Download 49. Peace and the Emergence of Superpowers

Peace and the Emergence of Superpowers
The worst war ever to plague mankind ended with the dark discovery of the extent
of the Holocaust. The world also witnessed the use of the then most powerful atomic
weapons, the fuel for which was processed in your hometown. In this way, at least, our
city will always be connected to the great effort to end the tragic consequences of fascist
aggression. Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan remains
controversial to this day, but not to the men who were preparing to invade Japan whose
lives were thus spared. Let us hope that no leader will ever again face the decision
President Truman faced then, to either destroy an entire city at a blow or not. In Europe,
the western allies and the Soviet Union had converged on Germany from both sides,
crushed it, and then stood eyeing one another’s huge armies that represented the
dichotomy of democracy versus dictatorship still. In what proved to be a troubled, even
transient peace, two superpowers emerged on either side of what Winston Churchill
called the Iron Curtain. This peace had been purchased at the then incredible cost
worldwide of 1.1 trillion dollars in war expenditures, and that was just the money. At
least 22 million military personnel were killed in combat operations in the war, and 34
million were injured. The total cost in human lives, including civilians, is so vast it can
only be an estimate—somewhere between 50 and 100 million.
The Allies had met at several conferences during World War II in order to plan
strategy. During the first half of 1945 as peace seemed possible for the first time, the
Allied leadership met twice to talk of the future. In essence, three men sat down twice
together to design the post-war world. At Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt met with Stalin
and were compelled to make concessions to the Soviets in order to keep them in the war
against Germany and in hopes of bringing them into the war against Japan. Regarding
Germany the Big Three decided to divide the country into four occupation zones, one for
each of them and assigning one to France. Stalin was much more concerned about
Poland at the Yalta Conference. For his continued support 47% of Poland’s territory was
given to the Soviet Union. An attempt was made to compensate Poland for this loss by
adding territory in the north and in the west and by assuring that “free and unfettered
elections” would be held. In exchange for agreeing to fight the Japanese, Stalin was
given territory from both Japan and China. Yalta also attempted to lay the ground work
for the formation of the United Nations and succeeded. Through the whole conference,
however, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill remained cordial to Stalin. Privately
communicating to Churchill his deep distrust of Stalin is one of the most important things
FDR ever did, especially since his New Deal measures back in the US had been criticized
by some as socialist. FDR died two months later.
The San Francisco Conference in the spring of 1945 was not a meeting of the Big
Three, but it deserves mention since it was the meeting that formally organized the
United Nations. The UN Charter was drafted at San Francisco and differed from that of
the League of Nations by including a clause stating, “. . . such actions by air, sea, or land
forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace.” Before such
measures would be used, however, the United Nations pledged itself to pursue peaceful
arbitration of disputes between or among nations and to employ economic sanctions if
necessary. The Security Council was established giving veto powers to those nations on
the council over the workings and conclusions of the General Assembly. Five Allied
powers were given permanent seats on the council—the United States, Great Britain, the
Soviet Union, France, and Nationalist China (replaced by Communist China in 1972).
Almost everything of significance we study the rest of the course will, for good or for ill,
have to be discussed in the context of the mission of the United Nations and of its
deliberations.
While delegates met in San Francisco, another conference of the Big Three met
just outside Berlin in a city named Potsdam. This time, the US was represented by Harry
Truman (FDR’s Vice President who became President upon Roosevelt’s death), and
Great Britain was represented by Clement Atlee who had just beaten Churchill at the
polls. Stalin stayed on in the Soviet Union, as you might have guessed. Boundaries for
Germany and Poland were made final, and the Soviet Union did enter the war against
Japan by invading Manchuria. At Potsdam, Harry Truman told both Atlee and Stalin that
the United States had a weapon that could destroy whole cities. Stalin thought he was
bluffing. Some historians suggest that Truman trusted Stalin even less than did Roosevelt
and was trying to intimidate the Soviet leader because Truman sensed coming conflict.
In a sense, what became known as the Cold War started at the Potsdam Conference.
A certain amount of closure was achieved by the efforts at the end of World War
II to round up, put on trial, and execute or otherwise punish leaders of the Axis powers.
