The USA in the Time of Harry S Truman
1945-1953
by Mike Donovan
Independence - “Dewey Defeats Truman!” - Quiz; what does the 'S' stand for? - The Fair Deal - "Give em Hell Harry!" - The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here – The Truman Doctrine - "To Err is Truman"- The Missouri Compromise - Nearsighted - Alben Barclay
Harry Truman is the most overrated President in American History. His revisionist popularity is a testimony to partisan Democrat bias in the media and in academia. Truman was ridden out of office in 1952 tarred and feathered on a rail, the most unpopular President ever, and over the last 60 years has somehow emerged as one of the greatest presidents ever. The country didn't feel that way about him when he was in office. So whose take on him counts more in evaluating him, the historians of today, or the Americans of his time? He is the Howard Cosell of American Presidents. Hated while he was around. Respected and admired after he was gone.
Truman is the only President since Cleveland who was not a college graduate.
“I Like Old Joe.”
Truman on Stalin
Election of 1948;
Electoral College---Truman-Barclay D) 303
Dewey-Lashua R) 189
Strom Thurmond SR) 39
Popular Vote Truman-Barclay D) 24,105,000
Dewey R) 21,970,000
Thurmond SR) 1,169,000
Wallace Progressive) 1,157,000
Strom Thurmond of the "Dixiecrats" (take out the 'c') and Henry Wallace of the Progresso Soup party finished with roughly the same amount of popular votes yet Wallace got no electoral votes and Thurmond 39. That's because Thurmond owned concentrated support in the Deep South and that translated into electoral votes whereas Wallace was punished in the EC for his broad based support. It was a little bit like 1860 when Lincoln had less broad-based support than Bell or Breck, but won because of overwhelming popularity in the North.
MR PARTISAN
A couple of clarifications about the two most famous phrases associated with Harry S. Truman, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” and “the Buck stops Here.”
“Give ‘em Hell, Harry” infers a gutsy working class fighting spirit in Harry Truman that is supposed to be admired by all. In actuality it represents the excessive partisan bitterness that always marked his political career. Truman was about to board a train for a 1948 campaign tour when he leaned back and shouted to reporters that he intended to “Give ‘em hell!” It was pretty spicy language for it’s time and the expression stuck. It meant that he was going to give the Republicans hell and it never meant anything else. No one in human history hated the Republican party as much as Harry Truman did and his black political heart helped to divide America when a bigger person could have helped unite it. I've listened to quite a few of his speeches and I am appalled and astonished at his hateful divisive spirit in his position as leader of all the people. Harry always acted as though he was only the President of those who voted for him, that's not right. It certainly is not leadership. Obama and JFK could teach Harry Truman a lesson or two in the power of trying to be nice when you win.
Next consider the very famous “The buck stops here.” Of all people to lay claim to this aphorism, wow. I read HT's thick two-volume presidential memoirs and I have never seen such a case of someone who always blames others and never owns up to a mistake in action or judgment.
The truth is that this pithy phrase was not something Truman chose as a way to demonstrate his philosophy. A friend gave him this quote on a plaque one day as a gift, long after he became president. It never ever even remotely reflected his conduct. Harry didn't spot it in a store or order it made. It was just a sharp PR decision by Harry to always keep it on his desk. A series of a thousand visitors had to sit there and listen to Harry refuse to admit to any errors while that slogan stared them in the face.
Harry was no Martin Van Buren, enjoying and appreciating compromise and co-operation with the other party. Truman was a guy who thought that everyone in the opposition party was a SOB, and only a SOB thinks that. I was expecting to really like Truman when I began reading his memoirs. I already had a good opinion of him when I started the books. A month later I was shaking my head in disbelief. He is very conceited. Even the book publisher had to joke in the jacket about how the reader has to try and overlook the Truman boasting from time to time. Check out this insane brag from pg. 116 of volume one,
"My time was spent in reading, and by the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old I had read all the books in the Independence Public Library and our big old Bible three times through."
The Bible, sure, but all books in the library? Give me a break, unless it was the smallest library in the world. I can't find time to read one fifth of the books in my own home. This child says that he read all the books in the town library? All the novels and all the books on sewing and cooking and birds and language and algebra and poetry and science and religion and everything else and all the new books added in the weeks he was reading the others? Shame on you Harry for this impossible lie. His memoirs are full of this sort of nonsense. The man must have been very insecure to have reached the most powerful office in the world and still have found it necessary to impress people with lies like this. Who on this planet has ever truly read "every book in the library?" Live up to your name and tell it true, man.
On the positive side Truman's finest political performance was his handling of the Korean War crisis of power with General Douglas MacArthur. In having the courage to fire the idolized MacArthur, Truman made a political, personal and patriotic statement about the proper pecking order of power in America. He told MacEgo that the military is subordinate to the civil power and the President has more authority than all the leaders in the military combined. In this clash of huge egos, the right side won.
Truman's era was one of the toughest if not the toughest hot plates of responsibilities ever given to a president. Truman had to deal with World War II, the Cold War, the civil war in Greece, the Korean War, McCarthyism, unemployment and strikes at home, and the burden of being the first human to drop a nuclear bomb in anger (twice.)
When I was in high school in 1970 I was in a statewide oratory competition with an original speech defending Truman's decision to use the bomb. It saved more lives than it took (the bomb, not my speech). It wasn't an original argument but I dolled it up in my own words and finished third (the first two winners bribed the judges.) Even at 15 I felt that Truman was right to drop the A-bomb, and even then I was hearing liberal talk of how wrong he was.
FDR had kept Truman in the dark about the development of the A-bomb and about everything else. Harry to start day one with a dozen crises in full swing and no experience or background briefings on anything important thanks to the leadership style of King Roosevelt.
When Truman left office the Korean War was unsolved and his approval rating was lower than a new TBS sit-com.
One other thing I'll say about Truman. I think if all the presidents had to fight it out in one-on-one ultimate fighting rounds untill only one was left standing, I think he'd finish in the final three.
Truman's cabinet;
Secretary of State-----Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. --1945
James Byrnes ---------1945-47
George C. Marshall-1947-1949
Dean Aecheson-------1949-1953
Secretary of War--------Robert P. Patterson-1945-1947
Kenneth C. Royal-------1947-1953
Secretary of Treasury--------Fred M. Vinson---1945-1946
John Snyder---------1946-1953
Attorney General-------Tom C. Clark--------1945-1949
J. H. McGrath-------1949-1952
Last Sec. of Navy-----Frosty Forrestal------1945-…
Secretary of Defense – Frosty Forrestal
Louis Johnson
George C. Marshall
CABNOTES
Navy James ‘Frosty’ Forrestal became the nation’s first Secretary of Defense. Frosty eventually developed severe mental illness and committed suicide by jumping out of a hospital window.
AG Tom Clark was opposed to all of Truman’s’ attempts at Civil Rights reform. He was Uncle Tom Clark. I know he's white and an Uncle Tom is black, but that should help you remember him.
The second Secretary of Defense, Lou Johnson made enemies every time he met people. LJ was considered mentally unstable and when the Korean War broke out 'Unsweet Lou' had to be replaced. So the first two Secretaries of Defense had loose bolts, and the third, G.C. Marshall, was no cream puff either, but compared to Forrestal and Johnson he was.
BIO
Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar Missouri. He was the oldest of three kids. Harry reached independence at the age of six. That's how old he was when his family moved to Independence, Missouri. His father owned a small farm, traded in mules, and raised a boy more stubborn than any of them.
