Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Truly great powers do national security strategy rather than simply react in ill-thought-out spasms. The Truman Doctrine required a review of national security structures and under the July 1947 National Security Act the US revamped its defence and intelligence apparatus. The wartime Joint Chiefs of Staff became a standing entity, while instead of secretaries for war and the navy, the armed services, which included a freestanding air force, were represented by a new cabinet-level defense secretary. This important post was dogged by bad luck. James Forrestal drove himself mad through overwork and in 1949 threw himself from a sixteenth-floor window in Bethesda Naval Hospital. His successor, Louis Johnson, who in 1948 amassed the campaign funds that enabled Truman to win a surprise second term, saw himself as his heir apparent and tried to ratchet down defence spending – airily announcing that he wished to abolish the navy and the Marine Corps – while talking tough on Communism. When he justified the cuts in defence spending by boasting that the US ‘could lick Russia with one hand behind its back’, the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, remarked that Truman ‘had unwittingly replaced one mental case with another’.27

  Long-term grand strategy was the domain of the new NSC, with the State Department more confined to diplomatic relations. Ironically, afraid that the NSC might cramp his style, Truman attended only twelve of the forty-seven Council sessions between 1947 and 1950. Not the least of Truman’s attributes was a rare willingness to admit error, and while he had abolished the wartime OSS, sacking ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan with an insultingly brief note, two years later he availed himself of Donovan’s own recommendations and of a large number of former OSS officers when he established the new and well-funded Central Intelligence Agency. Kennan’s Office of Special Projects linked the CIA to the State Department.28

  The sharpest end of national security had been established in 1946. Air Defense Command consisted of radar stations and interceptor aircraft to protect the continental US. Fighter aircraft and fighter-bombers made up the Tactical Air Command. The jewel in the crown was Strategic Air Command (SAC), whose B-29s could drop the Bomb on industrial targets in the Soviet Union. The US atomic stockpile was modest, with nine bombs in 1946, thirteen in 1947 and fifty by the end of 1948.29 But in 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission was authorized to build 200 further devices. By the end of 1947 SAC had 319 B-29s, one in ten of which had been modified to carry nuclear weapons, each weighing about 10,000 pounds. These thirty-odd planes packed the punch of 70,000 conventionally armed aircraft. The introduction of air-to-air refuelling tankers in 1948 gave their missions longer range and made them less suicidal.

  The biggest change was the appointment of General Curtis LeMay as bomber commander-in-chief. He was responsible for the Emergency War Plan called ‘Offtackle’, under which 104 Soviet cities would be hit by 292 atomic bombs, with a further 72 bombs for targets identified by parallel reconnaissance flights. The B-29s and newer B-36s would fly from Britain and Morocco as well as the US, arriving in small groups, in which only one plane would carry the most deadly ordnance. While much of what SAC did was necessarily secret, it had no difficulty recruiting 300,000 people to watch for Soviet aircraft seeking to fly under the US’s rudimentary radar shield, while the Nevada test site spawned a whole subculture of ‘atomic cocktails’ (four ounces combined of grapefruit and pineapple juice, half an ounce of Galliano and one of Plymouth Gin) or picnic baskets for families who wanted to gawp at mushroom clouds expanding in the clear skies of the desert.30

  Cocktail hour turned to deep dread when in early September 1949 US reconnaissance planes registered unusually high levels of radiation of a thousand counts per minute where normal background radiation counts were around fifty. Stalin had acquired and tested an atomic bomb, called RDS 1 or ‘First Lightning’ at a site named Semipalatinsk-21 in Kazakhstan. The Soviet spy chief Lavrentii Beria was on hand to watch the blast from the twenty-kiloton device. Afterwards he recommended such medals as Hero of Soviet Labour or the Order of Lenin for the scientists involved: the recipients did not know that the specific decoration they received was determined by their ranking on a list of those to be shot or imprisoned had they failed.31 Americans dubbed the weapon ‘Joe 1’. Fear of Communist subversion was thenceforth overshadowed by the prospect of mushroom clouds rising from US cities, even though the Soviets had no means of delivering such a weapon on a US target. After several months of secret debate, Truman decided in late January 1950 to authorize a hydrogen device whose explosive power dwarfed that of the bombs he had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.32

