THE END OF WORLD WAR II in Europe had been met with great joy. One visitor to Moscow reported, “I looked out of the window [at 2 A.M.], almost everywhere there were lights in the window – people were staying awake. Everyone embraced everyone else, someone sobbed aloud.” But after the victory parades and celebrations, Europeans awoke to a devastating realization: their civilization was in ruins. Some wondered if Europe would ever regain its former prosperity and importance. Winston Churchill wrote, “What is Europe now? A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” There was ample reason for his pessimism. Almost 40 million people (soldiers and civilians) had been killed during the preceding six years. Massive air raids and artillery bombardments had reduced many of the great cities of Europe to heaps of rubble. The Polish capital of Warsaw had been almost completely obliterated. An American general described Berlin: “Wherever we looked we saw desolation. It was like a city of the dead.”
Suffering and shock were visible in every face. Dead bodies still remained in canals and lakes and were being dug out from under bomb debris. Millions of Europeans faced starvation as grain harvests were only half of what they had been in 1939. Millions were also homeless. In the parts of the Soviet Union that had been occupied by the Germans, almost 25 million people were without homes. The destruction of bridges, roads, and railroads had left transportation systems paralyzed. Untold millions of people had been uprooted by the war; now they became “displaced persons,” trying to find food and then their way home. Eleven million prisoners of war had to be returned to their native countries while 15 million Germans and Eastern Europeans were driven out of countries where they were no longer wanted. Yet despite the chaos, Europe was soon on the road to a remarkable recovery. Already by 1950, Europe’s industrial and agricultural output was 30 percent above prewar levels.
World War II had cost Europe more than physical destruction, however. European supremacy in world affairs had also been destroyed. After 1945, the colonial empires of the European nations disintegrated, and Europe’s place in the world changed radically. As the Cold War conflict between the world’s two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – intensified, the European nations were divided into two armed camps dependent on one or the other of these two major powers. The United States and the Soviet Union, whose rivalry raised the specter of nuclear war, seemed to hold the survival of Europe and the world in their hands.
Even before World War II had ended, the two major Allied powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – had begun to disagree on the nature of the postwar European world. Unity had been maintained during the war because of the urgent need to defeat the Axis powers, but once they were defeated, the differences between the Americans and Soviets again surged to the front.
There has been considerable historical debate about who was responsible for starting the Cold War. In the 1950s, most scholars in the West assumed that the bulk of the blame must fall on the shoulders of Joseph Stalin, whose determination to impose Soviet rule on Eastern Europe snuffed out hopes for freedom and self-determination there and aroused justifiable fears of Communist expansion in the West. During the next decade, however, revisionist historians – influenced in part by their dislike of aggressive U.S. policies in Southeast Asia – began to argue that the fault lay primarily in the United States, where President Harry Truman and his anti-Communist advisers sought to encircle the Soviet Union with a group of pliant U.S. client states. More recently, many historians have adopted a more nuanced view, noting that both the United States and the Soviet Union took steps at the end of World War II that were unwise or might have been avoided.
Both nations, however, were working within a framework conditioned by the past. Ultimately, the rivalry between the two superpowers stemmed from their different historical perspectives and their irreconcilable political ambitions. Intense competition for political and military supremacy had long been a regular feature of Western civilization. The United States and the Soviet Union were the heirs of that European tradition of power politics, and it should not surprise us that two such different systems would seek to extend their way of life to the rest of the world. Because of its need to feel secure on its western border, the Soviet Union was not prepared to give up the advantages it had gained in Eastern Europe from Germany’s defeat. But neither were American leaders willing to give up the power and prestige the United States had gained throughout the world. Suspicious of each other’s motives, the United States and the Soviet Union soon raised their mutual fears to a level of intense competition (see the box on p. 869). In recent years, some historians have emphasized Soviet responsibility, especially in view of new evidence from previously closed Soviet archives that indicates that Stalin had even been willing to go to war to spread communism to all of Europe. Regardless of who was responsible, however, a number of events between 1945 and 1949 embroiled the Soviet Union and the United States in continual conflict.
DISAGREEMENT OVER EASTERN EUROPE Eastern Europe was the first area of disagreement. The United States and Great Britain had championed self-determination and democratic freedom for the liberated nations of Eastern Europe. Stalin, however, fearful that the Eastern European nations would return to traditional anti-Soviet attitudes if they were permitted free elections, opposed the West’s plans. Having liberated Eastern Europe from the Nazis, the Red Army proceeded to install pro-Soviet governing regimes in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. These pro-Soviet governments satisfied Stalin’s desire for a buffer zone against the West, but the local populations and their sympathizers in the West saw the regimes as an expansion of Stalin’s empire. Only another war could change this situation, and few people wanted another armed conflict.
THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE A civil war in Greece provided another arena for confrontation between the superpowers. In 1946, the Communist People’s Liberation Army and the anti-Communist forces supported by the British were fighting each other for control of Greece. Great Britain had initially assumed primary responsibility for promoting posrwar reconstruction in the eastern Mediterranean, but in 1947 ongoing posrwar economic problems caused the British to withdraw from the active role they had been playing in both Greece and Turkey. The U.S. president Harry Truman, alarmed by British weakness and the possibility of Soviet expansion into the eastern Mediterranean, responded with the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine said, in essence, that the United States would provide financial aid to countries that claimed they were threatened by Communist expansion. If the Soviets were not stopped in Greece, the United States would have to face the spread of communism throughout the free world. As Dean Acheson, the American secretary of state, explained, “Like apples in a barrel infected by disease, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all the East... likewise Africa... Italy... France.... Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth.” In March 1947, at Truman’s request the U.S. Congress agreed to provide $400 million in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey.
THE MARSHALL PLAN The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine was followed in June 1947 by the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. Intended to rebuild prosperity and stability, this program included $13 billion for the economic recovery of war-torn Europe. Underlying it was the belief that Communist aggression fed off economic turmoil. General George C. Marshall had noted in a commencement speech at Harvard, “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Nevertheless, the Marshall Plan, which did not include the Soviet Union, helped speed up the division of Europe into rwo competing blocs. According to the Soviet view, the Marshall Plan aimed at the “construction of a bloc of states bound by obligations to the USA, and to guarantee the American loans in return for the relinquishing by the European states of their economic and later also their political independence.” Some scholars believe that the Marshall Plan encouraged Stalin to push for even greater control of Eastern Europe to safeguard Soviet interests.
THE AMERICAN POLICY OF CONTAINMENT By 1947, the split in Europe between East and West had become a fact of life (see the Film & History feature on p. 871). At the end of World War II, the United States had favored a quick end to its commitments in Europe. But American fears of Soviet aims caused the United States to play an increasingly important role in European affairs. In an article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, George Kennan, a well-known American diplomat with much knowledge of Soviet affairs, advocated a policy of containment against further aggressive Soviet moves. Kennan favored the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.” After the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, containment of the Soviet Union became formal American policy.
CONTENTION OVER GERMANY The fate of Germany also became a source of heated contention berween East and West. Besides denazification and the partitioning of Germany (and Berlin) into four occupied zones, the Allied powers had agreed on little else with regard to the conquered nation. The Soviets, hardest hit by the war, took reparations from Germany in the form of booty. The technology-starved Soviets dismantled and removed to the Soviet Union 380 factories from the western zones of Berlin before transferring their control to the Western powers. By the summer of 1946, two hundred chemical, paper, and textile factories in the Soviets’ East German zone had likewise been shipped to the Soviet Union. At the same time, the German Communist Party was reestablished under the control of Walter Ulbricht (VAHL-tuh OOL-brikkt) (1893-1973) and was soon in charge of the political reconstruction of the Soviet zone in eastern Germany.
At the same time, the British, French, and Americans gradually began to merge their zones economically and by February 1948 were making plans for the unification of these three western sections of Germany and the formal creation of a West German federal government. The Soviets responded with a blockade of West Berlin that allowed neither trucks nor trains to enter the three western zones of Berlin. The Soviets hoped to secure economic control of all Berlin and force the Western powers to halt the creation of a separate West German state.
The Western powers faced a dilemma. Direct military confrontation seemed dangerous, and no one wished to risk World War III. Therefore, an attempt to break through the blockade with tanks and trucks was ruled out. But how could the 2.5 million people in the three western zones of Berlin be kept alive when the whole city was inside the Soviet zone? The solution was the Berlin Air Lift.
It was an enormous task. Western Allied air forces worked around the clock for almost a year to supply the city of Berlin with foodstuffs as well as the coal, oil, and gasoline needed to heat the city’s dwellings and run its power stations, sewer plants, and factories. At the peak 13,000 tons of supplies were being flown to Berlin daily. Altogether the Western powers shipped 2.3 million tons of food on 277,500 flights. Seventy-three Allied airmen lost their lives due to accidents. The Soviets, also not wanting war, did not interfere and finally lifted the blockade in May 1949. The blockade of Berlin had severely increased tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and brought about the separation of Germany into two states. At the end of May, a constitution was drafted for a Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Konrad Adenauer (AD-uh-now-ur) (1876-1967) was elected as the new German chancellor in September 1949. A month later, the separate German Democratic Republic was established in East Germany. Berlin remained a divided city and the source of much contention between East and West.
NEW MILITARY ALLIANCES The Soviet Union also detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, and all too soon, both superpowers were involved in an escalating arms race that resulted in the construction of ever more destructive nuclear weapons. Soon the search for security took the form of mutual deterrence, the belief that an arsenal of nuclear weapons prevented war by assuring that if one nation launched its nuclear weapons in a preemptive first strike, the other nation would still be able to respond and devastate the attacker. Therefore, the assumption was that neither side would risk using the massive arsenals that had been assembled. The search for security in the uncertain atmosphere of the Cold War also led to the formation of military alliances. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in April 1949 when Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal Signed a treaty with the United States and Canada. All the powers agreed to provide mutual assistance if anyone of them was attacked. A few years later West Germany, Greece, and Turkey joined NATO.
The Eastern European states soon followed suit. In 1949, they formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) for economic cooperation. Then in 1955, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union organized a formal military alliance in the Warsaw Pact. As had happened so many times before, Europe was divided into hostile alliance systems (see Map 28.1).