The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Britain was thus sinking psychologically under the combined effects of expensive domestic reforms and the cost of trying to reconstruct Germany when, like the rest of western Europe, she was rescued by the American Marshall Plan loan. Despite the western armies’ best efforts, the British and French governments were unable to afford the level of reconstruction needed in Germany after the war, whether it was laying new sewage pipes or rebuilding homes in the rubble of bombed cities. Fortunately for Britain and France in 1947 President Truman at last woke up to the dire straits the allies’ economies were in. Though he had none of FDR’s elongated glamour, the small tubby Truman was hard working and sincere. He had become alarmed by the shape eastern Europe was taking with the barring of anti-communist parties in the Soviet zone of Germany, as well as in the other Russian-controlled countries. He proposed the Marshall Plan to put Europe back on its feet and proclaimed what is called the Truman Doctrine: ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure’.

  For 200 years America’s attitude to Europe had been that the republic should hold itself aloof from the decadent Old World which the New World had been created to escape. The Versailles settlement had foundered on America’s isolationist refusal to underwrite what President Wilson had devised. But from 1947 onwards the United States undertook to involve herself in renewing the prosperity of the Old World by underwriting the economic reconstruction needed so desperately after the war. Named for the US secretary of state General George C. Marshall, who announced it, the Marshall Plan poured £1,325 million into all the countries in Europe which requested funds through the OEEC, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. American dollars transformed the post-war European situation in return for very little. It was an altruistic action. This generous gift is sometimes regarded as a hedge against communism, but in fact it was offered to all countries irrespective of their political structures, but was turned down by Russia on behalf of all eastern European governments under her sway.

  The Marshall Plan accentuated the line drawn down Europe by the Iron Curtain. On the western side the economies became prosperous. On the eastern side, however, the countryside was dotted with ramshackle buildings and rusty machinery. (Only in space was individual genius allowed to shine: Russia was the first country to put a man into orbit with Sputnik in 1957.) Stalin would not accept western aid. He continued to hope and believe that the capitalist contradictions in western democracies would make them collapse, as they should according to Marxist theory. The many partisan or resistance movements during the war throughout western Europe had had strong communist elements. The Russians were convinced that it was only a question of time before the communist parties took over.

  As a result of the Marshall Plan, the western powers were able to reform the currency in their zones in Germany. The combination of a less punitive attitude towards German industry and agriculture had almost magical results when controls were removed. Until 1948 many industries using iron and steel had been banned in Germany, while any surplus produced by factories or farms above a certain level had been exported to allied countries as a form of reparation. Now, the black market died at a stroke, food appeared in shops, and money took the place of the barter system to which the German economy had sunk.

  But the success of the western efforts in rebuilding Germany made the Russians feel threatened–they had been hoping that the whole of Germany would slowly go communist. When the western powers suggested spreading the helpful currency reforms to Berlin, the Russians reacted savagely. Believing that such reforms might lose them control of their zone, they took the extraordinary decision to close the roads from Berlin to the west. From June 1948 the Russians blockaded the city, even though a democratic local government was flourishing there, and even though it also contained the allied occupying forces of America, Britain and France. The Russians would allow nobody already in Berlin to go out, nor food to go in. These opening moves in the Cold War could have led to a third world war had it not been for Britain and America’s calm response. The skills of the US and British air forces made the Berlin Airlift possible: 240,000 tons of everything human beings needed to survive–foods, clothes, baby milk–were flown into the city in an unending succession of plane loads. The Berliners became heroes of the hour for their refusal to give in to the Russians, and the whole episode did much to draw western Germany back into the community of European nations. In May 1949 the Russians gave up the gamble and Berlin was reopened to the west.

  Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall: there was to be no reuniting of the four German zones for the moment. The western allies therefore continued to organize their zones to operate on their own. The small town of Bonn became the temporary capital of a West German government. By August 1949 a constitution for the German Federal Republic had been approved by the western allies, and a free election made Konrad Adenauer the first West German federal chancellor. In October of the same year the Moscow-controlled eastern zone set up the German Democratic Republic. Berlin continued nevertheless to be too much of a magnet for young dissatisfied East Germans because it was a gateway to the west. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was put up between the two halves of the city by the Russians to end the stream of emigration. Crowned with barbed wire and guarded by sentries who shot to kill, then dragged the bodies of their victims back into their sector, it was the very symbol of the Cold War.

  After the furore of the Berlin Blockade, western attitudes towards Russia hardened. A military alliance became a necessity. Anxiety about Russian intentions thus created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. A visible sign of the Truman Doctrine, NATO bound America in an unprecedented military alliance to protect western Europe. Britain had already attached herself to the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and France in a mutual defence treaty. Now America, Canada, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Portugal joined up with their own troops to create what became a formidable military system.

