The World at War (86 page)

DR STEPHEN AMBROSE

At the end of the war there was a great hope. No one dared to use the words Woodrow Wilson had used in World War One, that this was 'the war to end all wars', but that was the sentiment. There was great hope in the world that this would happen, that this was the last war, that the victors would now be able to cooperate in peace as they had in war, to see to it that the four policemen – as Roosevelt liked to refer to Britain, France, the USSR and the United States – would be able to see to it that there would be no more aggression in the world. That the war had meant something, that it had been fought for something rather than simply against Nazism; something positive, a better world was going to emerge. I suspect even Stalin felt it.

DR NOBLE FRANKLAND

From the point of view of the victors it was purely a defensive war. We had no aims, there was nothing that we wished to introduce, we simply wished to stop Hitler. The war was an extraordinarily simple one, almost uniquely simple, and the victory lay in preventing something, not in achieving anything. That accounts for the very complex situation which arose after the war. They were divided because the effort to stop Hitler was so great it introduced an entirely different power balance in the world. Before the war Britain and France were really leading major powers – or appeared to be, and it's what appears to be that counts. At the end of the war it was evident that Britain and France were now in a sense declining powers and this was due to the strength that was generated in order to stop Hitler. So the whole complex power balance after the war arose from a very negative action, in the sense that war was to stop things, not to start them.

GENERAL ANDRÉ BEAUFRE

I would say that the collapse of the French Army in 1940 has created the collapse of Europe, of
Western Europe. Of course afterwards the defeat of Germany completed the phenomenon, but if the French Army had stood as it did in 1914–1918, then the situation in Western Europe would have been entirely different and all the decolonisation would have been entirely different and the position of the Russians and Americans would be entirely different. I think it has been the key event which has produced the history of today, and we are paying today the results of this defeat.

DR AMBROSE

The British had as many problems, if not more, recovering from victory as the Germans did recovering from defeat. What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much, she lost a great deal. Positively she got a moral claim on the world as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year and provided the moral leadership against the Nazis at a time when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis.

DR FRANKLAND

The great effect on Britain was to increase the speed at which the natural course of developments was taking place. The British one might say were a non-imperialistic empire; the British, in acquiring their empire, had been very reluctant to call it an empire. When Queen Victoria took the title of Empress of India there was an outcry, people said our queen being called an empress was ridiculous. She might have declined the offer had it not been proffered by Disraeli, who had a particularly charming way of putting those sort of propositions. It wasn't really a very British idea. We are a trading people and the empire was really a by-product of trade. When the empire served its purpose, created communities, set up trade patterns, it really ceased to have a political significance in terms of an empire. And things would have gradually developed in much the way they have developed, but the war accelerated this.

AMBASSADOR CHARLES BOHLEN

I think the collapse of British power was inevitable, one of the reasons was that nobody, and I doubt if you did either, foresaw the loss of power that Great Britain would suffer following the dissolution of the empire. I know that Roosevelt firmly believed that there would be three great powers in the world, China was one by courtesy, France also to some extent, but I mean that Britain, the
United States and the Soviet Union would be the three dominant powers. And when it turned out not to be the case, this was brought sharply to our notice in February 1947 when the British Embassy sent us a note saying they could no longer bear the burden in Greece and Turkey, which led to the Truman Doctrine. And then came the
Marshall Plan, which was probably the most successful adventure in which we would jointly engage with you and other European countries, which then necessitated some consideration of security in the area. And that produced the
North Atlantic Pact. Those were the twin foundations of American foreign policy which formed our actions in the world since that time.

SIR ANTHONY EDEN, EARL
Of
AVON

The war transformed the position of the United States in the world. For a long period America lived and grew under the protection of their own law and, it's fair to say, under the protection to some extent of the British fleet, which kept the seas open, and at peace. The two wars, particularly the second, plunged them into this leading world position from which there can be no withdrawal, and one cannot but have sympathy with them and with those Americans who are courageous enough to face up to these new responsibilities. America was founded on the idea that they'd get away from all that in the world, away from the entanglements of Europe and build up their own society. And here they are plunged into all these responsibilities, which they have to carry, and asked to bear the burden financially in a project like the Marshall Plan, and they did a wonderful job for Europe. And now they are finding things turn sour upon them, which is not in any way surprising.

DR AMBROSE

Economists in the United States felt during the war that the big problem was going to be a return to Depression conditions and they agonised over the problem of 'what's going to happen when we demobilise these armies and all of a sudden we are going to have twelve million unemployed again?' What they failed to recognise was that money was being made hand over fist in the United States during the war and there was nothing to spend that money on. So it was being saved and you had this enormous pent-up demand for consumer goods that only American factories could satisfy, not only within the United Stated but for Europe and Asia as well. So at the conclusion of the war, the United States went into a boom that made everything preceding it in America look like peanuts. This is when America really takes off and begins to dominate the world and what we think of as the American lifestyle today begins to take hold in post-1945.

PROFESSOR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

I think it's easy to exaggerate the importance of economic interest in this but there's no doubt that with the passage of time the Cold War became a very great source of comfort and a reward to the military–industrial complex and we are finding how great that reward is now, as we try to reduce the scale of arms expenditure. I think it was more a general feeling that American well-being required European well-being, and vice versa. But by the time the Marshall Plan came, the worst fears of a post-war collapse had passed – 1946 and 1947 were rather prosperous years in the United States.

