Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

There was something quaintly old-fashioned, indeed redolent of late-nineteenth-century imperial skirmishes, about the Syrian crisis. In any event, though this was not yet clear in San Francisco, Britain and France would both lose their preeminent positions in the Middle East. The United States and the Soviet Union would soon call the shots. One British wartime plan offered a glimpse of the not too distant future. It was hoped in London that Britain and the U.S. would jointly police the postwar world by establishing military bases under the auspices of the UN; the U.S. in Asia, and the British in the Middle East. The Americans had already made it clear that local sovereignty would not stretch to areas selected for U.S. military installations—the so-called strategic trust territories. Already in the first months after the war, the dim shape of a more informal empire was starting to be visible. What the British had not quite realized was how minor their role in this new world was destined to be.

  The Syrians were not alone in demanding independence. Indeed this was one of the talking points of San Francisco. And Michael Foot was not wrong to say that the Soviet Union, for its own not strictly philosophical reasons, was more supportive of such aspirations than its western European allies. But, although the General Assembly would, in time, become a vital forum for anticolonial agitation, decolonization was not yet on the agenda in 1945. The most that colonial powers would concede was the promise, enshrined in the UN Charter, to look after “the well-being” of the inhabitants of the “non-self-governing territories.” Self-government would be promoted “according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their various stages of advancement.” The former governor of the Punjab, Baron (William Malcolm) Hailey of Shahpur and Newport Pagnell, could reassure the readers of the London Times that there was “nothing here which is not already implicit in our own policy.” And, more important, there was “clearly no intention that the United Nations Organization should intervene in the application of the principles of the charter by the colonial powers concerned.”29 All that Britain, France, and other imperial powers were obliged to do was to report regularly to the Secretary General of the UN on conditions in the “territories” they continued to possess.

  • • •

  GIVEN THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS in some quarters for a world government, the final outcome of the San Francisco conference was bound to disappoint. For a world government to work, national governments would have had to give up their sovereign rights. Of the Big Powers, only China, represented by T. V. Soong, business tycoon and politician, talked about “yielding if necessary a part of our sovereignty.”30 China had even been prepared to give up on Big Power veto rights. But since Chiang Kai-shek’s sovereignty in China itself was already looking shaky, Chinese magnanimity in this matter did not cut much ice.

  In his dispatches for the New Yorker, E. B. White had put his finger on the main paradox of the conference. He wrote that “the first stirrings of internationalism seem to tend toward, rather than away from, nationalism.”31 He saw in the national flags, the uniforms, the martial music, the secret meetings, the diplomatic moves, “a denial of the world community.” Under all the fine internationalist rhetoric, he heard “the steady throbbing of the engines: sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.”

  Another observer in San Francisco was John F. Kennedy, recently discharged from the U.S. Navy. He agreed with the “world federalists” that “world organization with common obedience to law would be the solution.” But he realized that nothing would ever come of this unless the common feeling that war was the “ultimate evil” were strong enough to drive governments together. An unlikely event, in his view.32

  Even the dropping of two atomic bombs failed to bring that sentiment about. A week after Nagasaki was devastated, Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, made a speech at a luncheon welcoming Gladwyn Jebb and his UN Executive Committee to London. It was a very high-powered committee. Andrei Gromyko was there for the Soviet Union; Lester Pearson for Canada; Stettinius for the United States, assisted by the tall and dapper Alger Hiss, later to be prosecuted as a Soviet spy. Britain was represented by Philip Noel-Baker, a great believer in internationalism. And the historian C. K. Webster was there to assist him, wearing a tennis visor in protest against photographers’ lights. This excellent committee, said Bevin, would soon complete the work begun in San Francisco. The terrible new weapons dropped on Japan made it all the more imperative that the world organization should work. However, Bevin continued, he recognized that “the idea of world government” would have to be “carefully nurtured.” Nations had histories, collective memories, traditions. All this might be overcome in time, just as he, Ernest Bevin, had managed to overcome his working-class origins. The “basic principle” of San Francisco was right. But it would take time to create “the right atmosphere.” Until then, “cooperation between nations, and notably large ones, who are the greatest influence for good and for ill, is the only practical method which we can adopt.”33

