Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  19. Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization, pp. 134–5.

  20. Ian Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies. Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London 2001), pp. 159–60.

  21. Morgan, My Battle of Algiers, pp. 123ff, is especially forthright on this ghastly preening individual.

  22. Martin Evans, Algeria. France’s Undeclared War (Oxford 2012), pp. 194–8, is good on the international context.

  23. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp. 405–6.

  24. Irwin Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (Berkeley, Calif. 2001), p. 28.

  25. Ibid., pp. 162–3. See also Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History. Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century (New York 2002), especially pp. 423–60.

  26. C. L. Sulzberger, The Test. De Gaulle and Algeria (London 1962), p. 5.

  27. Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War, p. 158.

  28. Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830–2000. A Short History (Ithaca, NY 2001), p. 111.

  29. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘The Foreign Policy of Charles de Gaulle’, in Gordon Craig and Francis Loewenheim (eds), The Diplomats 1939–1979 (Princeton 1994), pp. 228ff, is a perceptive portrait.

  30. Jonathan Fenby, The General. Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (London 2010), pp. 380ff for general background, and p. 484 for ‘not French’ quotation, is excellent on de Gaulle’s state of mind in this crucial year.

  31. Evans, Algeria. France’s Undeclared War, p. 292.

  32. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp. 284–7.

  33. Giles, The Locust Years, p. 351.

  34. Evans, Algeria. France’s Undeclared War, p. 253.

  35. Sulzberger, The Test, p. 108.

  36. Ibid., 108–13.

  37. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp. 344–6.

  38. Behr, The Algerian Problem, pp. 160ff.

  39. Fenby, The General, p. 465.

  40. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, p. 456.

  41. Pierre Meallier (ed.), OAS: la guerre d’Algérie vue de Bône à travers les tracts OAS (Nice 2004), p. 9.

  42. Olivier Dard, Voyage au coeur de l’OAS (Paris 2005), pp. 94ff.

  43. Paul Henissart, Wolves in the City. The Death of French Algeria (London 1970) is a fast-paced history of the OAS.

  44. Stora, Algeria 1830–2000, pp. 82–3.

  45. Henissart, Wolves in the City, pp. 411–12, for the death toll.

  46. Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria. Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, Conn. 2007).

  13: Terror and Counter-Terror: Kenya

  1. C. S. Nicholls, Red Strangers. The White Tribe of Kenya (London 2005), p. 258.

  2. Richard Frost, Enigmatic Proconsul. Sir Philip Mitchell and the Twilight of Empire (London 1992), pp. 252ff.

  3. Charles Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring. The Last Proconsul (London 1978), p. 52. This brilliant satire, for one assumes it is such, deftly draws out Baring’s character

  4. Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London 1972), p. 75. Many of the details of Kenyatta’s life recounted here draw on this exemplary biography.

  5. As explained by Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge 2009), pp. 29ff.

  6. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm. The Authorized History of MI5 (London 2009), pp. 455–6.

  7. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, pp. 169–71.

  8. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London 2005), pp. 18–21.

  9. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mt Kenya. The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (New York 1965), pp. 222ff.

  10. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, p. 196.

  11. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, p. 27.

  12. On the squatters see Vincent Harlow and E. M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa (Oxford 1965), vol. 2, pp. 346–8.

  13. Guy Arnold, Kenyatta and the Politics of Kenya (London 1974), p. 32.

  14. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, p. 63.

  15. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London 2007) is good on ‘white mischief’.

  16. Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (London 2002), p. 138.

  17. Nicholls, Red Strangers, p. 245.

  18. John Gunther, Inside Africa (New York 1955).

  19. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame. Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (London 2011), pp. 214–15, for examples of Mau Mau oaths from British army documents.

  20. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 454.

  21. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, pp. 39–46.

  22. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, p. 47.

  23. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, pp. 220–1.

  24. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, p. 258.

  25. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, pp. 238–9.

  26. ‘Your Turn May Come’ is reproduced as Appendix 1 in Peter Hewitt, Kenya Cowboy. A Police Officer’s Account of the Mau Mau Emergency (Johannesburg 2008), pp. 321–5.

  27. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 457–8.

  28. Joanna Lewis, ‘“Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau”: The British Popular Press and the Demoralization of Empire’, in E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Athens, Ohio 2003), pp. 227ff. This collection of essays is easily the best single source on Mau Mau.

  29. John Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya’, Journal of African History (1990) 31, p. 396.

  30. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, pp. 89–90.

  31. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945–1967 (Oxford 2011), pp. 79 and 230 for chapter and verse.

  32. Ibid., p. 93.

  33. In Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies. Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London 2001), p. 125.

  34. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 162–3.

  35. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, pp. 254–5.

  36. A. S. Cleary, ‘The Myth of Mau Mau in its International Context’, African Affairs (1990) 89, pp. 227–45.

  37. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 300–7.

  38. Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag. The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London 2005), p. 83.

  39. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 125.

  40. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, pp. 107–15.

