It was also a time when the leaders and their nations in America, Europe, and Asia considered how to change foreign affairs after the most destructive war in history had discredited Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism. The years between 1945 and 1953 seemed ripe for a calculated revolution in world politics, or at least some more rational approach to international differences that, if squandered, would cast a shadow over the leaders responsible for what some hoped could be long-term peace.
There was no reluctance by the victorious Allies and the new generation of political leaders in the defeated countries to compel the Germans, Italians, and Japanese to abandon their systems of failed governance, which had inflicted so much suffering on so many around the globe. A larger problem for the victors, however, was whether their politicians and peoples could curb the suspicions and rivalries that could jettison the cooperation that had brought them successfully through the war.
In the last year of the fighting, every major Allied figure began discussing the preservation of the alliance for the sake of future peace. Roosevelt spoke to this concern in January 1945, when he used his annual State of the Union message to call for a “peoples’ peace” that would prove “durable and secure.” He did not see a time when power politics would entirely disappear, he said, but he hoped it could be subordinated to men’s better angels.
General Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of ground forces in the Pacific, echoed Churchill and Roosevelt in September 1945 during the surrender ceremony on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s appeal for malice toward none at the close of the Civil War, MacArthur declared that the two countries do not meet “in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred.” He invoked “a higher dignity” than the celebra tion of the victor over the vanquished and “the hope of all mankind” for “a better world.” In a speech broadcast to the American people at the conclusion of the ceremony, MacArthur described the war as man’s “last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem is basically theological,” he said, “and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character…. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”
To Toshikazu Kase, the Japanese translator at the surrender ceremony, who anticipated the occasion as “the worst humiliation,” MacArthur’s words left him “spellbound and thunderstruck” at the general’s generosity. The quarterdeck of the battleship had become not a place of unbearable embarrassment but “an altar of peace.”
The horrors of the twentieth century’s two unlimited wars provoke unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions. How could supposedly effective leaders, with the skills to gain the headship of such large advanced industrial nations, have been so blind to the miseries they would inflict upon their own peoples as well as those they saw as enemies? When someone asked Stalin at the end of the war if Hitler was “a lunatic or an adventurer,” he responded: “I agree that he was an adventurer. But I can’t agree he was mad. Hitler was a gifted man. Only a gifted man could unite the German people.”
Stalin could have been speaking of himself in explaining how so many Europeans and Asians could have followed the dictates of men whose decisions produced such catastrophes for them.
But how could anyone, after witnessing the repression and slaughter of the war years, have believed, as Stalin did, that might alone made right or guaranteed a nation’s security? To be sure, one lesson of World War II was that a poorly armed nation was an inviting target to an aggressor. Yet another transparent lesson was that might alone was no guarantee of a nation’s defense against conflict and loss.
I do not pretend to have any simple explanation for why so many millions of people were drawn to mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Japan’s military chiefs. It is easy to understand why, after witnessing the horrors these men perpetrated on the world, defeated peoples would yearn for an alternative to militarism and war as a defense against external dangers.
Despite the attraction of a more benign way of assuring future peace than military might, it is not so difficult to understand why the success of the victors’ armed forces created a compelling appeal to sustained reliance on strength of arms as a guard against foreign threats. And yet, as the German and Japanese experiences might have suggested to the Allies, a buildup of military power is no assurance of national safety. Still, in a world in which trust is in such short supply, reliance on other nations’ goodwill seems less wise than strength of arms.
This is not a book condemning national defense arrangements, though there is much to be questioned. Rather, it is an attempt to revisit the end-of-war and immediate postwar events by asking why, in spite of the uncivilized acts of violence that had dominated international affairs, men and women all over the globe could still imagine that traditional power politics could assure their national safety and a wider peace. In short, what drove the postwar leaders of the most powerful and populous nations around the globe to act as they did?
In 2005, I had a conversation with a French attorney visiting the United States. We talked about his children, who were in their twenties, and how different their outlook was toward their country and the world than what he—a man in his fifties—had heard from his parents, who were part of the World War II generation. His children, he told me, certainly identified themselves as French, but unlike his parents they also viewed themselves as Europeans, or as citizens of a larger community. I asked him if he thought his children could imagine another war between France and Germany or any of the Western European states. “Certainly not,” he replied.
