplies in Britain or en route, for a settlement of $650 million payable on the same terms as the British loan just mentioned.
Assistance similar to these was available to the Soviet Union but was generally rebuffed. Even in 1945, efforts to establish international emergency committees for coal, transportation, and economic recovery in Europe were boycotted by the Soviet Union, with the exception of the one on transportation, which was necessary to supply the Russian troops. Little cooperation could be obtained from Soviet authorities for handling or aiding refugees, except for their demands for the return, to concentration camps or slave labor, of those who had fled from eastern Europe. On October 15, 1945, Moscow signed an agreement similar to Britain’s by which they agreed to pay, after July 1954, for the quarter-billion dollars’ worth of goods on their final Lend-Lease demands yet unfilled when Lend-Lease ended; but they refused to discuss any general Lend-Lease settlement and they refused to negotiate for a general loan, similar to that made to Britain, although Stalin had asked for one of $6 billion as early as January 1945. An American offer to discuss such a credit was rejected by Russia as “financial aggression” in March 1946. The offer was renewed in April and again in September 1946, but the American aims of multilateral trade free of artificial restraints except tariffs, like the American insistence on free elections, were regarded in Moscow as clear evidence of America’s aggressive aims.
One significant, but perhaps not essential, factor in the deterioration of the relations of the Big Three in 1945 and 1946 lies in the provincial ignorance of the three foreign ministers, Byrnes, Bevan, and Molotov, who conducted the negotiations. All three were men of limited background and narrow outlook who saw the world from a narrow nationalistic point of view and were incapable of appreciating the outlook of different cultures or the different values and verbal meanings to be found in alien minds. Nevertheless, it does seem clear that the postwar breakdown of cooperation was inevitable in view of the conceptions of public authority, state power, and political security to be found in all three countries.
On the whole, if blame must be allotted, it may well be placed at the door of Stalin's office in the Kremlin. American willingness to cooperate continued until 1947, as is evident from the fact that the Marshall Plan offer of American aid for a cooperative European recovery effort was opened to the Soviet Union, but it now seems clear that Stalin had decided to close the door on cooperation and adopted a unilateral policy of limited aggression about February or March of 1946. The beginning of the Cold War may be placed at the date of this inferred decision or may be placed at the later and more obvious date of the Soviet refusal to accept Marshall Plan aid in July 1947. The significance of the latter date is revealed by the fact that Czechoslovakia, which accepted on July 7th, was forced by Stalin's direct order to Prime Minister Gottwald to reverse this decision on July 10th.
One significant encouragement to Soviet aggression came from the almost total demobilization of the American war effort. Pressure from special-interest groups such as business, labor unions, and cattlemen, aroused public opinion for the ending of price controls and rationing and obtained cooperation from an anti-New Deal coalition in Congress to end most of the nation's economic controls in 1946. At the same time came almost total military demobilization. In spite of Ambassador Harriman's explicit warnings from Moscow in April 1945, and Stalin's declaration of cold warfare in February 1946, the American government carried out the demobilization plan of September 1943, which was based on individual rather than on unit discharges. This destroyed the combat effectiveness of all units by the end of 1945, when almost half the men had been demobilized, and every unit, as a result, was at 50 percent. The army's 8 million men in August 1945 was at 4 1/4 million by the end of the year and reached 1.9 million by July 1946. The air force fell from 218 combat groups to 109 groups in the last four months of 1945. The navy fell from 3.4 million men in August 1945 to 1.6 million in March 1946.
The most critical example of the Soviet refusal to cooperate and of its insistence on relapsing into isolation, secrecy, and terrorism is to be found in its refusal to join in American efforts to harness the dangerous powers of nuclear fission. Long before the test at Alamogordo, some of the nuclear scientists, spurred on once again by Szilard, were trying to warn American political leaders of the unique character of the dangers from this source. Centered in the Chicago Argonne Laboratories, this group wished to prevent the use of the bomb on Japan, slow up bomb (but not general nuclear) research, establish some kind of international control of the bomb, and reduce secrecy to a minimum. Early in April 1945, Szilard wrote to President Roosevelt to this effect, and, on the latter's death, sought out Byrnes and repeated his views verbally. The future secretary of state found difficulty in grasping Szilard's arguments, especially as they were delivered in a Hungarian accent, but the new President Truman soon set up an "Interim" Committee to give advice on nuclear problems. This committee, led by Secretary of War Stimson, was dependent on its scientific members, Bush, Conant, and Karl T. Compton, for relevant facts or could call on its "scientific panel" of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and E. O. Lawrence for advice. All these scientists except Fermi were "official" scientists, deeply involved in governmental administrative problems involving large budgets and possible grants to their pet projects and universities, and were regarded with some suspicion by the agitated, largely refugee, scientists in the Manhattan District laboratories. These suspicions deepened as the "official" scientists recommended use of the bomb on Japan "near workers' houses."
