Empires Apart (62 page)

Whatever the real motives of the various allied leaders, it is clear that having at one stage of the war looked as if it was on the path to destruction the Russian empire ended the conflict stronger than ever. The Red Army was the most powerful land force in the world and Russian troops controlled a broad band of territory from Estonia through Central Europe to the Balkans. Never had the empire of the tsars stretched so far or held so many.

The Second World War also re-ignited America's global ambitions, which had been in abeyance for a quarter of a century. In economic terms the war had been a tremendous success: the American GDP doubled in under four years because of war spending, while the economies of most of its competitors were smashed. The United States emerged as the undisputed economic powerhouse of the planet. The other allied powers had all fallen definitively into the second division, something the Lend-Lease Program had made abundantly clear.

Under the Lend-Lease arrangements the US sent nearly $50bn of material to its allies, particularly Russia and the largest recipient Britain. To show how totally the international tables had been turned, when the US Congress passed the Lend-Lease Bill they gave it the number 1776, the year of their independence from Britain. (Ironically one of the reasons the young American republic had survived is the lend-lease program Britain had instituted to protect the infant United States from Napoleon's depredations.) US officials were stationed in Britain to police the Lend-Lease regulations. Britain was banned from exporting not just the goods it received but anything similar, even if home made. At the end of the war any materiel that had not been consumed in the conflict had to be paid for. Britain paid the final instalment on its Lend-Lease debt (or more accurately the debt and the interest that had accrued on it) on 31 December 2006.

Historian and Conservative peer Robert Skidelsky has argued that ‘the way Washington managed the flow of lend-lease supplies had the effect, and possibly the intention, of leaving Britain dependent on US help after the war on whatever terms America chose to impose'. The terms in the 1946 Anglo-American Loan Agreement were devastating, producing a catastrophic financial crisis in Britain in 1947 that destroyed (or at least emasculated) the competitiveness of British manufacturing industry and ensured that rationing would continue long after the war had ended.

Nevertheless, without this aid Britain would have found it almost impossible to pursue the war against fascism. Theoretically the programme was reciprocal but the United States received only about $8bn in aid, ranging from wool provided by New Zealand to British supplies for US troops stationed in the UK. Lend-Lease was about the new economic superpower keeping the old one afloat. It was also about keeping the communist regime in Russia afloat.

The inherent weakness of the Russian economy was made plain during the war. Clearly the destruction in the west had an enormous impact, but given that most of Russia was not occupied by the Germans and that Stalin had moved much of his industrial plant east of the Urals, the scale of American aid needed to keep the Red Army fighting was surprisingly large. Transport was almost entirely dependent on US aid: practically all aviation fuel, 99 per cent of new railway locomotives, over 400,000 jeeps and trucks, even 15½ million pairs of army boots.

Six years of fighting left the economies of Europe shattered. Providing materiel to fight the war left the US economy resplendent.

The main impact of the war on the United States was psychological rather than economic. Whatever left-wing conspiracy theorists may say, America did not enter the war so that its corporations could make enormous profits, although many did, but to protect itself and its Asian colonies from Japanese attack (at that time the legal status of Hawaii was still somewhere between colony and state). As the US became caught up in the conflict in Europe, America's rationale for war moved from protecting ‘the nation' to protecting ‘democracy'. Once the war was over it was then a small step for Americans to conclude that as America had been fighting to save democracy, and democracy had been saved, it must follow that America had saved democracy.

American economic muscle had indeed been critical, and without it it is hard to see how the allies could have destroyed the German Reich; but to assert that America saved the world from Hitler is a gross exaggeration. In June 1944, when allied forces stormed ashore on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, the 58,000 Americans were easily outnumbered by the
76,000 troops drawn from the British Empire. The number of Americans killed in the war (less than 300,000) was significantly less than the number of British (357,000), but both were dwarfed by the 27 million Soviet losses. Just as Tsar Alexander had saved the rest of Europe from Napoleon, Stalin had saved it from Hitler.

As the war ended many in Europe, especially on the political left, felt an enormous debt of gratitude to the Russian people, but the overwhelming perception in America was that – as in the First World War – it was the United States that had rescued Europe from the grip of tyranny. Just as British history ascribes Napoleon's defeat to the Duke of Wellington rather than to the Russian tsar, so modern American history ignores the overarching role of Russia's communist dictator. Seen through the prism of ideology it would have been perverse to suggest that democracy had been saved by autocracy. The importance of this ideological perception of the war is hard to overstate; it conditioned American public opinion for decades after, and informed public debate on the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and a host of minor military interventions. Americans saw themselves as conquering heroes delivering freedom and civilisation, reinforcing a self-portrait that had been part of the American psyche since the first Englishman landed, musket in hand, on the Virginia coast, and the first Puritan brought God to New England.

The importance of ideology in American thinking was illustrated in a post-war exchange between Stalin and Truman, Roosevelt's successor. Truman was incensed that the Russian autocrat had ignored the Yalta commitment to democracy by installing a Communist party dictatorship in Poland. Stalin simply found this incomprehensible. Truman, he said, should mind his own business, pointing out that Russia did not claim the right to interfere in Belgium or Greece. That for America there was a fundamental ideological difference between the two situations was something that the Russian dictator, who always put self-interest before ideology, could not accept. Truman, however, was genuinely motivated by his ideological commitment to democracy as much as by any considerations of the electoral muscle
wielded by Polish-Americans, and could not understand how Stalin could apparently be so perfidious.

On one level Americans were sincerely committed to defending democracy in faraway lands and repeatedly demonstrated their innate decency through acts of great generosity. After the First World War the American public helped rescue Russia from famine, and similarly after the Second World War billions of dollars were sent across the Atlantic to rebuild shattered economies. The desire of millions of Americans was not just to help the hungry recover their strength but also to help the oppressed recover their freedom. The ideological component was every bit as important as the humanitarian. US policy was driven by an ideology that saw economic wellbeing and democracy as two sides of the same god-given coin.