It was a reflection of the sea change that had taken place in Europe. The pain and suffering of the century’s two continent-wide wars had brought the Western Europeans, in spite of themselves, the wisdom to replace armed conflicts with cooperative assemblies and institutions. The United States, which through the first hundred and fifty years of its history had largely isolated itself from foreign wars, succumbed to the curse of every emerging modern power, a military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1953 as the bane of America’s existence. Eisenhower was not decrying the need for arms or denying that the country justifiably felt embattled, but, as his successor in the presidency, John F. Kennedy, would say in his inaugural address, “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
I hope my exploration of timeless questions about the search for long-term postwar peace sheds some light on the roots of the individual and mass conduct that dominated national behavior in the years between 1945 and 1953. Since neither unwise acts of war nor mass illusions are about to disappear, it seems important to make every effort to come to a greater understanding of the acts of history that in some form or other are all too likely to reoccur. To be sure, the wars of the post-1945 era have been on a different scale and in different places and circumstances, but there have been indisputable similarities to earlier moments of violence and hope, as well as similarly poor judgments on the part of both the public and their chiefs.
On balance, the postwar generation did well enough in averting greater catastrophes than the world might have experienced. Nevertheless, it made its share of missteps, which are better considered than ignored. I take limited account of most of the achievements of the end of war and postwar leaders not out of any desire to diminish their accomplishments, but in the belief that their errors in judgment are more usable lessons of the past. As McGeorge Bundy, John Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, noted later about his role in expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam, “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it.” He added, “Because it matters what lessons are learned … the
re are lots of errors in the path of understanding.”
PART I
A WILDERNESS CALLED PEACE
1
LONDON, MOSCOW, AND WASHINGTON: FRIENDS IN NEED
The only thing worse than having allies is not having them.
—Winston Churchill
In the second half of 1944, as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin laid plans to confer in the coming year about postwar arrangements, they tried to mute long-standing suspicions of each other’s intentions. Without continuing cooperation that had brought them to the edge of victory against powerful German resistance across Russia, the Middle East, Italy, and now Western Europe, Churchill and Roosevelt foresaw another period of international tension that could provoke a new global conflict in the not too distant future. Stalin was deeply cynical about his allies and even less confident about avoiding another war unless he could arrange Soviet territorial and strategic advantages that would inhibit the reemergence of Western anticommunism.
Yet however much Churchill and Roosevelt hoped they might find means to blunt differences with Moscow, they were also doubtful that the national and ideological competition between East and West would disappear and sharply reduce their reliance on traditional military, economic, and political instruments of defense against an aggressive adversary.
Between January 31 and February 11, 1945, the Big Three, as the leaders of Britain, Russia, and the United States were described in the last year of the war, met at Malta and Yalta to plan the postwar organization of Europe and Asia. Outwardly, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and their staffs were pledged to sustained cooperation. And the conversations among them gave little indication that their unspoken assumptions about each other jeopardized the future peace. Yet their personal and national histories made them doubtful about their allies’ intentions and prospects for postwar harmony.
Churchill’s life experience inclined him to see future strife with Moscow. Churchill “lived for crisis,” the historian A. J. P. Taylor said. “He profited from crisis. And when crisis did not exist, he strove to invent it…. He did not share the contemporary belief in universal improvement nor did he await the coming of some secular Heaven on Earth. He strove to ameliorate hardships without ever expecting that they would be finally removed.”
From his earliest days, Churchill had been ambitious for power and dominance, ambitions that were reflected in a combative personal nature. Combined with his long-standing fear of the Soviet Communist threat to Great Britain’s world position, this character made Churchill as much an adversary as a compliant friend to Stalin and Russia.
Churchill was born in November 1874 into a British noble family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the son of the seventh duke of Marlborough, was a distant figure, who had little involvement in his son’s rearing. To Winston, his absent father was more an idealized representative of the family’s values than a flesh-and-blood character with whom his son directly engaged. As a boy, Winston imbibed the heroic attitudes of his class and times. He dreamed of “military glory,” of the chance to join the ranks of Britain’s greatest heroes who had rescued the nation from defeat and humiliation and received the Victoria Cross from the sovereign. His ambitions resembled those of earlier generations of English noblemen. The principal difference between Winston and most of his privileged contemporaries is that they outgrew their boyhood fantasies, and he never relinquished them.
After a time at Harrow School, where he exhibited behavior problems and performed poorly, Winston sought admission to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, which he won on his third try, demonstrating his keen determination to become an army officer. At Sandhurst, he seemed to find his calling, earning high marks and graduating eighth in a class of 150 in 1894. Eager for action and adventure that would test his courage, satisfy a yearning to serve queen and country, and expose him to dramatic events that he could record for a larger public in articles and books that could make him famous, Churchill won postings to the British Empire’s outlying regions of Pakistan, Egypt, and the Sudan. He was not disappointed: exhilarating combat against seemingly primitive tribesmen gave him the chance to feel heroic and write newspaper stories that put him before potential British voters.