At Chicago seven of the agitated scientists, led by James Franck of G๖ttingen (Nobel Prize, 1925) and including Szilard and Eugene Rabinowitch, sent another warning letter to Washington. They forecast the terror of a nuclear arms race which would follow use of the bomb against Japan. Later, in July 1945, they presented a petition seeking an international demonstration and international control of the new weapon. Szilard obtained sixty-seven signatures to this petition before it was blocked by General Groves and Arthur Compton, using military secrecy as an excuse. After Hiroshima this group formed the Association of Atomic Scientists, later reorganized as the Federation of Atomic Scientists, whose Bulletin (BAS) has been the greatest influence and source of information on all matters concerned with the political and social impact of nuclear weapons. The editor of this amazing new periodical was Eugene Rabinowitch..
The energetic lobbying of this group of atomic scientists had a considerable influence on subsequent atomic history. When the "official scientists," late in 1945, supported the administration's May-Johnson bill, which would have shared domestic control of atomic matters with the armed services, the BAS group mobilized public opinion behind the junior senator from Connecticut, Brian McMahon, and pushed through the McMahon bill to presidential signature in August 1946. The McMahon bill set up an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) of five full-time civilian commissioners, named by the President, with David Lilienthal, former TVA czar, as chairman. This commission, from August 1946, had ownership and control of all fissionable materials (uranium and thorium) from the mine to the final disposal of atomic wastes, including control of all plants and process patents, with the right to license private nuclear enterprises free of danger to society.
The AEC as it functioned was a disappointment to the BAS scientists. They had sought freedom from military influence and reduced emphasis on the military uses of nuclear fission, free dissemination of theoretical research, and a diminution of the influence of the official scientists. They failed on all these points, as the AEC operated largely in terms of weapons research and production, remained extravagantly secretive even on purely theoretical matters, and was, because of the scientific ignorance of most of the commissioners, inevitably dominated by its scientific advisory committee of "official" scientists led by Oppenheimer.
To the BAS group and to a wider circle of non-scientists, the AEC was a more or less temporary organization within the United States, whose work would be taken over eventually by a somewhat similar international organization. As a first step in this direction, the United Nations, at the suggestion of Bush and Conant and on the joint invitation of three heads of English-speaking governments (President Truman, Prime Minister Attlee, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada), set up a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) of all members of the Security Council plus Canada (January 1946). A State Department committee led by Undersecretary Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal and a second committee of citizens led by Bernard Baruch spent much of 1946 in the monstrous task of trying to work out some system of international control of nuclear energy. The task of educating the non-scientists generally fell on Oppenheimer, who gave dozens of his brilliant, extemporaneous, chalk-dusted lectures on nuclear physics The final plan, presented to the UN by Baruch on June 14, 1946, provided an international control body similar to the AEC. It would own, control, or license all uranium from the mine through processing and use, with operation of its own nuclear facilities throughout the world, inspection of all other such facilities, absolute prohibition of nuclear bombs or diversion of nuclear materials to non-peaceful purposes, and punishment for evasion or violation of its regulations free from the Great Power veto which normally operated in the Security Council of UN. The vital point in Baruch's plan was that it would go into effect by stages so that inspection and monopoly of nuclear materials would be operative before the American atomic plants were handed over to the new international agency and before the American stockpile of nuclear bombs was dismantled.
This extraordinary offer, an offer to give up the American nuclear monopoly, technical secrets, and weapons to an international agency, in return for a possibly ineffective system of international inspection, was brusquely rejected by Andrei Gromyko on behalf of the Soviet Union within five days. The Soviet spokesman demanded instead a reverse sequence of stages covering (1) immediate outlawing and destruction of all nuclear weapons, with prohibition of their manufacture, possession, or use; (2) a subsequent agreement for exchange of information, peaceful use of atomic energy, and enforcement of regulations; and (3) no tampering whatever with the Great Power veto in the UN. Since only the United States had the atom bomb at the time, the adoption of this sequence could require the United States to give up the bomb without any assurance that anyone else would do anything, least of all adopt any subsequent control methods, methods which might allow the Soviet Union to make its own bombs in secret after the United States had destroyed its in public. The nature of this Soviet suggestion shows clearly that the Soviet Union had no real desire for international control, probably because it was unwilling to open the secret life of the Soviet Union, including bomb-making, to international inspection.
The Soviet refusal of the American efforts at international nuclear control, like their refusal of American loans and economic cooperation, provides some of the evidence of the Kremlin's state of mind in 1946. This evidence became overwhelming in 1947 and 1948, when Soviet aggression appeared along the whole crescent from Germany, across Asia, to the Far East.
In Germany, as we have seen, the area under Soviet occupation was increasingly isolated from the West and increasingly communized internally. The Soviet military forces encouraged the formation of a dominant German Socialist Unity Party (SED) under Communist control. Local provincial elections in the winter of 1946-1947 gave victory to the SED in the Soviet zone and to democratic parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in the provinces of the three Western zones.
