The Cold War & Its Origins, 1917–1960. Vol.I, 1917–1950

Smith-Molotov Fiasco. The unwillingness of both the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate was illustrated by the abortive Smith-Molotov exchange in early May 1948. On May 4 Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith visited Foreign Minister Molotov and made a serious formal statement, intended to convince the Kremlin that the U.S.A. was united behind resistance to Soviet expansion and that Russia should not count on the Henry Wallace movement and the new Progressive Party to alter that fact. Nor should she take advantage of the presidential campaign and an apparent economic recession in the United States, to make any adventurous moves. Our policy was defensive, but it was firm.¹

Smith’s demarche ended with a pro forma statement that “the door is always open for full discussion and the composing of our differences,” which Molotov promptly accepted in his reply on May 9, proposing “a discussion and settlement of the existing differences between us.”

When these phrases were broadcast on the Moscow radio there was astonishment and some anger in London and Paris, along with confusion in the State Department. President Truman had to disavow any change in our foreign policy, and it had to become known that we had had no idea of negotiating with the Russians.

On their side the Russians would not have published our note so promptly if they had really wanted to negotiate. They would have pushed matters by quiet diplomacy.

Surplus and Deficit Zones in Germany. By this time the two sides had reached an impasse over what to do about Germany. Doubtless this was foreordained from the beginning. Walter Lippmann once remarked that if the four occupying powers had all been angels they could not have agreed on the disposition of Germany, and Howard K. Smith brilliantly demonstrated that each of the four powers was driven by hard necessity to pursue policies in Germany which led to deadlock, without anyone intending to dominate Germany.²

It had been agreed at Potsdam that Germany should be operated as an economic unit, but France was not present and she proceeded to veto the plan and to organize her zone, both to keep Germany weak and to exact reparations from current production. France was in dire straits after the Germans had drained her of tens of billions of dollars in real wealth. She was hungry and humiliated, after the long German occupation, the latest of three within a century. Who is to say that she had no right to proceed as she did?

Yet Russia’s, need was still more clamant. Her losses at German hands were almost beyond calculation. If ever a nation was entitled to restitution she was. In her German zone, moreover, there was surplus food and industrial plant. She removed the latter for a year until she learned that the shipment of plants did not pay. Then she took from current German production, as the French did, the great winter of 1945–6 having been succeeded by drought which made her need of German goods even more pressing.

Meanwhile, the British and Americans were operating deficit zones, at heavy expense to their own taxpayers. The British were worst off, because they had insisted on having the most populous, industrialized and damaged zone. After the winter crisis they could no longer stand the drain of dollars to buy American food to feed Germany, where people habitually fainted in the streets from hunger. The United States had to shoulder much of the British load in Germany and all the Anglo-Saxons were deeply irked that the surpluses in the other zones did not help to ease their loads, instead going to France and Russia. They naturally pressed for relief.

Divergent Views Inevitable. No thought of dominating all Germany, and the world, is necessary to explain the activities of any power in Germany in the first years. They were all driven by hard necessity, but by degrees both East and West acquired a firm conviction that the other side had “acted from malevolence throughout, with designs to capture Germany as a basis for wider dominance.”³

This belief was deepened by the policies which each side naturally pursued in governing its zone. The Russians made short work of the great estates of the Prussian Junkers, the historic nest of German militarism, and they pursued the nationalizing of industry vigorously. In the West the Americans would have none of that and they insisted on placing major power in the German states, thinking that federalism would help counter the rise of a new German danger. The result was to increase the power of the peasants and other conservatives, at the expense of the socialists. Positions hardened until eventually both sides became aware that they dared not let the other camp control all of Germany, for a revived Germany on either side would all too probably mean that that side could dominate the world. The weight of Germany in industry and manpower is so great that both sides had to strive to control it, and failing success, to divide it.

No appeal to Marxian doctrine, nor any conjuring of Russian dreams of world conquest was required to explain Russia’s efforts to win Germany. A Tsarist government which had endured two vast German invasions in thirty years would have been just as determined to prevent the consolidation of a new Germany hostile to her. Vice versa, even a communist government in Washington would strive to prevent a German-Russian combination which could not be coped with on the Eurasian continent.