A charter adopted in London set in motion the trials of German and Japanese leaders as
war criminals for crimes against peace, humanity, and the laws of war. An international
military tribunal tried 24 principal Nazi offenders at what became known as the
Nuremberg Trials since they were held in that German city. Twelve Nazi leaders were
sentenced to be hanged, but one committed suicide by taking poison the night before his
execution. In all, 836,000 Nazis were tried by the United States in the US occupation
zone, and of these 503, 360 were convicted and given fines and sentences in labor camps
or other forms of imprisonment or had their property and/or political rights stripped from
them. Japanese war leaders were tried in a separate international military tribunal. Seven
top leaders were hanged in Tokyo and others received jail sentences ranging from 7 years
to life. In all, 4,200 Japanese military personnel were convicted of war crimes and of
these 720 were executed. The war crimes trials were not only intended to punish those
responsible for the horrors of World War II but also to send a message to future
aggressive dictators.
After the fighting of World War II ceased, the twenty-one nations that fought
against the Axis met in Paris to make peace with the various Axis powers. Italy lost
some territory to France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Italy’s colonies were among the first
territories to be managed by the United Nations as their way toward self-determination
was sought. Because of geography, most of the other Axis powers (except Finland) were
occupied by the Soviet Union on the way to Germany. Stalin used this reality to his
advantage as he sought to restore Russia to it imperial boundaries back under the czars.
All the reparations and territorial concessions of these countries of Eastern Europe were
handed over to the Soviets. Winston Churchill described the aftermath of Soviet
opportunism at this stage as the drawing of an “Iron Curtain” across Europe in a speech
he delivered in the United States in 1946. The speech is another contender for the
starting point of the Cold War, and it opens with the line, “The United States stands at
this time at the pinnacle of world power.” Therefore, Churchill’s speech is also evidence
that the United States, the nation built from all nations, had attained superpower status.
Matters became even more contentious between the United States and the Soviet
Union over Germany. While Austria and Japan would eventually sign peace treaties and
remain largely intact, Germany was pulled from both sides of the world-view debate.
Both the US and the USSR wanted to fashion a Germany in their own likenesses. When
neither could prevail over the other in this regard, the country of 70 million people was
divided, as we have said, into four zones of occupation which eventually meant the longterm division of Germany into West Germany as a free democracy and East Germany as
a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. While thus divided, even West Germany
struggled to re-establish a viable national economy. East Germany was totally stripped of
all its industrial resources. For example, every machine in East Germany was crated up
and sent to Moscow. The other sought-after commodity for which the superpowers
competed was that of German scientists. The Germans had developed both jet planes and
rockets during the war. Now each side lured and/or dragged Germans into its camp in
hopes of developing weapons system like these for its own use.
When the western powers agreed to merge their zones economically in 1946,
West Germany’s industrial capacity increased dramatically and was restored to its prewar level by 1950. The Soviets responded to this upping of the stakes by the western
powers by petulantly closing off land access to the western occupation zones in Berlin
itself which was located deep in East Germany. The Soviets wanted the western powers
to evacuate Berlin entirely, but the former Allied powers of France, Great Britain, and the
United States mounted another campaign to stand up to bullying tactics. In what became
known as the Berlin Airlift, thousands of flights of supplies were delivered from June of
1948 to May of 1949 when the Soviets gave up and reopened access. Tons of food, coal,
medicine, and other supplies were flown to Berlin in a succession of flights that landed
every seven minutes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Soviets could not withstand
such resolve. The “theoretical wealth” of Marxism could not compete for long with the
actual wealth created by capitalism, a key to understanding both the course of the Cold
War and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union that ended it.
Still, for a time it was close going. Soviet-backed communist governments were
established in nearly all the countries of Eastern Europe and ultimately in China and in
North Korea. Greece and Turkey both were threatened by communist revolutions, and in
the spring of 1947 Britain said it could no longer afford to support the free governments
of these nations. Harry Truman said that the US would support all “free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This stand,
known as the Truman Doctrine, translated into first millions and then billions of dollars
of aid to the countries of Western Europe to help them recover from the war and to stop
them from turning to the Soviets for aid. The United States hoped that if the economic
and social conditions that gave rise to communism could be dealt with, then communism
would never take root and would therefore be contained to the extent to which it had
already expanded. While Greece and Turkey remained free, US aid did not prevent
Czechoslovakia from becoming a communist satellite nation by 1948, nor did the US
come to the aid of Hungarians when they rose up against the Soviets in the next decade.