Austria was also divided into four areas of military occupation, except that it had a single central government of its own under the old Social Democrat leader, Karl Renner, who had also been chancellor in 1919. While the Anglo-Americans supported the Austrians against starvation by the use of UNRRA assistance, the Soviet zone was systematically ransacked. This destroyed all Communist influence in the country, as was clear when the election of November 1945, reduced them to four seats in an assembly of 165 members. Only in May 1955, two years after Stalin's death, was it possible to get Soviet consent to a peace treaty and withdrawal of all four occupying forces (October 1955).
Even the friends of Russia suffered from Stalin's pressure and his insistence that the Kremlin must remain the center for Communist decisions throughout the world. In Yugoslavia, where Tito was originally as anti-Western as Stalin himself, Moscow's efforts to dominate Yugoslavia alienated Tito completely by a combination of economic, diplomatic, and propaganda pressure. The rivalry between the two Slavs came to a head at the end of 1947 when Tito tried to build up a non-Russian Communist bloc by signing friendship treaties with Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. By March 1948, a complete break between Belgrade and Moscow was reached. Tito took his place next to Trotsky in Stalin's list of the damned, and the next few years were filled with efforts to overthrow Tito, and the purging of Tito sympathizers by Stalin's cooperative jackals in the other Communist satellites.
Farther east, strong Soviet pressure had been put on Greece, Turkey, and Iran since 1945. On Greece this pressure came through the Communist regimes in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, but in Turkey and Iran it came from the Soviet Union directly. These pressures were probably designed to bring into power in the three countries governments relatively favorably inclined toward the Soviet Union to the extent that the latter could obtain a veto power over any collaboration of the three with the Western Powers, especially with Great Britain. This was an effort in which Stalin had few good cards and which showed his ignorance of political conditions in countries outside his own. In these three, as in other countries, most people desired two things: political independence and economic aid. Neither of these could be or would be obtainable from Stalin, the first because it violated his imperious nature and the second because of economic scarcity in the Soviet Union itself.
Nevertheless, the effort was made. In Greece the election of March 31, 1946 gave the Popular Party (which supported the king) 231 out of 354 seats in the Chamber. The following September a plebiscite on the return of the monarchy gave 69 percent favorable votes. The Communist groups refused to accept these results and by 1946 were carrying on guerrilla warfare in the mountains, using the three adjacent Communist states as bases for supplies, training, and rest areas. A commission of the Security Council of the UN studied the situation in the early months of 1947 and condemned Greece's three northern neighbors, but a Soviet veto stopped any further action by the UN.
Instead, the guerrilla leader "General Markos" set up a Greek Provisional government in the mountains, but alienated much support among Greece's impoverished peasants by the banditry of his guerrillas and especially by their kidnaping of thousands of peasant children who were smuggled into the three Communist countries for Communist indoctrination. Many of these children did not return for eight or ten years, and hundreds vanished forever. Large groups returned from Albania as late as 1963.
The Soviet pressure on Turkey was uncalled for and totally unremunerative. We have already noted that the Soviet-German accords of 1940 1941 showed Soviet ambitions for bases "on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles" and for a sphere of political influence "south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf." Thus in this area, as in the Far East, Stalin resumed the expansionist aims of czarist Russia. At Potsdam, Stalin had looked even farther afield by asking for a trusteeship in the former Italian colony of Libya and a less definite influence in Eritrea on the western shore of the Red Sea. These aims were formally demanded by Moscow in September 1945 and in April 1946 (Conference of Foreign Ministers in Paris).
As early as March 19, 1945, Russia denounced its treaty of friendship with Turkey and within a few months made demands, both official and unofficial, for Kars, Trebizond, and other areas of northeastern Turkey. Anti-Turkish agitation was encouraged among the Kurds (a non-Turkish people living at the base of the Anatolian peninsula and divided among Turkey, Iran, and Iraq), and the Georgia Socialist Soviet Republic demanded eight Turkish provinces covering much of the Black Sea coast and Kurdistan. On August 8, 1946, Molotov demanded a joint Soviet-Turkish defense of the Straits. Only after Stalin's death, on May 3o, 1953, did the Kremlin renounce the earlier territorial demands on Turkey, but by that time the alienation was complete: Turkey had been driven into the Western camp, soon allied with Greece and Yugoslavia in a defensive alignment against the north Balkan Soviet satellites (August 1954), and became the eastern pillar of NATO.
The Soviet aggressions on Iran began in 1945 when Soviet-sponsored Communists, under the protection of the Russian armies occupying northern Iran, set up "independent" Communist governments at Tabriz and in Iranian Kurdistan. These were apparently intended to be incorporated into Soviet Azerbaidzhan with the Kurdish areas to be taken from Turkey, but the failure of the latter scheme made this impossible. Nevertheless, the Russian Army refused to evacuate northern Iran in March 1946, as it was bound to do by the agreement of January 29, 1941, which had admitted it. Only in May did Iran win Soviet evacuation of its forces by agreeing to form a joint Soviet-Iranian oil company to exploit the petroleum resources of northern Iran (a project which never was fulfilled).