Bizonia. These considerations are basic to an understanding of the Berlin blockade crisis of 1948–49. Baffled in their efforts to gain relief through the economic unification of Germany, the United States and Britain combined their zones economically on January 1, 1947, and sought to persuade the French to merge their zone also. However, the French, having been defeated on detaching the Ruhr and the Rhineland from Germany, fought a long delaying action in the hope of achieving real international control of the Ruhr. They feared that General Lucius Clay and other American officials would make the Ruhr the basis of European recovery and then leave its industries in the hands of those who had teamed up with Hitler, but our officials in Germany “remained hostile to the idea of a special regime for the Ruhr as likely to antagonize the Germans and to interfere with plans for economic recovery.”⁴

A West German Government. It was accordingly not until June 1948 that the three Western powers and the Benelux nations agreed substantially at London on the formation of a West German government, the decision which precipitated a Russian effort to drive the West out of Berlin.

On the basis of logic the Soviet position was strong. If the West was formally splitting Germany into two parts, then it should abandon its position in Berlin, which was 125 miles deep in the Soviet zone. If partition was accepted, the West should not attempt to maintain an artificial outpost in Soviet Germany. The Soviets argued that the West could not have it both ways. They seemed, moreover, to have the means of expelling the West, since it had no legal rights of surface access to Berlin, though a document did exist giving the Allies three air corridors to Berlin, each twenty miles wide, not subject to Soviet regulation.⁵

On the other hand, the Allies had a clear legal right to be in Berlin, even if they had neglected to reserve means of access. They also valued highly the Berlin window looking into the Soviet East, which allowed favorable standard of living comparisons to be made and offered numerous opportunities to get some information about conditions in Soviet land. Berlin would also be of value if there was to be a final struggle over a unified Germany. There was also a heavy obligation to the 2,000,000 Germans in the Western zones of Berlin who had defied communism under Allied tutelage.

However, the really decisive question was prestige. At the beginning of the struggle the evacuation of Berlin might not have involved a grave loss of prestige, but after it got under way it was believed that evacuation would convince the West Germans, and all Europeans, that the Allies would also pull out of Germany, if put under heavy pressure.⁶

The Berlin Blockade

Currency Dispute. The Four Power Allied Control Council for Germany conducted negotiations early in 1948 over the admitted need for a new currency in Germany, which would strike a heavy blow at inflation and give a real incentive for work. As usual, divergent plans got nowhere and at the fourth session, on March 20, the Soviet delegates withdrew, after their demand for a full report on the three power negotiations in London had been rejected.⁷

On March 30 General Clay announced a plan for currency reform in the bizonal area and the next day the Russians demanded special clearance and inspection of Western military trains passing through the Soviet-zone to Berlin. When inspection was refused the U.S.S.R. stopped all railway and river traffic and tightened road blockades. Other driblets of allied military surface traffic were gradually severed, though British barge traffic was resumed on May 1. On May 20 the United States closed the borders of its zone to Soviet traffic, and when the new currency was introduced into the Western parts of Berlin on June 23, the Russians halted all traffic, including food trains for the civilian population. In reply the British zone closed its frontier and the Allies began the famous air lift to Berlin, on June 28, though few were confident that it could perform the miracle of supplying Western Berlin through the winter.

A three power protest of July 6, 1948, to Moscow elicited a full statement of the Soviet position, which seemed to look toward a new session of the Council of Foreign Ministers. A Russian offer to feed the whole population of Berlin was rejected. Allied officials in Berlin favored a show of force, such as an attempt to run an armored train through, and the State Department was reported to be sounding out the British and French on this line of attack.⁸

Moscow Negotiations Abortive. The decision was for an attempt to negotiate in Moscow. At the close of a first meeting of the three Western Ambassadors with Stalin on August 2, he proposed the simultaneous introduction in Berlin of the Soviet currency and the removal of all transport restrictions.⁹ This was agreed to, with the reservation that Soviet currency in Berlin be subject to some form of quadripartite control, but a series of fruitless draft meetings failed to agree on the conditions.

At a second meeting with Stalin, on August 23, he agreed orally, according to the American version, to direct the removal of the traffic restrictions and place the Soviet-German Bank of Emission under the control of the Four Power Financial Commission, as far as its Berlin operations were concerned.¹⁰ A directive to the four military commanders in Berlin was then worked out, but when they met on August 31, difficulties and deadlock developed. Each side was soon accusing the other of failing to honor the directive agreed upon at Moscow, which “was not as precise as it might have been.”¹¹

Each side alleged that the other was acting in bad faith, the Soviets accusing the West of trying to disrupt the economy of its zone and “ultimately to force the U.S.S.R. to withdraw therefrom.” The United States’ reply charged the U.S.S.R. with intent to “acquire complete control over the city of Berlin.”¹²

United Nations Mediation. After these exchanges it was decided to take the question to the UN Security Council. Great Britain and France were reluctant to do so, since it was not practical to proceed under Chapter 6 of the Charter dealing with pacific settlement, under which all four of the disputants would be barred from voting. There was no question, either, of proposing sanctions against Russia under Chapter 7. For these reasons the British and French Governments were slow to invoke the UN, but they were persuaded by the United States that skilful handling would yield a great propaganda value. The strategy was to avoid all talk of sanctions and persuade one of the smaller powers on the Council to present a resolution calling upon the Russians to lift the blockade.

