The World at War (87 page)

DR AMBROSE

Soviet reconstruction could either be by forced savings on the part of the Russian citizenry, who had been through hell, but if you continued to make demands of them, force them to work, provide them with none of the ordinary consumer goods, Russia could rebuild on her own. This was the least desirable choice. A second choice, that worked hand in glove with it, was strip all the areas that you had conquered, just move everything that's movable and bring it back to the Soviet Union. Both of those were solutions that were followed. The third possibility was get investment capital from the United States and the Soviets did ask for a loan, but they were not about to let the Americans come into Russia, that is the enormous American corporations coming in making investments and taking control of the economy. They wanted a loan with no strings. The United States, when they discussed the loan with the Soviet Union, said, 'We want you to open up all of your books to us,' and they weren't about to open their books to the West. So the Russians were forced back upon themselves to reconstruct.

AMBASSADOR BOHLEN

Why the Soviets didn't join the Marshall Plan is not too difficult to discern, I think the main reason was that their system would not permit the land of interplay that went on during the whole Marshall Plan for the countries that were receiving the aid. And the other thing is they were concerned about losing their control over the eastern Europe countries, which they helped set up, with the exception of Czechoslovakia. The terms of the Marshall Plan as drawn up in the speech were not drawn with the idea of keeping Russians out, but certainly they would not have got through the Congress of the United States just to give out billions of dollars to any country and say, 'Go ahead and spend it the way you want to.' They were really demanding and would require some form of joint responsibilities for the utilisation of this aid. At the end of the war there were considerable shortages in this country, some of which were in the field of materials that we were planning to send to Europe. There were three committees which were looking into the state of the American economy and to see how much we could afford to do, and they came out with plus answers that we could indeed afford it. The Marshall Plan was really pretty heavy going in Congress until the Russians helped organise the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and I think that really pushed it over the edge.

DR J GLENN GRAY

I think we felt unduly virtuous as victors in World War Two. We felt we had won because we were in the right, and that has led to unfortunate consequences in Vietnam and elsewhere. We Americans somehow have a feeling that we have a superior land of virtue. We never fight until we are attacked, we never fight imperialistic wars, we are always the defenders of justice and so on. This again, by means of our policy of unconditional surrender, gave us an undue sense of virtue. It was almost too easy for us. After all, in both world wars America played not a central role or an important role, but all Americans seem to feel after World War Two that without us the Germans would have won. I'm not so sure this is true.

AMBASSADOR BOHLEN

The
Cold War is not a new phenomenon in Soviet life: the Soviets began the Cold War on 8th November 1917. The only question is targets, changed from the beginning of the Soviet seizure of power. Virtually until the rise of Hitler you were public-enemy number one, the British Empire was all that was evil and wrong in the world, and a great deal of Soviet policy was geared to that conception. And for a while reality and fiction merged. After the war we were the chief obstacle, as they saw it, to the achievement of certain aims that they were after, we became public-enemy number one. We called that the Cold War because we were the victim of it – a term first used by [US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Committee] Bernie Baruch in October 1946, which is an interesting date because it came entirely from dealing with the Soviets over the Baruch Plan for control of atomic energy.

DR AMBROSE

The atomic bomb was tested while Potsdam was going on but there were only two atomic bombs and in 1945 they were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so in practice the West did not have atomic bombs available to use in a war in Europe. The West did have a mighty Air Force, British Bomber Command and the United States Strategic Air Force. 'Tooey' Spaatz, who was the commander of the USAAF, strongly advocated, 'Let's leave the Air Force in being in England as a deterrent to the Russians.' All these ideas associated with the Cold War were very prominent in the minds of the American military, most especially the idea of deterrence.

ALGER HISS

None of us at any but the highest level knew of the atomic-bomb development; the first we knew was when it was dropped on Hiroshima, so I have to look back with hindsight.
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I can only say, knowing something about Mr Baruch's cockiness and truculence as a person – and Mr Truman had some of these qualities – that if there was arrogance to American policy, possession of the atomic bomb did not minimise it. I consider myself a premature revisionist. I was a revisionist before there were any other revisionists because I saw things quite differently from the way many of my colleagues did, and what happens in politics, as in art, is partly in the eye of the beholder. They had been trained by different values than I – I was a New Dealer, and there were not many New Dealists in the Department of State.

PROFESSOR GALBRAITH

It is true that in the late 1940s and 1950s American foreign policy passed into the hands of the New York–Washington foreign-policy establishment. Secretary of State Byrnes, whose knowledge of foreign policy depended on position and not information, and it was the grandeur of the Dulles brothers [John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State 1953–59; Allen Dulles, Director of CIA 1953–61] as members of [the law firm] Sullivan & Cromwell rather than their knowledge of the world which won them their post, and in principle the only knowledge, the great fact of which they were beholden was that their free enterprise was good and Communism was wicked – and there was certainly a Cold War attitude, developed particularly in the 1950s. As we now look back on it, it's dangerous and partly ludicrous.

LORD AVON

There've been many changes and formidable ones. The main difference I suppose is that Europe's authority and power suffered very considerably. Had the dictators not plunged us into that war, Europe today would be the centre of authority over a wider part of the world. But as a result of the war, Russia and the United States were left commanding the heights, and European power by varying degrees was secondary and that position has never really changed fundamentally, even the rise of China hasn't changed that, so far.