  Bevin was right. But without meaning to, he revealed the great defect in the ideal of world government. It depended for its working on an alliance of Big Powers. If the alliance kept together, a kind of global authoritarianism—a repeat of Metternich’s Holy Alliance after Napoleon’s defeat—threatened. If it didn’t, the fledgling world organization would be powerless, and another, perhaps even more devastating war loomed.

  In the event, the Big Powers failed to stick together. Exactly when the Cold War began is hard to say. Serious rifts were already apparent at Yalta, no matter how much Roosevelt tried to keep Stalin on his side—to the point of needlessly bullying Churchill. John Foster Dulles did not yet call it the Cold War, but he claimed to have witnessed its birth, in London, at the end of September 1945.

  The foreign ministers of the Big Five powers—the United States, Britain, the USSR, France, and China—had gathered there to discuss various peace treaties, notably with Italy, Finland, and the Balkan countries. They did not disagree on anything substantial. Indeed, the U.S., for the sake of harmony in the Big Power alliance, had already agreed to recognize the Soviet-imposed provisional government in Poland without being too fussy about its nature, and was prepared to do the same in the case of Hungary. In his report on the conference, U.S. secretary of state James F. Byrnes stated that his government “shares the desire of the Soviet Union to have governments friendly to the Soviet Union in eastern and central Europe.”34

  But Molotov had another agenda. Communism was a major force in two of the Big Powers, apart from the Soviet Union: in France, where the Communist Party was still very powerful, and China, where simmering civil war would soon come to the boil. If Molotov could humiliate the Chinese Nationalists and the French, and implicate the U.S. in their humiliation, the communist cause would be greatly strengthened. His tactic was to demand that France and China withdraw from the treaty discussions, since they had not been signatories to the surrender terms of the relevant countries. The aim was to bully the French, insult the Chinese, and rattle the British. John Foster Dulles, in his memoir, couldn’t help but admire Molotov’s cold-blooded diplomatic skills: “Mr. Molotov at London in 1945 was at his best.”35

  The French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, a former leader of the resistance and future president, was constantly slighted, provoked, and humiliated. One of Molotov’s tricks was to ask his British and American colleagues to postpone a meeting without informing Bidault, so the Frenchman would turn up to an empty room. The hope was that Bidault would stomp off to Paris in high dudgeon. The Chinese minister was simply ignored, as though he weren’t in the room at all. And Bevin, who had a temper, was needled into explosions of fury, followed by sheepish apologies that might result in concessions to the Soviet view.

  When these tactics failed to have the desired result, the Soviets tried blackmail. Bevin and Byrnes were told that the Soviet Union would no longer cooperate if France and China did not withdraw. Byrnes refused to lend himself to the further humiliation of hi
s allies and the conference was abandoned. To Dulles, this was the moment of truth. It marked “the end of an epoch, the epoch of Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam. It marked the ending of any pretence by Soviet Communists that they were our ‘friends.’ It began the period when their hostility to us was openly proclaimed throughout the world.”36

  The old Cold Warrior was surely not wrong about this. And he wasn’t the only one to see cracks appearing in the postwar world order. Hanson W. Baldwin was the military editor of the New York Times, a liberal, unlike Dulles. In a column written for his paper on October 26, he argued that the invention of atomic bombs meant that the world, and the two Big Powers in particular, were faced with a harrowing choice. One was to strengthen the United Nations. Inevitably, in that case, the Big Powers would have to give up a great deal of national sovereignty, and veto power in the Security Council would be abolished. Russians would have the right to inspect American atomic facilities, and vice versa.