By the end of 1946 Britain found the burden of providing military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey too heavy for its over-strained resources. It was, moreover, eager to overcome the American aloofness in the Near East, where it felt it was bearing much of the Soviet pressure alone. Accordingly, in February 1947, it threatened to withdraw completely from Greece and Turkey by April 1st. On March 12th the American President enunciated the "Truman Doctrine" to a joint session of Congress. This stated that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation hy armed minorities or by outside pressures." He asked for financial assistance to "free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way." His request for $400 million for aid to Greece and Turkey was granted, after considerable debate, in May 1947. Two weeks later, at Harvard's commencement, Secretary of State General George C. Marshall enunciated the "Marshall Plan," which offered American economic support for a European Recovery Program which would include the Soviet Union and other Communist states. Once again Stalin's ignorance committed him to an unrewarding path. He rejected this offer, and forced Czechoslovakia, which had previously accepted, to do the same.
The path Stalin was following took a more aggressive turn in 1947 and 1948. This involved complete Soviet domination of the area already under Communist control, the shift of Communist parties from coalition to opposition in other areas, the instigation of Communist outbreaks in "colonial" areas (especially in the Far East), and the expulsion of the Western Powers from their enclave in Berlin. All this was to be achieved while avoiding an open clash with the United States. As part of this process, which was badly bungled everywhere except in Czechoslovakia, the Communists withdrew from the "bourgeois" coalition governments which they had joined in 1944-1945: in Belgium in March 1947, in France and Italy in May, and in Austria in the autumn. At the same time, agitation from Communist-dominated trade unions was increased, and the first postwar large-scale strikes began at the end of the year. As part of this same harassment, the Soviet Union in the UN vetoed applications for membership by Italy and Finland.
In the states already under Communist control, the Soviet influence was intensified by efforts to establish a system in which the local parties and secret police were controlled hy Soviet agents in the Russian embassies. As part of this effort, the Third International, or Comintern, which had been dissolved in theory by Stalin in December 1943 (but had continued to operate secretly out of Moscow), was reestablished under the new name "Cominform." This was done under Zhdanov's direction at a meeting of representatives of the Communist parties of France, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia held in Poland in September 1947. The delegates were told by Zhdanov and Georgi Malenkov of the Soviet Union that the world was now divided into two antithetical forces—the "imperialist group" headed by the United States and the "peace-loving" group headed by the Soviet Union—and that it was necessary to reestablish direct operational control of the Communist parties.
The Soviet effort to obtain operational control of the party in Yugoslavia was vigorously resisted by Tito. As a final effort in this direction, Stalin in February 1948 tried to force Yugoslavia into a federation with more docile Bulgaria. Tito flatly refused. As a result, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in June 1948, and all-out economic, propaganda, ideological, and political warfare was begun by the Soviet bloc against Tito. The conflict was used by Stalin as an excuse to purge all oppositionist Communists within the bloc as "Titoists." As part of this struggle, Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the Greek guerrillas, with the result that they, with General Markos, ended their disturbances in 1949, and Tito, became a recipient of American economic aid which eventually reached $700 million. This process reached its climax with the achievement of a Greek-Yugoslav alliance in 1954.
A parallel effort by Stalin to take Czechoslovakia completely into the Communist camp was more successful, and was, in fact, the most successful of his numerous efforts to increase his power in the last six years of his life. In Czechoslovakia the Russian-trained Communist Klement Gottwald had become prime minister in a coalition government in July 1946. In February 1948, the Communist minister of the interior replaced eight Prague police officials by Communists, was overruled by the Cabinet, but refused to back down, calling out into the streets the workers' militia, armed factory workers, and the police (all three under Communist control) to sustain his refusal. When the non-Communist ministers protested and some threatened to resign, Gottwald threatened the ill President Bene with civil war if he did not dismiss twelve non-Communist ministers. Bene, who had been determined to seek support from Russia and not from the Western Powers since his unhappy disillusionment with the latter at Munich in September 1938, yielded to Gottwald's demands on February 25, 1948; he himself resigned on May 4th and died in September 1948. His friend, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, and the chief Czech advocate of a pro-Western policy, died mysteriously hy a fall from a window on May 10th. The Communist control of Czechoslovakia was then complete.
Stalin's victory in Czechoslovakia was followed by an even more dramatic defeat, in an effort to eject the United States, France, and Britain from their sectors in West Berlin. Apparently he believed that the United States was considering a withdrawal from Berlin and that a Soviet push would hasten that event. The former belief may have been based on good evidence, but the latter inference from it was quite mistaken.
American policy in Germany for almost three years (April 1945-April 1948) was a confusion of conflicting and ambiguous objectives. The basic idea, going back to 1942, was to make it impossible for Germany to wage aggressive war again, but no plans had been made, even on a tentative basis, as to how this goal should be sought. Two decisions left unsolved were whether Germany would be broken up and how reparations might be obtained from her without building the country up economically to provide these. Efforts by the State Department to settle these questions were blocked by other departments, notably by the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department, which wanted them left unsettled, and by the Treasury Department, which had totally different aims from State.
