Churchill's Legacy

by Alan Watson

  Paradoxically, while US assertiveness in what was becoming the Cold War was what Churchill had wanted, its pace and extent also increasingly concerned him. Churchill’s purpose was not only to stop Stalin – it was to force him to negotiate. He wanted dialogue. He believed in summitry. As he made clear, he saw the objective of Western rearmament not as war but as its avoidance once the Soviets had been forced to recognise the resolve and recovery of the West.

  As we turn to America’s change of position, it will be necessary to recognise it was not entirely to Churchill’s taste. What mattered in the two years after Zurich was the mighty achievements of US policy – reversing the unreality and appeasement of Roosevelt’s approach to Stalin. In 1946 Churchill called for two things above all else – that the USA with Britain demonstrate the political will and military capability to deter Stalin, and that the economic recovery of Europe proceed as fast as possible powered by American aid and facilitated by growing European co-operation. By the end of 1949 Stalin’s grab for Berlin had been thwarted, the Marshall Plan was under way, the Federal Republic of Germany had been established and NATO was being set up. It was a breath-taking advance wresting the initiative from the Kremlin.

  Those who played a part in it recognised its scale and stature. They were ‘present at the Creation’ and Churchill had been the first to arrive.

  18

  The USA: From Irritation to Determination

  At root, Churchill was always optimistic about the USA. Half-American through his mother, his instinct was to view any cup offered by the USA as half-full not half-empty. It was this tendency that led him into his parliamentary folly over the terms of the loan to Britain proposed by Washington in 1945. Yet equally it was this optimism that had kept him going during the darkest days of the war. The Americans had agreed Lend-Lease in 1941 but it was far too little to turn the tide of war. That spring, Churchill had been forced to evacuate British forces for the second time – from Crete not France – and Joe Kennedy, when US ambassador in London, had been pessimistic about Britain’s chances. There seemed no likelihood of America joining the war. However, on 27 April, he went on air quoting Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem:

  For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

  Seem here no painful inch to gain

  Far back through creeks and inlets waking

  Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

  And not by Eastern windows only

  When daylight comes, comes in the light:

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.

  But Westward, look, the land is bright.1

  That was how Churchill saw it in 1941. It was how he saw it also in 1946.

  He was sure that his message at Fulton would galvanise Americans whether they at first agreed with it or not. The assessment by the British Foreign Office on Fulton and its impact confirmed this. It found that while many, especially in the US military, supported what Churchill had said, it had also been condemned by many in Congress, the media and amongst the general public. It had also – as we have seen – been disowned by the Truman administration. But the FCO report concluded that the speech had given ‘the sharpest jolt to American thinking of any utterance since the end of the war’. It would ‘set the pattern of discussion on world affairs for some time to come’.2

  Thus Churchill would not have been surprised by the turn of events and the stiffening of US resolve that emerged after his seminal speeches at Fulton and Zurich. This is not to argue that these speeches caused the events of America’s increasingly public reaction and eventual pre-emption of them, but the FCO report’s judgement can be applied to both Fulton and Zurich. They were indeed the catalyst for discussion in Europe and America.

  Two sets of events ultimately forced the change from American irritation to US official determination. First was the character of Soviet conquest and occupation in Eastern and Central Europe. The second was Britain’s inability to contain the Soviet threat given the parlous state of her economy coupled with the disarray and destruction in Western Europe. It was time for America to pick up and wear the mantle of leadership that had to pass from Britain to the USA. Any return to isolationism would – as Churchill’s speeches predicted – condemn Europe to Soviet domination. As it was, matters had been left so late that – as we will see – the US government had to contemplate and, at least in principle, agree to the possibility of deploying its one sovereign advantage – the A-bomb – if Stalin moved to take Germany.