PROFESSOR PAUL SAMUELSON

The successful mobilisation of the economy by the government was a lesson not lost on anyone and right after the war we passed what's called the
Full Employment Act of 1946. Very controversial, but this was the charter that from now on the American economy is not rugged capitalism, it's not laissez-faire, it's going to involve militant fiscal and monetary policy with a planning goal for high employment, for full employment, and we've done a tremendously better job in the post-World War Two period than was ever done by capitalism in its heyday. The expansion periods have been much longer, the periods of recession which we still have with us have been nothing short of anaemic. The one place where we haven't done such a good job is on the price front.
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ALGER HISS

The Yalta spirit disintegrated because of the new forces that had developed during the war, from a period under the New Deal when our industry was prostrate, when big business really abdicated its leadership, it had lost its own self-confidence and it was certainly discredited with the public as a whole. From that period until the end of the war, when a magnificent new industrial base had been created with new captains of industry in control, enormous expansion of the military with new generals and admirals in posts of importance. There was a power vacuum in the world and these people were not going to be denied their crack at it.

DR AMBROSE

In the case of Poland, Stalin simply couldn't allow the Polish colonels, the Catholic Church, Polish landlords to come back and take control. Poland, as he pointed out time and again, had three times in the past generated the gateway for the invasion of Russia. In Greece, for example, with the Greek civil war being waged at the time and the British very deeply involved fighting against the Communists, Stalin quite clearly lived up to the wartime agreement with Churchill and refused to support the Greek Communists. In France and Italy the strongest individual parties were the Communist parties and they had strong moral claims on the nation because they had led the resistance to the Nazis. It would have been possible for the Communists in both countries to raise all kinds of hell at a minimum and go into armed revolt. One of de Gaulle's greatest fears at the end of the war was, 'Here we've got this resistance, Communist dominated and it's armed – what happens if they go into open revolt?' Stalin could have encouraged them to do so and create chaos in the West – but Stalin didn't want chaos in the West, Stalin wanted the West to recover so it could help Russia recover. And so he cooperated all along the line in France and Italy by telling the Communist parties there to cool it.

ALGER HISS

The signal element of conflict was Poland: other things were pretty well ironed out and that symbolised the Soviet insistence for what Stettinius regarded as security interest. Perhaps the Soviets are more aware of their security than we were. From their point of view the band of containing states must no longer exist. Poland was not going to be an outpost of the West, nor were any of the Balkan countries. They thought they had various agreements about spheres of influence with Mr Churchill: they left Greece pretty much in British hands; they could have certain proportional influences in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, particularly Poland. My impression at Yalta was that the Russians thought we had got the substance – not an unreasonable assumption because it was the underlying assumption of the United Nations charter – of co-existence. They could contend their interpretation was not followed by us because we did not allow them to run things as they allowed us to run Latin America. We sent agents in; we were in touch with unhappy dissidents remaining in those countries and our Military Attaches who served in those places were pretty busy about what have seemed to the Russians political matters. So when you have that bone of contention with neither side prepared to give up its position, you can only expect trouble.

LORD AVON

It's conceivable that the change in the American position was taking place before Roosevelt died. I read recently in some American source that there was a last message of his to Winston. A last message which was tougher and endorsing some of the things which Winston had said to him we must do in relation to the Russians. So perhaps a change would have come anyway. Certainly Truman, I know, felt the Russians were not carrying out the terms of their engagements and we ought to tell them so, and do all we could to correct what they were doing.

DR AMBROSE

US journalist Walter Lippmann pointed out the Americans were asking for an awful lot: they wanted to control the areas that their armies had conquered, but also wanted to have a major say/influence in the areas the Red Army had conquered. In 1943 when Italy surrendered the Russians wanted to be part of the occupation, but the Americans and the British systematically excluded the Russians. Stalin originally protested but then eventually he said, 'Ah, I see, a
precedent has been set, the principle is clear – whoever occupies a country also imposes upon it his own social system.' The Americans were not willing to go along with that when the shoe was on the other foot. The Americans were demanding a major say in Poland while being totally unwilling to give the Russians any say in areas that their armies had conquered. The Russians systematically followed this principle for the remainder of the war and to the post-war period.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

I had seen a good deal of Stalin during the war and I went up to him and I said, 'Marshal, this must be a great satisfaction to you after all the trials that you've been through and the tragedies that you've been through, to be here in Berlin.' He looked at me and said, 'Tsar Alexander got to Paris,' so it seemed perfectly clear to me, after what I'd been through before, that he had every intention of spreading his influence not militarily but through the Communist parties and he saw Europe wide open. All industry was disrupted – it wasn't only physical damage but there was also vast unemployment, hunger. I'm sure his Communist leaders in Italy and Prance told him we can take these two countries over. I'm satisfied that he thought that Communism could take over Western Europe either directly or else it would become some sort of glorified Finland under Russian domination. Instead of that Truman had the extraordinary initiative to recognise that something had to be done, and he authorised General Marshall to make his famous 1947 speech. Molotov was invited to the ensuing Paris conference but didn't sense the fact that if he'd stayed in Paris it would have been very difficult. Instead he said, 'We must find out from the Americans what they'll give us, and then divide it in accordance with the one that suffered the most should get the most' – which was Russia. But British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault took the stand and said the American offer was a cooperative, so Molotov left in a huff. Stalin declared war on the Marshall Plan, but there was no doubt in my mind Stalin thought economic conditions were such, he told me once, that there could be a Communist takeover. Communism bred in the cesspools of capitalism and Europe was in an appalling condition. For the United States to take such an initiative was really an extraordinary change. I think Churchill once said that if the United States behaved after World War Two as they did after World War One, Stalin would have challenged the British Channel at least.