However, the six small-power members of the Council were so impressed with the explosiveness of the situation and in such fear that the action of the Council “might lead to the breakup of the United Nations and to war” that they refused to accept the proposed role and banded together in an attempt to find a solution that both sides would accept. After a month of behind the scenes negotiations they proposed a resolution of their own, on October 22nd, which was vetoed by Vishinsky because it did not call for simultaneous lifting of the blockade and the introduction of the Soviet currency into Berlin.

The result largely placed upon the Soviet Union the onus which the United States had anticipated, a success which was dimmed partially by the November 13 letter of President Herbert Evatt, of the General Assembly, and Secretary General Trygve Lie urging the four powers to begin conversations looking toward the breaking of the deadlock between them. This initiative was rebuffed and a committee of experts appointed by the President of the Council, Bramuglia of Argentina, worked fruitlessly for several months. The smaller powers were not able to mediate because, once again, neither the United States nor the U.S.S.R. would make any important concession.¹³

The Blockade Ended. The Western air lift was steadily expanded until during the winter months it carried an average of 5,500 tons a day into Berlin, mostly coal. On one record day nearly 13,000 tons were delivered and in the Spring the daily average reached 8,000 tons, which was normal intake for the Western zones of Berlin.¹⁴ The incessant roar of its motors across German skies, together with the efficiency with which the whole operation developed and the fact that it kept the Western sectors of Berlin going, grew into a striking psychological and political success for the West.

Early in 1949 there were repeated signs that the Soviet Government would like to call off the blockade. Perhaps as a preliminary Molotov was relieved of his post as Foreign Minister on March 4. He was succeeded by A. Y. Vishinsky and on March 15 a conversation between Philip C. Jessup of the United States and Yakov A. Malik of the U.S.S.R. at the United Nations led to an agreement that the blockade and counter blockade should simultaneously be lifted on May 12 and a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers held in Paris beginning May 23rd.

The Conference was abortive, as usual. The West did not even get any firm guarantees of access to Berlin. Nevertheless, the tension was very considerably lessened and the West had reason to believe that it had won a significant success in holding its own. Western opinion had been strongly solidified against Russia, a Gallup poll showing that 80 per cent of Americans favored staying in Berlin, even if it meant war.¹⁵

Trusteeship for the Ruhr. Meanwhile, the Western powers had reached an agreement on June 1, 1948, on the principle of an international regime for the Ruhr, that industrial prize in which the Russians had ardently hoped to share up to the Berlin blockade. No decision was reached on the key question of the ownership and management of the Ruhr industries which was to be discussed at a new conference in London on November 11 to work out the statute for the new Ruhr authority. On the day before the conference opened General Clay announced a new law under which the ownership of the Ruhr industries was to be vested in trustees until their final disposition was decided.

This attempt to foreclose the decision of an extremely vital issue naturally produced a tremendous reaction in France. The entire French press assailed the law as an act to cut the ground from under the French position before the negotiations began. President Auriol denounced it as unforgivable, a violation of justice, and a promise of a new German aggression. After strong French diplomatic protests France was given assurance that final decision on the ownership issue would not be made until the peace settlement. Meanwhile, the way was kept open for the recovery of the Ruhr industries by their old German owners.¹⁶

The Tito-Stalin Rift

Danubian Conference. In another conference which opened in Belgrade on July 30, 1948, the United States and its allies were dealt with even more summarily than France had been in the matter of the Ruhr. The conference was held pursuant to a decision of the Council of Foreign Ministers in December 1946 to work out a new regime for the Danube. It began by excluding English as an official language and there was no negotiation at any time. The Soviet decision to confine membership of the new Danubian Commission to the riparian states, excluding the Western powers altogether, was forced through without a hitch. The Western delegates had only the satisfaction of demonstrating that they could sit through a conference in which they were outvoted as consistently, and more ruthlessly, than the Soviets were in the United Nations.¹⁷

Origins of the Rift. The West eyed the Belgrade Conference sharply to see if the ideological rift between Yugoslavia and Russia would extend to the diplomatic field. On June 28, 1948, Yugoslavia had been expelled from the Soviet dominated Cominform agency, beginning recriminations which at first left the West incredulous, especially since Yugoslavia continued faithfully to support Soviet leadership at the Belgrade Conference and elsewhere.

