Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Although fascism and communism were ideologically at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the new generation of European dictators had much in common. Left and right launched bitter attacks on each other, both verbal and, in the Spanish Civil War, on the battlefield, and yet in August 1939 the two supreme autocrats Stalin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact that paved the way for war. In secret annexes they carved up eastern Europe. The following month Hitler launched the blitzkrieg on Poland that signalled the beginning of the Second World War, and the Red Army rolled west to grab eastern Poland and end the short-lived independence of Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Stalin had recreated the boundaries of the Romanov empire, but he wanted more. In November 1940 he sent his foreign minister to Berlin to negotiate an alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan, but the negotiations foundered on Stalin’s insistence on gaining Iran and western India. Instead Hitler turned on Russia, something Stalin had refused to believe could happen; even after the German attack had started, Stalin insisted that the assault must have been launched by renegade generals without Hitler’s authorisation. Hitler, of course, did not share his opposite number’s sense of solidarity with a fellow autocrat, and Germany and Russia plunged into one of the bloodiest struggles of all time.

  America’s involvement in the Second World War was far more gradual. In November 1939 the United States agreed to sell arms to the British and French, but strictly on a ‘cash and carry’ basis. After the fall of France Churchill’s pleas for assistance became ever more desperate. Britain was running out of money, a situation exacerbated by losing much of what it had bought from America in German submarine attacks. Roosevelt finally agreed in September 1940 to give Britain and Canada fifty obsolete destroyers in return for rent-free bases in Bermuda, British Guiana and – achieving an ambition that had been there since the nation’s founding – Newfoundland. This was not enough to sustain the British war effort and, as Britain had by now largely exhausted its reserves, in March 1941 Congress approved the Lend-Lease programme. Nine months later came the Japanese attack on Hawaii.

  One of the myths about the Second World War is that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused the US to join the allied cause. In fact the US response was to declare war only on Japan. It was three days later, when Hitler declared war on America, that Russia and the United States suddenly discovered they were allies, albeit with very different objectives. How different those objectives were was illustrated by negotiations going on at the very same time on the other side of the world.

  In December 1941, as the Japanese bombed Hawaii and prepared to attack the American colony in the Philippines, German troops were poised outside Moscow. Inside the city the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden held discussions with Stalin. With Russian prospects in the war looking as bleak as the Russian winter, Eden was amazed when Stalin declared that the ‘main question’ for him was British recognition of the territorial gains Russia had made under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact (the conquest of Finland, the Baltic states, Romania and part of Poland). As if to illustrate his imperial mindset, Stalin proposed that Britain should take permanent military bases in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. There was no doubt in British minds that Russian imperialism was on the roll once more. Much of Britain’s wartime strategy was predicated on containing Stalin’s imperial ambitions, but when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met in Tehran in 1943 it appeared to the British that Roosevelt regarded Britain’s undoubted imperial past as a bigger threat to the post-war world than Russia’s potential imperial future. In the debate about opening a new front against Hitler, in which Stalin wanted the British and Americans to invade France and Churchill wanted to strike at the Balkans to forestall possible Russian intervention, America sided with Russia, effectively consigning the peoples of central and south-eastern Europe to half a century of servitude as part of the Soviet empire. As American men, and more importantly materiel, turned the tide of war against the Axis powers, Russia moved on to the offensive. When Hitler’s short-lived empire collapsed, Stalin was able to achieve what earlier tsars had only dreamt of.

  Debate still rages over Stalin’s intent: was he seeking world domination or merely a security cordon on his frontier? Those with a more limited view of Stalin’s intentions point to his actions in places like Greece, where after the war a communist guerrilla army fought a bloody civil war with very little support from Stalin. The Russian leader seems to have regarded his agreements with Roosevelt at Yalta as a division of spoils between their two empires. It is not clear that Roosevelt saw it that way, but the position of the western allies was not always clear. Churchill in particular combined cynical realpolitik with a sincere commitment to protecting other nations from slipping into Russia’s maw. In the last days of the war he flung British troops north to the German coast, to stop the Red Army seizing Denmark and fulfilling Peter the Great’s ambition of making the Baltic a Russian sea; but the previous October he had met Stalin in Moscow and carved up much of eastern Europe so that, for example, Russia was given a free hand in Romania in return for leaving Greece to Britain.

  Whatever the real motives of the various allied leaders, it is clear that having at one stage of the war looked as if it was on the path to destruction the Russian empire ended the conflict stronger than ever. The Red Army was the most powerful land force in the world and Russian troops controlled a broad band of territory from Estonia through Central Europe to the Balkans. Never had the empire of the tsars stretched so far or held so many.

