by Benn Steil
In Italy, as many as twenty thousand suspected collaborators were murdered in the months following the Fascist defeat in April 1945. In Yugoslavia, partisans killed some seventy thousand accused collaborationists, civilians as well as soldiers. In Poland, thirty thousand would die in conflict over the new Communist regime between the end of the war and 1948. In France, some ten thousand were killed in extrajudicial reprisals. An estimated twenty thousand women suspected of collaboration—that is, sleeping with the enemy—were subjected to public degradation and violence. Mass trials, purges, expropriations, expulsions, and executions were used in eastern Europe—typically instigated by the Soviet occupation authorities—to eliminate political elements on the right; in Greece they were used to undermine the left. On a single day, May 19, 1945, the Czechoslovak Extraordinary Peoples’ Courts handed out over twenty thousand sentences (7 percent of which were for life or the death penalty) to “traitors, collaborators and fascist elements.” By 1948, Romania would imprison nearly a quarter million for political crimes, roughly 2 percent of the population. Up to 200,000 were arrested and deported from Hungary to the Soviet Union. Most wound up in the Gulag.
Ethnic minorities—notably Jews, who as “capitalists” or “communists” were held responsible for deprivations befalling communities in central and eastern Europe—were subjected to brutal mass attacks and expulsions. The most infamous postwar pogrom took place at Kielce, in south-central Poland, in July 1946, when false reports of a Jew abducting a Catholic boy triggered a massacre of forty-two Jews in a single day. Over 63,000 Jews flooded into Germany from Poland in the three months that followed; seventy thousand left for Palestine. Ethnic Germans fled the country, under Soviet direction, in the most prodigious numbers: roughly seven million (on top of three million from Czechoslovakia). By the end of 1947 there were virtually no ethnic minorities left in Poland.5 (Perversely, the new Soviet occupation thus made Poland more “Polish” than before the war.)
In all, some twelve million ethnic Germans left eastern and central Europe for the occupied zones of Germany, which were struggling to sustain the local population. Seven million foreigners had been forced to work in the country during the war, over a fifth of the country’s labor force, and many of these were now also on the march—part of the horrific mass movement of homeless humanity crisscrossing the devastated continent.
After the First World War, borders had moved while people remained largely in place. This time was different, with borders mostly stable while people moved (Poland being the major exception, where border movements led to at least 1.2 million being evicted from their homes). At the end of the Second World War, fifty million Europeans were homeless, half of whom in the western part of the Nazi-ravaged Soviet Union. In Germany, 40 percent of prewar housing was destroyed.6 All told, Stalin and Hitler forcibly displaced some thirty million between 1939 and 1943. Many were now being shunted “back home.” Non-Soviet Russians and Ukrainian partisans, for example, were herded across the Soviet border by British and American troops, meeting their fate (typically work camps or death) at the hands of waiting NKVD security forces.7
Local economies of sorts continued to function, but often only in their most Hobbesian form. During the war, the right to property had dissolved, with occupiers and resisters taking and distributing, retaking and redistributing, in the cause of war, justice, or opportunity. In the process, trust in authority and one’s fellows had been shattered. “Belgians and French and Dutch had been brought up in the war to believe that their patriotic duty was to cheat, to lie, to run a black market,” future Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak reflected decades later. “These habits became ingrained after five years.”8 Liberation, which, like invasion, had generally been carried out by foreigners, had not meant a return to “legitimate” local rule. The Nazis, after all, had run France with just 1,500 German functionaries. They had relied mainly on willing French collaborators. Now there was no right to anything, no common sense of justice to appeal to; only brute physical control over property.
“It [was] hardly an exaggeration,” the head of United Nations relief in western Germany wrote, “to say that every man, woman and child in Western Europe is engaged to a greater or lesser degree in illegal trading of one kind or another. . . . [I]t is hardly possible to support existence without doing so.” U.S. assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy memoed Truman in April 1945 that Germany was on the verge of “complete economic, social, and political collapse”—a collapse “unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire.”9
Money had become part of the problem, having in parts of central and eastern Europe lost all meaning. In Hungary, inflation in 1946 rose to a peak of about 160,000 percent per day.10 Buying and selling with money was like setting one’s watch to a crazed clock. As a result, commercial exchange broke down, and production for exchange along with it. The human effect of this breakdown was dire. Average daily calorie consumption in the British occupation zone of Germany plummeted by a third between mid-1946 and early 1947, from 1,500 to 1,050.11 In major urban centers such as Vienna and Budapest it had fallen to as low as 800.12 “We are threatened,” said French economics minister André Philip, “with total economic and financial catastrophe.”13
U.S. State Department officials who would rise to public prominence in the coming months had been in Europe late in the war, and in its early aftermath. What they saw and heard disturbed them. In December 1944, fifty-one-year-old assistant secretary of state Dean Acheson wrote from Greece, where a thousand villages had been obliterated,14 of the potential for a continent-wide bloodbath if Europe were not somehow rehabilitated quickly. “The peoples of the liberated countries . . . are the most combustible material in the world,” he memoed to Roosevelt special assistant Harry Hopkins. “They are violent and restless.” Failure to put them to productive work would mean “agitation and unrest,” to be followed by “arbitrary and absolutist controls” and ultimately “the overthrow of governments.”15 More than fifty thousand Greeks would die in the renewed civil war that would erupt in 1946, one that would have dramatic and enduring effects much further afield. Acheson’s immediate concern in 1944 was, of course, winning the war with Hitler, but he also returned to Washington convinced that economic stabilization was vital to preventing another calamitous European conflagration.