By degrees it became apparent that a complete breach had occurred between Russia and her strongest satellite and that the friction between them went back to the early days of the war. As loyal communists Tito and his small group of associates began at once to organize a resistance movement against the Germans, which grew steadily until it controlled Yugoslavia by the end of the war, possessing an army of 800,000 men and an organization which was easily transformed into a permanent government. This striking achievement was due to the fact that the communists threw themselves with single-minded devotion into organizing resistance and fighting the Germans.

Their task was complicated, however, by the fact that the Serbian Government-in-Exile at London had been born in a burst of patriotic resistance just prior to the German invasion of Yugoslavia in May 1941. This government was recognized by all of the Allies and until late in the war Moscow repeatedly refused to back Tito against it, urging Tito to soft pedal his communism.

With her own existence so precariously at stake, Russia was not going to take any step which would jeopardize the war-time alliance. She naturally placed her own survival first.

This emphasis prevented the sending of any aid to Tito, despite repeated promises, and for a long time it prevented the unmasking of Mihailovich’s Chetniks as collaborators with the Germans. Eventually, however, the British discovered the true situation and threw their support to Tito, with the result that he got some aid in arms and munitions from the West. Russian aid did not come until the very end of the war and then mainly in the form of troops which occupied Belgrade and left a very bad reputation behind them.¹⁸ The Yugoslavs were aware also that Moscow had divided their country with Great Britain, in a spheres of influence agreement which never materialized, and they were deeply disappointed when Moscow disavowed Tito’s impetuous occupation of Trieste. At that time Tito made a rebellious speech which brought a blunt threat of public disavowal by Moscow if there should be any repetition.¹⁹ The war ended, accordingly, with the Yugoslav leaders proud of the tremendous military and political feats which they had accomplished, on their own, and resentful of the lack of support from the fountainhead of communism.

This frame of mind was not improved when it became apparent that in the post-war negotiations Russia was quite unwilling to give consistent support to Yugoslavia’s claims at Trieste and on Austrian Carinthia. Yugoslavia was compelled to retreat from her threat not to sign the Italian treaty of peace.²⁰ Matters were not improved, either, when it became evident that the Russians were using the Yugoslav claims as a bargaining wedge for their own aims.

Exploitation. For the Yugoslavs the crowning disillusionment came in the discovery that Moscow had cast them in their age-old role as poverty stricken suppliers of raw materials. Yugoslavia is a country rich in minerals which had been exploited for ages, first by the Turks, then by the Austro-Hungarians, then by Western capitalists, and finally by the Germans, all of whom took away the mineral wealth of the country without making any compensating investments in it. The Tito Government was determined to end this exploitation by an ambitious program of industrialization, which it had every right to expect would be heartily approved in Moscow. Yet the Moscow planners were quite cold to Yugoslav ambitions. They wished to integrate the entire economy of Eastern Europe and could see no reason why new industries should be established in Yugoslavia, when those of Czechoslovakia and Poland, not to mention Russian industries, were waiting to receive the raw materials of Yugoslavia.

When, therefore, the Yugoslavs proceeded to implement their ambitious five-year plan, announced in 1947, they were dismayed to discover that they got consumer goods of bad quality from Russia when they expected machinery, at retail prices far above those prevailing in Western Europe, where they were not allowed to buy.²¹

The Yugoslavs discovered also that they were subjected to outright exploitation at the hands of the Soviet Union. They permitted the formation of only two joint companies with the Russians, and in both cases discovered that they had furnished nearly all of the capital and paid the great bulk of the expenses. Russian managers and experts also required salaries several times larger than their Yugoslav counterparts, together with luxurious subsistence.²²

Greater Yugoslavia? On their side, the Russians found the proud Yugoslavs much too ambitious. They proceeded to organize joint Yugoslav-Albanian concerns and to make Albania a satellite, a fit candidate for incorporation into Yugoslavia as another federal republic. Bulgaria was also cast in this role by the Yugoslav planners. The Bulgarians held out for equal status in a Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation and the resulting impasse compelled Moscow to arbitrate in January 1945 and to put this premature project on ice until the war was ended. It was not until January 29, 1948, that the Soviet Union definitely turned thumbs down on the Balkan federation idea and urged Eastern Europe to think of “independence” instead. The original Balkan federation idea which had been blessed in Moscow had now become a threat to Russian interests there.²³

Excommunication. In the Spring of 1948 the accelerated tempo of the Cold War made it seem urgent to Moscow that the satellites be more closely coordinated, especially the wayward Yugoslavia, though all of the governments of the Peoples Democracies had been developing loyalties to their own lands and peoples. The way for a showdown was prepared by a Yugoslav order forbidding the lower echelons of the civil service from giving information to foreigners and by the withdrawal of all Soviet advisers and experts on March 18.

