The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  There has been another resurrection: Turkey. I have been teaching there for some fifteen years, and very happily so: my university, Bilkent, a private one, was established a quarter-century ago in the teeth of considerable resistance. Its founder, İhsan Doğramacı, had a very good idea as to what was going wrong with universities in the 1970s. Inflation had been a disaster, and Turkey was one of the centres of the troubles of the 1970s. However, she too is a country with tissue regeneration, and though I was much criticized by left-wing friends for being a sort of monkey in a fez jumping up and down on the Bilkent barrel organ, they now admit that I was right. In the latter part of this book, concerning the 1980s, I have written a good bit about Turkey, because there is much interest in a process that has turned the country into a considerable economic power, with a resonance throughout Eurasia. When the country started off, in 1923, you could not even have a table made, unless by an Armenian carpenter, because the legs wobbled, the Turks not knowing how to warp wood. Now, they make F16s. Today, aged not far from seventy, I still look forward to marching into a class of Turks, the best being excellent, and the others decorative and polite. As ever, I owe much to my Rector, Professor Ali Doğramacı.

  I have a great many other debts of gratitude, a book of this scope needing a great deal of outside support. The London Library is a wonderful institution, and my assistants, Onur Onol and Yasin Yavuz, have been helpful way beyond the line of duty. My agent, Caroline Michel, has been magnificently encouraging, as have Simon Winder at Penguin and Lara Heimert at Basic Books. Rupert Stone, as ever my target reader, made encouraging comments, and Christine Stone has splendidly put up with the bad patches that come up when sails flap listlessly in windlessness. Over the years I have of course learned a great deal from friends in various countries, and I can here only acknowledge a few. Manfred Bruncken, of the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer Foundation in Cologne, Francine-Dominique Lichtenhan in Paris, Sergey Mironenko in Moscow, Rusty Greenland in Texas and, on matters to do with business in England, Robert Goddard have all been especially informative and helpful. In Turkey I have as ever relied especially upon David Barchard, Andrew Mango, Sean McMeekin, Hasan Ali Karasar, Evgenia and Hasan Unal and Sergey Podbolotov. As regards the significance of the 1980s, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss them at length, and at all levels, with Niall Ferguson, Nick Stone and Robert Skidelsky. There is one final debt. Towards the end of her time in office, Margaret Thatcher took me on as speech-writer, and these were rather dramatic occasions. She did not exactly throw things, but she made her point, and you did not spend five minutes in her company without having a memory to chalk up. She represented a force of tissue-regeneration that, in the 1970s, I had not expected.

  1. The War of the British Succession

  The winter of 1946-7 sank into the memory of anyone who lived through it. A contemporary, the historian Correlli Barnett, writes that it was ‘a catastrophe of ice and snow’. It started early, and on 20 January produced a:

  savage east wind that cut through every cranny in British houses and froze all within [and] the blizzards began to sweep in across the country again and again through the rest of January and on through the coldest February for three hundred years. In the hills nearly a third of the sheep perished. In East Anglia the snowdrifts piled to a height of fourteen feet. Off the Norfolk coast ice-floes eerily converted the North Sea into a semblance of the Arctic.

  In London the temperature fell to sixteen below, and the railways were paralysed; coal could not be moved from the pitheads, and the power stations’ stocks collapsed. By February 2,500,000 people were idle because of power cuts. This lasted until the end of March (and was followed by a drought). Yet the British climate was generally quite mild, and matters were made worse because of the strange way in which the British preferred inefficient coal fires (‘cosy’) to central heating, and put up, every winter, with the phenomenon of burst pipes. Later on, George Orwell, though not complaining at the time, blamed that winter in London for the appalling condition of his lungs, which later killed him.

  On the European continent that winter was still worse the further east you went. In Germany the frozen waterways and paralysed (or shattered) railways could not move stocks at all. The bombing damage had not been made good and people lived in cairns of rubble, freezing and starving; they did business by barter or in crumpled Reichsmark notes, marked with endless noughts. Such were the scenes that the American Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, saw from his train window as he went to a conference of foreign ministers at Moscow in the middle of that winter. In England, there had been bread rationing since the previous summer (500 grams per week for working men, half that for most others) and rations were low otherwise — 50 grams of tea and bacon, the same for mousetrap cheese, with about 250 grams for fat and sugar. Dried egg was an item of that period, eked out with water into an at least edible paste. The British were even then much better off than the French, whose official rations were considerably less. In Germany there was outright starvation, and an unknown number of people just died — maybe 9 million, in addition to the 6 million men who had gone in the war. In 1946, 6 million of them had been expelled, carrying a suitcase each, from Czechoslovakia and Poland, and they had been dumped in makeshift camps over the new German border.

