Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The Second World War had been, in western Europe, a civil war as well, and Communists were very strong in the resistance movements. When Marshall returned from Moscow, he could see that France and Italy were in no condition to withstand the effects of the winter of 1946-7. In fact Stalin had even been preening himself at the Americans’ discomfiture. Controlling as he did the Communist parties, he knew well enough that western Europe might be lost for the Americans altogether. The Americans might be the strongest military power, but they would be powerless if western Europe fell naturally into Communist hands, and in any case there would be an economic crisis in America once the demobilized soldiers tried to find jobs in an economy that could not export, given the collapse in Europe. He was of course informed of what was happening by spies in high positions — Donald Maclean, second man at the British embassy in Washington; Kim Philby, one of the chiefs of British Intelligence; Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, in the immediate entourage of General de Gaulle, who in 1945 headed the French government; Anthony Blunt, also excellently informed as to British Intelligence; John Cairncross, chief civil servant in the London Cabinet defence committee, who revealed the secrets of the atomic bomb; Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White in the US machine: so many, in fact, that Stalin gave up reading what they wrote, because he could not believe that such men were real spies. When Maclean defected, he was simply sent to teach English in a remote Siberian place, and was drinking himself to death until a bright young foreign ministry man, Alexandr Lebedev, rescued him. Expecting Communism to triumph, Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, refused to try to make that Moscow conference work. They dragged it out, haggling over details, and the Americans were struck by the confidence of Stalin’s tone. But this time the Americans were going to take up the challenge.

They did so much more robustly than before because of a further crisis. When the Second World War ended, there was no idea of their staying for long, and millions of soldiers went home. There was an American occupation zone in Germany and Austria, but it was not the chief zone (the British took over the industrial areas of the north-west) and it was supposed to be run under the general auspices of an Allied Control Council, at which the Russians were strongly represented. At Yalta, early in February 1945, there was a famous meeting of men who were known in the news as the ‘Big Three’. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin undoubtedly deserved the title. The American war economy had been extraordinarily productive, with one mass production miracle after another — especially the ‘Liberty ships’ turned out in six weeks, partly prefabricated. The USA fought wars in two hemispheres but even managed to improve the home population’s standard of living as well. Stalin for his part controlled a huge war machine which had recovered from disastrous defeats, and, from the summer of 1943 onwards, had rolled into central Europe and the Balkans, flattening all before it. The third of the ‘Big Three’ was Winston Churchill, who had defied Hitler from the start, and who now counted as the great hero of the Second World War. But Great Britain had suffered, and was really kept going by American troops and money. Churchill did not have the strength to resist Stalin, and the Americans did not have the will. The old man had been forced to fly, very uncomfortably, in stages over Malta and Cairo to the Crimea, and even then, on arrival, had an eight-hour journey by road, through high hilly country, to a residence some way away from the main palace, where the other two were installed. He had put a good face on things, waving his trademark cigar, but the real business was done despite his wishes. The Americans — Marshall was there, as Chief of Staff of the Army — wanted Soviet help to finish the war with Japan. As things turned out, they did not need it. On 6 and 9 August they dropped two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that brought a Japanese surrender, but until then everyone had expected the Japanese to fight on and on, fanatically and suicidally, as they had done for the past three years in a chain of Pacific islands (some individuals had still not surrendered, decades later, and had gently to be persuaded that the war had been lost). But in February 1945 no-one foresaw this: the atomic bomb was not successfully tested until July. The American-Soviet deal had already been in the air at an earlier conference, held at Teheran in November 1943. Now it was confirmed. Stalin could control much of central Europe and the Balkans. There were other concessions. The United Nations was set up, with a five-country Security Council, in which each member had a power of veto. There were suggestions of the Soviet Union’s joining in the new world financial arrangements, with a large American loan; for a time, consideration was even given to a sharing of the secrets of the atomic bomb. Great Britain did not rate such treatment. The Americans of course supported her, but they did not mean to help the British maintain their empire. At the time, that accounted for a quarter of the world’s land surface, and most Americans did not like it.

To start with, in 1945 the USA assumed that Great Britain would take the main responsibility for Europe, and American troops left, in droves. She also halted the economic help, ‘Lend-Lease’, that she had been giving, and ships were even turned back in mid-Atlantic. But the winter of 1947 saw crisis in Britain as well. There had been five and a half years of fighting, and the start, in 1940, had been Great Britain’s finest hour, when she did indeed stop Nazi Germany from taking over Europe, and probably Russia as well. As the war went on, the American share in it became more and more important, and there was a decisive moment late in 1944, when American troops outnumbered British ones on the battlefield in France. The Americans also had the money, because the US economy had prospered greatly with production for war, and in 1945 it accounted for fully half of the entire world’s manufactures. But, still, the British thought that they would be an equal partner, together with America and Russia, in making the post-war world. Even very sober, disillusioned commentators thought so. George Orwell, who had reported the troubles of London, the dreadful food, the unpredictable bombs, to the American Partisan Review , assumed that his country would still have a decisive voice in the settlement of the world after the war. So did a very clever European expert, Hugh Seton Watson, whose father, after the First World War, had had some influence over that peace treaty. They very soon realized the limits of British power. The fact was that the country was bankrupt, and the war had left it with enormous responsibilities and not nearly enough strength to take them on. The physical destruction had not been nearly as great as on the Continent and the British standard of living was much higher than there: overall health had even improved during the war, and British industry accounted for roughly half the output of western Europe for the next three or four years. But, otherwise, the problems abounded.

Twelve million tons of shipping had been sunk. Imports stood at six times the figure for exports, and, with such demand, American prices rose by 47 per cent in 1946. There was a large debt. The country’s overseas assets, most of its foreign investment, had been sold off for the war effort. The worldwide prestige of the wartime leader, Winston Churchill, was vast, and he was treated with respect and affection almost everywhere, but he was a very old-fashioned figure — an aristocrat brought up in the imperial Victorian certainties, and now presiding over a country that had greatly changed. Wartime arrangements were carried on for years to come. For example, you registered with a grocer and handed over stamps which entitled you to a loaf every three days. There was a South African fish called snoek, which could be bought without dollars: its taste was revolting but there was not much alternative at the time. This world, of permits and privation, went on for several years after the war had ended (until 1954), and one could hardly recognize the country. The novelist Evelyn Waugh — his trilogy about wartime England, Sword of Honour , is the best book on the subject — felt that the country was under a sort of foreign occupation. Many bright sparks simply emigrated. Denis Hills was an Englishman of a peculiar but typical sort. After a standard middle-class education (in Birmingham) he went, in the thirties, to Poland and during the war worked with the Poles. In Italy at the end, the Poles having been heavily involved in the reconquest of that country, he was helpful to various unfortunate Soviet citizens who had ended up fighting on the German side: he got them away from Soviet captivity, and death. He fell foul of the military authorities, getting tipsy in front of the military governor’s palace in Trieste, and left the army. Then it was home, to an impoverished England where nothing worked and the climate added to the gloom. An advertisement caught his eye, for a post as teacher in Ankara College, an establishment in Turkey where the teaching was carried on in English.