In the animated correspondence which followed, the Yugoslavs were conciliatory but firm in maintaining that “no matter how much each of us loves the land of Socialism, the U.S.S.R., he can, in no case, love his own country less,” and when Yugoslavia was hailed before the Cominform she refused to go. Her leaders were accordingly expelled by a Cominform resolution published June 28, 1948.²⁴

Its terms indicated clearly that the Kremlin expected the rank and file of the Yugoslav Communist Party (CPY) to rise and overthrow the offending leaders, but nothing of the sort happened. Two Soviet stooges in the cabinet were put out, a disgruntled general was shot while escaping over the border, and that was all. Moscow had grossly overestimated its prestige.

Its charge that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had lost its identity in the Yugoslav Popular Front was true to the extent that the members of the Front had all fought together and developed a brotherhood not dependent on Marxist theories, of which the great majority were quite ignorant. They had been too busy fighting and organizing to study Marx and Lenin. They were all revolutionists against the old sterile order in their country, and they were communists, but in their own way.

Another Soviet charge also had foundation, that the CPY had based itself on the peasants, instead of the industrial workers. This again was the result of the war of liberation and of the 12 to 1 ratio of peasants to workers, just as it was in China.

The Yugoslav leaders were visibly stunned by their outlawry, but they did not yield. They carefully kept the dispute on an ideological basis, gradually taking the position that they were the true practitioners of Marxism-Leninism. The Soviet leaders were the apostates. Two months passed before any hostile word was levelled at the Soviet Government, and for a longer period Belgrade supported all Soviet moves internationally—until all the Cominform states began to cut drastically their shipments of oil, coal, and all other necessities, by degrees forcing Yugoslavia to look to the West for the means of survival. These were granted slowly, as the hostility of the Soviet bloc to Yugoslavia mounted in intensity and it was evident that the breach was firm—and as the fact was appreciated that Tito had the largest and toughest army in Europe, outside the Soviet Union.

Effects on the Cold War. It became increasingly apparent that the Tito-Stalin break was an event of great importance. It was unpalatable to Western capitalists that Yugoslavia was still ardently communist, but their national communism was no threat to the West. The threat lay in the ability of Moscow to control and direct a vast empire of communist states. If this could not be done, then the threat of world communist domination would diminish rapidly.

There was ample evidence, also, that the nationalist virus was present in all the East European satellites. In Poland the Party Secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka, had to be deposed and everywhere else purges were carried out in all ranks. The Kremlin recognized belatedly that the spread of “Titoism” could be fatal to its control of the entire region.

The parallel with China was also deeply disturbing to Moscow. There too, and on a much vaster scale, communism had triumphed, with no aid from Moscow until very late in the evening. There, also, an able leader, and a host of his lieutenants had come up by their own efforts and won a mighty victory. Again there was pride, independence, and a peasant basis beneath the Party. Great must have been the relief of the Soviet leaders when the Korean war relieved them of all danger of a Titoist defection of China, for the time being.

It was soon evident that Moscow’s effort to regiment Yugoslavia was a colossal blunder. The Yugoslavs had both the spirit and the strength to resist, as well as the necessary protection of distance. A little willingness to meet them as equals, and to cooperate, would have gone a long way to make the dream of a communist world solid. The opposite tactics rent the mantle of communism and provided an example which would make it increasingly difficult to prevent other nationalist “deviations” in the communist world. Therefore nationalism, which became such a holy virtue when the Soviet Union was at the brink of destruction during the war now became the great Red sin. Only communist “internationalism,” i.e. submitting to direction from Moscow, was laudable in their eyes.

For the West the Tito schism changed the outlook greatly. We could not undo the wide and deep social revolution which came out of the Second World War in Yugoslavia, any more than we could reverse the same result of the war in China. But we could encourage both nations, and others, to stand on their own feet and trust to time and evolution to move them nearer to practices more acceptable to the West.

The North Atlantic Alliance

While the Soviet orbit was torn by schism, shaken by purges, and knitted together by a tight skein of bilateral treaties of trade and alliance, the United States strove to weld the nations of the North Atlantic area into a defensive alliance.