  Most of continental Europe was in dreadful shape. France had been fought over, and more comprehensively than in the First World War, which had affected only thirteen of the north-eastern and northern departments, whereas the Second affected seventy-four. She had also had a robber baron Nazi occupation for four years, and the outcome was terrible — with almost 10 per cent infant mortality at Tourcoing, for instance, and a whole range of growth troubles associated with vitamin deficiency, such as rickets. The railway system was so badly run down that you needed fifteen hours to go from Paris to Strasbourg and there was constant inflation, as paper money chased an industrial output less than one third of that of 1929. In Paris rations amounted to 1,500 calories per day in May 1945, as against an otherwise minimum 2,000, and the daily bread ration in the Marshall winter was at 250 grams and even at times 200. In 1946 France had to get half of her coal from the USA, not the Ruhr, and there were terrible shortages of fuel. There were shortages of grain because cattle, not people, were fed on it: the peasants would not sell grain for the paper money. In Italy, though she was spared the worst of the weather, matters were even worse. Much of the south was starving; the peninsula had been fought over; there had been a civil war in the north; there were millions of refugees; and in 1947 1.6 million were out of work. Those in work had seen their wages cut in half by inflation and survived often enough only through a subsidized canteen, eating meat only once a week. Italy was backward by other European standards, and there were millions of peasants; malaria was still a problem; and relations between the great landowners and their peasants in the south were sometimes tense, to the point of violent occupations of land, and counter-killings by the armed police.

  Politics in both countries were at boiling point, and a Communist Party became the largest one, taking a third of the vote, and running the trade unions. In early March 1947, as General Marshall journeyed to Moscow through this devastated scene, he was well aware that Communist coups could be launched, to take over western Europe. Already, that had happened to the east, where only Czechoslovakia stood out as a parliamentary and democratically run country, but even there the Communists had taken two fifths of the vote. The Moscow conference that he attended — one of several, of foreign ministers, devoted to the subject of central Europe and especially Germany — dragged on for weeks and went nowhere. And now there was a very obvious problem, that the USSR would use the emergency to encourage the spread of Communism. Over Germany, the Soviet idea, said Ernest Bevin, was to ‘loot Germany at our expense’. The Russians wanted huge reparations for the damage caused to them in the war, and they also meant to keep Germany permanently down. Maybe, even, the Germans would vote Communist so as to save themselves from this miser
able fate. There was no peace treaty as yet, but at the turn of 1946-7 such treaties with other countries had been settled, and Communists had won support in, say, Romania or Poland when they promised land at the expense of Hungary or Germany.

  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.

  As with Denis Hills, bright British emigrated, but the reason was not just the privation. In 1945 a Labour government had been elected with a landslide, and it proceeded with social revolution. ‘We are the masters now’ was the claim (characteristically it was said, and is generally slightly misquoted, by an upper-middle-class lawyer, Hartley Shawcross, who subsequently moved to the Right). The world gasped that the great Churchill had been overthrown, but events were moving in the direction of Labour. The Conservatives were associated with the 1930s, with mass unemployment and also with the attempts to buy off Hitler, ‘appeasement’ as it was called. Most people were persuaded that if the Western Powers had stood up to Hitler in 1938, he could have been stopped, and the most powerful writers argued in this sense. Then there was the English class system, an outcome of England’s peculiar history. There were ‘two nations’ which dressed, spoke, ate and were educated differently. Orwell told his American readership that Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the USA early in the war, was as representative of his country as a Red Indian chieftain would be of the United States. In 1945 class resentment was strong, at least in the big cities, and it affected even many solidly middle-class figures themselves. Labour drew its strength from the trade unions, but there was an important element made up from men who had a background in grand schools or at Oxford (or, more rarely, Cambridge, which was less politically minded). They resented the sheer inefficiencies that the class problem entailed. Woodrow Wyatt, with an Oxford background and a good war behind him, was typical of such men, largely because he believed that fairness and efficiency could be combined.