  The restoration of Europe’s economic fortunes was integral to its conversion into an effective bastion against the Soviets. US attempts to interest the Soviets themselves in post-war European reconstruction proved pointless. In March 1947, Under Secretary Acheson set in motion planning to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies, in a more comprehensive and permanent way than was suggested by the word ‘relief’. Reconstruction would benefit the US economically and strategically, while inoculating European societies against the conditions in which Communism thrived. The process was made more urgent by the failure of the Moscow conference to agree the future of Germany and Austria, for the industrial Rhine basin was the lynchpin of any efforts to revive the continent’s economy.

  The joint stakes which several US states had in the Tennessee Valley Authority became a template for how many US policy-makers saw the future of Europe, which was as a single entity, preferably with the British inside it.33 The eponymous Marshall Plan reflected the Secretary of State’s own concern that in Europe ‘the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate’, as he put in it an April 1947 radio address.34 Acheson trailed the gist of it to an audience of farmers in the unlikely setting of the Delta State Teachers College in Mississippi, before it was reprised by Marshall in the grander setting of a Harvard commencement ceremony. Drafted by the former Ambassador to Moscow ‘Chip’ Bohlen, Marshall’s speech to Harvard alumni was focused on the need to combat ‘hunger, desperation and chaos’, rather than Communism – though that lurked in the background as the beneficiary of such abstract evils.

  There was no formal exclusion of the Soviets and their satellites; indeed the ideal was to secure their collaboration in return for loans. However, Soviet participation was out of the question since it would mean revealing the economic reality of Soviet weakness through data Stalin would never share.35 Stalin also realized that such a plan would undermine the Soviets’ lock on their satellites, if they were enticed into the orbit of the powerful sun that was the US economy.

  Between 1945 and 1953 total global US aid was $44 billion, of which $12.3 billion was pumped into European economies after 1948. This permitted European governments an extended range of policy choices while lubricating recovery that was often already under way. All wished to introduce welfare states, but there were wide divergences in how US aid was used in each national case, with the French and Germans making most intelligent use of these funds.36 If the strictly economic impact of the Marshall Plan is contentious, it undoubtedly contributed to the consolidation of the West as an Atlantic political entity. No similar effect was achieved in Asia, where equally vast sums were invested, but not under a similar unifying plan. Reflecting what was a truly remarkable enterprise, the phrase Marshall Aid recurs again and again when a major crisis calls for boldness of vision. Marshall Aid gave Bruno at BMW and Giuseppe at FIAT something to believe in. In former Axis countries, where nationalism was under a cloud, productivity became a consensus-building vocation, a miraculous Wunder as the Germans called it. The rapid revival of West Germany in turn accelerated French efforts to contain it, which took the form of intra-European institutions from which the British excluded themselves.

  The Soviets responded to the Marshall Plan in September 1947 with the formation of Cominform, and the use of sinister methods to cement their hold on Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1947–8.37 The takeover in Czechoslovakia, where Foreign M
inister Jan Masaryk ‘fell’ from a high window, accelerated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one of the great achievements of the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who therewith dodged a solely European defensive alliance. NATO bolted the US into Europe’s defence, in a sort of ‘empire by invitation’, and in 1955 locked in West Germany too, frustrating Soviet gambits for a neutral unified Germany. It was sold to Congress as a new kind of alliance, allegedly directed against ‘armed aggression’ in general, rather than any specific enemy. It was a precedent-setting novelty in US foreign policy, a cardinal tenet of which had always been to avoid ‘foreign entanglements’.38 Together these confident policies hugely benefited centrist Christian Democrat, Liberal (meaning free-market) and Social Democrat politicians, marginalizing Stalin’s West European Communist puppets.