In a farsighted message from London in August 1944, Ambassador John Winant warned that lack of an agreed reparations policy would inevitably lead to a breakdown of joint Allied control of Germany and to a struggle with Russia for control of Germany. These wise words were ignored, and President Roosevelt, to stop the bickering, postponed all decisions. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau took advantage of this lacuna and of his close personal friendship with Roosevelt to push forward his own pet scheme to reduce Germany to a purely agricultural state by almost total destruction of her industry, the millions of surplus population to be, if necessary, deported to Africa! The secretary, supported by his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White, was deeply disturbed by Germany's history of aggression and by her efforts to annihilate other "races," and was fairly certain that an American relapse into isolationism would make it possible for Germany to try again. The only way to prevent such an attempt, he felt, was to reduce Germany's industry, and thus her war-making capacity, as close to nothing as possible. The resulting chaos, inflation, and misery would be but slight repayment for the horrors Germany had inflicted on others over many years.
By personal influence Morgenthau obtained acceptance of a somewhat modified version of this plan by both Roosevelt and Churchill at the Quebec Conference of September 1944. There is little doubt that Churchill's approval had been won by his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, who had personal animosities against Germany and had been the chief civilian advocate of indiscriminate bombing of German cities.
The error at Quebec was quickly repudiated, but no real planning was done, and the Morgenthau Plan played a considerable role in JCS 1067, the directive set up to guide the American military occupation of Germany. In the same context the vague and unsettled reparations discussions at Yalta proposed that reparations of $20,000 million, of which half to go to Russia, be obtained by the dismantling of German industry. The JCS 1067 directive ordered that Germany be treated as a defeated enemy and not as a liberated country, with the chief objective that of preventing future German aggression; no steps were to be taken to secure its economic recovery. At the Potsdam Conference it was agreed that the German economy should not be permitted to recover higher than a level which would sustain the occupation forces and displaced refugee persons, with standards of living for the German people themselves no higher than the average standards of living of other European countries. This rather ambiguous level was subsequently defined as equal to the German standard of living of 1932, at the bottom of the depression, the level, in fact, which had brought Hitler to power in January 1933.
It took more than two years of misery for Germany and frustrating relations with the Soviet occupation forces to secure any change in these American objectives. During these two years, lack of equipment, of fertilizers, and of encouragement to enterprise made German economic and social conditions worsen until the end of 1947. Much of the country was still in ruins, housing was lacking, production of food and coal were in almost total collapse, unemployment was very high, inflation was rampant, crime (especially from bands of displaced persons, ex-Nazis, and juvenile delinquents) was widespread, and the black market, using cigarettes as a monetary standard, was flourishing. Hunger and cold in the winter took a considerable toll, and the Germans, for two years, experienced some of the misery they had inflicted on others in the preceding dozen or more years.
Without a revival of industry, which was hampered by disarmament, reparations, and war damage, it was impossible to resume the two vital necessities of recovery, increased mining of coal and export of industrial products to pay for food imports. By the end of 1947, the Americans and British were thoroughly tired of paying astronomical sums each year to keep food flowing to western Germany. All efforts to make an economic reunion with eastern Germany failed because of Soviet insistence that such a reestablishment of interchange of food for industrial products between the two halves of Germany must be tied in with recognition of renewed Soviet claims for $10 billion in reparation payments to be taken from current production, two points which had been unsettled by the wartime agreements.
To revive German industry so that it could pay for imports of food, the Anglo-Americans devised a reform of the German currency. The Soviet government objected violently to this, because it might work but also because it would inevitably bind West Germany economically to the West: if the products of a revived West German industry could not be exchanged for eastern European food, they would have to be exchanged for food and raw materials from the West.
The German currency reform of 1948 is the fiscal miracle of the postwar world. From it came (1) an explosion of industrial expansion and economic prosperity for West Germany; (2) the tying of the West German economy to the West; (3) an example and model for other western European countries (and for Japan) in economic expansion; and (4) a wave of prosperity for western Europe as a whole which continued year after year and refuted completely the claims of Communists (or even Socialists) and, to a lesser extent, the claims of American businessmen that they held the sole key to prosperity. The reform, which went into effect on June 1, 1948, drastically reduced the volume of money in western Germany by exchanging new Deutschemarks for the current Reichsmarks on a one-to-one basis for the first 60 but on a 6.5-to-100 basis for all over 60. The new marks were blocked in banking accounts in complicated ways which encouraged their use for production.
