ADVANCED PLACEMENT
UNITED STATES HISTORY
The Cold War Begins
*Some of America’s greatest presidents have been accidents:
TR should never have been president; Lincoln owed his victory in
part to the division of the Democratic Party; even in 1844, the
Whigs asked, ‘Who is James Polk?’ Harry S Truman, another
accidental president, set the precedent of American engagement in
the world to contain the spread of Communism during the Cold
War.
*A WWI veteran, HST was a failure at farming and business (he was
a haberdasher) before entering politics through one of America’s
most corrupt organisations, the [Tom] Pendergast Machine of
Missouri. He stood out as perhaps the only honest man in the
organisation, and was said to have been the only man to lose money
while working for the machine. Handpicked by Pendergast to
fill one of Missouri’s US Senate seats in 1934, Truman first came
to the attention of FDR when the Truman Commission's investigation
into wartime military spending led him to an unexplained money
sink called ‘Manhattan.’ He was told to quietly back away,
and he did so.
*In 1944, Truman was chosen as FDR’s third Vice-President, and
took over as President on 12 April 1945, much to his surprise and
dismay, as FDR had largely kept him in the dark about the
executive office’s internal workings.
*Unlike other presidents, Truman was unable to live in the White
House for almost half of his time in office. During the
first few years of his presidency, plaster began falling out of
the ceilings and in 1948 he was told it was unsafe to remain in
the White House. Structural analysis of the building showed
the White House to be in immediate danger of collapse, partly due
to problems with the walls and foundation that dated back to the
burning of the building by the British in the early 19th
century.
*The President was moved immediately to Blair House nearby, while
the White House interior was systematically dismantled to the
foundations and rebuilt (within the shell of the exterior walls),
using concrete and steel, with as much of the old interior as
possible re-inserted over the new floors and walls. A new
balcony was also added over the curved portico, now known as the
Truman Balcony. Other additions were reflections of the
times and of technology: central air conditioning and a bomb
shelter that could withstand anything but a direct nuclear
blast. Truman did not get to move back in until March, 1952.
*Truman had the misfortune to preside over the opening years of
the Cold War, although in many ways the Cold War actually began at
Yalta in February 1945, where the Big Three met for the last time
to divide up the spoils of Europe. Stalin was permitted
control over Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and other eastern
territories, although he promised to permit them to hold free
elections. The USSR was also asked to step into the war with
Japan, and agreed, under terms that would end up giving them de
facto control of most of Manchuria, North Korea, and any
other areas they could take.
*Many have accused Roosevelt of selling out Chiang Kai-shek and
the peoples of Eastern Europe, and there is a measure of truth to
this, since none of the free elections ever materialised, or at
least had any effect. In part FDR trusted ‘Uncle Joe,’ or so
it has been said, in part FDR was very sick and not at his best,
and in part he knew he had no choice but to accede to the requests
of the man with the largest army on the planet, a force already
occupying much of the land Stalin asked for.
*The truth is that, despite the war-time alliance, the USA and the
USSR had never much liked one another. Shortly after Hitler
invaded the USSR, Senator Truman said 'If we see that Germany is
winning, we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought
to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as
possible.'
*This attitude was fairly common among Americans before the war
and did not much change during the war. Both nations held
strongly to ideologies that united large populations across large
spaces--ideologies, moreover, that were essentially
internationalist in nature yet mutually incompatible.
*Russians resented the US and UK’s slow and small entrance into
the war in Europe, the US gave less lend-lease to the USSR than to
other major allies, the US tried to keep the Soviets out of their
atomic research (although Communist spies, most famously Klaus
Fuchs, ended up keeping Stalin better informed about the bomb than
Truman was), and as soon as the war ended the United States cut
off support to all her allies, but soon began making new loans to
the UK and other nations—but not the USSR.
*Americans resented not only Soviet Communism in its own right,
but also the fact that the Soviets were apparently carving out an
empire of their own from Germany’s old eastern territories—hardly
the desired outcome of a war to keep the world safe for
democracy. The Russians, though, remembered two German
attacks through Eastern Europe in the 20th Century alone, and
wanted a better buffer than German goodwill.
*Defeated Germany was dealt with in several ways. First, the
Potsdam Conference just outside Berlin divided up the post-war
world. Germany was reduced, Poland was moved west to take up
the last German land (losing land in the east to the USSR in
return) and East Prussia ceased to exist. Germany was split
into four zones of occupation, as was the city of Berlin.