  41. French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, p. 121.

  42. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, pp. 246ff, for multiple examples.

  43. Stephen Chappell, ‘Airpower in the Mau Mau Conflict’, Small Wars and Insurgencies (2011) 22, pp. 495–525.

  44. Kennell Jackson, ‘“Impossible to Ignore their Greatness”: Survival Craft in the Mau Mau Forest Movement’, in Odhiambo and Lonsdale (eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood, pp. 176ff.

  45. Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs (London 1960), pp. 77ff, and Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 285–6.

  46. Ian Henderson and Philip Goodhart, The Hunt for Kimathi (London 1958) is a tedious Boy’s Own adventure account of the capture of Kimathi. One of the authors (Goodhart) went on to be a prominent ‘wet’ Conservative MP, that is opposed to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

  47. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, especially pp. 152–232, gives exhaustive evidence of brutality in these camps.

  48. Ibid., pp. 315ff.

  49. Philip Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd. A Biography (London 1999), pp. 208–14.

  50. Elkins mistakenly writes that Powell had left the Tory Party; he had resigned from a junior Treasury post in the Macmillan government in support of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft who went too, but he remained a backbencher.

  51. See also Simon Heffer’s outstanding Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (London 1998
), pp. 252ff.

  52. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Fifth Series, vol. 610, House of Commons Session 1958–9. (London 1959), pp. 232–7 (Enoch Powell) and p. 239 (Leslie Hale) quotations.

  14: The Cold War Comes to Africa

  1. George McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World. Adventures in Diplomacy (New York 1969), p. 128.

  2. John Kent, ‘The US and the Decolonization of Black Africa, 1945-63’, in David Ryan and Victor Pungong (eds), The United States and Decolonization. Power and Freedom (London 2000), p. 170.

  3. Thomas Noer, ‘New Frontiers and Old Priorities in Africa’, in Thomas G. Patterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory. American Foreign Policy 1961–1963 (New York 1989), pp. 254–5.

  4. James Meriwether, ‘“A Torrent Overrunning Everything”: Africa and the Eisenhower Administration’, in Kathryn Statler and Andrew Johns (eds), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Oxford 2006), p. 184.

  5. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK. Ordeal in Africa (New York 1983), p. 20.

  6. Noer, ‘New Frontiers and Old Priorities’, p. 257.

  7. See Francis Spufford’s outstanding semi-fictional Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (London 2010). This vividly brings to life the clunky technology of the times.

  8. William Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and his Era (New York 2003), pp. 461ff.

  9. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2: The President 1952–1969 (London 1984), pp. 568–80.

  10. Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (London 2001) is a vivid account of Congolese history.

  11. Madeleine Kalb, The Congo Cables. The Cold War in Africa – From Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York 1982), p. 49, is based on a wealth of declassified US documents.

  12. Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (London 1961), especially pp. 49ff, explains this process most clearly.

  13. Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London 2001), p. 2.

  14. For the identification of Lumumba with Castro see Charles Cogan and Ernest R. May, ‘The Congo, 1960–1963: Weighing Worst Choices’, in Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow (eds), Dealing with Dictators. Dilemmas of US Diplomacy and Intelligence 1945–1990 (Cambridge, Mass. 2006), p. 57.

  15. Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War. The USSR in West Africa and the Congo 1956–1964 (Washington, DC 2010), p. 88.

  16. R. F. Holland, European Decolonisation 1918–1981 (London 1985), pp. 186 –7, is good on the business community in Congo.

  17. Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (London 1987), p. 149.

  18. Kalb, The Congo Cables, p. 27.

  19. Mahoney, JFK. Ordeal in Africa, p. 38.

  20. Legum, Congo Disaster, p. 167.

  21. Larry Devlin, Chief of Station Congo. Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (New York 2007), p. 77.

  22. Meriwether, ‘A Torrent Overrunning Everything’, p. 185.

  23. Mahoney, JFK. Ordeal in Africa, p. 41.

  24. Peter Grose, Allen Dulles. Spymaster. The Life and Times of the First Civilian Director of the CIA (London 1995), pp. 502–3.

  25. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 132.

  26. ‘Baroness Park of Monmouth’, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2010, obituary and private information from one of her service subordinates in the 1970s.

  27. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila. A People’s History (London 2007), pp. 143–4.

  28. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 169.

  29. Mazov, A Distant Front, p. 118.

  30. Ibid., p. 103.

  31. Kalb, The Congo Cables, pp. 149ff.

  32. Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila, pp. 111–12.

  33. George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern. Memoirs (New York 1982), pp. 232ff.

  34. Noer, ‘New Frontiers and Old Priorities’, pp. 263–4.

  35. Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga and Back. A UN Case History (London 1962) contains vivid accounts of the main players and of the smell of Katanga at the time.

  36. Ibid., pp. 201–2.

  37. Kalb, The Congo Cables, p. 312.

  38. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices. Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin 1994).

  39. ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien’, Daily Telegraph, 19 December 2008, anonymous obituary.