  The burgeoning commitments demanded by globalized containment encountered plenty of critics in the US itself. On the left there were many who deplored the amorality of propping up, or installing, regimes with dubious records of repression. This is familiar enough, but criticisms from the right are less so. Conservative anti-interventionists and realists criticized the indiscriminate nature of what was being undertaken, much of which they found hard to relate to American national security. What business of America’s was it who ruled in Greece, Iran or Laos? Were revolutionaries nationalists or Marxist-Leninists? To what extent did more venerable national pathologies – for example Vietnamese hostility towards China – cancel out any ideological sympathies? It is almost impossible to imagine what the world would have been like had ‘isolationist’ Senator Robert Taft become Republican president, for he was implacably opposed to both the Marshall Plan and NATO.

  US aid had ramifications far from Western Europe, for it indirectly freed up resources used to cling on to overseas colonies. In the Dutch case, Marshall Aid was used to blackmail America’s fifth-ranked strategic partner into relinquishing control of a former colony. In what was a travesty of the reality of moderate Indonesian nationalism, the Dutch played to US enthusiasms by highlighting the ‘Communist’ character of the independence movement. That gambit failed when in September 1948 the Indonesian Republic swiftly crushed an Indonesian Communist rising in the town of Madiun. Since Indonesia instantly became ‘the only government in Far East to have met and crushed an all-out Communist offensive’, the CIA immediately sent an agent to Jogjakarta to assist in such operations.39

  Thus when in December 1948 the Dutch resumed their military offensive, capturing Jogjakarta and arresting Sukarno, Hatta and half the Republic’s cabinet, the US was outraged. American Congressmen, of all political stripes, were especially angry over how Marshall Plan dollars were indirectly financing Dutch military activities in Indonesia on behalf of ‘a senile and ineffectual imperialism’. Moreover, the CIA coolly warned that ‘The Dutch “police action” provides ample material for a prolonged Communist propaganda campaign and the greater part of this material will seem irrefutable when presented in the context of Asiatic nationalism versus Western imperialism.’40 Ten Republican Senators introduced a resolution amending Marshall Aid funding and calling the Dutch action ‘a crushing sneak attack like Japan’s on Pearl Harbor, like Nazi Germany’s on Holland itself’. The resolution’s author, Owen Brewster of Maine, pointedly inquired: ‘Do we intend to support nineteenth-century Dutch–British–French imperialism in Asia which will create a climate for the growth of communism? Or do we intend to support the moderate republican nationalists throughout Asia?’41

  While the US threatened to suspend Marshall Plan funding to the Netherlands, Dutch forces on the ground were running into stiff guerrilla resistance, and support among the anti-Republican federal states they had created began to fray. In the end, as Acheson put it, ‘money talked’ and the threat to end all Marshall Aid to the Netherlands forced the Dutch to resume negotiations with the Indonesians. With considerable US pressure to resolve the many issues over which talks stalled, the Dutch eventually conceded Indonesian independence, which took place at a formal handover ceremony in Jakarta on 27 December 1949. Here was a precedent not pursued elsewhere.

  ‘Losing’ China

  If the huge red expanse of the Soviet Union seemed disconcerting on maps, how much more so once China, with its population of some 600 millions, had turned red too. A struggle which had been waged for decades was coming to its grim conclusion, its outcome partly due to the different temperaments of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. ‘Old Mr Chiang was not like old Mr Mao. Perhaps this was why Chiang was beaten by Mao.’42 Their reversals of fortune were as swift and striking as this apparently simple peasant diagnosis, for Mao possessed another order of ruthlessness. He was known to like Aesop’s Fables, one of which, ‘Evil for Good’, concerns a peasant boy who, on finding a snake frozen rigid by cold, decides to nurse the serpent. When the snake revived from the boy’s warmth, it bit him and he died. Mao would quote the dying boy’s lament: ‘I’ve got what I deserve for taking pity on an evil creature.’ Mao was pitiless.43

  In mid-1945 Chiang controlled less than 15 per cent of China’s territory. Following the surrender of Japan, and after the US had flown his troops into liberated northern territory, Chiang controlled 80 per cent of the whole. Or so it seemed, for control is relative and the corrupt, inept and reactionary KMT government alienated the population wherever it was imposed.44 The position of Mao’s Communists in a few north-eastern pockets above the Great Wall seemed so weak that most Western newspapers had written them off. Stalin was not overly impressed either. Yet four years later Mao’s peasant army rolled into the historic capital in US trucks, brandishing American weapons – rather than their standard Soviet issue – to further demoralize what was left of Chiang’s forces, for which the arms had been destined.