  Stalin’s thinking was on the record. On 9 February in Moscow he had beaten the drum. The war had been caused by the ‘capitalist monopolies’. They were still there. Thus ‘the USSR must treble the basic materials of national defence’. George Kennan had argued that the USSR was ‘committed fanatically to the belief that . . . there can be no permanent modus vivendi with the US’. At the same time, Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, told his prime minister that ‘the Russians have decided on an aggressive policy based upon militant communism and Russian chauvinism . . . and seem determined to stop at nothing short of war’.3

  The one – for the time being – unique factor in America’s favour was the A-bomb, but this could disappear. When Truman had told Stalin at Potsdam of America’s successful testing of ‘a new bomb of extraordinary power’,4 Stalin showed no surprise. His spies embedded in the Manhattan Project had warned him but also alerted him to the reality that ‘as yet the Americans only possessed one or two bombs’.5 These they were to use over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Stalin had Eastern and Central Europe in his grip. His control of the Kremlin was total. Those in his immediate circle were terrified of him. His paranoia was such that he trusted no one but equally no one could trust him. His silences could threaten extinction or imprisonment for oneself or any member of one’s family. No one was safe. Of course he bribed as well as bullied. In Simon Sebag Montefiore’s telling phrase,6 corruption was

  the untold story of Stalin’s post-war terror – the magnates and marshals plundered Europe with the avarice of Goering . . . Stalin’s potentates now existed in a hot house of rarefied privilege bedecked with fine Persian carpets . . . their houses were palatial . . . the dachas of the Mikoyans, Molotovs and Voroshilovs were crammed with gifts from workers . . . rugs, gold Caucasian weapons, porcelain.

  The richest pickings came from the countries the Red Army had liberated. Anne Applebaum, in her study of the Gulag, describes how ‘all across Central Europe, the Soviet Union’s great strength as an occupying power was its ability to corrupt local elites, to turn them into collaborators who willingly oppressed their own people’.7

  Always behind the corruption was terror. Stalin had been frank to the Yugoslav Molovan Djilas and others when he enunciated his reality of conquest – ‘whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system as far as his army can reach’. His army had reached Berlin and its military preponderance held the potential for far greater extension. Only the atomic bomb could balance Soviet strength and one way in which Stalin could destroy this advantage lay in the fact that, as Applebaum notes, ‘Concentration camps were a fundamental part of the Soviet social system.’ These now appeared across Soviet Europe and, as in the USSR itself, the slave labour they provided was essential to Russia’s military-industrial complex. In Czechoslovakia, eighteen special camps were grouped around the uranium mines of Yachimov. The inmates mined the uranium for Stalin’s atom bomb. They did so without any protective clothing and very many died.

  Beria, Stalin’s head of the Soviet police and, under ‘the boss’ himself, the man with the most power over the Gulag, was put in charge of creating the bomb. This project was to have overriding priority. Beria’s spies within the Manhattan Project were invaluable. So too were German scientists captured at the war’s end, as well as many brilliant Russian physicists – all isolated and guarded. But equally important was Stalin’s denial of higher living standards for the Russians themselves, which released resources for the Soviet atomic bomb programme,
including the ever available labour of the Soviet penal camps.

  This bleak reality was partly known and partly guessed at by Western intelligence and Western leaders. Churchill was disingenuous in claiming that the West knew nothing of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. But the most direct indication of Russia’s obsessive urgency in marshalling and increasing its material resources focused on the demand for reparations from Germany. So strident did this become that it furnished America’s new secretary of state, George C. Marshall, with his sticking point with the Russians during his first and last full conference with them in Moscow. It proved to be the final – the 43rd – conference of the wartime alliance of foreign ministers. It was held on 24 March 1947. The meeting itself was preceded by a screening of a new Soviet colour film based on a Russian folk story, ‘The Snow Flower’. Stalin demanded that the USA and UK make good on what he claimed he had been promised by Roosevelt before his death – $10 billion of German reparations.

  The scene had been set earlier by a glacial Molotov, making it clear that if Germany was allowed to fuse into one economic entity – the direction advocated by the West – then it could only happen if the UK and USA ensured this reparation. In practice that would have meant Britain and America subsidising their zones in order to make payments. The Soviet zone was already being stripped of its factories and economic assets with guarded trains leaving daily loaded with machine tools and factory parts destined for Russia. Bevin and Marshall had seen through this and challenged the Russian approach time and time again.

  Now at this final meeting, Marshall and Bevin ‘had had enough’.8 Marshall expressed bluntly his frustration. Enough attempts had been made to negotiate with the Russians but ‘I decided finally at Moscow after the War that they could not be negotiated with’.9 On his flight back to Washington his translator later remembered that ‘Stalin’s seeming indifference to what was happening in Germany made a deep impression on Marshall’. The secretary of state saw how perilous was Europe’s economic predicament: ‘Millions of people were on short rations. There was a danger of epidemics . . . this was the kind of crisis that Communism thrived on.’10

  Marshall was now committed to a programme of US aid and reconstruction. It would become the Marshall Plan and it forms a key part of America’s change of heart. The other key element had occurred just before Marshall’s conference with the Russians in Moscow. It was President Truman’s speech to Congress broadcast to the nation on 12 March 1947. In it, he enunciated what became known as the Truman Doctrine. The key passage was as follows:

  The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments.