  40. O’Brien, To Katanga and Back, p. 121.

  41. Noer, ‘New Frontiers and Old Priorities’, p. 266.

  42. Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo, pp. 194–5. It was actually Daphne Park’s idea.

  43. Mazov, A Distant Front, p. 179.

  44. Cogan and May, ‘The Congo’, p. 86.

  45. Kalb, The Congo Cables, pp. 371–2, for this exchange.

  46. Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man. The United Nations and the Quest for World Government (London 2007), pp. 83–5.

  47. William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks. A Personal Adventure (New York 1967), p. 60, makes this valuable point. Attwood was US ambassador to Guinea in the Kennedy era.

  48. Ibid., p. 53.

  49. Alaba Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy in Africa 1958–1971 (Cambridge 1974), p. 89.

  50. Ibid., pp. 68–9.

  51. Mazov, A Distant Front, pp. 190–7.

  52. Ibid., pp. 197–218.

  53. R. F. Holland, European Decolonisation 1918–1981 (London 1985), p. 294.

  54. Robert Shepherd, Iain Macleod (London 1994), p. 162.

  55. All described at interminable length in Simon Ball’s The Guardsmen. Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made (London 2004). Of course they were Guards officers, and they did not ‘make a world’ either.

  56. H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Maurice Harold Macmillan’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online. edition, p. 4. See also Ferdinand Mount, ‘Too Obviously Clever’, London Review of Books, 8 September 2011.

  57. D. R. Thorpe, Supermac. The Life of Harold Macmillan (London 2010), p. 170.

  58. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, pp. 252–3.

  59. L. J. Butler, ‘British Decolonisation’, in Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire. Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States 1918–1975 (London 2010), p. 98.

  60. Dan Horowitz, ‘Attitudes of British Conservatives towards Decolonization in Africa’, African Affairs (1970) 69, p. 22.

  61. Ball, The Guardsmen, p. 349.

  62. Thorpe, Supermac, p. 454.

  63. Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok. Britain and South Africa since the Boer War (Cambridge 2003) is easily the best guide to Anglo-Afrikaner relations.

  64. Shepherd, Iain Macleod, p. 155.

  65. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, p. 261.

  66. Shepherd, Iain Macleod, p. 177.

  67. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London 2007), p. 581.

  68. John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation. The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (London 1988), p. 273.

  69. Shepherd, Iain Macleod, pp. 225–7.

  15: Backyard Blues: Cuba

  1. Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States. A History of US Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, Mass. 1998), p. 209.

  2. Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine. General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington, Ky 1998) p. 291. This essay appeared in the 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense. At the time Butler – nicknamed ‘Old Gimlet Eye’ – was the most decorated Marine in the Corps history with sixteen medals, including (twice) the Medal of Honor.

  3. Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War against Castro’, in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory. American Foreign Policy 1961–1963 (Oxford 1989), p. 127.

  4. Stephen R
abe, ‘Controlling Revolutions: Latin America, Alliance for Progress, and Cold War Anti-Communism’, in Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory, p. 108.

  5. Schoultz, Beneath the United States, p. 339.

  6. FR 1952-1954 4:1-10 and Annex to NSC 144, 6 March 1953.

  7. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower. US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford 2008), pp. 369ff, explains this very well.

  8. Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles. Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in US Foreign Policy (Wilmington, Del. 1999), p. 109.

  9. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, p. 685.

  10. Alexandra von Tunzelmann, Red Heat. Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean (London 2011), pp. 196–7, is excellent on the Dominican Republic, as well as on Cuba and Haiti

  11. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, pp. 473–4.

  12. Stephen Rabe, ‘Dulles, Latin America, and Cold War Anticommunism’, in Richard H. Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton 1990), p. 163.

  13. Ibid., p. 178.

  14. Schoultz, Beneath the United States, pp. 351–2.

  15. Ibid., 328–31.

  16. On Figueres see David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch. 25 Years inside the CIA (London 1977), pp. 62–3. In 1955 Phillips spent three days in San José as guest of Pepe and Karen Figueres though they did not learn of his profession until 1977.

  17. Thomas Zoumaras, ‘Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy: The Case of Latin America’, in Richard Melanson and David Mayers (eds), Reevaluating Eisenhower. American Foreign Policy in the Fifties (Urbana, Ill. 1989), pp. 155ff.

  18. Hugh Thomas, Cuba. A History (London 1971, revised edn 2001), pp. 446ff.

  19. For the sordid details see T. J. English, Havana Nocturne. How the Mob Owned Cuba . . . and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York 2007).

  20. Tunzelmann, Red Heat, pp. 40–1.

  21. Hugo Abedul and R. Gerald Hughes, ‘The Comandante and his Labyrinth: Fidel Castro and his Legacy’, Intelligence and National Security (2011) 26, pp. 533–4, is a detailed demolition of the dictator’s biographical mythologies.

  22. Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro. A Biography (Cambridge 2004), p. 53.