  The Second World War also re-ignited America’s global ambitions, which had been in abeyance for a quarter of a century. In economic terms the war had been a tremendous success: the American GDP doubled in under four years because of war spending, while the economies of most of its competitors were smashed. The United States emerged as the undisputed economic powerhouse of the planet. The other allied powers had all fallen definitively into the second division, something the Lend-Lease Program had made abundantly clear.

  Under the Lend-Lease arrangements the US sent nearly $50bn of material to its allies, particularly Russia and the largest recipient Britain. To show how totally the international tables had been turned, when the US Congress passed the Lend-Lease Bill they gave it the number 1776, the year of their independence from Britain. (Ironically one of the reasons the young American republic had survived is the lend-lease program Britain had instituted to protect the infant United States from Napoleon’s depredations.) US officials were stationed in Britain to police the Lend-Lease regulations. Britain was banned from exporting not just the goods it received but anything similar, even if home made. At the end of the war any materiel that had not been consumed in the conflict had to be paid for. Britain paid the final instalment on its Lend-Lease debt (or more accurately the debt and the interest that had accrued on it) on 31 December 2006.

  Historian and Conservative peer Robert Skidelsky has argued that ‘the way Washington managed the flow of lend-lease supplies had the effect, and possibly the intention, of leaving Britain dependent on US help after the war on whatever terms America chose to impose’. The terms in the 1946 Anglo-American Loan Agreement were devastating, producing a catastrophic financial crisis in Britain in 1947 that destroyed (or at least emasculated) the competitiveness of British manufacturing industry and ensured that rationing would continue long after the war had ended.

  Nevertheless, without this aid Britain would have found it almost impossible to pursue the war against fascism. Theoretically the programme was reciprocal but the United States received only about $8bn in aid, ranging from wool provided by New Zealand to British supplies for US troops stationed in the UK. Lend-Lease was about the new economic superpower keeping the old one afloat. It was also about keeping the communist regime in Russia afloat.

  The inherent weakness of the Russian economy was made plain during the war. Clearly the destruction in the west had an enormous impact, but given that most of Russia was not occupied by the Germans and that Stalin had
moved much of his industrial plant east of the Urals, the scale of American aid needed to keep the Red Army fighting was surprisingly large. Transport was almost entirely dependent on US aid: practically all aviation fuel, 99 per cent of new railway locomotives, over 400,000 jeeps and trucks, even 15½ million pairs of army boots.

  Six years of fighting left the economies of Europe shattered. Providing materiel to fight the war left the US economy resplendent.

  The main impact of the war on the United States was psychological rather than economic. Whatever left-wing conspiracy theorists may say, America did not enter the war so that its corporations could make enormous profits, although many did, but to protect itself and its Asian colonies from Japanese attack (at that time the legal status of Hawaii was still somewhere between colony and state). As the US became caught up in the conflict in Europe, America’s rationale for war moved from protecting ‘the nation’ to protecting ‘democracy’. Once the war was over it was then a small step for Americans to conclude that as America had been fighting to save democracy, and democracy had been saved, it must follow that America had saved democracy.

  American economic muscle had indeed been critical, and without it it is hard to see how the allies could have destroyed the German Reich; but to assert that America saved the world from Hitler is a gross exaggeration. In June 1944, when allied forces stormed ashore on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, the 58,000 Americans were easily outnumbered by the 76,000 troops drawn from the British Empire. The number of Americans killed in the war (less than 300,000) was significantly less than the number of British (357,000), but both were dwarfed by the 27 million Soviet losses. Just as Tsar Alexander had saved the rest of Europe from Napoleon, Stalin had saved it from Hitler.

  As the war ended many in Europe, especially on the political left, felt an enormous debt of gratitude to the Russian people, but the overwhelming perception in America was that – as in the First World War – it was the United States that had rescued Europe from the grip of tyranny. Just as British history ascribes Napoleon’s defeat to the Duke of Wellington rather than to the Russian tsar, so modern American history ignores the overarching role of Russia’s communist dictator. Seen through the prism of ideology it would have been perverse to suggest that democracy had been saved by autocracy. The importance of this ideological perception of the war is hard to overstate; it conditioned American public opinion for decades after, and informed public debate on the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and a host of minor military interventions. Americans saw themselves as conquering heroes delivering freedom and civilisation, reinforcing a self-portrait that had been part of the American psyche since the first Englishman landed, musket in hand, on the Virginia coast, and the first Puritan brought God to New England.