The Soviet Union used the monetary reform in West Germany as an excuse for its blockade of Berlin which lasted in extreme form from June 24, 1948, to May 12, 1949 (although it had begun, on a partial basis, on March 31st). It began in an atmosphere of rapidly rising East-West tension. In December 1947, the King of Romania was forced into abdication and exile. Shortly after the new year, the SED in East Germany was purged of any leaders likely to show independence toward Stalin. The Czech takeover in February 1948 was preceded by Soviet invitations to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Finland to sign military alliances with Russia. All did so, but the Finnish delegates (in February) flatly refused Stalin's demand that the Soviet have the right to move troops into Finland on its own decision. In Italy, on April 18, 1948, desperate Communist efforts to get a strong foothold in the Italian government were defeated in the first general elections under the new Republican constitution. This election marks the turning point in postwar Italian history just as the simultaneous Berlin crisis and monetary reform mark the turning point in postwar German history. The Communists had participated in all three of Italy's postwar governments, under the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, but went into opposition in his fourth government, set up on May 31, 1947 (as they did in all countries of western Europe about the same time). The new constitution of January 1, 1948, required a new election during which the fate of newly democratic Italy hung in the balance. The results were a great defeat for the Communists, who obtained only 182 seats in their Popular Front alliance with the Left-wing Socialists, compared to 307 Christian Democrat members in the Assembly of 570 seats.
The Soviet decision to push the Western Powers out of their occupation sectors in western Berlin was part of this general Soviet movement. It was accompanied by claims that the whole city was an integral part of the Soviet occupation zone of eastern Germany and that the Western Powers were present there only on sufferance. To this the Western Powers answered that their presence in Berlin was on exactly the same basis as that of the Russians—the right of conquest. The Kremlin at no time admitted that it was establishing a blockade or that its aim was to eject the Western Powers. Its aims, rather, were to close access to smugglers, criminals, and eventually to the new "illegal" marks introduced by the monetary reform.
As we have seen, through the neglect of General Lucius Clay, as Eisenhower's deputy in 1945, the Western Powers had obtained no Soviet recognition of their access rights to Berlin from the western occupation zones of Germany. Rail, canal, road, and air traffic to the west were under Soviet control and were constantly harassed by shifting regulations, delays, and open obstacles. By the early months of 1948, rail and road routes were tied in knots, and air traffic along the recognized corridor was jeopardized by trespassing Soviet fighter planes, intruding barrage balloons, and unannounced aircraft gunfire. On May 5th a Russian fighter pilot, buzzing a British transport plane as it approached Berlin, collided with it and killed himself and the fifteen persons on the British plane. On June 24th all traffic by ground to Berlin from the west was closed, on a variety of excuses, and only the harassed air corridor was open. Hopes of supplying the 2,000,000 persons in the western sectors of the city by air were dim, as the population's need for food was over 2,000 tons a day and the need for coal for power would be about 5,000 tons a day, excluding home heating. Nevertheless, the attempt began. Day after day the operation became more intense and more efficient, with planes landing, originally at two, later at three, airports, as fast as they could act in. This continued night and day, reached 3,000 tons in 362 planes on July 5th and erratically crept upward, in spite of deteriorating weather conditions and lengthening darkness, through the winter.
In September the city government, broken up by Communist mobs, moved from the Soviet sector to the western part of the city, but was replaced by a new, completely Communist city government in the eastern sector. The Western Powers stopped all goods flowing between zones to the east and began to merge the three zones of the Western Powers and took steps to create a Western German government to rule over them in succession to the military occupation regime. To indicate the temporary nature of the new system, until the reunion of eastern Germany could permit establishment of a permanent government, the new regulations were called a Basic Law rather than a constitution, and were drawn up by a council of delegates from the provincial assemblies rather than by an elected constituent assembly. The new West German regime began to operate in May 1949, in the same month as the ending of the Berlin blockade..
The Berlin blockade was won by the West because of the tireless efficiency of the airlift and the resolute determination of the Berliners themselves to undergo any personal hardships or death rather than to submit to another despotic government. Food was scarce, other supplies nonexistent, and heat almost totally lacking through the winter of 1948-1949. Some starved, and many froze, but the resistance did not waver, and the airlift went on. Night and day, in spite of weather, weariness, and accidents (which killed 61 airmen), the planes roared in and out again. Soviet harassment of the airlift, by night flying on instrument in the air corridor, was never sufficient to stop it, as the Soviet clearly feared to push the dispute to open conflict. By September, planes were landing, around the clock, every three minutes. Daily tonnage crept slowly upward, passed 5,000 tons a day as the New Year opened, and by April passed 8,000 tons a day. One day that month, 1,398 planes, landing every 62 seconds, delivered 12,941 tons of supplies. The Soviet blockade had been defeated.
On May 12th, after elaborate negotiations, the ground routes to the city were reopened. In eleven months the American airlift had landed more than 1.6 million tons of freight in about 200,000 flights, a demonstration which undoubtedly awed even the Russians. And, in the interval, West Germany had been united from three zones to one and had obtained its own German government. The West German elections of August 14, 1949, gave the Christian Democrats 31 percent of the vote, with 139 seats in the Parliament. The chief opposition party, the Social Democratic, had 29 percent, with 131 seats. The Communists, with 5 percent and 15 seats, were in fifth place, after two other minority groups, the conservative, centralist Free Democrats with 52 seats, and the moderate, anti-Prussian, federalist German Party with 17 seats. Though the first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, an anti-Nazi who had been imprisoned by Hitler, won his post by only a single vote, he kept it until 1963.