When American policy makers pondered the rapid coordination of the Soviet orbit in Eastern Europe, with the significant exception of Yugoslavia, they could not resist the conclusion that they should achieve a similar organisation of Western Europe. This decision was constantly reinforced by the knowledge that the Red Army could sweep quickly to the English Channel at any time it was ordered to do so. Yet the difficulties involved in organizing Western Europe into a powerful defense zone for the United States seemed almost insuperable. No military power worth mentioning existed anywhere on the continent, and no one could put his finger upon any West European country in which a powerful army could be expected to arise. Influenced by the afterglow of German military might, West Germany was most often selected as the source of an antidote to the Red Army—a very doubtful expedient lest the two unite to dominate Europe. Perhaps powerful West German forces could be integrated into a great West European army, but there was no West Europe, only an aggregation of helpless states, most of them so debilitated by world wars and occupations that they could not contemplate another similar ordeal.

Still, there were two hundred and seventy-five millions of skilled people in West Europe, and large resources, though inadequate to sustain such populations. The remedy in American minds was for all of these people to get together in one great federal union, on the American model, and become so strong that the Soviet Union would never dare invade. They should integrate and remove from our minds the nightmare of a communist Eurasia.

Western Union. It was recognized that the age-old welter of national loyalties, traditions and prejudices could not yield easily to this heroic treatment. Therefore the State Department encouraged the countries on the English Channel to make a beginning by signing a defensive alliance among themselves. On March 17, 1948, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg signed a fifty year treaty of alliance and on the same day President Truman in a message to Congress expressed confidence that the United States would “extend to the free nations the support which the situation requires.” Blaming Russia for violating post-war agreements and directly accusing the Soviets of “designs to subjugate the free community of Europe,” the President urged the speedy passage of ERP, universal military training and a new selective service law. In the next few days Secretary Marshall found the situation quite similar to the years before 1939 and the President declared that slavery was worse than war.²⁵

The Vandenberg Resolution. “Being impotent militarily, the new Western Union was an invitation to trouble rather than an insurance against it, unless the power of the United States was clearly behind it. Members of the new alliance were quick to point this out, but Senator Vandenberg was reluctant to propose a military alliance to the Republican 80th Congress. It was therefore decided that he should sponsor a resolution encouraging “the progressive development of regional and other collective arrangements” for defense and promising to promote the “association of the United States” with such “collective arrangements as are based on continuous and effective self help and mutual aid, and as affect its national security.”²⁶

The Vandenberg resolution was passed in the Senate in June 1948 by a vote of 64 to 4 and after many months of confidential discussion the five Western Union states agreed on October 26, 1948, to press for the conclusion of a wider North Atlantic alliance.²⁷

Atlantic Alliance. The text of the proposed treaty was signed at Washington on April 4, 1949 by twelve North Atlantic nations: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The treaty provided that “an armed attack against one or more of (the parties) in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and treated accordingly. The treaty was integrated into the United Nations machinery as carefully as possible.

To us it was “armor but not a lance; a shield but not a sword.” It was greeted by Russians a “weapon of an. aggressive Anglo-American bloc in Europe . . . aimed at the establishment of Anglo-American world domination,”²⁸

The Soviet Government sent a memorandum to each of the treaty nations charging that the treaty had an obviously aggressive character, that it was aimed at the U.S.S.R., that it ran counter to the principles and aims of the United Nations Charter, the Anglo-Soviet alliance treaty of 1942, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Gromyko added that “the United States and Great Britain are building up a series of military bases and staffs which can only be justified on the basis of aggression.”²⁹

There is no reason whatever to doubt the sincerity of Premier Paul Henri Spaak of Belgium when he said: “The new pact is purely defensive; it is directed against no one.” It is equally certain that throughout history “defensive” alliances have always seemed highly offensive to those at whom they were directed. Nor does the possession of temporary armed superiority make the object of a defensive alliance feel safe and secure, since the growing strength of the new alliance may upset the balance and lead it to assume the offensive. The cycle of developments in all past arms races also offered little assurance that a balance of armed strength satisfactory to both sides would ever be achieved. Likewise the thesis that the Atlantic Pact would strengthen the UN was equally doubtful. Though it was a multilateral treaty, its purpose was the Creation of a balance of power.

The treaty was ratified in the Senate on July 21 by a majority of 82 to 13. On July 25 President Truman sent to Congress the first instalment of the vast arms aid program designed to make Soviet aggression in Western Europe too expensive. The bill requested only $1,450,000,000 for the current fiscal year and the amount applied to the North Atlantic countries was eventually cut to $1,000,000,000 before the bill passed the Senate on September 22. The next day the President announced that an atomic explosion had occurred in the U.S.S.R. and the final form of the arms aid bill was speedily agreed upon.

