Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (86 page)

Again, it was Stalin’s greed which led him to overplay his hand and so reverse the process of American withdrawal. And it was a greed not only for land and power but for blood. He arrested sixteen leading non-Communist Polish politicians, accused them of ‘terrorism’ and set in motion the machinery for the last of his show-trials.
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American envoys and commanders on the spot sent messages confirming the same pattern everywhere: Robert Patterson from Belgrade reported that anyone seen with a British or American was immediately arrested; Maynard Barnes cabled details about a bloodbath of 20,000 in Bulgaria; Arthur Schoenfeld described the imposition of a Communist dictatorship in Hungary; Ellery Stone in Rome advised that a Communist
putsch
was likely in Italy. William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, then America’s nearest approach to an intelligence agency, advised measures to co-ordinate Western defence on the basis of the cumulatively terrifying reports flowing into his office from American agents all over Europe.
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But it was Stalin’s policies which supplied the raw material for these reports. And it was Stalin’s brand of intransigent diplomacy, conducted through Molotov, which brought matters to a head at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow in December 1945. There, Ernest Bevin, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, bluntly called Molotov’s arguments ‘Hitlerite philosophy’; and James Byrnes, Secretary of State, said Russia was ‘trying to do in a slick-dip way what Hitler tried to do in domineering smaller countries by force’.
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When Byrnes reported back on 5 January 1946, Truman made his mind up: ‘I do not think we should play compromise any longer …. I am tired of babying the Soviets.’
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The next month a well-timed 8,000-word cable arrived from George Kennan in Moscow, which crystallized what most people in the Administration were beginning to feel about the Soviet threat: the ‘Long Telegram’, as it came to be known, it reads exactly’, its author wrote, ‘like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.’
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A fortnight later, on 5 March, Churchill made the Cold War a public fact when he delivered a speech, under Truman’s sponsorship, at the university of Fulton:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Beyond that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe … what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Since, he added, the Russians respected military strength, America and Britain must continue their joint defence arrangements, so that there would be ‘no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition and adventure’ but an ‘overwhelming assurance of security’. Afterwards, at a dinner given by the owner of
Time
, Henry Luce, the triumphant orator gobbled caviare: ‘You know, Uncle Joe used to send me a lot of this. But I don’t suppose
I
shall get any more now.’ By speaking at precisely the right time – by May US polls showed that 83 per cent of the nation favoured his idea of a permanent military alliance – Churchill had averted any possibility of a repetition of the tragic American withdrawal from Europe in 1919. He claimed he lost $75 playing poker with Truman, ‘But it was worth it.’
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Stalin continued to draw the Americans deeper into Cold War. In March 1946 he missed the deadline for the withdrawal of his troops from Iran, and finally did so only after an angry confrontation at the new United Nations Security Council. In August the Yugoslavs shot down two American transport planes and the same month Stalin began putting pressure on Turkey. The Americans responded accordingly. The prototype of the CIA was set up, and at a White House party to celebrate, Truman handed out black hats, cloaks and wooden daggers, and stuck a fake black moustache on Admiral Leahy’s face.
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America and Canada formed a joint air and antisubmarine defence system. The British and US air forces began exchanging war plans; their intelligence agencies resumed contact. By midsummer the Anglo—American alliance was in unofficial existence again. Truman undertook a purge of his Administration to eliminate the pro-Soviet elements. The last of the New Dealers in the cabinet was Henry Wallace, Agriculture Secretary, a profound admirer of Stalin, Anglophobic, anti-Churchill: ‘nothing but a cat-bastard’, as Truman put it. In July he sent the President a 5,000-word private letter, advocating unilateral disarmament and a massive air-and-trade programme with Russia, then leaked it. Truman confided to his diary: ‘Wallace is a pacifist 100 per cent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo …. The Reds, phonies and the parlour pinks seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger. I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.’
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The next day he sacked Wallace; not a mouse stirred. By October Churchill was able to claim: ‘What I said at Fulton has been overpassed by the movement of events.’

In 1947–9 America undertook a series of formal commitments to Europe which became the basis of Western global policy for the next generation. The process began with a desperate signal from Britain that she could no longer support the posture of a world power. The war had cost her $30 billion, a quarter of her net wealth. She had sold $5 billion of foreign assets and accumulated $ 12 billion of foreign debts. America had given her a post-war loan, but this did not cover the gap in her trade – exports in 1945 were less than a third of the 1938 figure – nor her outgoings as a slender pillar of stability in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In 1946 Britain spent 19 per cent of her Gross National Product on defence (against 10 per cent in the USA). By the beginning of 1947 she had spent $3 billion on international relief programmes, $320 million feeding Germany in 1946 alone, $330 million keeping the peace in Palestine, and cumulative totals of $540 million on Greece and $375 million on Turkey. On 6 January, a snowstorm heralded the worst winter in more than a century, which continued until the end of March. The coal froze in the pit-head stocks and could not be moved. Electricity cuts shut factories and put 2 million out of work. The Fuel Minister, Manny Shinwell, spoke of ‘a condition of complete disaster’. The loan was virtually gone; $100 million were pouring from the reserves each week.