The S doesn't stand for anything but the letter 'S'. Each parent, John and Martha wanted to name the child after their own father so a letter was chosen to represent both. So S is named after his two grandfathers. That's kind of dopey if you ask me.
Poor little Harry had those awful thick glasses from the time he could walk. His classmates called him ‘four eyes’ in grammar school (Harry got the last laugh on those chumps).Harry was blind as a bat and something a bookworm, plus he was tough enough to get his glasses dented once in a while in a fight. Like TR, Harry didn't allow people to call him “four eyes” repeatedly. (Teddy Roosevelt wasted a guy at a bar who teased him that way back in 1889.)
HT wanted to go to college but his father was in financial trouble, so Harry stayed at home and took a job as a bank clerk to help keep the family solvent. Then from the age of 22 to 33 the future President worked as a farmer.
Truman served his country courageously in World War One. As a member of the Missouri National Guard he was already under contract when Wilson got his war declaration in April 1917. Those who rip men like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle for having served in the National Guard should remember that Harry Truman was a proud member.
Truman became the commander of an artillery battery, and saw several hot battles of the 35th Division in France under the overall command of General Pershing. Those who speculate on whether Truman was right in dropping the atomic bomb should remember whom they are dealing with. The man had already personally rained death on human beings for months while in his thirties. What kind of sensitivity would these critics expect of such a man in command of the nation in the middle of a war even more full-fledged than the one he had personally fought in? By July of 1945 little old ladies were willing to pull the lever themselves to drop atomic bombs on cities. A brilliant pugnacious guy from Missouri with first-rate combat experience as commander of front line cannon in nine campaigns: how is he going to handle the A-bomb decision? Hmmm….
At the beginning of one large battle he took personal initiative and advanced alone to an observation position ahead of the American forward line. From here he directed artillery fire to its targets and also detected early a major flanking movement by the Germans. His actions, especially in reporting the flank movement, saved many lived and earned Harry high praise.
Harry Married Bess Truman on the same day they signed the treaty of Versailles in 1919. I'm not sure why Harry and Bess were asked to sign the Treaty of Versailles, but that's what I read.
In 1922 Harry S came very close to joining the Ku Klux Klan. He even paid the initiation fee of ten dollars. But a few days later he changed his mind and asked for his money back. But I think the fact that he came that far says all we need to know about his racial attitudes. One apologist biographer explained that “Truman's attitude towards blacks was typical of Missourians of his era, for example his casual use of the word “nigger” in conversation.” Well I grew up in South Boston and from the time I was 16 I stopped using that word when everyone else around me was still using it. In fact I was accused of being a “nigger-lover” just because I refused to “casually” use that word anymore. My point being that it's no excuse to say that you were just representing the typical attitude of your neighborhood. And its not OK to join the Klan and then ask for your money back. Like If I paid dues to join the Taliban Support Society but then asked for my dues back and stayed home. That wouldn't absolve me.
Truman went into business with man named Lashua in 1921. They opened up a hat store (“The Haterdashery”) but it didn't exactly make them rich. They never could make a hat big enough to fit Truman's ego.
In the 1920's Truman caught the break of his life when Tom Pendergast, the big boss man of Kansas City took a liking to Truman and started him on the road to political success.
Truman became a judge for a while.
In 1936 Pendergast decided that Truman should run for the United States Senate from Missouri. There were many men ahead of him that expected to get the nod, but it went to the man who best licked Pendergast's feet, and that was Truman. It was so transparent a hoax upon genuine self-made political achievement that people all over Washington began to casually refer to him as “The Senator from Pendergast.”
The voters of Missouri re-elected to a second term in 1940.
During the early years of World War II Senator Truman headed The Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (the CINDP). This senate group looked into improprieties in the awarding of War production contracts. His work saved the government millions, established new standards of honesty in war industry, and earned Truman the notice of Franklin Roosevelt and many others.
Truman tough guy not only fought in World War One, he also sent a letter to a writer who had given Truman's daughter a bad review for her musical show in which he told the writer that he was going to "need a new nose." There's no doubt that he was a tough man and I wouldn't want to take him on in an alley fight, even if I was 20 and he was 60. But I think that this strength was also his greatest weakness. He didn't know how to love anyone except those who loved him. And if you didn't love him, all you got was Mr. Tough Guy. No compromise, no compassion, no forgiveness, no desire to work together with those who disagree, no modesty, no stepping back to reconsider that ' hey, I could be wrong on this, let's take another look at it.' No. It was always Truman's way or the highway and those who disagree will be loudly condemned in speech after speech, thus removing any chance of working things out, since the opposition has now lost all its dignity if it does try to compromise.
Truman always claimed to be a passionate New Dealer but really he made VP because he wasn't. FDR chose Truman to be his Vice President because VP Henry Wallace and the entire New Deal was so far left (and Wallace so personally eccentric) that even FDR realized that the center needed a gesture in its direction. Truman was that gesture at the 1944 Democratic Convention. The country had gone hard left for so long that even in his green-faced illness FDR confessed to several people that it was time to backtrack a little from all of this radicalism.
A lot of Democrats were furious at the choice of Truman in 44 because he was not a self-made man, and because he was not a New Deal lefty. HT was pro-Democratic Party to a despicable fault, but I don't think it mattered one bit what that Party's policies were. Harry was just a party animal. That's how he rode to power in the first place. If Truman had a core political philosophy, I never saw a glimpse of it in any of the books I've read, nor the speeches I've listened to.
And by the way, he was one great orator. I mean wow. It certainly was one of the keys to his success. Many politicians speak naturally in a calm radio talk but have to contrive passionate fire in a speech before a campaign crowd. Harry Truman was the opposite. He naturally spit passionate fire in front of a campaign crowd and had to contrive calm to deliver a relaxed radio talk.
EVENTS
DEFEAT OF NAZI GERMANY MAY 1945
OKINAWA
POTSDAM
DISPUTE OVER POLAND
RUSSIA INVADES MANCHURIA 8 1945
A-BOMB
BARUCH PLAN BOMBS
NUREMBERG TRIALS
CIVIL WAR IN GREECE
SHOWDOWN WITH USSR OVER IRAN
TRUMAN DOCTRINE
MARSHALL PLAN VS MARSHALL STALIN
NATIONAL SECURITY ACT
HISS VS CHAMBERS
OCCUPATION OF GERMANY
BERLIN BLOCKADE 1948-49
ELECTION OF 1948
FORMATION OF ISRAEL
LABOR UNREST
“LOSS” OF CHINA
H-BOMB
KOREAN WAR
PRICE CONTROLS
HOT PLATE FROM WARM SPRINGS
On April 12 Truman got an ominous but unspecific call to report to the White House at once. When the VP went upstairs he found a small group of very important people with stone faces. In the middle of it was Eleanor Roosevelt, the foxy first lady. She broke the news.
“Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman looked pale and nervous and said nothing. Then his heart went out to Eleanor, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No,” she responded, “is there anything we can do for you. For you are the one in trouble now.”1You can see this scene recreated badly in the movie starring Gary Sinese, who wears 30 pounds of ridiculous make-up to look 30 years older. Why didn't they just cast a good older actor?
True, but Truman was in trouble because her husband had never included Truman in highly sensitive discussions about the war. Now he had to quickly make world-class decisions before he could even begin to develop his own team, based on information he was absorbing in crash-courses.
Truman called Justice Harlan Stone and told him that FDR was gone. Stone didn’t have to be told what to do next. Within 20 minutes Stone was at the White House to swear in the new president. A few minutes were lost trying to find a bible for Harry to swear on. At 7:09 p.m. in the cabinet room of the White House on the 12th of April 1945, Justice Stone swore him in as the 99th President of the United States.