And yet on another level the United States was as determined as the Soviet Union that its own interests should take absolute priority over everything else. Although its proclaimed mission during the war was to save the world for democracy, the underlying mission was always far more parochial: to defend the homeland from attack and recover whatever had been taken from it.

One trivial event illustrated the American mindset. Just as Hitler's declaration of war on the United States made America, Russia and Britain allies, his defeat brought the rationale of their alliance to an end. America's military strategists assumed that once the European war was concluded US troops could be withdrawn from the continent almost immediately: the devastated continent would sort itself out by spontaneously embracing democracy and free markets (an assumption later repeated in Iraq). Based on this assumption, they calculated that with US troops in Europe freed up America could now win the war in Asia unaided. On VE Day, as the victory bells rang out in Europe, President Truman signed an executive order not only cancelling Lend-Lease but embargoing all shipments to Russia and other European nations. Ships already at sea were ordered back to port, and their cargoes were unloaded. Neither Britain nor Russia had any prior warning of Truman's intention, and both were furious: British troops were still
engaged in bloody conflict with Japanese forces in Burma, and Stalin was still considering an earlier American request to declare war on Japan. Such was the fury, in particular of Stalin, that a message was eventually sent explaining that the episode had been an awful mistake and the order was rescinded. (But when the war in Asia was over Lend-Lease was again peremptorily closed down.)

However complex the events and motivations of the Second World War really were, it was the perceptions of events that had the most impact on subsequent behaviour. The perception of most Russians was that they had suffered far more than anyone else in a war started by others, and that any gains they had made were no more than their due. The perception of most Americans was that the United States had mounted both a moral and military crusade, and it was this that rescued Europe from tyranny. After the war these perceptions were reinforced on both sides. Countless cinematic epics have reinforced the contrasting versions of events, both of which after all have more than an element of truth. The American film
U-571
, for example, was based on the true story of the capture by British sailors of a German U-boat carrying the famous Enigma code machine – except that Hollywood replaced the Royal Navy with the US navy to produce another ‘Americans save the world' adventure. Soviet film-makers did what Stalin and his immediate successors told them to do. Hollywood's role was less clear-cut; it both moulded and reflected an underlying tilt in the balance of American public opinion. Before the war the majority wanted to ignore the rest of the world; during and after the war they were willing to fight to save it.

Two key events at the end of 1941 determined that the international quiescence of the United States between the world wars would be an aberration. Just as throughout the nineteenth century the US was engaged in almost permanent foreign wars as it pushed its frontiers outwards, so after the Second World War military force would once again become a key element in expanding America's influence in the world.

The first event was history repeating itself, but it had a shattering impact on the American psyche. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor mirrored their attack on Port Arthur that had started the Russo-Japanese War and the American attack on the Philippines that had started the Spanish-American War.

Tension between the US and Japan had been growing for some time. After the fall of France Japan, already fighting a brutal war in China, occupied French Indo-China and cast covetous eyes at the oilwells of the Dutch East Indies, perilously close to the American colony of the Philippines. The US imposed an oil embargo, and in November 1940 Secretary of State Cordell Hull approved a contingency plan to drop incendiary bombs on Tokyo, described as a ‘city of rice-paper and wood'. By the middle of the next year half of all America's heavy bombers had been transferred to the region, away from the Atlantic sea lanes where German submarines were wreaking havoc. Just weeks before the Japanese attack the
New York Times
reported plans for American bombing raids against Japan from bases in Russia and the Philippines.

Although the Japanese perceived the United States as having been actively hostile, that is not how the American people saw it. Just as after 9/11 Americans were shocked to discover that the lofty sentiments they believed determined their foreign policy could engender bitter hatred in others, so after Pearl Harbor America awoke to the realisation that there were political forces in the far corners of the globe that they could not ignore.

The second event was nearly as significant, but that significance was apparent only to a few in the political and corporate establishment. In 1919 a gloomy report on domestic oil supplies from the US Geological Survey provided ammunition for those demanding that America receive a share in the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. In November 1941 an obscure American state department official named William Ferris produced a similar report that caused almost as much consternation in some circles as the attack on Pearl Harbor the following month. The subject matter of the Ferris report was oil. The United States was thought at that time to have 20 billion barrels of
oil reserves; as it was using 4 million barrels a day or 1.45 billion a year, within thirteen years all of its domestic reserves would be exhausted. For a nation that was already wedded to the automobile the prospect of running out of oil was unthinkable. It was even more alarming to the oil companies, which were coming to dominate corporate America: at the end of the First World War four of the top sixteen US corporations were oil companies; by the end of the Second World War eight were. The report's conclusion was unequivocal: the United States should pursue a ‘more aggressive foreign oil policy aimed at assuring access to petroleum overseas'. As the war progressed the United States found itself supplying not just its own oil requirements but those of its allies, and the expectation of even thirteen years of oil reserves started to look optimistic; securing overseas supplies moved to the top of the foreign policy agenda.

The most obvious place to look for overseas reserves was Saudi Arabia. If the US could control the Saudi oilfields the US navy estimated that American reserves would effectively be doubled. Seizing them by force was no longer the American way and Roosevelt set out to buy control. He signed a declaration that ‘the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States', and on that basis extended Lend-Lease aid to the oil-rich kingdom (not what Congress had in mind when it approved the Lend-Lease legislation). Soon he went further and proposed that the US government buy the Saudi oil concession, but Congress refused; corporate lobbyists were happy for the government to protect their oil interests overseas, but they had no desire to see the government entering the oil business itself – war or no war.