  The importance of ideology in American thinking was illustrated in a post-war exchange between Stalin and Truman, Roosevelt’s successor. Truman was incensed that the Russian autocrat had ignored the Yalta commitment to democracy by installing a Communist party dictatorship in Poland. Stalin simply found this incomprehensible. Truman, he said, should mind his own business, pointing out that Russia did not claim the right to interfere in Belgium or Greece. That for America there was a fundamental ideological difference between the two situations was something that the Russian dictator, who always put self-interest before ideology, could not accept. Truman, however, was genuinely motivated by his ideological commitment to democracy as much as by any considerations of the electoral muscle wielded by Polish-Americans, and could not understand how Stalin could apparently be so perfidious.

  On one level Americans were sincerely committed to defending democracy in faraway lands and repeatedly demonstrated their innate decency through acts of great generosity. After the First World War the American public helped rescue Russia from famine, and similarly after the Second World War billions of dollars were sent across the Atlantic to rebuild shattered economies. The desire of millions of Americans was not just to help the hungry recover their strength but also to help the oppressed recover their freedom. The ideological component was every bit as important as the humanitarian. US policy was driven by an ideology that saw economic wellbeing and democracy as two sides of the same god-given coin.

  And yet on another level the United States was as determined as the Soviet Union that its own interests should take absolute priority over everything else. Although its proclaimed mission during the war was to save the world for democracy, the underlying mission was always far more parochial: to defend the homeland from attack and recover whatever had been taken from it.

  One trivial event illustrated the American mindset. Just as Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States made America, Russia and Britain allies, his defeat brought the rationale of their alliance to an end. America’s military strategists assumed that once the European war was concluded US troops could be withdrawn from the continent almost immediately: the devastated continent would sort itself out by spontaneously embracing democracy and free markets (an assumption later repeated in Iraq). Based on this assumption, they calculated that with US troops in Europe freed up America could now win the war in Asia unaided. On VE Day, as the victory bells rang out in Europe, President Truman signed an executive order not only cancelling Lend-Lease but embargoing all shipments to Russia and other European nations. Ships already at sea were ordered back to port, and their cargoes were unloaded. Neither Britain nor Russia had any prior warning of Truman’s intention, and both were furious: British troops were still engaged in bloody conflict with Japanese forces in Burma, and Stalin was still considering an earlier American request to declare war on Japan. Such was the fury, in particular of Stalin, that a message was eventually sent explaining that the episode had been an awful mistake and the order was rescinded. (But when the war in Asia was over Lend-Lease was again peremptorily closed down.)

  However complex the events and motivations of the Second World War really were, it was the perceptions of events that had the most impact on subsequent behaviour. The perception of most Russians was that they had suffered far more than anyone else in a war started by others, and that any gains they had made were no more than their due. The perception of most Americans was that the United States had mounted both a moral and military crusade, and it was this that rescued Europe from tyranny. After the war these perceptions were reinforced on both sides. Countless cinematic epics have reinforced the contrasting versions of events, both of which after all have more than an element of truth. The American film U-571, for example, was based on the true story of the capture by British sailors of a German U-boat carrying the famous Enigma code machine – except that Hollywood replaced the Royal Navy with the US navy to produce another ‘Americans save the world’ adventure. Soviet film-makers did what Stalin and his immediate successors told them to do. Hollywood’s role was less clear-cut; it both moulded and reflected an underlying tilt in the balance of American public opinion. Before the war the majority wanted to ignore the rest of the world; during and after the war they were willing to fight to save it.

  Empires Re-emerge

  Two key events at the end of 1941 determined that the international quiescence of the United States between the world wars would be an aberration. Just as throughout the nineteenth century the US was engaged in almost permanent foreign wars as it pushed its frontiers outwards, so after the Second World War military force would once again become a key element in expanding America’s influence in the world.

  The first event was history repeating itself, but it had a shattering impact on the American psyche. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor mirrored their attack on Port Arthur that had started the Russo-Japanese War and the American attack on the Philippines that had started the Spanish-American War.

  Tension between the US and Japan had been growing for some time. After the fall of France Japan, already fighting a brutal war in China, occupied French Indo-China and cast covetous eyes at the oilwells of the Dutch East Indies, perilously close to the American colony of the
Philippines. The US imposed an oil embargo, and in November 1940 Secretary of State Cordell Hull approved a contingency plan to drop incendiary bombs on Tokyo, described as a ‘city of rice-paper and wood’. By the middle of the next year half of all America’s heavy bombers had been transferred to the region, away from the Atlantic sea lanes where German submarines were wreaking havoc. Just weeks before the Japanese attack the New York Times reported plans for American bombing raids against Japan from bases in Russia and the Philippines.

  Although the Japanese perceived the United States as having been actively hostile, that is not how the American people saw it. Just as after 9/11 Americans were shocked to discover that the lofty sentiments they believed determined their foreign policy could engender bitter hatred in others, so after Pearl Harbor America awoke to the realisation that there were political forces in the far corners of the globe that they could not ignore.