On the next day the first decision Truman made was to not postpone the meeting of the first United Nations, scheduled to take place in San Francisco on April 25th. Then he held his first cabinet meting, telling everyone that they could relax, their jobs were safe. Truman wanted to continue the policies of his hero, FDR. He certainly believed in them, so it was easy to retain his old cabinet. In reality Truman realized he would have to move some people out as time went by but day one was not the time to maneuver. In due time some people would indeed be shown the door.
After the meeting the Secretary of State, Hank Stimson asked for a moment alone with the Prez. He then told Truman about the atomic bomb that was being developed. Incredibly, the Vice President had not known a thing about it. That’s how effectively the I'll take Manhattan project had been kept secret. When Truman had investigated the war production situation FDR had asked him to leave the secret project in Tennessee alone, and he had. Now he knew why. The a-bomb had the potential to not only win the war but to destroy the world. This was a real eye opener on the first full day in charge.
Next Truman met with the heads of the armed services to hear their assessment of the war situation. Except for Secretary Giles of the Air Force, all these men were household names in America. There was George Marshall, the head of the US Army, a man whom Truman would often refer to as the ‘greatest living American’; there was Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War; there was James Forrestal and Ernie King of the Navy (the latter in charge of operations); and there was the often controversial Admiral William Leahy the White House Chief of Staff to Roosevelt, and the antithesis of the ‘yes man,’
The military cabal told Truman on 4/13 that it would take another six months to defeat the Nazis and another year and a half to conquer Japan. The Europe estimate was pessimistic compared to the outcome, while the Asian cannot be judged fairly because the surprise A-bomb changed the playing board.
Later that day Truman met alone with Leahy and asked him to stay on in the same role he had performed in FDR’s White House. Leahy warned Truman that he never once told FDR only what the President wanted to hear. Truman said that’s why I want you to stay on. Leahy agreed to serve as the blunt truth for Truman as he had for Frankie D.
THE SETTINIUS REPORT ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD - 4 45
Secretary of State Stettinius would soon be replaced by James Byres, a former Congressman, a friend of Truman, and currently a justice on the Supreme Court. So much for Harry’s promise to continue on with FDR’s team. Harry did not like the idea that Stettinius had never held elective office before. Truman felt that a Secretary of State should have won a vote from the people at some point in their career. By this HT standard, today’s Condi Rice would have to step down tomorrow as head of State. (By the way on that subject, a partisan interjection - Anne Richards of Texas at the Dem 1988 National Convention got a laughing ovation from the Atlanta audience when she mocked candidate George Bush with this barb - “now that he’s trying to get a job that he can’t get appointed to” … G.H.W. Bush was elected to Congress from Texas so what was she talking about?)
For now Ed was still in. On 4.13.44 Stettinius prepared an in depth written summary of the world situation for Truman in order to help guide the new president at the start of his voyage.
The report stated that the US must maintain some level of economic stability in the liberated areas after the war. Democracy and political stability could not thrive in a starved population. The report then toured the European war zones.
Britian – The Brits were worried about the post-war decline of their colonial empire. The limeys were also more steamed about the Crimean betrayal that we were. Edward’s tone demonstrated a FDRish borderline tolerance for Stalin’s elastic interpretation of the Yalta agreements. Churchill’s position was that a deal was a deal and the Russians were supposed to bloody well honor it. Stettinius wrote that Churchill “ is inclined however to press this position with the Russians with what we consider unnecessary rigidity as to detail.”
France - The USA wanted the French to regain their full pre-war status and economic health. But “They have … put forward requests which are all out of proportion to their present strength and have in certain cases, notably in connection with Indochina, showed unreasonable suspicions of American aims and motives.” The seeds of America’s terrible war in Vietnam were already planted. But not to worry. De Gaulle gave a vague but forceful public promise to cooperate fully with the United States in le post war monde.
USSR - The Russians had apparently decided they could pick and choose when and where they should honor the Yalta agreements. For starters they were evidently not going to honor them in say, Eastern Europe. The USSR was now simply using thug tactics to keep the entire war treasure chest of land and people. Secretary of State Stettinius in his report puts it in euphemistic diplo-speak. “In the liberated areas under Soviet control, the Soviet government is proceeding largely on a unilateral basis and does not agree that the developments which have taken place justify application of the Crimea agreement.” Yeah, like I just said.
The USSR was now simply using thug tactics to keep the entire war booty of land and people. It was as if the USUK alliance had made colonies in 1945 of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Monaco, Luxembourg, Italy, North Africa, Burma, and New Guinea
Poland “Direct appeals to Marshall Stalin have not yet produced any worthwhile results.” Not yet, eh? Did Edzo think some worthwhile results on Poland were just a heartbeat away if Truman only persisted in kissing up to Stalin as FDR had for four years? Not yet sounds an awful lot like nyet (the Russian word for ‘no’.)
Southeastern Europe - The Soviet Union “uses its position [military occupation] for unilateral political interference in the respective countries.” Stettinius urged Truman to continue to press forward the Yalta agreements
in Rumania where there was now “a minority government imposed by intimidation,” and in Bulgaria “in anticipation of unfair elections.”
Germany was to be “administered with a view to political decentralization.” This policy would change completely later on but for now the post-war settlement was still seen through the late president eyes. FDR’s important policy directive of 3.23.45 sought the division of Germany into several small countries.
Austria was to be “established as a free and independent country,” with all four victor powers taking up zones of occupation The proposition was a contradiction in terms for the people of Austria falling within the Soviet zone. Vichy France was more independent than a small East European state living under the post-war Russian umbrella.
Italy – The British wanted to treat Italy as a recent member of the Axis first and a fair-weather member of the Allies second. America leaned more for the opposite equation. “We have been unable to end the anomaly of Italy’s dual status as active cobelligerent and as a defeated enemy.”
There was a volatile situation on the northeast border with Yugoslavia over the city Trieste that might involve US foreign policy if it is not controlled.
THE NATIONAL REDOUBT BOGEY - APRIL 1945
Eisenhower near the end of the war took seriously the prospect that Hitler at the head of the last of the German Army would set up a last ditch defense to the south in the Austrian mountains.
German radio was broadcasting fabulous tales of a series of underground fortresses there and spoke of large troop movements. If it was a ruse, it had practical benefit for the Germans. The Nazis wanted to divert Allied forces on a wild goose chase, and also hoped to inspire the last troops to more intrepid last ditch efforts. If the Wermacht men thought that the German Empire was going to fight to the last man in the mountains, it might inspire them to fight better in the cities.
Ike took the redoubt bait. Several American divisions were sent to the Austrian theatre in anticipation of Adolph Custer’s last stand. But this ‘national redoubt’ was essentially fictional. There were some forts in these mountains but not on an effective scale, and Hitler and the Nazi government (pardon the oxymoron) had no intention of leaving the big city. They were going to fight to the last man, woman, and child in Berlin. The redoubt rumor has to go down as one of the most effective stories of disinformation of all time. The redoubt no doubt factored into the famous decision to halt at the Elbe. Ike and Bradley wanted to keep their forces close enough to the Southern front in case a desperate Okinawa style slugfest developed in the national redoubt.
FINAL DAYS FOR NAZI GERMANY
American armies 1 3 and 9 had reached the Elbe at the same moment in history that FDR died. They waited there for two weeks while the Soviet Army raced into Germany. Was this a disastrous error? Was this part of a political deal?