On 21 February the British informed Truman they would have to cut the Greek—Turkey commitment. Three days later Truman decided he would have to take it on. There was a tense meeting in the Oval Office on 26 February to outline the idea to leading Congressmen. General Marshall, the new Secretary of State, fumbled the job, and his deputy, Dean Acheson, decided to chip in. He said that ‘Soviet pressure’ on the Near East had brought it to the point where a breakthrough ‘might open three continents to Soviet penetration’. Like ‘apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one’, the ‘corruption’ of Greece would ‘infect Iran and all the East’. It would ‘carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt’ and ‘to Europe through Italy and France’. Soviet Russia ‘was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost’. It did not need to win them all: ‘even one or two offered immense gains’. America ‘alone’ was ‘in a position to break up the play’. These were the stakes that British withdrawal offered ‘to an eager and ruthless opponent’. This was followed by a long silence. Then Arthur Vandenberg, a former isolationist, spoke for the Congressmen: ‘Mr President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you, and I believe most of its members will do the same.’
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Truman announced the ‘Truman Doctrine’ on 12 March, ‘I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure … we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies
in their own way.’ The help must be ‘primarily’ economic. He asked for money for Greece and Turkey, plus civil and military experts, for a start: and got it with two-to-one majorities in both houses. Thus isolationism died, by act of Joseph Stalin. Two months later, on 5 June, the Secretary of State unveiled the Marshall Plan at the Harvard Commencement. It was vague; as Acheson paraphrased it: if the Europeans, all or some of them, could get together on a plan of what was needed to get them out of the dreadful situation … we would take a look at their plan and see what aid we might practically give.’
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Eventually twenty-two European nations responded. The Czechs and Poles wished to do the same; Stalin vetoed it.

The programme began in July 1948, continued for three years, and eventually cost the American government $10.2 billion. It made excellent sense because the American export surplus, by the second quarter of 1947, was running at an annual rate of $12.5 billion. As Hugh Dalton, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it: ‘The dollar shortage is developing everywhere. The Americans have half the total income of the world, but won’t either spend it in buying other people’s goods or lending it or giving it away.… How soon will the dollar shortage bring a general crisis?’ The US average consumption of 3,300 calories a day contrasted with 1,000 to 1,500 for 125 million Europeans. Marshall Aid recycled part of the surplus, narrowed the calorie difference and laid the foundation for a self-reliant Western and Southern Europe. By 1950 it was manifestly an overwhelming success.
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It began the process of eliminating the gap between North American and European living standards and in the process opened an equally cataclysmic one between Western and Eastern Europe: the Iron Curtain became the frontier between plenty and shortage.

But as yet America had no definite military commitment to defend Europe. With successive blows, Stalin made it unavoidable. He had only about 500 soldiers in Czechoslovakia; but his men in its government controlled the police. Czechoslovakia had a mixed government. Marshall considered it part of the Soviet bloc. But for Stalin it was not enough. Greed dictated more. On 19 February 1948 he sent his Deputy Foreign Minister, V.A.Zorin, to Prague. The next day twelve non-Communist ministers submitted their resignations. After five days of crisis, a new government emerged and the country was a satellite. The US Ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, thought the Czechs might have resisted, like the Finns and Iranians. He blamed the cowardice of President Benes and Foreign Minister Masaryk, who committed suicide after capitulating.
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But the lack of forceful American policy was likewise a factor, and tempted Stalin further. On 24 June Stalin blocked access to the Western zones of Berlin, and cut off their electricity.

Unable to agree on a peace formula for one Germany, the rival blocs had begun creating two Germanies in 1946. On 18 June 1948 the three Western Allies announced a new German currency for their zone. That was the pretext for the Soviet move. It is significant that General Lucius Clay, head of the US zone, had been the most reluctant of the Cold Warriors. Now he changed decisively. He admitted that Allied access to Berlin was only ‘oral agreement … implied in almost three years of application’. Now he proposed a judicious use of force to examine the ‘technical difficulties’ which the Russians said were blocking the route. He asked permission ‘to use the equivalent of a constabulary regiment reinforced with a recoilless rifle troop and an engineer battalion …. Troops would be ordered to escort the convoy to Berlin. It would be directed … to clear all obstacles even if such an action brought on an attack.’
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This response was discussed at length in Washington and rejected. Forrestal, the new Secretary for Defence, told Marshall: ‘the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not recommend supply to Berlin by armed convoy in view of the risk of war involved and the inadequacy of United States preparations for global conflict.’
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What were the risks? Nikita Khrushchev later admitted that Stalin was merely ‘prodding the capitalist world with the tip of a bayonet’. His real gamble was in Yugoslavia, where he had broken with Marshall Tito and expelled him from the Cominform, the co-ordinating body for national Communist parties he had set up in 1947; this took place four days after Russia blocked the Berlin routes. Khrushchev added: ‘I’m absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had a common border with Yugoslavia, Stalin would have intervened militarily.’
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It is hard to see Stalin, involved in a showdown within his empire, allowing a Berlin probing operation – which he could cancel or resume anytime he wished – to get out of hand.

But if the risks were arguable, the inadequacy of US military power was clear enough. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that the Red Army had now stabilized at 2,500,000 plus 400,000 security forces. To balance this the Americans had a nuclear monopoly. But it was a theoretical rather than an actual one. On 3 April 1947 Truman had been told, to his horror, that though materials for twelve A-bombs existed, none at all was available in assembled state. An arsenal of 400 was then ordered, to be ready by 1953, but not enough had yet been delivered by mid-1948 to carry through even the Air Force’s ‘Operation Pincher’, which called for the complete destruction of the Soviet oil industry.
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Some sixty B29s, known as ‘Atomic Bombers’, were flown to Britain in a blaze of publicity; but by no means all had atomic bombs. Instead the decision was taken to mount a technical demonstration of US air-power and to supply
Berlin by plane. It worked: the airlift was flying in 4,500 tons a day by December, and by spring 8,000 tons a day, as much as had been carried by road and rail when the cut-off came.
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On 12 May 1949 the Russians climbed down. It was a victory of a sort. But the Americans had missed the opportunity to meet the 1940s equivalent of the 1936 Rhineland crisis and force a major surrender by the Russians.