Download Slide 1 - Old Saybrook Public Schools

Cold War Beginnings
1945-1948
 Would
peace reverse the economic
recovery?
 No more government contracts meant no
more government spending
 GNP slumps in ‘46 and ‘47; prices rise
without control
 High demand creates inflation and huge
black market
 Nuremberg Trials
– Germany, 1945-1946
• 22 tried; 12 hung, 7 jailed, Goering suicides
• Other trials continue for years
 Dispute: Hurt or help?
• Reparations requested by U.S.S.R.
(wanted payback, but not a strong
German future threat)
• Healthy Germany needed to
rebuild Europe
 Territory
divided up
between France, Britain, U.S.
and U.S.S.R.
• East and West Germany; satellite
states bound to U.S.S.R.
• Russia regained and extended
territory – Poland
• “Iron Curtain” – Winston Churchill
• West Germany an independent
country
 Berlin?
• Split into 4 zones
• U.S. and Britain introduced
common currency in Western
zones – Stalin replies by
halting all traffic to West Berlin
June 24, 1948
 Operation Vittles
– Berlin Airlift
• RAF and U.S. Air Force ship in 2 millions tons of
supplies over the next year; blockade ends May
1949
• Flights occur daily; citizens build runways out of
gravel and broken buildings; intense coordination of
flights
 February
1945: Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt
 Plans to end Axis power
• Poland, Bulgaria, Romania to have self-determination and
free elections (didn’t get it)
 Stalin
to attack Japan in return for concessions
in China
• Intervention not needed – Stalin still got control of
Manchuria
 Purpose
of meeting was informational, not
determination of final outcome of conflict
 July
1945
 Big Three: United States, Great Britain,
Soviet Union
• Same players as the Yalta Conference in February
 Stalin had promised free elections, did not ever happen
 Soviets, British, Americans, and
French
would take reparations from their own
occupation zones
 U.S. wanted to use Europe as a market for
new productivity
 February
1945: Yalta
 April 1945: FDR Dies, Truman becomes Pres
 May 8, 1945: V-E Day
 June 26, 1945: United Nations Established
 July 1945: Potsdam
 August 6-9 1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
 September 2, 1945: V-J Day (end of the war for
U.S.)
 George F. Kennan
• American diplomat in Moscow
 U.S. Policy of Containment
• Prevent any expansion of communist rule
• Truman’s foreign policy
 Western (democratic) Europe and Eastern
(communist) Europe
 June 26, 1945 – United Nations charter
signed
• Arena for competition between the United States and
the Soviet Union
 After Yalta
• Germany divided into 4 allied zones
• Stalin promises free elections in satellites
(especially Poland) – doesn’t happen
• Germany to pay reparations
 After
Potsdam
• Allied divisions become East (USSR) and West
(US, UK, France) Germany
• Stalin wants extra German reparations, UK and
US say, “No.”
 What
accounts for the breakdown in
relations between the United States and
the Soviet Union after World War II?
Is there anything that the United States
could have done to avoid it?