The American and Russian armies finally linked up at a town on the Rhine called Torgeau.
The Russian division commander met a US General in formal talks and asked him, “Can I ask you an honest question and get an honest answer?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you guys digging in?”
“Digging in? Of course not. We’re allies. Why would we be digging in?”
The Russian commander immediately got on the phone and in Russian gave orders all up and down the line to stop digging in. The Americans had reached the Rhine in a spirit of peace and co-operation between the two superpowers, while the Soviets had not. They had already been “digging in” at Torgeau.
ELBE CONTROVERSY
The charge has been made and still stands, that US forces halted at the Elbe in order to assist in a political deal made between FDR and Stalin in the division of post-war Germany. Truman kept Franklins’ promise to Jerky Joe and the GI’s stopped. If only they had marched on, the entire cold war would have been different and a US-UK condominium of freedom would have, could have, been in a much stronger position to secure true freedom in Europe after the war. Halting at the Elbe was appeasement at worst, naïve at best.
But the generals on the ground saw no need to take another 100,000 casualties in order to take territory that had already been predetermined to lay inside the Soviet Zone for post war administration. If the Americans had marched on to Berlin they would have been doing the Russians a great service in blood. The US was going to have to evacuate all of the territory that armchair critics say we should have seized in the last days of World War II Europe.
I used to enjoy taking the redneck side on this. It's fun to say that the liberals FDR and Truman blew it and let the Russians in and we could have saved Eastern Germany and maybe more territory from tyranny. But it's just a needless argument when the facts make it crystal clear that the decision to halt at the Elbe was not only the correct one but the only one. Even if we knew the Russians were up to no good in the long term, we had made a deal and had to honor it.
HEIL HIMMLER
Heinrich Himmler had a meeting with Swedish diplomat named Count Chocula Bernadotte in Lubeck on April 24. He wanted to get word to the Allies that Hitler was incapacitated by a brain hemorrhage and that he was the actual leader of Germany at the moment. His offer to the Allies was this. The German forces in the west would immediately surrender to the western Allies, but his army would continue to fight the Soviets on the eastern front.
When Churchill and FDR got word of the Himmler proposal they contacted each other by phone and had a good laugh. Nice try, Heinrich. Even if they took the idea seriously they knew that German forces were so scattered and disorganized that even a Himmler could not really be in command anymore. No one controlled Germany anymore, no one could, not even the original Nazi, Hitler. It was piece-meal fighting and surrender for now was a matter of tactical on the spot procedures.
NAZI NORWAY MIGHT HOLD OUT – SWEDISH INTERVENTION?
German forces were still strong in Norway. The Allies hadn't bombed Norway for three years from the air and starve it to near extinction, as they had done in Germany. The Nazi divisions in Germany were relatively dangerous and the Allies were concerned that they might refuse to throw in the terrible towel.
In March of 45 the Allies opened discussions with Sweden about possible intervention in Norway. The Norwegians would have been thrilled to see the Swedes jump in to rescue their Scandinavian brothers, but the Swedes backed off with the excuse that the Germans would conduct a scorched earth policy on Norway and the Swedes didn't want to see that happen. The Norwegians were mad at Sweden for pretending they were thinking only what was best for Norway, when really they just didn't want to get their ski's bloodied in battle, period.
When, at the end of April it seemed incredibly safe to do so, the Swedes informed the Allies that they were willing to jump into the war. Way to go, clutch. Sweden prepared to welcome Allied armies on its cold soil for an inside out attack on Norway, but the Germans surrendered before this ever got off the tundra. These opportunist Swedish meatballs could have done the moral thing and got involved way before that. Sweden might have asked for territorial compensation if it had led the liberation forces into neighbor Norway.
DENMARK AND HOLLAND FREE MAY 4
Almost five years to the day from the time they were conquered, Holland and Denmark were liberated. The Germans surrendered formally to Monty in the low countries on the fourth of May.
TAKE MY SURRENDER..... PLEASE
Through these final days the one constant was that Germany wanted to surrender to the western Allies and were terrified of the thought of surrendering to the Russians. Takes one to know one. They knew that Russia was as merciless and they were and they didn't want a taste of their own fascist medicine.
The Nazis kept stalling for time so they could transfer as many troops from the east to the west in time for the surrender. Every thousand men on the western front instead of the eastern on surrender was a thousand German lives spared. It says a lot about the quality of mercy of the American and the Brits that the Germans so desperately wanted to surrender in the west and not the east. Yet all that is remembered by the liberals is how the Americans nuked Hiroshima and needlessly razed Dresden. If the western Allies were the demons that revised history has made them out to be, then it wouldn't have made much difference to the Germans who thy surrendered to.
THE END OF HITLER
The Russian Army closed in on Berlin. Generals Zhukov and Koniev led armies towards the capitol of Germany. The Guards Army of General Chuikov began shelling the Chancellery area. Hitler finally gave up. Some people give up by surrendering. Not Hitler. On April 29th Adolph Hitler, ever the romantic, decided to marry his long term girlfriend Eva Braun.
He wrote out a will.
“I leave to humanity, my unmatched inhumanity.”
Hitler was mad at both Goering and Himmler for negotiating surrender terms with the Allies, so in his last will and testament he expelled them both from the Nazi Party! That's like telling a 94 year old man he is no longer eligible to compete for the Olympic medal in gymnastics.
HOLD HANDS YOU LOVEBIRDS – APRIL 28 1945
On the morning of April 29th two mid-level Nazi officials were doing some some last minute Reich paperwork in Hitler's Berlin bunker. One of them casually mentioned to the other,
“By the way, our Fuhrer got married last night.”
“What?”
“Our Fuhrer married Eva late last night with witnesses, an official ceremony, religious decoration, a full reception with Goebbels, Bormann and Speer and their families. Someone tinkled the champagne glass and called for a speech. They would have thrown him a bachelor party, but there wasn't time. Anyway, our fearless leader is is no longer a bachelor.”
The two men looked at each other and then exploded into a fit of laughter.
Suddenly General Burghoff appeared from the next room an screamed at them,
“How dare you laugh at the Fuhrer! Get back to work and shut your damn mouths!”
The two men stopped laughing ... on the outside.
It was true. Addie and Eva were married in Hitler's bunker beneath the German Chancellery while the Russian artillery shells were crashing into the building. He at last had decided to make a commitment. For the honeymoon they decided to kill themselves. Eve was shot while Hitler opened a can of Prudence corned beef hash and died shortly thereafter. Those crazy lovebirds! Loyal guards took their bodied to the courtyard, doused them with gasoline and then broke out their Zippos.
If Hitler had lived to stand trial, what would have become of Eva Braun? I doubt that any formal charges would have been brought against her. But can you imagine the life she would lead after Hitler hung?
There is a photo of Hitler’s charred body in a bio by Robert Payne and I don’t understand why I have never seen it elsewhere. In any case his body was never found and rumors persisted for decades that Hitler was alive and living in Argentina. This is unlikely for many reasons. For one his health was so fragile that even if he had escaped he would not likely have lived for more than a couple of years. It’s also hard to imagine a man of his ego (several times larger than Woody Allen’s) would be willing to begin a new life of obscurity after having been the emperor of the Third Reich. Several experts on the war believe that Hitler could have planned a successful escape if he desired but he simply did not desire. He had already faced death in World War I and had proven he was not a physical coward. The worst person that ever lived in the history of the planet, yes, but a coward, no, although he did duck and run for cover when the shooting started at the Beer Hall Putsch.
Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda killed his family and then himself while the Russians were knocking on the door. Mrs. Goebbels gave poison medicine to all seven of their innocent little children and then the MP and Mrs. G killed themselves. Thanks be to Allah. Imagine a show trial with Goebbels getting to make speeches in his own defense?
Berlin surrendered on May 2. It had been 137 years since Berlin had last been taken. Then it was the French eating Madison’s dinner. Now it was the Russians. Throughout Germany, in the final weeks of the war, German citizens were fleeing towards the American lines and away from the Russians. They would prefer our posturing ‘unconditional surrender’ backed up by leniency, to flowery words of promise from Soviet propaganda followed by brutality and enslavement.
Admiral Doenitz became Fuhrer for a week as the sky was falling. He negotiated the final surrender.
BLUMENTRITT TREATY
Generals Keitel and Blumentritt continued to stall in the first days of May so that as many Germans as possible could be spared Communist retribution.
The Germans officially surrendered at 2:24 in the morning on May 7 1945. The guns fell silent at midnight on May 8.
JAPAN REACTS
Japan was now alone against the world. The Japanese government announced on May 9 that the surrender of germany would not change the situation in Asia. Japan would continue to fight on to victory. GMAB.
Russia terminated the non-aggression pact with Japan, signed back in early 1941. Japan began diplomatic talks with Russia asking for Soviet help in mediating an end to the Pacific War with America, as if that would somehow deflect Russia from entering the war like a vulture when Japan was staggering in the desert. If Japan thought this would work it was even more naïve about Soviet nature than FDR!
The new Prime Minister was Kantaro Suzuki. He took over the sinking ship after Okinawa was down to mop-up operations and the invasion of Japan became imminent.
Many of the militarists wanted to force the USA to invade Japan inch by inch. This was not, however, simply a stubborn suicidal stand. They felt that if the Americans became bogged down in a mass Okinawa campaign on the Japanese main islands, they might agree to a negotiated peace giving some concessions to Japan. To surrender now unconditionally would not get the most out of a bad situation. But no one was reckoning with the atomic bomb.
Suzuki presided over most of the important Imperial conferences in Tokyo debating the end of the war. They were all held in secret and without notes, so some mystery will always be there on that.
When Suzuki finally persuaded Hirohito to agree to unconditional surrender, the militarists tried to assassinate him (Suzuki, not Hirohito.)
HOLOCAUST
It is so horrible that it’s hard to study. It’s hard to think about because even though it was another country that did it, it still was done by members of the same race as yours and mine, the human race. The deliberate genocide of the Jewish race was the worst crime in the storied history of our planet. Worse than that, I'm half German!
But the Nazis included others in their ovens. They murdered six million Jews and that has gotten a lot of ink. But they also murdered five million Christians!
I keep buying books about the Holocaust but it is so nauseating to read about that I have yet to finish one. Battles are a sort of sick fun, but there's no fun in these Auchwitz/Treblinka books. They are so depressing.
When the Allies liberated the Concentration camps they couldn’t believe what they found. Tough guy soldiers and Generals vomited out of control. Piles of dead bodies stacked up like bags of raked autumn leaves. Living skeletons with piercing sad eyes too weary to cry any longer offered weak smiles to their stunned liberators. And a lot of Germans guards claimed they had nothing to do with it, many donning civilian clothes and hoping to avoid punishment. Freed prisoners were allowed to inspect line-ups of German civilians, picking out the guilty who were trying to hide in sheep's clothing.
It's almost impossible for some people to believe in the basic goodness of mankind once they know about the Holocaust in detail. All right, I’m speaking for myself. German soldiers used to kick Jews into pits of human excrement and laugh while they drowned. What else do you need to know? This proves that God may be God, and may be real, but he did not “create man in his own image and likeness.” That wouldn't say much about who God is.
It's a scary world, and civilization is a thin suit of clothes over the animal beneath.
RUSSIA'S HEROIC “SACRIFICE”
On May 9, 1945 it was all over in Germany. May 9 is the day the Russians still commemorate to mark the end of World War II. But shouldn’t it be August 12? The Soviet Union intervened in the Pacific War in August of 1945 so maybe they are using the wrong date.
In any case the catastrophe of the war for the Russian people was 27 million people killed in and out of military uniform. The United States by comparison lost a half a million servicemen and a few civilians in Honolulu on 12/7. That's a 54-1 ratio of casualties. No wonder the Russians had a lot of bitterness after the war. On the other hand, the United States didn't make a friendship pact with Hitler, so....
The feelings of war friendship between the US and the USSR were deep and real at least at the level of the man in the street. When the Nazis capitulated in May a mass of Russian people formed around the American Embassy to celebrate. Whenever an American even showed their face in a window for a moment the crowd cheered. Yanks who dared to venture out the front door were carried through the crowd on their cheering shoulders. It’s kind of sad considering how things went from there.
Sound-bites histories of the Second World War always stress that the war could not have been won without the great sacrifice of the Russians. True, but it's unfair not to mention that if not for the treachery of the USSR in the conquest of Poland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 8/39 that set it up, the world war might never have started up in the first place. Hitler could never have conquered France if he did not have his eastern front secured. The amount of forces Germany needed to defend a potential attack from Stalin in the east would have made impossible to assemble the necessary overwhelming force to attack France with. Russian acquiescence of the Nazi empire gave Hitler complete comfort in the east.
Germany attacked Poland first in 1939 but not because this was inevitable. Poland and France in combination were a rook and a knight threatening the black queen. Just because France had a lot of socialists didn’t mean it did not know that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. The Polish government at the start of the game was not a lamb just because it ended up losing the war and getting sacked for six years. The one by one destruction of Poland and then France by Hitler, two nations he could not have beaten at the same time was the best example ever of Ben Franklin’s 1774 maxim that “we must hang together or we will hang separately.”
Just because France didn’t counter-attack in the Rhineland in 1936 didn’t mean it never would. In 1939 after the occupation of Czechoslovakia France was an offensive threat to Germany because it had it’s ally in the east, the large Polish Army. But Hitler needed to know that he would not face a Russian counter-attack and so the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 brought on the war that killed 27 million Russians. Soviet complicity killed 27 million Russians.
The Russians were guilty of starting the war in other ways too. Soviet aggressive attempts to overthrow the capitalist nations from within after the WWI by sabotage and political revolution helped significantly to create the Nazi party and its ilk world-wide. The Nazis rose to power not on a tide of anti-Semitism, but on a tide of anti-communism. Their message of ‘smash the communists’ gave them 10 votes to every one that voted Nazi because they hated Jews. They turned up the dial on the anti-Semitism only after they gained some power.
Germans in the 20’s and 30’s lived in a continental shadow of Communism. There was for example a Communist republic set up in Bavaria in 1919. A left-wing-thug vs. right-wing-thug civil war was fought all over Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. It’s hard for Americans to imagine the perspective of Germany in regards to political philosophy battles. Over here this was primarily just entertainment for windbags in coffee shops, but over there it translated into violence on a daily basis. In Germany after World War One the issue of the 'isms' especially Bolshevik Trotskyite Communism (the export kind) was a matter of life and death for the nation. Communism proclaimed its jihad against the west and never stopped screaming its threats and sending its agents to cause trouble. Worst of all the Russian mother ship was in Germany’s own back yard and the Eurasian plain was all that separated them.