  At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

  One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

  The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

  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 by outside pressures.

  I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

  I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes . . .

  The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.

  The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

  If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world – and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.

  Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.

  I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.11

  This was precisely the commitment from the USA Churchill had sought with the Fulton and Zurich speeches. In Missouri he had drawn the defining line between freedom and tyranny. Here it was stated once more with total clarity:

  One way of life is based upon the will of the majority . . . distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression.12

  At Fulton, Churchill had postulated ‘two giant marauders’. To Congress, Truman recognised the effects of both tyranny and war. One robbed people of their rights and freedom. The other had ‘dissolved the frame of civilized society’ confronting ‘humble folk with difficulties with which they cannot cope’. For them, ‘all is distorted, all is broken, even ground to pulp’. At Zurich this was precisely the state of Europe as Churchill saw it. ‘Over wide areas,’ he lamented, ‘a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care worn, and bewildered human beings gape at the ruins of their cities and hopes.’ This was ‘the tragedy of Europe’ which had to be addressed and only the Americans had the resources. Here then, to his immense relief, the USA under Truman was now ready to act, calling on Congress to provide ‘the economic and financial aid . . . essential to economic stability and orderly political processes’.

  And the reason? Again he echoed Churchill:

  The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.

  His analysis was also identical to that of Marshall, so shocked by Stalin’s indifference to the conditions in Germany. The Marshall Plan would do more than keep the hope alive. It would kick start economic growth and recovery. Above all it would restart the motors of economic power in France and Germany, replacing poverty and strife with the Franco-German partnership called for by Churchill in Zurich and later realised in the Coal and Steel Community linking both nations.

  Truman ended his address to Congress by accepting the Churchillian challenge to pick up the mantle of Western leadership now so far beyond Britain’s resources. He drew a line so clear, firm and determined that even Stalin must heed it. He declared to Congress and to the world: ‘I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ There were no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’; Truman was unequivocal. His determination would be sorely and dangerously tested ultimately in Berlin.

  However, the immediate crisis resulted from British economic exhaustion and its consequences. These constituted the second unavoidable challenge to the USA forcing its change from irritation with Russia to a robust determination to contain Soviet ambition and defeat Russian expansion. Washington had been informed by London that it would have to evacuate British forces from Greece as it no longer had the means to counter communist guerrilla forces there. Now fully alert to the nature of Soviet ambitions and the methods by which it could impose its ‘social system’ the Americans were confronted with the undeniable reality of British weakness. After explaining this to Congress, Truman asked and received authorisation to provide Greece and Turkey with $400 million in economic wealth and military assistance.

  To George C. Marshall, what was involv
ed was nothing less than the opening move by Russia to secure their domination in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His analysis was stark:

  If Greece should dissolve into civil war it is altogether probable that it would emerge as a Communist state under Soviet control. Turkey would be surrounded . . . Soviet domination might thus extend over the entire Middle East to the borders of India. The effect of this upon . . . Austria, Italy, and France cannot be overestimated. It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.13

  In the event Marshall was being uncharacteristically alarmist. In part this was because the aid package of $400 million proved effective. In part it was because the crisis in the Aegean was on the periphery of the tightening confrontation between the USSR and the West.

  Another decisive clash was about to occur at the very centre of Europe – Berlin. Its outcome would prove disastrous for Stalin and the USSR. In retrospect, Stalin’s blockade of Berlin can be seen as a last throw at wresting back the initiative from the Americans and the West. By the time the blockade was lifted in May 1949, the Marshall Plan was under way. The North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in April and ratified in the US Senate by eighty-two votes to thirteen, and the Basic Law creating the Federal Republic of Germany had cleared all its hurdles with elections scheduled for August the same year. In October, Truman was elected for his second term. In his biography of the president, Roy Jenkins quotes Mrs Truman’s comment as they returned to the White House, with sore throats but the vote in the bag: ‘it looks like you’re going to have to put up with us for another four years’.