  This was Baldwin’s own preferred solution, not on moral grounds, but for the sake of self-preservation. Dulles, as always, took a more moralistic view. The UN would always remain weak, he wrote, because there was no worldwide “consensus on moral judgment.”37 To him, the Cold War was a moral as well as a political conflict, a war of good against evil.

  Hanson Baldwin was not naïve, however. He did not expect the Soviets, or the Americans for that matter, to agree to his proposed solution. And that would mean, in his words, “a world divided into two blocs, each suspicious of the other, a world that may be stable for many years, but eventually would trend toward major war.”

  So it came to pass. By the time autumn turned to winter, the high hopes of the spring of ’45 were already fading. There would be no world government, let alone a world democracy; there would not even be four or five world policemen. What powers were still left to the two European countries represented in the Security Council would soon be further depleted by the bloody demise of their empires. The Soviets and the United States were drifting into open animosity. And China, a gravely wounded country after Japanese occupation, was itself divided into two blocs, with corrupt and demoralized Nationalists holding out in major cities south of Manchuria, and the Communists dominating the countryside and much of the north.

  In the fall and winter of 1945, American newspapers were still reporting on positive developments in the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking, where negotiations between Communists and Nationalists continued as a kind of shadow play. There was talk of “compromise” and “truce” and “democracy,” and the reluctance on both sides to “start” a civil war. In an article published in the New York Times Magazine on October 14, full confidence was expressed in the leadership of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It makes for very curious reading now:

  Notwithstanding his democratic ideology, Chiang now has more power than any world leader except Stalin, and he has more titles than Stalin. Besides being President of China, Commander of the Army and chief of the Kuomintang, he is the head of at least forty-three other organizations . . . the Generalissimo is China. His word is law and he has his word on many things that other national leaders would delegate to subordinates.

  It would not do him any good. Exactly four years later, the Generalissimo would be reduced to wielding his authority over a small island off the Fujian coast, formerly known as Formosa, and now as Taiwan.

  • • •

  AND SO YEAR ZERO FINALLY came to an end, on a mixed note of gratitude and anxiety. Grateful that a kind of peace had been achieved, in most places, people had fewer illusions about a glorious future and growing fears about an increasingly divided world. Millions were still too cold and hungry to celebrate the coming new year with any semblance of joy. Besides, the news was often grim: food revolts were expected in occupied Germany; acts of terrorism were creating chaos in Palestine; Koreans were furiously protesting against their semicolonial status; fighting continued in Indonesia, with British soldiers and Dutch marines, “fully supplied with American equipment,” trying to crush the native rebellion.38

  But the sense one gets from newspapers around the world on the last day of 1945 is that most people were too anxious to get on with their own lives to care much about the global news anymore. During a worldwide war, everywhere matters. In times of peace, people look to home.

  So the British talked about the weather and sports. According to the Manchester Guardian, “The war-time ban on weather reporting has left us a little out of practice in assessing the sort of fog we had last night in the North-west.” But it was good to know that “the Derbyshire and Lancashire Gliding Club hopes to be the first gliding and sailplane club in the country to resume activities which were suspended when war broke out.”

  The French talked about food. American GIs, who just one year ago had been fighting in the bloody snow of the Ardennes, were now being treated to a skiing holiday in the French Alps. “The cuisine,” reported Le Monde from Chamonix, “was prepared by French chefs to everyone’s delight. One is surprised to see to what extent this aspect of French civilization is appreciated.” The paper was also happy to announce that the “fourth litre of wine in December” could be obtained with J3, M, C, and V rations.