Austria, again separate from German, was jointly occupied in all
areas, and ended up remaining cautiously neutral during most of
the Cold War. The rest of Eastern Europe (including Finland
at the moment, although it later managed to avoid complete Soviet
domination and remained neutral throughout the Cold War) were
added to the Soviet Sphere. The free elections promised to
the region never materialised in fact, and when elections did
occur, they were heavily influenced by the USSR and the Red
Army. Soon all of Eastern Europe, including the state of
East Germany, was under Communist rule, and steadfastly opposed to
the West. According to Winston Churchill, ‘From Stettin in
Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended
across the Continent.’
*Within Germany, war crimes trials were held at Nuremberg.
The showcase trial put 22 major German and Nazi leaders on
trial. 12 were hanged, Hermann Göring committed suicide
before he could be executed, 7 more leaders got long jail terms,
and all the rest served some time in prison. Lesser Nazis
were prosecuted in trials lasting for years, even into the 21st
Century. Claiming ‘I was just following orders’ was not good
enough.
*German scientists were captured by or surrendered to both
sides. The OSS conducted Operation Paperclip to recruit, and
in some cases capture, German scientists, even creating false
paperwork to cover up Nazi connections, and other branches of the
military made similar efforts to capture German scientists and
engineers. Some scientists were known to have gone to great effort
to be captured by the Americans, rightly figuring them to be
kinder than the Soviets. Perhaps the most famous of these
was Wernher von Braun, who became instrumental in the American
rocket program.
*Despite this rapid growth of tensions among the great nations of
the world, an attempt was made at co-operation. In 1945 the
United Nations was founded, allowing all nations representation in
the General Assembly (who choose a Secretary-General) and with the
USA, UK, France, USSR, and China holding permanent seats with veto
powers on the 11-member Security Council (expanded to 15 in
1965). FDR, unlike Wilson, had made the creation of the UN a
bi-partisan effort, and it was accepted by the USA and, after
FDR’s death, fully supported by Truman, who sent a very
distinguished group to the early meetings, including Eleanor
Roosevelt.
*The UN helped create Israel as a modern nation-state in 1948 with
a great deal of support from both the US and USSR. This was
seen at the time as a great humanitarian move to give Jewish
people a place to go to escape persecution and to make up for the
crime of the Holocaust. Since then it has been at the heart
of almost every regional war in the Middle East, and even at the
time, many members of the US State Department opposed American
support for Israel, fearing it would turn the Arab countries
against America and possibly lead them into the Soviet Sphere.
*In Eastern Europe, the Red Army ensured that the promised ‘free
elections’ were won by Communists, and even in Western Europe and
elsewhere, starving nations devastated by war also seemed ripe for
Communist revolutions or takeovers.
*In 1947, Britain became unable to send money to Greece to support
their struggle against Communist insurgents. Fearing that
the fall of Greece would also lead to the fall of Turkey, which
was also threatened by communism, Truman called a joint session of
Congress and addressed them asking for money for Turkey and
Greece, declaring that ‘it must be the policy of the United States
to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by
armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ This became known
as the Truman Doctrine, the promise to support any country that
was resisting Communism. It was part of the process whereby
the entire world became essentially two armed camps in which
everyone was either with us or against us.
*This policy was also known as containment, and was originally
proposed and supported by an American diplomat named George
Kennan. Truman believed this was necessary because if
America did not stand up to Soviet aggression early, it would
encourage the Soviets to expand further, just as appeasement had
encouraged Hitler, and ultimately lead to World War III.
*To rebuild Europe, so that post-war poverty would not lead
Europeans to turn either to Communism or to some other
totalitarian system as they had after the First World War, Truman
and his Secretary of State, General George Marshall, created a
plan--the Marshall Plan--to encourage Europeans to create a joint
plan for rebuilding the continent. The incentive for
co-operation was that the USA would pay for it. Many
congressmen, particularly isolationists like Senator Bob Taft,
were initially reluctant to spend the billions of dollars required
by the plan, but agreed to do so in 1947 after watching a weak
democratic government in Czechoslovakia overthrown by a
Soviet-backed Communist insurrection.
*From 1948 to 1951, the Marshall Plan rebuilt much of Western
Europe, paying over $13 billion (perhaps $100 billion in to-day’s
funds). The Communist countries were invited to take
advantage of it as well, but the Soviet Union forbade them (and
the Czechoslovakian foreign minister who suggested attending a
conference to discuss accepting American aid was found dead not
long afterwards). The USSR created their own version
instead. That version in fact did little for most conquered
nations; in fact, the Russians actually dismantled German
factories and moved them back to Russia as a form of
reparations.
*Thanks to the Marshall Plan, most of Western Europe was more
prosperous (or at least had a higher industrial output) than they
were before the war, and local Communist parties declined in
popularity.