DR FRANKLAND

The main effect was the nourishing of the spirit of nationalism in Asia. A large part of
Asia had been under British rule and most of that which had not was under Dutch rule or some European rule. And the people were beginning to aspire to the creation of their own political institutions. The demonstration by
Japan that the British could be beaten, and beaten very severely, naturally encouraged in the eyes of the people of South-East Asia the belief that they too might be able to secure a much stronger position against the British than they'd previously dreamed possible. This had a great effect on opinion on India and all over South-East Asia.

LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

Suddenly I found myself responsible as the Supreme Commander for an enormous area of the globe with a distance of six thousand miles across it, that's as far as from London to Bombay, with a hundred and twenty-eight million starving and rather rebellious people who had just been liberated, with a hundred and twenty-three thousand prisoners of war and internees, many of whom were dying and who we had to try and recover quickly. And at the very beginning I had some seven hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen to take in surrender, disarm and put into prison camps, awaiting transportation home. Even looking at that it sounded a big problem, but I had no idea what I really was in for. What I really was in for was trying to re-establish civilisation and the rule of law and order to this vast part of the world.

DR AMBROSE

Truman made the decision at Potsdam that no one would be allowed into Japan except for American troops. The United States had a major influence in western Germany, in France, in the United Kingdom and had its own industrial plant. What this meant was that of the six areas in the world that can support a modern war through industrial productivity – Japan, France, West Germany, Great Britain, USSR and the USA – the United States either controls or has a major influence in five of these. The Pacific has become an American lake: the US Navy has built bases throughout the Pacific during the war and it held on at the end of the war, and in addition extended itself into Japan and made Japan into a major military base. The one area of the world in which the United States did not have a predominant influence was the USSR but the Americans were in a very strong position in Asia because of their extremely strong position in the offshore islands, most of all in the Philippines, Japan, Okinawa and Formosa.

LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

It was of course an extraordinary stroke of fate that it all fell on the Supreme Commander, perhaps luckily because the Supreme Commander's not obliged to listen to anybody's advice, he is the dictator. I had very few advisers who were qualified to give me advice on this – very few people had studied this in military headquarters, after all – and I don't think that anybody particularly agreed with what I was going to do. But I must say they all followed it very loyally, they soon saw the point. I realised that I was setting the sign for all future developments of this sort, which is quite a heavy responsibility. I realised if I made the wrong decision there could be an absolute bloodbath throughout the world and indeed I believe any attempt at real suppression in my part of the world would have resulted in real civil war, in real fighting of a much worse nature than we had at any time.

DR AMBROSE

America wanted to have a very strong Japan, as a counter to the Soviets in the Far East and as a counter to what they feared was going to happen in China – already the handwriting was on the wall in China as to who was going to win the civil war there. The Americans wanted Japan rebuilt as quickly as possible and a highly industrialised Japan to emerge from the war within the American orbit. So they systematically excluded all of the Allies. The Aussies and the British had wanted reparations from Japan: they had suffered pretty badly at the hands of the Japanese and had a good claim for getting something back. The Americans absolutely refused and Japan had to pay no reparations at all. The Russians in the Far East, aside from gains of such places as Port Arthur, Manchuria and North Korea, get a Communist China. It's not clear that Stalin wanted a Communist China: he gave very little support to Mao to win the Chinese civil war. Both parties would soon enough have reason to wonder how good a deal they made, with the growth of Japan since the war and her economic position today, and obviously the Soviet Union has had enormous difficulties with China.

LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

I had two French colonels, one of them called Mitterrand, who at this precise moment is now Prime Minister of France. I had dropped him to the north of Vietnam and he was captured quite soon, and the very gallant fellow then escaped. In talking with General Philippe Leclerc, his aide reminded me quite recently that I said to him, 'When you go in with your troops I strongly advise you to make friends with the local insurgents to explain you've come back to help them, and not try and take vengeance on them. If you do that, then French Indochina will have the benefit of working with the French. If you go in, in a military way, in the long run you'll be defeated.' He said, 'I appreciate your advice, but I'm a soldier, my orders are to take over the military way and that's what I'll have to do.'

AMBASSADOR BOHLEN

For about twenty years, until the Vietnam business, the United States seemed to accept the world role that we had really thrust on us by history. Vietnam, to this country and to the effect of which is certainly not over, may take a number of years to really absorb and get over. What effect that has had on the American public's willingness to accept some responsibility abroad just has to be seen. I think there's certain areas where we still feel we have a duty, particularly in Israel. It is a certain open question as to whether the experience didn't give us a push in the direction of not so much isolationism as non-commitment.

PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH

The lesson the Second World War taught us was to keep out of war. Fortunately I think the atomic bomb has done just that for the last generation and I hope and trust it will do it for another ten generations. By that time the world may become sane so that we won't need it. But you can be sure of this, no country, ruler or group of rulers is going to take its country into an atomic war for one reason – they know that no matter what else happens in that war, they themselves will not survive it. If they are not eliminated by the enemy they will be eliminated by their own people. As long as we have an atomic stand-off as we have today, I think we can rest and have bets with safety.

DR AMBROSE

Was a Russo-American conflict inevitable? Surely, no question – it mattered little if it was a Tsarist Russia or a Communist Russia. Of course all of these great world conflicts, of which the twentieth century had seen the worst, are always followed by a falling-out between the victors once they have lost everything that holds them together – the common enemy. Russian ambitions and American ambitions were bound to clash. Added to it is the ideological dispute between capitalism and Communism that heightened but did not create the tension. I think this is one of the few times in history when one can use the word 'inevitable'. I don't think there was a ghost of a chance of the Russians and Americans creating the kind of world they talked about during the war – an Atlantic Charter kind of world, or a United Nations kind of world, in which the victors continue to cooperate as they did during the war.