In September 1945, forty-one-year-old diplomat George Kennan had, since June the previous year, been on his second tour of duty in Moscow, this time as the number two (“counselor”) to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. Making his way by train between Moscow and Helsinki, four months after the formal end of the European fighting, he was moved to capture the eerie images in his diary. Vyborg, a modern and vibrant Finnish port city before the war, was at its end empty, rotting Soviet war booty. At the remains of its train station on his way back to Moscow, Kennan noted “rays of early morning sunshine [catching] the gutted shells of apartment buildings, flood[ing] them momentarily with a chill, pale gleam.” The train pulled away, clacking “slowly through a devastated and deserted country . . . houses, doorless and windowless . . . sinking gradually back into the new vegetation around them,” which “still concealed tens of thousands of live land mines.”16
In such a world, people wanted change. Economic change came in different forms, ranging from industrial planning in France to nationalization in Britain to outright seizure of farms and enterprises in Hungary and much of the Soviet-controlled East.17 Many thought that the disasters of authoritarianism in Europe were the products of the laissez-faire brutality, inefficiency, and inequity in the interwar years. “Nobody in Europe,” wrote British historian A. J. P. Taylor in 1945, any longer “believes in the American way of life—that is, private enterprise.”18
People also wanted political change. Communist parties throughout Europe were promising a radical alternative to capitalism. History seemed to be on their side. The Soviet Union was victorious in war, and now far and away the most powerful country on
the continent. Communists received 19 percent of the vote in Italy, 24 percent in Finland (where Communist Mauno Pekkala became prime minister), and 26 percent in France in 1945–46. And although no national elections in Germany would take place before 1949 (in the west), Communists took up to 14 percent in some regional contests. Together with the Socialists, the total left-wing vote was 39 percent in Italy and 47 percent in France. In Italy, many thought the revolutionary left was destined to take control of the country. The merging of the left parties in the Soviet zone of Germany seemed a template for wider Europe.19
Back in Washington, where belief in the civilizing influences of the market had been far less shaken by the war than in Europe, officials were worried by developments. The State Department view, represented by its decidedly anti-statist under secretary of state for economic affairs, Will Clayton, was that the new postwar European approach was doubly misguided, entrenching failed interventionist doctrines nationally while erecting barriers to cooperation and trade internationally. The sweeping 1946 Monnet Plan for industrial modernization in France, for example, cohered only in a context in which French access to German raw materials and markets could be assured. Europe as a series of national economic silos would, in Clayton’s view, never regain its former vitality. The American aid that was being extended—over $13 billion between 1945 and 1947 ($161 billion in today’s money)—could therefore provide only relief and not recovery. Or in the perspective of New York Democratic congressman Emanuel Celler, it was simply “promot[ing] too damned much Socialism.”20
Meanwhile, the mood in the American heartland was set against the idea that American troops or treasure had any further useful role to play in Europe. The “popular attitude toward foreign policy,” Acheson observed, could be summed up as “bring the boys home” and “don’t be a Santa Claus.”21 Europe could choose to prosper or perish as it wished. President Truman had himself jumped on the homefront-first bandwagon following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, canceling Lend-Lease aid abroad and proclaiming a sweeping twenty-one-point progressive economic reform program at home.
In Britain, too, there was an urge to turn the page. The country could not quite decide, though, whether to go forward or back. Winston Churchill, who had just led his nation through to victory in war, was unceremoniously booted from office while representing it at the final Big Three wartime conference at Potsdam in July 1945. Clement Attlee’s Labour Party swept to power on a platform of creating full employment, a National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. “Let us face the future” was the theme of the victorious campaign. Yet the belief remained, even within the Labour leadership, that the country’s strength lay in its past—in (a reformed) empire. “I know that if the British Empire fell,” Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin told the House of Commons in February 1946, “it would be a disaster. I know, further, it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”22 But what a difference a year would make.
BRITAIN’S NATIONAL DEBT HAVING QUADRUPLED during the war, the strain of policing occupied Europe and restless far-flung colonies had, by 1947, become an intolerable financial burden. “We are, I am afraid,” Chancellor Hugh Dalton wrote to Attlee on January 20, “drifting in a state of semi-animation, towards the rapids.”23 Over the course of a dramatic few weeks between January 27 and February 20, one pillar after another of British imperial power came crashing down—Burma, Palestine, Greece, India. The driving force was a desperate lack of dollars and gold, which the war had rendered the only acceptable means of international payment.