Soviet efforts, real and propagandistic, for the violent overthrow of Germany was the spark that created the Nazi Party which created the War. Nice going, Russia. Thanks for starting all this trouble over stupid Marxism and getting the Germans all riled up when the rest of the world is trying to calm the Germans down. Nice going, Leon. Swift work, Vlad. Good going Joe. And we Americans were supposed to feel like mud if we don’t concede the superior sacrifice and morality of the Soviet effort in World War II as compared to our own?
We were dragged into this stupid war on both sides of the globe and little blame can be affixed to the United States for its origin for starting it. The only major charge against the USA is that we didn’t join the League of Nations. I don’t think that puts us at the top of the list of bad guys in starting this conflict. How it ever became the job of the United States to stop a war in Europe in 1939 has never been explained fairly. I think it was Europe’s job to stop the outbreak of the war in Europe.
FINAL BATTLES WITH JAPAN
With Germany defeated, the USA could turn its full military might against Japan. The War was already a rout in that theatre; a hard fought one, but a rout. Japan was winning no victories. They could only put up fanatical defenses of places like Okinawa and Iwo Jima. The invasion of the Japanese home islands was only a matter of time.
The battle for Okinawa began on April 1, and did not conclude until the end of June. On the first day of Truman's presidency, April 13 the Japanese launched a full attack on the American positions on the south side of Okinawa. The Army and Marines held their ground and a week passed without major fighting there. But there was plenty to go. Okinawa was only 350 miles from Kyushu in Japan.
Japan was so desperate to stop the advancing Americans that beginning in late 1944 they used suicide planes to attack. The Kamikaze was a plane loaded with explosives and enough gas for a one-way trip into the side of an American aircraft carrier or battleship. These suicide pilots are considered crazed by most Americans today, but consider their situation. They had planes that were far inferior to the American fighters. Their birds were under-maintained, in need of spare parts, and there was never enough gas. The Americans had a major superiority in numbers as well as quality. By the summer of 1945 most Japanese pilots who went out on a conventional mission did not return.
Why not fly the plane into the ships? You’re probably going to die anyway and you have little chance of delivering ordnance in the teeth of the notorious concentrated anti-aircraft fire, not to mention the US fighter planes. It was in fact less suicidal than one might think. It could be more the practical thinking of the professional flying soldier. These pilots were essentially kicking the hangman with their last request.
The kamikaze tactics worked. They sank 36 US ships off of Okinawa alone. But the crazy K's had no effect on the outcome of the war.
One kamikaze pilot, Kota Yamahata was ostracized in Japan after surviving the war. He had flown 23 missions!
JULY 14 1945 – US NAVY SHELLS HONSHU
If Japan didn't know already that the enemy was closing in, on July 14 an impressive fleet of US battleships and cruisers shelled a Japanese city on the main island of Honshu. many of the battleship were scarred veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack. It would have been hard to imagine on the morning of December 8 1941 that these same battleship would be bombarding Honshu at no risk of harm to themselves on July 14 1945. Japan had no power to resist. Fighter bombers from carriers complimented the bombardment by running missions all over the interior near the coast. There was no resistance, unless you count one fisherman at a lake who shook his fist at a Corsair before it shot him up. having battleship and carrier task forces sitting off shore doing as they pleased against Japanese targets on the mainland was a severe incremental increase over bombing Japan with planes from Tinian or Guam.
The next day, July 15, Truman arrived on the USS Augusta at the harbor of Antwerp Belgium on his way to the Potsdam Conference to witness and assist in the birth of the Cold War. Shelling Japan by conventional warships truly told Truman that the USA no longer needed the Russians to come in and help win the Pacific War. But the US had already asked for Russian help for so long that it would be hard to refuse them. Suddenly he needed to win the war as quickly as possible in order tp rpevent the Russian from coming in and “helping.”
THE POLISH GOVERNMENT IN EXILE, April-May 1945
The Russian Red army had overrun Poland on the way to Berlin. What would be the character of the new Poland, and would the Russians remain there after the war? The US and the UK wanted to influence the Polish political situation, but could they? Were they stupid enough to think they could?
It is exasperating to read about the negotiations over Polish democracy that went on for the last two years of the war. So much wasted labor. The Allies were like characters in a movie making a huge blunder and everyone in the theater wants to cry out to them to “don't do it!” There were so close to the scene they were blinded by the vantage point. Stalin had already helped Hitler invade Poland in 1939. Where was the logic in thinking he would give that nation its political freedom in 1945 after the Russian army had irrigated the Polish land with blood for four years? Only adults could fail to see the folly of the American position over Poland. Any child would have known with the facts available that Stalin was going to keep Poland and do whatever he wanted with it. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
The western powers deluded themselves (Churchill notwithstanding) into thinking that they could negotiate a say in the structure of the new Polish government when they had taken no part in the military conflict, and had not a single soldier on Polish soil.
Back in 39 Britain and France had declared war on Germany over that nation's violation of Poland. Yet neither France nor England gave air or naval support at the time, just words. The “phony war” followed with no plans for an offensive anywhere by a rescue Poland squad. Later, when Poland was suffering genocide under Nazi rule, there was no talk of a Normandy/Sicily type invasion to liberate the Poles. Not once, ever.
Stalin had been furious for many months before 6.6.44 that the Western allies had not opened up a second front on the French side of Germany. Churchill and FDR were telling Stalin that they weren’t ready and Stalin was replying that yes they were ready. Joe said they just wanted Russia and Germany to bleed each other to death while they sat it out on the sidelines.
The western politicians were hurt and angry when Stalin accused them of these low things, but they kept their own counsel and refrained from snapping back at him, even in words. They always were willing to give Uncle Joe a break.
Or there is another possibility for their tolerant attitude towards Joe’s complaint. That would be that the charge by Stalin was probably true and FDR and Churchill at their most private conferences may well have agreed to this without ever putting it down in writing to be discovered later.
Stalin and Roosevelt were exchanging urgent notes about the constitution of the new Polish Government.
There were two important Polish groups. There was the SPG, Stalin’s Puppet Government. And there was the Delusional Government in Piccadilly, the DGP. The exiled government thought it would be allowed into the Polish government just because its friends there in London and over in Washington had large armies in other theatres. FDR and some of his advisors were equally delusional. They forgot that they were dealing with a Gensec (Soviet slang for general secretary) who had personally assassinated people as a young man, like Sadaam Hussein of Iraq. Stalin was a singular murderer and a mass murderer and they trusted his word on democracy in Poland.
After much political negotiating, the DGP was allowed to be in the new government. The Washington boys gloated that they had stood up to Stalin over Poland. But soon it was clear that the agreement was a joke. The DGP nominally was sharing power with the SPG, but on day one everyone on the DGP was handed a bucket and mop and a short sleeve shirt with their first name on it. That’s approximately how much power they had in Warsaw.
If someone more conservative than FDR had been in the White House, the realities of Soviet power politics would have been perceived, the Polish situation would have been exposed publicly as the lost cause it was, and the insults from Stalin would have met verbal retaliation in public (Churchill had begged Roosevelt to go public with Stalin’s insolence towards his allies but FDR would not). The Cold War would have started sooner than it formally did, but since it was going on in reality, exposure wouldn't have changed anything for the worse.
1067
On May 10, 1945, three days after Germany surrendered, Joint Chiefs of Staff memo 1067 was issued to commanders in Europe. JCS/1067 directed US occupation forces to make sure that for the time being no effort would be made to help German economic recovery. The German people had to pay. Germans had to learn their lesson, the lesson they had not learned after World War I. They had to learn that aggression is a bad thing and you shouldn’t do it anymore. A dose of hunger and homelessness might not be such a bad thing in the overall scheme of things.
