With the surrender of Japan the Second World War had finally come to an end. Though the British Empire still stretched far across the globe, it was a shadow of its former self. India was poised for independence, and the strength of anti-colonial feeling among British possessions in Africa and Asia suggested they wanted theirs too. Ties of affection between Britain and the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been strengthened by their shared struggle against Hitler. But after 1945 the Pacific Rim countries made treaties with America to protect them. It had after all been American forces which had saved Australia from the Japanese.
Reform at Home, Communism Abroad (1945–1952)
Peace came officially to a shattered Europe on 8 May 1945, when Germany surrendered unconditionally. Over that preceding week there had been a series of armistices on the different fronts in the west. Ever since the news that Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April the life had gone out of the German war effort, though it had been trickling away for some time. In early 1945, the sight of triumphant Russian armies swarming across Europe had brought a few high-up German officers like General Wolff of the Army in Italy into secret negotiations with the allies independently of Hitler. The Germans might hate the allied democracies, but they did not hate them quite as much as they feared the communism the Soviet Red Army represented. Many German officers believed that it would now be better to join the allies to defeat communism. But the allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender, and terror of Hitler, prolonged the war. In Berlin, while Hitler cowered in his bunker a hundred feet below the Chancellery, civilians fought the Russians street by street, from the suburbs to the centre of the city. They had the crazed bravery of the desperate.
The German fear of the Red Army soon proved justified. It was spread right across eastern Europe and showed every sign of remaining there. Under the extraordinary General Zhukov, victor of Stalingrad, the heroic feats of the Russian army had acquired a legendary reputation. At the cost of twenty million dead, its soldiers had driven the Germans out of eastern Europe: first out of their native land, then out of Poland, Hungary and Austria; it had fought across half of Germany to reach Berlin. But in the process the Red Army occupied those countries and would continue to occupy them after the war was over. It was the price the allies now paid for allowing the Red Army to liberate the continental landmass from the Nazi tyranny.
Roosevelt and Churchill had proclaimed that their countries sought ‘no aggrandizement, territorial or other’, and that they respected ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. Their ally Stalin’s war aims were exactly the opposite. But to keep Russia on the allied side Roosevelt and Churchill had to accept her demands that eastern Europe should become her sphere of influence. Stalin intended to re-establish Russia as the great power she had been before the end of the First World War. To prevent a strong central European power like Germany arising to threaten her, Stalin’s plan was to ensure that all the countries which touched Russia’s borders became her loyal satellites or client states–that is to say, ruled by communist regimes run by leaders trained in Moscow.
Unfortunately the American State Department took an overly benign view of Stalin, whom one historian has called ‘that charming temporary gentleman Uncle Joe’. Unlike Churchill and the more wary British Foreign Office, the US made the naive assumption that Russia’s eastern European client states would be set up on British or American democratic lines. The US government believed that Stalin would mysteriously change his spots and permit free elections throughout the Soviet sphere of influence.
President Roosevelt had been crucially important to Britain’s war effort when she stood alone against a Nazi-controlled Europe, not least by unofficially financing Britain’s fight-back before most of America would have been sympathetic to participating in the war. But he was not as interested in the shape of post-war Europe as he should have been, partly because he was a dying man. Unlike Churchill, he did not square up to Stalin at the strategy conference held at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. In the confusion after Roosevelt’s death, with the excellent but very inexperienced President Truman at the helm, America’s attention had not been focused on what Stalin was up to in eastern Europe. But Churchill’s was.
With his usual sense of strategy, Churchill had seen that as the war ended it was important for the western powers to prevent the Red Army pushing too far west. Once the Russians entered a country it would be very hard to get them out without fighting them, which Britain did not have the manpower to do. If allied soldiers got to Prague, Berlin, Vienna and Warsaw before the Russians and liberated them there would be no reason for the Russians to go near those capitals. But American commanders were not interested in politics and there was no keen American president above them to order them forward, so they refused to press on further east. Churchill’s desire to keep the Soviets at bay was thwarted. With Soviet armies stretching as far as the eye could see, Stalin was more formidable than ever.
It soon became clear as peace resumed that Russia’s export of world revolution, which had been on hold during the war, had resumed. The Red Army was a far more effective way of spreading communism than the Comintern had ever been. Free elections in Poland after the war had been one of Churchill’s demands to which Stalin had agreed. But Stalin had lied. In 1945 the wishes of the Polish government-in-exile in London were ignored–its leadership was in any case divided and ineffectual after the mysterious death of the premier General Sikorsky in 1943. Poles trained in Moscow appeared in Warsaw to set up a communist government, and non-communist leaders of the other political parties were arrested, taken for trial in Moscow and executed. And that was only the beginning of what Churchill would in 1946 call an ‘iron curtain’ descending over Europe from ‘Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. In country after country which had divisions of the Red Army stationed in them at the end of the war, voters–under the eye of soldiers with red stars on their lapels–returned communist regimes.
Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia all went communist, and would remain so for the next forty years. Indeed until they were liberated from the late 1980s onwards, when the glasnost era broke up the Soviet Empire, there seemed no reason why things should ever change. The countries of the eastern bloc appeared doomed to a one-party system of government in which dissent was punished by death. Despite their long and colourful histories, by 1946 a dreary grey uniformity had been enforced across what became known in 1955 as the Warsaw Pact countries: their peoples had little to eat, few medicines and lived their lives in fear. In 1948 Czechoslovakia became part of the unhappy band. When the foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell out of a window in his office in Prague, almost certainly having been pushed, it was the beginning of the end. By September Czechoslovakia had joined the Soviet bloc.
It was in Potsdam in occupied Germany at the peace conference held in July 1945 that the post-war governments of the democratic west and the autocratic secretive communist east rubbed up against one another. There were some hopeful omens. The United Nations, an international organization intended to keep the peace the way the League of Nations had never succeeded in doing, had been created at a conference in San Francisco the previous month. Fifty nations signed the organization’s Charter and began to meet at the General Assembly, a sort of world Parliament in New York. Reflecting the UN’s origins at the end of the war the great powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France became the only permanent members of the organization’s Security Council, each of which possessed the right of veto.
But at Potsdam the burning issues were what should happen to Germany, Austria and, to a lesser extent, to Italian possessions. Though Italy had fought on the allied side at the end, she had to yield some of Istria and the city port of Fiume to Yugoslavia and the Dodecanese islands to Greece; she also renounced her African empire. Austria was to remain divided into British, French, US and Soviet zones of occupat
ion until 1955, when she became strictly neutral.
It had been agreed that Germany was likewise to be divided into four zones to be occupied by those same four powers. Though France had been defeated in 1940, Britain argued successfully that she should be included in the army of occupation. The German capital Berlin was also divided into four sections among the four powers. Unfortunately Berlin lay some distance by rail and road from the zones of the western powers: it was situated in Russian-occupied territory in old Prussia. This was soon to raise problems.
Britain began with two representatives at Potsdam, Churchill (now heading a caretaker government pending a general election) and the Labour leader Clement Attlee. To the Tories’ and his own surprise Attlee took Labour to a landslide victory at the end of July 1945. It was the first Labour majority government. The population might love Churchill, the great saviour of his country, but returning soldiers voted to have the country rebuilt by Labour. To the British people the Tories still seemed ‘guilty men’, even at the end of the war–guilty of not caring enough in the 1930s and guilty of the appeasement which had led to war. In short the population did not believe that they would get the sort of social reforms from the Tories they were determined to have after six years of total war.
Attlee had been Churchill’s deputy prime minister. Although he looked disconcertingly like Lenin, he was a kindly former barrister who had spent much of his life on philanthropic projects in London’s East End, but he was a good judge of men. Many were surprised that the stately role of foreign secretary went to Ernest Bevin, who had no diplomatic background and a reputation for calling a spade a spade. He was then best known for being the robust head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and minister of labour in the wartime coalition. But Bevin was an honourable, fearless man who had always been passionately interested in international affairs and was known for holding his own in any debate. He had been one of Labour’s earliest critics of appeasement. Moreover, for many years he had fought the communists in the unions. Thus he had few illusions about the real nature of communist dictatorships and was ideally suited to dealing with the Cold War, as the continuous state of tension between Russia and her former allies was beginning to be known.
The Labour government began rapidly transforming Britain. The trade unions were liberated by the repeal of the 1927 Trade Disputes Act and allowed to recommence their fundraising. Heavy industries were nationalized. Plans were drawn up for new housing and an innovative free medical service. But the big problem Attlee and Bevin were wrestling with was what should happen to Germany after her division into zones.
It is hard to imagine more than half a century later the anger that was felt towards Germany at the end of the Second World War. German militarism had once again devastated the European continent and created a world war only twenty years after the first. The French had suffered three invasions, three destructions of their countryside, with two occupations of their capital Paris in seventy years. They simply did not believe that the Germans could be trusted with a national central government. Their experiences made them believe that the German nation was too warlike and powerful to be allowed to govern herself. The nature of the German people, the size of their country and her mineral resources made it inevitable that they would always want to dominate the continent. France’s view overshadowed post-war discussions.
But there was considerable delay as the allies argued about what form post-war Germany should take. Some believed that there should only be local state governments as before German unification, and that any government at federal level should be controlled by Britain and France. Controls were imposed on German industries, and anything which could be turned to military manufacture was forbidden. At the same time the French drew up plans for the international management of iron and steel manufacture in Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr.