  The formation of NATO put Russia on notice to tread more carefully. The United States, which had spread her wing over Europe, had the bomb and the dollars. In August 1949 the Soviet Union exploded her first atomic bomb, its programme greatly accelerated by the betrayal of critical data by the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. The western alliance and the strength of the Cold War truce was to be tested only the next year by the outbreak of the Korean War. Once again this could have led to a mighty conflagration in the Far East, but all powers concerned were anxious to prevent it getting out of hand.

  Korea descends from mainland China into a peninsula opposite Japan, her former ruler. From 1945 she was occupied by American troops in the south and Russian troops in the north. But on 25 June 1950 the communist government of North Korea sent troops into South Korea, armed with Russian tanks and supported by Russian aircraft. The brand new United Nations sprang into action and asked its fellow members to support South Korea by sending a defence force to help her. Britain naturally contributed troops, though she could scarcely afford to. She continued to have important imperial commitments in Malaya and was anxious about Chinese communist influence there–for Chiang Kai-shek, China’s nationalist leader, had been defeated and expelled by Mao Tse-tung the previous year.

  The United States had a large number of troops in the region already owing to her occupation of Japan. At first US and UN troops under General MacArthur chased the North Koreans almost to their border with Manchuria. But communist China now began to throw her weight behind North Korea. Although there was a moment when it seemed that the world trembled on the edge of its third global conflict as American soldiers were directly engaged with Chinese troops, the conflict was contained–it never explicitly became an out-and-out war between China and the United States. The Americans did not attack Chinese territory, and did not use the atomic bomb. Russia too restrained herself. Despite the initial aid to the North Koreans, she did not send troops to the battle zone.

  Seventy-five
thousand South Koreans and United States servicemen died during the Korean War, but the conflict ended inconclusively. All concerned were anxious to show that they did not really wish for war. In 1951, a ceasefire was agreed upon and the country reverted to the status quo ante. The old frontier between North and South Korea at the 38th parallel was retained in a treaty agreed in 1953. That was also the year of Stalin’s death, which caused the world to heave a collective sigh of relief. Nikita Khrushchev, who took over as secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, denounced Stalin’s dictatorship and his cult of personality. There seemed to be a distinct thaw in the Cold War: the Communist party congress in 1956 recommended a deStalinization process, as long as it did not go too far. Controls over Russia’s client states in eastern Europe were loosened.

  The expense involved in sending British troops to the Korean War was the final straw that broke the back of the Labour government, despite its remarkable achievements. It had made huge strides in changing the fabric of Britain, but the austerity measures it required of the public were very harsh because the costs of those changes were so huge. Nationalizing the coalmines cost hundreds of millions of pounds to acquire them from the private owners, and similar costs were incurred in nationalizing the railways, the utilities (that is, gas, electricity and water) and the iron and steel industries. Although they lost the 1951 general election (there had been another election the year before in which their majority had been drastically reduced), Labour had an enormous amount of which to be proud. There had been relatively little disagreement about their reforms. Many Conservatives agreed wholeheartedly with nationalization if it benefited the country as a whole as opposed to a few wealthy private owners. They too felt that the National Health Service was a benchmark of what the most enlightened twentieth-century democratic civilization could achieve.

  And what twentieth-century governments represented was of course at the forefront of British politics in the aftermath of the war. The shame of the Nazis’ treatment of minorities and of the vulnerable gave an additional edge to considerations of what post-war society ought to be like. In fact in the 1950s national politics were marked by their consensual nature: Labour and Conservative tended to implement programmes that moderates in all parties could approve of. This consensus politics came to be called Butskellism, taken from the names of the progressive Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler (author of the 1944 Education Act, which created universal free secondary education for all to the age of fifteen) and Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as chancellor, who became leader of the Labour party in 1955 when Attlee retired to the House of Lords. Their policies were remarkably similar, and (to a much lesser extent) elements of consensus were maintained until the arrival of Mrs Thatcher.

  The most important contribution to national life made by Labour was the creation in 1948 of the welfare state, set up by two statutes: the National Insurance Act and the National Health Service Act. Its architect Sir William Beveridge, the ‘People’s William’, proudly explained that this all-encompassing plan for national insurance would look after everyone ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Every adult in Britain would contribute to it by paying national insurance, to ensure that everyone in British society was provided for. Every British citizen would be entitled to free medical care in free hospitals provided by the National Health Service. Child benefit was to be paid for every child after the first. There was to be cover for industrial accidents. State pensions were to be given to all citizens–to women at sixty and men at sixty-five.

  Labour also took important decisions to reduce Britain’s responsibilities overseas. India had been promised independence, but the division between Muslims and Hindus was so deep that it became clear that only partition would work–that the country was on the point of civil war. The Labour government announced that India’s new viceroy Lord Mountbatten, a distinguished naval officer and member of the royal family, would hand over rule in June 1948 to an Indian government which would be set up by local parties. But once Mountbatten had arrived in the country he decided that independence had to be brought forward to a much earlier date, 15 August 1947. He believed that, if the subcontinent were swiftly divided into Muslim and Hindu states, this would cut down on the mounting death toll.