Chapter 64: The Crisis in China, 1945-1950
The critical year 1949, which showed so clearly that the Kremlin's influence in Europe was severely limited within the area of control of the Soviet armies, saw also a shift of Stalin's activity to the Far East, where he tried new tactics in new circumstances. In Europe, outside the area of Soviet military occupation, even in West Berlin, Stalin had met a series of defeats in Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, and even Finland. In the Far East, where there was no extensive area of Soviet military control, different tactics were both necessary and possible. There also Stalin was largely defeated, although it took many years to demonstrate this fact. His defeat arose from his failure to recognize that Communism could advance in backward areas only so long as it was anti-colonial rather than Communist and worked to further local interests rather than those of Moscow. Stalin did not recognize these truths, and Soviet success in adopting tactics based on them was largely reserved for his successors after 1953.
At first glance the Communist success in ejecting the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek from China does not seem to support these remarks....
Stalin was like a shrewd old wolf of the north Siberian forest. Understanding nothing outside his own experience, he never forgot what had happened to himself. Stalin had been involved once before, in 1927, in an effort to communize China, and had failed ... in the attempt.... [In] the Far East ... he wanted a weak China surrounded by small states in which American influence was minimal. Such a weak China could be guaranteed by continued rule under the Nationalist government, possibly with the Communists playing a role in a coalition, as the United States seemed to wish. Through such a weak and divided China, Stalin could anticipate no threat to himself either from American efforts or from China itself. To reduce the danger of either of these alternatives, Stalin would have welcomed Communist or largely Communist regimes in Japan, Korea, southeast Asia, and Indonesia, with an autonomous or independent Communist Chinese regime in control of northwestern China, and possibly even Manchuria, as a buffer to the Soviet Union's own territory.
At the end of the war in the Far East in 1945, it was clear to most observers that Roosevelt's pretense that Nationalist China was a great Power, like his equally confused pretense that France was not a significant Power, was mistaken. China's war effort against Japan weakened fairly steadily from Pearl Harbor to the end. This decline resulted, very largely, from the almost total corruption of the regime, which left the Chinese peasant in sullen discontent and roused open disfavor among many urban groups, notably students. Many portions of the huge area of China were only nominally subject to Chiang Kai-shek's rule, and a very considerable extent in the western and northwestern far interior were subjected to the Communist regime of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, operating out of Yenan, in barren northern Shensi Province.
Chiang Kai-shek was a man of considerable ability and experience, and ... was deeply involved ... with cliques [Warlords and landlords] ... whose chief aims were to profit from their public positions and from their close associations with Chiang and to resist, by any means, efforts to reform or strengthen China which might reduce their opportunities for ... [personal gain]. These relationships, in 1945, in some cases had continued for almost twenty years. American aid and the contributions of the Chinese themselves disappeared in the network of ... mutually beneficial relationships which were spread throughout the system and which made it impossible for the Chiang regime to provide a decent living for the people of China or even to defend itself against possible enemies, internal or external. Arms and supplies from abroad were dissipated, vanishing in one way or another, sometimes forever; but on other occasions they turned up subsequently in the hands of guerrillas or of the Communist enemies of Chiang's regime. An enormous and incompetent army drained from the peasants, at low prices, large requisitions which were sold, usually for private profit, at high prices into urban black markets. In the two years following the defeat of Japan, $1,432 million in American assistance to China vanished in one way or another, and at the end the Chinese Army and the Chiang regime was weaker than ever. [The aid was secretly diverted to the communists.].
In spite of this weakness ... the Nationalist government refused to obey American advice either to reform or simply to consolidate itself in the parts of China it still controlled. It was determined to destroy the Communist regime, especially when Mao began to take steps to consolidate the buffer area which he and Stalin wished to establish in northwestern and northern China. This determination became a panic to prevent the Russian forces in Manchuria from turning over that rich area to the Communist units. The Soviet forces there, after looting the area under the guise of reparations from Japan, began to withdraw early in 1946. By a simple process of informing Mao and not informing Chiang of their withdrawal schedules, they ensured that the abandoned areas should be occupied immediately by Communist forces. The United States, which had been engaged in evacuating three million Japanese from China, moved fourteen Nationalist Chinese armies, most of which had been trained and equipped by the United States, to North China and Manchuria to block the Communist takeover. After the defeat of the Communist forces in the north, however, the Nationalists, contrary to American advice, attempted to crush the Communist forces everywhere. They did succeed in capturing the Communist capital of Yenan in March 1947, but, as the effort continued, their own forces were dispersed and defeated, while the Chinese forces, supported by disgruntled peasants, took over much of rural China.