Aside from long-term political and geographical solutions, the devastated country also presented immense and more immediate practical problems. Not only was the countryside of Germany itself ruined and burned out, but Europe was filled with homeless peoples and marauding Russian armies. Two million Germans were fleeing from what had become western Poland as a result of Yalta. The occupying Russian soldiers, filled with fury against the German people whose soldiers had ruined their homeland, continually avenged themselves on the German civil populations, particularly by raping women.
The occupying American and British armies were at first forbidden to speak to the German people. British soldiers were so appalled by the death camps they had liberated at Belsen, one of the several sites where six million people of Jewish origin had died, whether gassed, killed by disease or worked to death, that they had no wish to fraternize with them. Germans in towns nearest to these sites were forced to rebury the dead in individual plots, so many of them having been thrown into mass graves. But, as the year wore on, the physical plight of the German people became so frightful that compassion crept into the allied powers’ attitude to them. In a country with hardly a building standing they began to see the wisdom of Churchill’s advice not to insist on punitive reparations. Thus, though the Nazi leaders were tried in the German city of Nuremberg by a multinational court of judges for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, reparations (except to Russia) would come to an end quite soon.
From the start relations were bad between the occupying powers. The British and American occupying armies were outraged by the callous and brutal behaviour of the Red Army. Although it had been agreed that the Russians should be allowed to remove German industrial machinery as reparation for the destruction inflicted on Soviet plants, Britain and America had not anticipated the level of asset-stripping to which the Russians would descend, carrying off whatever German industrial equipment they could get their hands on. From typewriters to telephone lines, from rolling stock to whole factories of superb German machinery, everything movable was loaded on to Russian lorries and disappeared into the east.
As the dust settled and the world began to spin in its own peaceful orbit again it became clearer that democracy had not completely died in Germany. Some pre-1933 politicians who had survived imprisonment by the Nazis were the best hope of future democracy in the western allies’ part of Germany, such as Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne. The western powers concluded that the whole country should be united under one government. But it became clear that Russia had no intention of allowing that to happen unless it was to be under the communist parties which soon controlled all the state governments in the eastern zone. Meanwhile, after free elections the whole administration of the city of Berlin was in the hands of democratic socialists, the SPD, despite Russian intimidation of its members through arrests and assault.
Matters came to a head with the brutal winter of 1947–8. The weather seemed to conspire with a simple lack of money to put back post-war recovery in Europe for twelve months. Britain ground to a halt because the extreme cold prevented fuel from being moved. For much of the time coal could not be mined, massively upsetting an already teetering balance of payments. With most of Britain’s factories having been turned over to the war effort there was next to nothing to export to earn money. There were constant power cuts because of the weather and equally constant strikes in the newly nationalized coal industry.
The Labour government, however, continued to feel ‘exalted’, as Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the Exchequer put it, at the thought of the changes it was going to make to life in Britain. But those reforms needed a great deal of money. And despite higher taxation lack of money was one of the most striking features of the post-1945 Labour government. American credit, American generosity, had made it possible for Britain to continue in the war after 1940. But directly the war in Japan had ended in August 1945 the Americans had cut off the Lend-Lease loans. From September that year Britain was left floundering.
Continually suspicious of Britain’s imperialist aims, the US had given no consideration to the sacrifices made by Britain
to fight Hitler, which had consumed about a quarter of her national wealth and all her overseas assets. In order to defeat Germany, Britain’s manufacturing industries had been turned over to munitions factories, her heavy industry to warships, tanks and aircraft. America gave Britain no time to adjust to post-war dislocation. Two-thirds of the nine million people employed in the armed forces were going to be unemployed, even if it was only temporarily as old industries started up again. Nevertheless, returning to everyday production would be far from easy since many of the old pre-war overseas markets had been lost as the countries concerned had opened their own factories to replace British goods.
Dalton was allowed to borrow £1,300 million from America and Canada but only on condition that after twelve months the pound would be convertible to any other currency. But after six months the loan had been used up, and Dalton had made way for Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-minded but rather desiccated man whose name became a byword for austerity. In what is known as the convertibility crisis–a run on the pound as it was used to buy dollars to pay for the American goods which dominated the post-war world–the sort of measures employed in wartime Britain were implemented once again. Very limited amounts of cash were allowed out of the country. Rationing continued into the early 1950s as Britain did not have the money to import food nor the ability to grow it herself. The pound was devalued. Newspapers were permitted to print only four pages. Petrol could be bought for private use only for specific reasons listed by the government. The black market reappeared.
The Story of Britain Page 91