After the fall of Czechoslovakia to communism, however, the US and the free
governments of Europe were sufficiently alarmed to consolidate their economic and
military power in an alliance in the face of Soviet expansionism. Nations in Europe had
been allying since 1947, but the loss of Czechoslovakia made these nations seek a formal
military alliance with the United States. By 1949, the United States and eleven European
nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which pledged itself to
the notion that “an armed attack against one or more” of its members “shall be considered
an attack against them all.” Greece and Turkey joined the original twelve NATO nations
by 1951. West Germany joined in 1955. If the Cold War hadn’t started before the
formation of this alliance, it certainly did then.
Meanwhile the United Nations proved useful in a matter that did not offend either
the US or the USSR and prompt either nation to veto a UN action. One of Great Britain’s
headaches as a waning imperial power had been the animosity between Arabs and Jews
in Palestine. After World War II ended, Britain decided to withdraw from the region, and
the United Nations stepped in to manage a transition. Before a peaceful partitioning of
the region could be accomplished, however, Jews announced the formation of an
independent state of Israel. Both the US and the USSR recognized the government of
this new nation (both nations had large Jewish populations) in part because of sympathy
over what the Nazis had done to exterminate European Jewry. The Arabs in Palestine
resisted but were unable to prevail over Jews determined to reclaim their Promised Land
centuries after the Roman Diaspora. The UN negotiated a cease-fire by 1949 between
Arabs and Israelis, but it was not to last. Israel remains, of course, today, but the
Palestinian partitioning question is at the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is ongoing,
a saga of strife centuries old.
Now we must finish by looking at the end of World War II in Asia. The United
States dominated in the occupation of Japan, and Douglas MacArthur, an American
General who had been the commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, was made its
provisional governor. MacArthur basically wrote a new constitution for Japan which
kept all of their government intact except that sovereignty was passed from the Emperor
to the people. Japan has been a democracy, therefore, since 1947. The Japanese army
and navy had been dissolved when MacArthur signed the treaty ending hostilities back in
1945 aboard the US battleship Missouri. The Japanese constitution banned patriotic
organizations and reformed education. The zaibatsus were retained, however, to allow
quicker economic recovery. Land was distributed to former tenant farmers. A final
agreement was reached in 1951 when the full sovereignty of Japan was restored. This
sovereignty so far has been limited, however, in the provision disallowing Japan to build
an offensive military. Our having imposed this provision on Japan has left the United
States in the position of having to defend Japan ourselves, a relationship now in the form
of an alliance. Meanwhile the Japanese ingenuity that made them able to produce a
formidable war machine has since been devoted to the production of technology for
civilian purposes, making Japan one of the East Asian economic giants.
The Chinese civil war that had been postponed to fend off the Japanese resumed
in earnest after Japan was defeated. Mao Zedong’s promised land policy reforms brought
the majority of northern China under communist control by the end of 1948. Chiang Kaishek began withdrawing his nationalist forces to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949. By October
of that year, Mao declared the formation of the People’s Republic of China, a communist
state with himself as president. By 1950 the whole mainland of China was in communist
control. The USSR recognized Mao’s government as the legitimate rulers of China while
the US continued to recognize the nationalist government in exile on Taiwan.
This new front in the Cold War lead to the division of Korea after World War II
just as with Germany except this time north/south. North Korea was nurtured by the
Soviets to become the communist dictatorship that it remains today. South Korea was
nurtured by the Americans to become another immensely productive East Asian
economic power. The Korean peninsula was the site of one of the proxy wars of the Cold
War during the early 1950s as you will see. In the end, Hitler’s dream to share with the
Soviets in the redistribution of the world actually came to pass, just not for him. The
United States and the Soviet Union squared off for five decades as the two world
superpowers. Their conflict had numerous consequences, not the least of which is that on
two occasions the world was on the brink of thermonuclear war.