The Communist insurgency in Greece had the most immediate ramifications for Britain’s relations with both the United States and Russia. “I am very doubtful indeed about this policy of propping up . . . weak states in the Eastern Mediterranean against Russia,” Dalton put to Attlee in November 1946, “even with American aid.” It was time, he concluded by February 1947, to “put an end to our endless dribble of British taxpayers’ money to the Greeks.”24
To make matters worse, the weather over Britain turned violent in mid-January 1947. Temperatures plummeted and, on the 23rd, snow began to fall incessantly: it did not stop for seven weeks. Blizzards hammered the country. For three weeks in February, temperatures did not rise above freezing; high winds amplified the chill. Travel all but stopped, as roads and rail lines disappeared under feet of snow. Already near-destitute men and women lost their jobs. The Royal Air Force parachuted food and supplies into isolated farms and villages. Fuel and power supplies collapsed; water pipes burst. Homes went unheated. People venturing out risked their lives. Death rates among older Britons soared.25
Now, against the background of a collapsing economy, with over half of British industry at a standstill, the government decided to prioritize conservation of Britain’s inadequate dollar reserves, which were running down at an alarming rate. In 1945, Washington had demanded that the string and glue holding debt-ridden Britain’s empire together—imperial trade preference and an inconvertible pound sterling—had to go as a condition for $3.75 billion in loan assistance. But with convertibility now looming on July 15, 1947, guaranteeing a run on Britain’s meager dollar stash by its eager colonies and dominions, the British government could do little more than hunker down in London. The imperial mind-set had been slow to adapt, but the crisis could no longer be postponed. It fell to Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Inverchapel (Archibald Clark Kerr), to hand off the crumbling edifice of empire to its main creditor.
Inverchapel, his private secretary told Dean Acheson on February 21, 1947, wished to deliver to the new secretary of state “a blue piece of paper”—diplomatic parlance for a message of great importance. George Marshall having left that morning to speak at a bicentennial celebration at Princeton, the embassy allowed Acheson to breach protocol by reviewing a facsimile of the documents, holding back the “ribbon copy” to present to the general on Monday. The revelations, Acheson recalled, “were shockers.”
In six weeks’ time, Inverchapel said, Britain would begin withdrawing its forty thousand troops from Greece. It would further cut off aid to both Greece and Turkey, which was costing half a billion dollars a year ($5.4 billion in today’s money). The United States would need to take over the security and financial burden, immediately.26
The British pullout, Acheson understood, was the final act of the Pax Britannica—the global order that had defined the nineteenth century. Since Greece was the last barrier to Soviet domination of the Aegean and the Adriatic, the responsibility was now on Washington to prop it up.
The following day, Marshall delivered his speech at Princeton. Though he had prepared it before learning of the British decision, it foreshadowed his reaction to it. “I think we must agree,” he told his young audience, “that the negative course of action followed by the United States after the First World War did not achieve order or security, and that it had a direct bearing upon the recent war and its endless tragedies”:
There were people in those days who understood the lessons of history, who knew well what should be done in order to minimize the danger of another world disaster, but their combined voice was a feeble one and their proposals were ignored. . . .
You should have an understanding of what course of action has created power and security and of the mistakes which have undermined the power and security of many nations, and above all, a clear understanding of the institutions upon which human liberty and individual freedom have depended. . . .
You should fully understand the special position that the United States now occupies in the world, geographically, financially, militarily, and scientifically, and the implications involved. The development of a sense of responsibility for world order and security, the development of a sense of overwhelming importance of this country’s acts, and failures to act, in relation to world order and security—these, in my opinion, are great musts for your generation.27
STANDING BEFORE A LARGE MAP of the newly expanded Soviet Uni
on Shortly after the German surrender in May 1945, Stalin nodded with approval. The vast buffer in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe would now protect his empire against future Napoleons and Hitlers. He took the pipe from his mouth, waving it under the base of the Caucasus. This time he shook his head and frowned.28
“I don’t like our border here.” This was where the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan met the hostile powers of Turkey and Iran.29
So in June, Molotov summoned the Turkish ambassador. Uncompromisingly, he laid out for the stunned diplomat new Soviet claims to the Kars-Ardahan regions of eastern Turkey, encompassing some 6,500 square miles and 300,000 people. The Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia would soon press additional claims.30 Pravda published arguments from Soviet strategists asserting their unquestionable legitimacy.31
In an attempt to extend his Caucasus border and force oil concessions from Tehran, Stalin also began organizing an armed separatist movement in northern Iran—using Soviet troops that had occupied the country under the wartime Anglo-Russian-Iranian Treaty of 1942. When the Iranian government sent forces to quell the rebellion, the Soviets barred the way. On March 1, 1946, Moscow announced that it would keep its troops in the country beyond the March 2 deadline for withdrawal specified in the treaty. Privately urged on by Washington, Iran appealed to the new United Nations Security Council, making it the object of the first major superpower confrontation in the body. In April, Truman signaled his intention to defend Iranian sovereignty by transporting the body of Mehmet Münir Ertegün, the deceased former Turkish ambassador to Washington, home on the mightiest battleship in the American fleet—the USS Missouri. Anxious to end the bad publicity, and unwilling to risk an armed confrontation, Stalin retreated. He withdrew the last of his troops from Iran in May.32