  Mao had not been in Beijing for thirty years, the last time as a poorly paid junior librarian. It was the only big city he knew. This was one reason he revived it as China’s capital; another was that there he was closer to the Soviets than in the former capital Nanjing. On 1October 1949 Mao appeared on top of Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate, where, despite suffering from low-level malaria and bronchitis, he inaugurated the People’s Republic of China. Chiang withdrew to Shanghai and then to Taiwan, where his incomers were as unpopular among the natives as they had been on the mainland. Nine months before, the heads of the US intelligence agencies had met in Washington DC to discuss what was happening in China. The Chief of Naval Intelligence Admiral Inglis said: ‘One thing that puzzles us is the superiority and the strategic direction of the Chinese Communists and their ability to support themselves logistically and in communications. It just doesn’t seem Chinese.’ General Irwin, Director of US Army General Staff Intelligence, mused: ‘I don’t think it is.’45

  Stalin’s ideal solution for China was that it would function as a weak buffer zone, protecting his empire’s eastern flanks against any resurgence of Japan. To that end he backed both Chiang, from whom he extracted territorial concessions in return for recognizing his legitimacy as ruler of China, and Mao, whom the Soviet dictator regarded as a naive peasant or a potential troublemaker in the mould of Yugoslavia’s Tito, architect of a revolution that owed little to Soviet support. Stalin’s appreciation could not have been more wrong. US policy towards China blew up in the Truman administration’s face. While the powerful, and largely Republican, China lobby regarded Chiang as a Christian hero resisting Mao’s godless hordes, the administration became increasingly frustrated with the huge sums they disbursed down what Truman called Nationalist ‘rat holes’. But the money had to be paid to ensure Republican assent in Congress to the aid more usefully pouring into Europe. Informed observers had warned for years that Chiang Kai-shek was a loser, though that message had not been allowed to become widespread in the US. ‘Why, if he is a generalissimo,’ asked Texas Senator Tom Connally of the Foreign Relations Committee in a possibly unconscious solecism, ‘does he not generalize?’46

  While the Nationa
lists endeavoured to fight a war at the further reaches of their supply chain, Mao imposed his iron grip on rural Manchuria, using class war and terror to meld peasant society and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into one lethal whole. Chiang’s military efforts were hampered by commanders who acted as warlords with headquarters riddled with Communist spies. They included the personal secretary to General Hu Zongnan, who in March 1947 managed to take the Communist capital of Yan’an, and both an adviser to and the daughter of Fu Zuoyi, the KMT commander in Beijing.47 Armed with this intelligence, Mao’s commanders were able to ambush and destroy every KMT force sent against them. Mao compared this approach with prising open an attacker’s fist to chop the fingers off one at a time.

  In April 1947, the French counter-insurgency expert David Galula was briefly captured by Communist troops in a town in Shanxi Province. As a guest of honour, Galula was allowed to explore his hosts’ camp, where it was explained to him that Nationalist prisoners were treated leniently to promote their demoralization. If they chose, prisoners were simply incorporated into the PLA; officers who defected to the PLA were accorded the same rank they had reached in the KMT armed forces. If they decided to return to the Nationalist fold, the Communists calculated that no one would trust them.48 Mao’s Soviet-advised forces successfully made the transition from guerrilla operations to sophisticated main-force manoeuvres of the kind the Red Army had practised to such effect in Eastern and Central Europe. Although Mao took much of the credit for a series of stunning battles – culminating in the decisive Huaihai campaign of November 1948–January 1949 – he relied on such capable commanders as Lin Biao and Liu Bocheng. On they swept, driving the Nationalists towards the southern coast, or across the borders into Burma and Vietnam.