General Marshall, on a mission from President Truman, spent much of 1946 in China. At first he hoped to work out some kind of coalition regime which would stop the civil war by taking Communists into the Chiang government in a minority role. Because this was not acceptable to either side, Marshall, and later (1947) General Wedemeyer, tried to get Chiang to reform and to consolidate in the areas he still controlled. Promises were free, but efforts to carry them out were insignificant. In an attempt to force the Nationalist government to stop the civil war and carry out the American program of reform, consolidation, and coalition with the Communists, an American embargo on arms shipments to China existed for eleven months, from August 1946 to July 1947. Unfortunately, this was just the period in which the Communists were expanding their forces with captured Japanese arms obtained from the Russians and with large acquisition of earlier American arms shipments to the Nationalists which were ... allowed to go to the Reds. To stop this ... it would have been necessary to allot at least 10,000 American officers to Chiang's forces, attached to every unit down to company level. Neither side wanted to do this, as the problems of language translation, of inability to enforce recommendations, or to overcome personal Chinese resentment against such interference by foreigners were almost insuperable.
Marshall, in 1946, became convinced that the Nationalist regime was hopeless and that it could overcome the Communists only if the United States took actual control by American personnel and fought the Communists with American troops. [Actually his mind was already made up at this time and he was secretly working with those in Washington, D. C. and elsewhere who were planning the betrayal of the Chinese people and the forces of Chiang Kai-shek.] He was unwilling to do this because he felt that the Chinese would resent it themselves, and it would make impossible any American effort to save Europe from direct Soviet control. Since there could be no question that Europe was more significant by an immense margin, he made the choice, represented by the Marshall Plan, to save Europe. [The Marshall Plan was a gigantic American taxpayer supported build up of the German Industrial machine.] He did not regard the Chinese position as total loss because he was convinced that any Chinese regime, Nationalist or Communist, would find it almost impossible to create a strong and prosperous China. General Wedemeyer, whose report was submitted to Washington in 1949 ... felt that large American aid and control should be extended, as a method of delaying the Communist advance. However, Wedemeyer, unlike Marshall, gave less consideration either to Europe or to political possibilities in Washington.
The policy adopted in the Truman Administration was something of a compromise between the Marshall and Wedemeyer recommendations. On the whole, the administration secretly adjusted its outlook to the hopelessness of the Chiang regime and its future, but it did continue assistance by appropriating $400 million in Chinese aid in 1948. [In reality the opposite was true, the Truman Administration, like the Roosevelt Administration was upholding the secret agreements it had made with Stalin to turn over China to the communists.] The inability of the Chiang government to make any substantial use of such aid continued to be revealed in 1947-1949. The printing of paper money for the government's expenses continued until the Chinese paper dollar became almost valueless. In August 1948, a new yuan currency replaced the previous Chinese dollar at a rate of one yuan to $3 million, but the new money was decreased in value by deflation as the old had been. [Actually the forces of Chiang Kai-shek were opposed at every conceivable way to ensure the victory of Mao and his forces.]
... On November 6th the American military mission decided unanimously that the situation could not be saved without the use of American ground forces and that "no amount of military assistance would save the present situation." At mid-January 1949, the main field armies north of the Yangtze were destroyed by Communist forces. By that time, Mao's successes were going far beyond the limits expected ... Soviet agents from central Asia took over Sinkiang Province, but in China itself Mao's advance ... could be financed from Chinese areas already controlled and could be fought with weapons captured from National forces to add to the captured Japanese weapons obtained from Soviet sources earlier.
The Communist victories were carried to conclusion in 1949. In January, Peiping was captured from the Nationalists and, three months dater, the Yangtze River was crossed, and Nanking fell (April, 3rd). In the course of the summer, all the south fell, and the Nationalist government, eight years to the day after Pearl Harbor, fled from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa), where they were protected from Communist pursuit by the United States Seventh Fleet.
In December 1949 Mao Tse-tung and Stalin met in Moscow .... These led to a mutual-assistance treaty signed on February 14, 1950. By this agreement Mao sought economic and technical assistance which he needed to build up China, while Stalin sought to use these needs to turn China's unexpected developments in directions he desired. Most of the agreements remained secret, but the chief included a defensive military alliance, detailed agreements by which most of the railways and ports controlled by the Russians in the north would be turned over to the Red Chinese by the end of 195: (these included Port Arthur), and a loan to China of 560 million a year for five years at I percent interest (much less in total than China had sought). Less tangible agreements left Outer Mongolia and Chinese Tannu-Tuva in Soviet control, set up a condominium in Sinkiang, left North Korea in the area of Soviet control, and turned China's expansionist ambitions southward. At the same time, a secret agreement may have been made to support the projected North Korean attack on South Korea, as 50,000 Koreans in the Chinese Communist forces were weeded out and transferred to the North Korean Army in the next five months.
One consequence of the Sino-Soviet agreements of February 1950 was a mass influx of Soviet advisers and technicians into China to guide their allies in use of the new equipment and methods made possible by the Soviet loan. These rose to scores of thousands, of which about half were military. At the same time, about 6,000 Chinese students were admitted to university study in Russia....
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