*Douglas MacArthur commanded the US reconstruction of Japan
essentially single-handedly, and did so with great skill, becoming
loved by the Japanese people. Although seven war criminals
had been hanged by the US, the American presence, the
American-written constitution, and American dollars were largely
welcomed.
*The Cold War grew colder in 1948 when the USSR, tired of sharing
Berlin with the other Allies (who refused to allow reparations to
be demanded of Germany) cut off all contact between Berlin and
West Germany, shutting down rail traffic and closing off all
roads. The USSR assumed that the Allies would be starved
out, but, instead, the Berlin Airlift began. For almost a
year, the US Air Force and Royal Air Force flew food and other
supplies into Berlin, supplying not only their own and allied
troops, but the civilian population as well. Although the
blockade lifted in 1949, this event, combined with the obvious
electoral fraud in all the supposedly free nations of Eastern
Europe over the past few years, convinced the West that the
Soviets could not be dealt with.
*In fact, 1949 was one of the most frightening years in American
history. In August, 1949, the Soviet Union tested their
first atomic bomb, using technology closely based on America's
plutonium bomb, thanks largely to communist spies in the Manhattan
Project.
*In September, 1949, Chinese Communists, led by Mao Tse-tung
(Zedong) won the Chinese Civil War and announced the formation of
the People's Republic of China.
*In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s (Jiang Jieshi) nationalists had
fought Mao’s Communists for years, sometimes even at the same time
both fought off the Japanese. Although Chiang was supported
by US dollars, he was a poor leader with a corrupt administration,
while Mao was more efficient and had better access to Soviet
assistance, and in 1947, the US accepted that no truce could be
created, and quietly pulled out of China.
*Nonetheless, Chiang’s defeat was a serious blow to American
morale, despite his escape to Formosa (now called Taiwan) and his
continuation of the Republic of China from the new capital at
Taipei in opposition to Mao’s People’s Republic of China.
Many Republicans blamed the Democrats, accusing them of
withholding support from the Nationalists. While there may
be some truth in this, the fact is that Chiang lacked support from
his own people as well, and that is why his government fell.
*Still, the United Nations recognised the Republic of China as the
legitimate government of China until 1971 and the United States
would until 1979.
*In response to the world situation, America and Western Europe
began to re-arm. The United States had already re-organised
the structure of the armed forces. In 1947, the old
departments of War and the Navy were subsumed, along with a new
department of the Air Force, into the Department of Defense.
Located in the new Pentagon office building, this unified command
would, at least in theory, allow the different branches of the
armed services to work together more efficiently and
effectively. Military reformers had wanted a unified Defense
Department for years, and the difficulties of co-ordinating the
massive effort of WWII, along with the promotion of many new,
young officers to important posts, finally accomplished it.
*The US created a peace-time draft in 1948.
*With this new force, the United States did something else
unprecedented in peace-time: in 1949 the USA joined the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation along with eleven other
nations, pledging than an attack on any one of them was an attack
on all of them. Later more nations would join, including
beleaguered Greece and Turkey. In response, the Soviet
Sphere signed the Warsaw Pact, pledging much the same thing to one
another (with the exception of Yugoslavia, which, under Marshal
Tito, began to go its own route—still Communist and totalitarian,
but not dominated by Moscow, making it almost unique in Communist
Europe).
*The National Security Council was created to advise the president
and the Central Intelligence Agency was formed out of the old
Office of Strategic Services to spy on foreigners while the ‘Voice
of America,’ created by the Office of War Information during the
War, began broadcasting American radio across the Iron Curtain.
*The United States exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb (or
H-bomb) on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Eniwetok
Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named Mike. It yielded
10.4 megatons of explosive power (equal to 10.4 million tons of
TNT), which is over 450 times the power of the bomb that fell on
Nagasaki. The detonation obliterated Elugelab, leaving an
underwater crater 6,240 ft wide and 164 ft deep where an island
had once been. A year later the Soviets would test a smaller
(i.e. more easily delivered) H-bomb a year later.
*Thenceforth both the USA and USSR would seek ‘nuclear
superiority,’ hoping to have more atomic weaponry than the
other. Britain announced the possession of atomic bombs in
1952, and France and Red China would also develop atomic weapons
during the Cold War. This escalation and proliferation of
nuclear armaments--the Arms Race--would characterise the Cold War
for decades to come. On the other hand, it would keep the
Cold War Cold, because neither side dared go into open combat with
the other out of fear of Mutual Assured Destruction--the old
Balance of Power had been replaced by the Balance of Terror.
This page last updated 14 April, 2021.