Was the Threat Military? In the early part of 1948 James P. Warburg visited Europe and toured much of the United States. In his own country he found the people much less afraid than their government which was “deliberately promoting anxiety among the people in order to obtain a mandate for its fear-inspired policies.” In Europe he found the people not as frightened of the Soviet Union as most Americans. They were “more aware than we of Russia’s weaknesses and needs and less fearful of her power.” They were also interested in the North Atlantic Alliance solely as a means of preventing war and not because they thought it would be “of the slightest help to them if war should break out.” They also had little thought of thoroughly rearming themselves.³⁰

Warburg himself believed that the great American program for arming West Europe was unsound for three reasons: (1) “because no amount of feasible rearmament by Western Europe could stop the Red Army from marching to the Atlantic seaboard;” (2) because rearmament would place an intolerable burden upon already overstrained economies; and (3) because it would be likely to provoke the very attack against which it was intended to insure, especially if West Germany were included. He feared that “we might be committed beyond the ‘point of no return’ in a military adventure of rearming Western Europe.”³¹

When the Atlantic Pact was published Warburg sent two detailed and cogent memoranda to a hundred members of Congress in which he stated his conviction that the primary threat to West Europe was political rather than military; that the attempt to rearm Western Europe would require a mobilization of man power sufficient to disrupt economic recovery and that we must guard against the Cold War ceasing to be a method of seeking a peace settlement and becoming instead “merely the preparation for an atomic war tacitly assumed to be inevitable.” His analysis of the prospects of countering the strength of the Red Army did not indicate much chance of success.³²

Was Military Defense Feasible or Required? In the autumn of 1950, shortly before his untimely death, the brilliant military critic, Max Werner, wrote a series of articles registering his disbelief in the practicability of defending West Europe against a Soviet attack. Taking up the possibility of another great German army arising, he doubted that any good German general would undertake building a force to combat the Soviets. Such a force would be encircled by near-by Soviet power from the start. German military planners knew that the Soviet Union was stronger now than the combined military power of Russia and Germany in 1939. They knew that 200 German divisions were unable to defend Germany in the last war. They remembered that in one battle, at Kursk, in July 1943, “17 German armored and three motorized divisions plus 18 crack infantry divisions were smashed within three weeks,” and that this elite army, saturated with tanks, could fight only because it was supported by 160 other German divisions along the entire front. How then could the Germans believe that forty or fifty or sixty Atlantic divisions could defend Germany? They would be unable to believe in their defense, unless from 100 to 150 American divisions were fully deployed on the European continent before the battle started.

Werner discounted also the mystical idea that Western Europe would become fairly strong by 1952. Hitler had used six years in furious armament, building on fifteen years of meticulous training of the Reichswehr, and any real build-up of military power must include, besides weapons, “skill, experience, education, training, military culture,” all things in which the Russians were well supplied.

What practical basis was there for the rearmament plans? Our calculations assumed that the Soviet Army would stand still, whereas an armament race is a two-way affair. The estimated Soviet weapon reserves of 40,000 tanks, 20,000 planes and 50,000 guns, would be supported by many new quality weapons.

With these facts in mind Werner noted that Western diplomats were tortured by the question, “Why don’t the Russians attack now?” Soviet military power in 1950 was “immeasurably superior to that of Hitler in 1939,” but the absolute military weakness of Western Europe had not provoked Soviet aggression. Instead of launching her armies Russia was making tremendous investments in long range projects, huge factories, big dams, irrigation, reforestation and the rebuilding of cities—all of it pure waste if the Soviets believed war inevitable in the near future. This decade was “decisive for Soviet industrialization.” It was highly unlikely that Soviet leaders would willingly imperil it by invoking the devastations of war, of which they had recent first hand knowledge. Moreover, Soviet military doctrine rejected the blitz idea. It was based on protracted effort in a long war, the kind of war which defeated Napoleon and Hitler. Yet aggression could not “start without belief in a blitz, since it makes no sense to attack in order to wage a long, expensive and dangerous war.”³³

The assembly of these simple facts, mostly accessible to everyone, seemed to constitute a military analysis as conclusive as one could be. We could rearm Western Europe to the point where its several governments could suppress any communist revolution. That would be a very great insurance, and not too expensive. Beyond that we might conceivably hope to amass in Europe enough military power to make the Red Army think twice before advancing, but this amount of military power would probably be backbreaking to be really deterrent. Unless Europe could be pounded into one great sovereignty, and merged economically with North America, the Red Army could overrun Western Europe whenever it was determined to do so.

Some Europeans might feel more secure if they saw a moderate amount of arms in their midst, but the main defense had to be political, including social reform.