  The Frankische Presse of Bayreuth struck a more somber note with reminiscences of the terrible hardships suffered by the German population, “huddled in cellars and bunkers, a shattered, exhausted mass of people with feverish eyes and shivering hearts, with only one hope, not even of victory, but of an end to the war.” There was other news: two German men had come forward as volunteers to execute the war criminals at Nuremberg. Erich Richter, from the town of Marburg, said he would be happy to chop their heads off for nothing. Josef Schmidt, from a DP camp in Leipzig, was prepared to hang or behead the convicts, but would exact “a price for each head.” The solace of culture was not neglected. For the first time in years, the Bayreuth Symphony Orchestra would perform music by Claude Debussy, “the French composer who . . . worked systematically to free French music from the influence of German Romanticism and neo-Romanticism.” And this in Bayreuth, the Mecca of Wagnerism!

  In Tokyo, the main editorial of the Japan Times proclaimed: “Ring out the old! Ring in the new! Japan will ring out the old year which has just ended with no regrets. For it was a year of pain and suffering, disillusionment and confusion and humiliation and punishment. Such a year of bitter memories can be relegated to the limbo with hearty relief.” The paper also revealed that “Japanese plans for using flour made of ground silkworms, locusts, mulberry leaves and a dozen other food substitutes to avert a food crisis when American forces invaded . . . [are] still being developed.” And a reporter named Nishizawa Eiichi explained that although most heroes in Kabuki plays were regrettably feudal, there were some rare exceptions. The seventeenth-century village headman Sakura Sogoro, for example, crucified for impudently asking the shogun to reduce the tax burden on poor peasants, “was a martyr in the democratic cause.”

  The tone of the New York Times was a bit more upbeat: “New York’s Bacchanalian barometers flew storm warnings yesterday, indicating the city was headed tonight for its most exuberant New Year’s Eve since 1940.” But more than the articles, it is the advertisements in the Times that showed the almost unimaginable gulf between the new and the old worlds: “It’s different—the creamy smooth peanut butter that melts in your mouth—spread it thicker, Mom, it’s Peter Pan!”

  If there is anything to be gleaned from these glimpses of the global mood on New Year’s Eve, it is that a certain sense of normality was beginning to seep back into the daily lives of people who were lucky enough to be able to lift their heads from the direst misery of the immediate postwar period. This was not a luxury available to those who were still displaced in Germany, in Japanese POW camps, or in whatever sordid limbo they found themselves.

  Set to the task of rebuilding their shattered countries, they had no more time for feasting, or even much mourning. There was w
ork to be done. This made for a more sober perception of reality, grayer, more orderly, less exciting than the upheavals of war and liberation. In some places, of course, new wars, against colonial masters, or domestic enemies in civil conflicts, would continue, and new dictatorships were imposed. But for millions of others, there had been enough excitement to last a lifetime, years of drama that some preferred to forget, and others, who had perhaps been more fortunate, would look back on with a tinge of nostalgia—things would never be as interesting again.

  Year Zero itself has been rather eclipsed in the world’s collective memory by the years of destruction that preceded it, and new dramas that still lay in store, in Korea, Vietnam, India-Pakistan, Israel, Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on. But for those who came of age after Year Zero, when so much was created amidst the ruins of war, it was perhaps the most important year of all. Those of us who grew up in western Europe, or indeed in Japan, could easily take for granted what our parents had built: the welfare states, economies that just seemed to grow, international law, a “free world” protected by the seemingly unassailable American hegemon.

  It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever does. But that is no reason not to pay tribute to the men and women who were alive in 1945, to their hardships, and to their hopes and aspirations, even though many of these would turn to ash, as everything eventually does.

  EPILOGUE

  Did the war really end in 1945? Some have claimed 1989 as the year that hostilities finally came to a close, for it was only then that Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other parts of east and central Europe were released from communist rule. The division of Europe, inflicted by Stalin in 1945, was one of the rawest wounds of World War II. Bad faith had followed bad faith. Czechoslovakia, a parliamentary democracy, was first carved up by Hitler in 1938, with the connivance of France and Britain—as Neville Chamberlain said, it was “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” In 1939, Britain had gone to war with Germany, supposedly to restore the integrity of Poland, a promise that was never fulfilled.