But the policy of 1067 gradually shifted over these months into the realization (helped by British prodding on this point) that economic recovery for Germany was somewhat essential to the overall economic prosperity of the western financial system.
1067 was discarded in practice by the beginning of 1946 and was officially retired as a policy directive in mid-1947.
FORT DIX JONESTOWN RIOT JUNE 28
Even though Russia was the ally of the United States, there were nevertheless Russia prisoners in US PW camps. That's because many Russians, especially in the Ukraine, had volunteered to serve in the German army. They hated their own Soviet overlords so much they they fought for Hitler. When the US Army overran Western Europe they ended up bagging more than a thousand Russian PW's.
In June, 168 of them at Fort Dix New Jersey (near the center of the state) heard the bad news that they were going to be repatriated (sent back) to the USSR. They knew that this was a death sentence, possibly with brutal beatings along the way and then, if they are lucky, starvation in Siberia. They preferred to die. They sent letters to the State Department and other agencies pleading that the United States was virtually executing them by making them go back to the USSR.
Finally the Russians rioted. It was one of the most bizarre prison riots of all time. The anti-Boloshevik Russians weren't attack the New Jersey guards, they were attacking themselves! All 168 men tried to kill themselves all at once by seizing weapons to do it with. Three of them managed to die before the guards subdued them all. The final outcome of this story is that all of the survivors of the suicide riot were indeed forcibly sent back to Russia and were never heard from again.
There had already been a race riot at Fort Dix in 1943.
POTSDAM 7.45
First the short version;
From July 17 to August 2, 1945 Truman met with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam in Germany to discuss and negotiate the future of the post-war world. Some of the participants called it the Berlin Conference, but it has come down to history named after the small city in the suburbs of Berlin where the meetings were held.
Potsdam was within the Russian occUpation zone but it was close to the British zone border. Potsdam had suffered little Allied bomb damage which was partly why it was chosen for the meetings. It was also picked because of it's better homes. Potsdam was home to many of the German movie industry moguls. It was the West-Hollywood/Bel Air of Nazi Germany. Potsdam was on the shore of Lake Griebnitz a long slender and lovely lake. The meetings were held in the Castle Cecilienhof, near Bladensberg.
I don't give a Potsdam where they were held. What's important is that the Soviet Union got the best of the United States by making promises it would not keep and making disrespectful evasions whenever Truman tried to get tough.
The biggest problem for all parties was the independence of the nations of eastern Europe. It was Poland plus six more. The Soviet enslavement of East Europe had plagued the Allies since Yalta and would continue to plague them long after the war ended.
Free elections were under way in Greece with observers from all over the world guaranteeing their integrity. But the elections in Bulgaria and Romania were a different matter. Here the Russians were controlling the elections and preventing international observers from carrying out their work.
When at Potsdam the Brits and the Yanks complained about this lack of true free electoral procedures in B&R, Stalin had a ready answer. He said,
“Winston, whoever is telling you these
stories is taking you for a long ride.”
That was about it. That was Joseph’s answer. Stalin just dismissed all charges the Allies made against Russian behavior as fabricated stories. He made it seem as though he felt sorry for Win and Harry because they had believed all of this bogus information, as though inept US and UK intelligence sources were sadly creating a needless dispute between the Allies. In other words he lied through his mustache.
Stalin didn’t believe his own lies for a minute. USUK believed that he may have believed them, even though they certainly didn’t. But he was, or pretended he was, willing to risk all, while the USUK group were cautious about conflict. Potsdam was Stalin’s Cold War Rhineland. He played in-your-face bullying, gambling that the other side would back down.
The USUK would not threaten to walk because they were too fond of the potentials of the US-Russian alliance in the post war world, while Stalin had little faith in that. Pretending to believe in the new alliance while punking the western industrial democracies was a fun game for him.
The only correct answer to Stalin laughing off these and other serious charges was the Mel Bernstein (corrupt narc) answer to Tony Montana in Scarface. Churchill or Truman should have leaned foreward with an intense chilly smile at Stalin and said, “Look, Joey, are we gonna talk or am I gonna bust up this alliance, here and now?”
Once the west backed off a little bit, it was the beginning of a long walk in retreat. Defeat came in small increments of expedient tolerance of Soviet lies. Every time the true democracies let a lie slide they lost a point on the board, and not just psychologically. The Soviets always gained something concrete when they intimidated the west verbally in diplomatic settings.
For example, the Soviets had agreed in one of the Yalta accords that they would not unilaterally seize German industry as war booty while the fighting was in progress. All three great powers agreed to wait until Germany was totally defeated before they divided up the spoils and made firm agreements of reparations amounts and procedures. But countless confirmed reports came in that the USSR had been doing just that. Massive amounts of military and non-military German machinery and supplies were being sent back east to Mother Russia. It was old fashioned Captain Morgan looting. Stalin was roaring his drunken pirate belly laugh from the Kremlin. German factories and entire industries were slightly dismantled and shipped back east on flatbed railroad trains. And Russia had no intention of accounting for these seizures in postwar negotiations. Somehow the record of these seizures weren't on any record books.
Harry and Winston tried to get tough with Stalin and demanded that the Russians answer in full for these diplomatic and economic atrocities against their brother allies. But Stalin scoffed and said to Winston and Harry, “All lies, Allies. I'm sad that my Allies actually believe them.' Then he puffed his pipe and blew the smoke into both of their faces.
USUK should have pressed the point, but diplomats can’t avoid their nature and agreements had to be reached. There were far too many diplomats all there in one place to allow for failure to reach agreements. The Reykjavik 1986 technique of walking out in a huff was never even on the western ammo list. Refusing to negotiate any further is a form of diplomacy. It sets boundaries for the future. Here is where you can’t go; And we don’t even threaten to walk, We just walk. FDR and Truman both should have walked on Stalin or more than one occasion. Reagan did it with Gorbachov in Iceland and it led to the groundbreaking treaties reducing nuclear weaponry world wide. People respect you when you don’t act like a sycophant. Nations are just like people and diplomatic relations are a grand game of the same sociology that rules human behavior at ground level. Why ask a nation to be shamefully passive when being treated rudely when one would never ask the same of an individual?
To wipe out the unpleasant looting of Germany affair, the USUK passively proposed a new set of rules for postwar reparations and seizures. From now on each victor should take its war booty from its own occupied zone. There would be no big kitty of German war booty to divide up, as had been agreed at Yalta.
It was done. So the Americans and British broke their word on Yalta in order to spare Russia the embarrassment of openly breaking their word on Yalta.
Stalin’s allies generously suggested with no prompting that Russia should have 50% of all the German post-war reparations as compensation for their sacrifices in the war. The Soviets had asked at Yalta for 10 billion dollars from Germany in settlement reparations. The Americans had said that they would take that figure and think it over. Now at Potsdam the Russians were demanding 10 billion in reparations and were insisting that the Americans and British had agreed to that sum at Yalta, which they had not. The western allies suggested that in light of the uncountable sums of war loot already illegally plundered in violation of Yalta, the Soviets could at least reduce their demand to nine billion. To say yes was more or less an acknowledgment that they had stolen some stuff, but Russia seemed amenable to the proposal. Ivan might take one less billion in reparations if Westy agreed to stop hounding them about the seized equipment.
The Soviet Union was not being a good friend on oil either. One of the prizes of the world is the oil of Romania. The Allies made several air raids on Romanian oil fields knowing full well that many pilots would die at what would usually be considered an unacceptable ratio. Hitler had obtained Romania’s oil in 1940 with his bloodless conquest of that country. Romania became a 1940 member of the Axis because it had seen the war footage from the Polish campaign. The Romanians knew what was in store for them if they said no.