Social Progress Indispensable. These conclusions seemed to be buttressed by the events between 1948 and 1951. On April 18, 1948 an election was held in Italy which was quite openly a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. A tide of American goods flowed into Italy gratis, with speeches at the docks by the American Ambassador. U.S. Naval vessels made good will visits and twenty-nine merchant ships were presented to Italy. The West proposed to return Trieste to Italy and compelled the Soviet Union to veto her entry into the United Nations. American motion picture appeals, radio broadcasts, bulletins and private letters flooded the land. The result was a victory for the Christian Democrats, the Communists and their allies winning only 30·7 per cent of the votes.

In June 1951 local elections were held in Italy and the vote for the Communists and their left wing allies increased from 31 to 37 per cent. Italian labor had been under heavy attack. Few of the great landed estates had been broken up. Nothing had been done about the suffocating overproduction of people in Italy. Some 41,000 large landowners still held a third of all the usable land.³⁴ A rising percentage of Italians had no hope short of a communist revolution.

In the summer of 1951 parliamentary elections were held in France. As in Italy, the election law was rigged against the communists. The other parties could combine their votes in any given election district and if they won a majority, take all the seats, except in communist Paris where proportional representation was preserved to protect the democratic minorities. The two-sided election law reduced the number of communist deputies very sharply, from 183 to 101, but the Red popular vote fell only 2·2 per cent, still standing at 26 per cent. French workmen still had to pay a highly disproportionate share of the national tax burden, out of controlled wages. They saw no hope of a better future in the democratic process.³⁵

Must Europe Unite? Were we thrown back then upon the integration of Western Europe, to provide both a viable social system and military power? This seemed to be the feeling of General Eisenhower six months after he assumed command of the NATO forces in Europe. In a speech to the English Speaking Union in London, on July 3, 1951, he spoke with a fervor as pronounced as the coolness of his distinguished audience to his message. He was sure that progress was being made, that “the despairing counsel of neutralism appeasement” had been exorcised, and that machines and weapons were coming in a steady stream, but he was almost vehement in his attack upon the “web of customs barriers interlaced with bilateral agreements, multilateral cartels, local shortages, and economic monstrosities. How tragic!” The “patchwork territorial fences . . . pyramid every cost with middlemen, tariffs, taxes and overheads. Barred, absolutely, are the efficient division of labor and resources and the easy flow of trade. In the political field, these barriers promote distrust and suspicion. They serve vested interests at the expense of peoples and prevent truly concerted action for Europe’s own and obvious good.”

This state of affairs appeared to add up to something like hopeless frustration, and Eisenhower was not willing to wait for a long process to soften the age old barriers by degrees. They could not “be attacked successfully by slow infiltration, but only by direct and decisive assault, with all available weapons.”³⁶

Were Our A-Bombers Enough? As an alternative to the gigantic task of pushing West Europe, including a very reluctant Britain, into federal union, the air power school proposed to leave everything to giant bombers based on North America, and perhaps Britain. This school argued that air bases around the perimeter of the Soviet orbit would soon be taken by the Red Army.

Therefore, the only real antidote to Soviet aggression was air power based so securely that it could strike at the industrial heart of Russia.³⁷

If successful, this would avoid all the troubles of integrating Europe, including rearming Germany. Aggression could be deterred by the fear of ruin in Russia, and if it occurred it could be defeated by the devastation of the Soviet Union.

This solution was simple, to anyone who could reconcile himself easily to the death of some 30,000,000 Russians and the beggary of the rest, until it was remembered that the Red armies could still fan out over West Europe, capturing its industrial resources, along with the oil-rich Middle East. In that event Russia would equalize with us both its industrial and oil potential, and she might be able to utilize these assets enough to fight a long war, and to compel us to attempt gigantic land operations in Eurasia—without being able to count on Britain as a staging area or aircraft carrier.

Conclusions. These considerations suggested that the defense of Western Europe would require every kind of armed force, in carefully balanced proportions, along with the integration of West Europe, and its armament up to an exceedingly delicate point, one which would not make the social antagonisms of the area irreconcilable.

In 1951 the Soviet Union was pushing an intensive armament program in East Europe, under the stimulus of increasing tension in the East-West Conflict, especially the Korean war and the American arms program in West Europe. In the interval between 1948 and 1951 some sixty divisions were trained and armed in East Europe. Enough had been accomplished to give ample grounds for another big whirl of the arms race spiral in the West.

Western Europe is a legitimate security zone for the United States. That was the bed-rock consideration, but fire power was not the main weapon for its defense. Much more important was the vigorous promotion of social progress, together with the defense of individual freedom in the whole North Atlantic area against attack from the Right, as well as from the Left.

The alleviation of the mutual fears which drove East and West toward a common destruction was also a much more feasible undertaking than the salvage of a world wrecked and barbarized by the time-tested culmination of a spiralling arms race.

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