  Pakistan, the new Muslim state, was to comprise those regions with large Muslim communities, concentrated in the north-west corner of India and above the Bay of Bengal, east of Calcutta. Unfortunately the two halves of the new state (known as West and East Pakistan) were a thousand miles apart. Worse still, the nine weeks during which Mountbatten organized partition saw the number of deaths rise to perhaps 200,000. Meanwhile the short period of time given to the Muslims of India to cross into Pakistan and the Hindus of the new Pakistan to cross into India created separate difficulties. During that two-and-a-half-month period, ten million people of rural origins, their bedsteads and belongings loaded anyhow on to oxen and carts, were on the move across the huge Indian subcontinent. They had to be within the freshly established frontiers before the stroke of midnight on 15 August. This vast movement of peoples, for whom shelter had to be found, was an additional source of strain for the brand-new governments of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

  The second enormous headache for the Labour government was Israel, another ancient country struggling to be born anew in the late 1940s. The problem of Israel and Palestine was as complicated as that of India. In the 1930s Nazi persecution of the Jews greatly increased their immigration into Palestine. By 1936 the Jewish population was almost 400,000 or a third of the whole. Conflict in Palestine brought about the Peel Report’s 1937 recommendation of partition, but this was rejected by both sides. The last British government investigation into what was best for the mandate of Palestine in 1939 had produced the recommendation in a White Paper that the final number of Jewish immigrants be limited to 75,000. The mandate would be given up, Palestine would become independent under Arab majority rule. Previously Jewish emigration between the wars had been of an individual and unofficial nature. The situation, however, was dramatically changed after the Second World War by the sufferings of the Jews under the Nazis. From 1945 onwards the immigration into Israel threatened to become a flood which would upset the balance between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, when the American government asked Britain to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine.

  The British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin felt that if the Jews were allowed to immigrate into Palestine in the numbers the United States was proposing they would swamp the original Arab inhabitants. The Palestinian Arabs in any case refused to accept further Jewish immigrants. Britain had been entrusted to rule in the Palestinians’ best interests by the League of Nations mandate, and Bevin believed she could not simply abandon them.

  There were also the wishes of the Arab leaders of the Middle East to consider. These were important allies for Britain of long standing whom Bevin was anxious not to offend, who were already opposed to the Jewish National Home. Their importance was made greater by the west’s increased reliance by mid-century on the motor car, fuelled by petrol converted from oil beneath the desert kingdoms of Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and, since 1938, Saudi Arabia. So when boatloads of illegal Jewish immigrants began to arrive in Palestine often visibly sick from their treatment by the Nazis, Britain felt compelled to use force to stop them from disembarking, though this was greatly deplored by the rest of the world.

  Meanwhile a guerrilla war was being fought between the Palestin Arabs and Jewish terrorist gangs. Jewish terrorist attacks were also carried out on the British army, which was trying to keep the peace between the two warring sides. The British resident minister Lord Moyne was assassinated in 1944, the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British army) was blown up without warning in July 1946, killing ninety-one people, and two young British sergeants were hanged in July 1947. British public opinion became increasingly disenchanted with remaining in Palestine. Britain’s duty towards the Arabs was offset by the high cost to an i
mpoverished Britain of enforcing the mandate, in the year of austerity 1947. Britain could no longer afford to play the world’s policeman. Moreover, with India gone in August 1947, the importance of Palestine to British interests fell away. Earlier that year Britain had referred the problem of Palestine to the newly founded United Nations in America, as an international arbiter. The UN recommended partition. In September the Labour government decided that British forces would leave in mid-1948, for Bevin would not use British soldiers to enforce partition on the Arabs who did not want it.

  The day that the British mandate in Palestine expired, 14 May 1948, as the last British troops pulled out of the country, the Jews declared the existence of the independent State of Israel. It was to be open to any Jew throughout the world. David Ben Gurion became the first Israeli prime minister, while Chaim Weizmann was president. The Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, was set up in 1949. The reappearance of the State of Israel with all its historic biblical resonances for Jews and Christians, almost 2,000 years after vanishing from the map of the world, caused great rejoicing among many sympathizers. But the Arab leaders whose lands surrounded Israel on all sides were furious. Three days after the new state had been declared, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and others declared war. Astonishingly, in the tradition of David and Goliath the infant state defeated her mighty Arab neighbours and enlarged her territory by a quarter. The war ended in January the following year with the sacred city of Jerusalem divided in two between Israel and Jordan, which also occupied most of the UN-designated Palestinian state, and many of the 650,000 Palestinian Arabs homeless.