In 1899, Churchill unsuccessfully stood for a seat in Parliament. Although intent on trying again in the following year, he used the time between elections to serve as a correspondent in South Africa, where the British were fighting the Boer War. Captured by the Boers and held as a POW in Pretoria, he had the satisfaction of escaping after a month and then rejoining the army to participate in successful campaigns in South Africa and the Sudan.
In 1900, after returning to Britain, Churchill won election to Parliament as a Conservative, but soon found himself in opposition to his party’s support of the protective tariff. Shifting his allegiance to the Liberal Party, he established himself as a national figure, his reputation as an independent maverick feeding his self-image as a courageous battler who put principle above slavish party loyalty.
Between 1908 and 1919, Churchill held a succession of cabinet posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, where he shouldered responsibility for a failed invasion of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli that compelled his resignation and threw him into one of the periodic depressions he called his Black Dogs. Unlike so many other contemporaries, who saw the failure at Gallipoli and the larger cost of the war in blood and wealth as reasons to turn away from force in response to international conflicts, Churchill found relief in action. His down moods induced aggressive deeds more than passivity. In November 1915, he rejoined the army to command a battalion in France.
During subsequent service in the War Office, Churchill was an architect of the Allied intervention in Russia after the revolution of 1917 had turned into a conflict between Communists and defenders of the czarist regime. Churchill was no admirer of the Russian monarchy, but he thought that “Bolshevism should have been strangled in its cradle.” In the 1920s, he praised Italy’s Benito Mussolini for fighting communism. In his war memoirs, after Il Duce had become Adolf Hitler’s ally, suffered defeat, and been lynched in Milan by anti-Fascist partisans, Churchill described him as an “adventurer,” but justified his assumption of dictatorial powers as a response to communism.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, Churchill opposed the pacifism that had developed as a reaction to wartime losses and postwar European tensions threatening another war. In the 1930s, he was also critical of Spain’s Republican government, which was supported by the Communists in a civil war with Francisco Franco’s Fascists. In response to Italo-German intervention in the fighting that helped Franco defeat the Republic, Churchill favored a policy of strict Anglo-French neutrality.
Although he would later be on record as regretting the Fascist victory, Churchill continued to see Spain’s Marxists as a dreadful alternative. With the goal of “absolute power,” they had inflicted a reign of terror on Spain characterized by “wholesale cold-blooded massacres of their political opponents and of the well-to-do.” If he had been a Spaniard, he later wrote, the Communists “would have murdered me and my family and friends.” He continued to believe that Britain’s best course had been “to keep out of Spain.”
Churchill was as vocal about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, which he described after the Munich concessions to Hitler on Czechoslovakia as a “defeat without a war.” He said of Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
Churchill wisely advocated rearmament against the Nazi menace, and favored an alliance with Soviet Russia to deter Hitler from an attack on Poland. The defense of Britain’s national security trumped his anticommunism. He condemned the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 1939 as “an unnatural act” that only totalitarian despots could have signed and then survived the repressed public condemnation in their respective countries. “The fact that such an agreement could be made,” Churchil
l asserted, “marks the culminating failure of British and French foreign policy and diplomacy over several years.”
Churchill also saw the pact as a demonstration of how “crafty men and statesmen” can be “misled by all their elaborate calculations.” It would take only twenty-two months for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union to reveal the hollowness of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Governments with “no moral scruples,” Churchill added, gain only temporary advantages from betraying their true interests. “The Russian nation in its scores of millions were to pay a frightful forfeit.”
For Churchill, the 1930s have been described as the wilderness years, a time when his views were largely out of sync with the national mood that favored appeasement and avoidance of war at almost any cost. His determination to persevere through this difficult period rested on convictions that he was right and that his public positions would eventually be vindicated. His affinity for what he could see as heroic opposition to wrongheaded popular sentiment helped sustain him through a phase of personal depression over the public’s blindness and his political isolation.
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 restored Churchill’s public influence. The war brought him back into the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. Germany’s conquest of Poland, followed by Hitler’s successful spring offensive in the West, toppled Chamberlain’s government and elevated Churchill to the post of prime minister, where he famously offered nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Churchill’s inspirational rhetoric at the time of Britain’s peril, especially after the fall of France in June 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s triumphant military, was partly a function of the inner struggle against despair that had plagued him throughout his life. In the aftermath of Hitler’s 1939–40 victories, when so many of his countrymen feared for Britain’s future, Churchill’s personal history made him the nation’s perfect leader. Having struggled through periods of defeat and renewed success, Churchill could impart a message of hope during a time of loss. He rallied Britain with words that he could have told himself in past moments of hopelessness. It was a marvelous example of how one man’s life experience could serve a whole nation in its struggle to chase away gloom and turn retreat into a sustained fight for victory.