Then the Soviet army conquered Romania on its way to Berlin. Lo and behold they had found oil. Now, with the Russians controlling the Romanian elections, the Russians were in essence controlling the Romanian oil.
But the United States had its own Romanian oil issues. It seems that before Hitler occupied Romania, the US had a few billion dollars worth of legal contractual investments and ownership in Romanian oil. Hitler had thus indirectly seized a great amount of American oil. Anthony Eden also protested to the USSR that Britian wanted it's pre-war Romanian oil leases back, or at least some compensation from Russia for them. Now if we were allies and you just happened to capture these oil-fields, we would think you’d give us back the ones we had owned for 20 years before 1940. Stalin responded by saying that the Red Army had captured German oil fields and they now belonged to the Soviet Union. Then he lit the pipe again.
Why did the Yanks and Brits put up with all this?
The Atlantic Charter, endorsed by the USSR, had made it clear that none of the victors were supposed to gain territory as a reward for war. This wasn’t supposed to be another Versailles 1919, promising freedom and delivering neo-imperialism. Now at Potsdam 1945 Stalin blurted out that Russia wanted a 1920 style “a trusteeship” over one of Italy’s colonies, preferably in North Africa or the Mediterranean. Churchill gave an angry response to this request. Stalin did let the allies blow off steam now and then. Joe stayed cool, said as he pleased, and won the actual points in the end. Allowing someone else to yell at you doesn't mean you've lost the argument. Sometimes it indicates quite the opposite. The winner has nothing to be mad about.
Truman knew at Potsdam that the atomic bomb would work and did not want to tell Stalin about it. But Stalin already knew but didn’t let on to Truman. Truman brushed away the Gensec's pipe smoke, then leaned over and hinted to Stalin that America had a new and terrible weapon. Stalin reacted nonchalantly, griping about his faulty lighter. If Stalin acted like he already knew about the bomb he might be tipping off the Yanks that there were Soviet spies deep inside the State Department.
Before the atom bomb tested successfully, the long standing goal of the US was to get Russia into the war in the Pacific against Japan. Now the gears were switched and the USA’s goal was to try and keep the USSR out of the Pacific War. We had formerly thought that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would kill so many Americans that Russia’s help would be worth it, even if it did mean sharing the occupation of Japan with the Russians in the same way it was anticipated the powers would be sharing the administration of post war Germany. It would be worth it even if it meant Russia got a slice of Manchuria.
But now the bomb made it seem as though victory was in sight without 100,000 US KIA's. Suddenly America no longer needed the Russians, but had given them license to make a move in Asia. Now Truman didn't want the Russians to launch a power grab assault in Asia in the last days of the conflict, under the guise of helping. This of course, is exactly what they did.
TO THE VICTOR GO THE BOOT
During the Potsdam conference the British voters threw Churchill out of office! He had to leave the conference. Some gratitude towards the man who led Britain through the Second World War. But no worries, they sent over the new Prime Minister Clement Atlee to finish the negotiations. “And remember this about Clement Atlee,” said Truman later, “There’s a lot less there than meets the eye.”
Few experts had predicted that Churchill would lose his job while at the Postdam Conference. But Churchill did. That's why he insisted that Clem Atlee Come along on the trip. That way he would be able to pick up the negotiations on behalf of Britian immediately. A lot of people put Atlee down. Churchill called him “a sheep in sheep's clothing” and “Clement Hitlee.”
The final documents, the “Potsdam Agreement” and the “Potsdam Protocol” would become the basis of controversy and dispute over the next several years.
Conservative critics have charged that Truman gave away too much at Potsdam.
POTSDAM DAY BY DAY – A CLOSER LOOK AT THE BIRTH OF THE COLD WAR
The Potsdam shindig began officially on July 16. Stalin was late because the brave assassin of the Caucasus, the rough tough Kobe, the man who murdered 20 million Russians and conquered Germany, was afraid of flying. Stalin too the train all the way from Moscow. Along the way he looked out the window at his new improved Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander II would have been most proud of him. Stalin had achieved almost all the exact geographical goals of empire that the Romanov's had sought for 300 years. A Russian Empire is a Russian Empire, whether it is all about radical socialist international leftism, or about Tsarist rightism. A conquered family isn't fussy about the political philosophy of their conquerers. Except for being unable to take the straits of Constatinople, Stalin, with Hitler's unwitting help, had made all the Tsar's dreams comes true (that's all of the Tsars and all of their dreams.)
Stalin had the usual suspects with his entourage.
There was Molo, Miko, Kaga, and The Berry. These are nicknames for Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Beria. Molo was in charge of Foreign Affiars and Beria was in charge of murdering Russians who once knew someone who once knew someone who once said something bad about Stalin. Lev Beria had replaced Yezhov at the NKVD, and changed it to the name KGB. Beria and Yezhov murdered far more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the morning of July 16, the British and the Americans had a half a day off waiting on Stalin, so they went in separate parties for a little sightseeing tour of Berlin.
They devastation they saw made the most hawkish of the hawks reflective and nearly sick. The buildings destroyed by bombs were crushed from the top down. The buildings destroyed by artillery were bashed in from the sides and often had one wall left standing. Churchill visited the ruins of the German Chancellery and took no pleasure. He found all the sights to be positively disgusting and said little, preferring a quick look and quick exit at every sightseeing stop, while others fished around for souvenirs. Churchill made a statement to the press that Julius Ceasar had conquered half the world by being kind to those he had defeated, and it was time to help these poor people.
Some diplomats were happy to grab souvenirs from Hitler's office. I know I would have. He had this big heavy marble desk which was now smashed up. Pieces of this desk became lifelong paperweights for some British officials. Iron Crosses, the Medal of Honor for German soldiers, were lying around like they had the value of a discarded candy wrapper. Many of these made it back to London or New York via the pockets of curious diplomats who had the inside access at Potsdam. Pieces of Hitler official war map were ripped up, folded and pocketed. They sell pieces of brick from torn up sports stadiums today for absurd prices. Who wouldn't want a slice of Hitler's war map? (I would have wanted his diary entry that admits that he's pretty sure that Marty Bormann has been tapping Eva Brain but he can't prove it.)
JULY 17 ENTER STALIN
Marshall Stalin arrived at Potsdam with a new title. He was now Generalissimo Stalin, not Marshall.
He arrived with a few simple things on his mind and he was made up about them. He wanted Russia to receive a fair share of the captured German Navy. He wanted the Allies to break relations with Franco's Spain. He didn't want China to be part of the Big Five.
Stalin had enough trouble accepting France as part of a Big Four power concept. He had no intention of allowing China to be part of of Big Five. “This is a European conference to settle the future of Europe. Why is China being discussed at all on any terms?” he asked bluntly.
Churchill and Truman threw Chiang and China under the bus by the end of the day. They would not be part of a Big Five, as originally planned. Stalin learned fast that he could handle these two star bozos.
Stalin had Spain on his mind and the other two did not at all. Stalin demanded that the victors throw Franco of Spain and restore decdent government there. He made that valid point that the Allies had just defeated the fascists and now this one remaining fascist was just sitting there in Spain and the victors were proposing to do nothing about it. What really nettled Stalin was that he had lost the civil war there to the Fascists and that was stuck in his craw. The Nazis and Italians had supplied the planes and cannon that won the Spanish Civil War, and this defeat was an insufferable insult to this insane egoist failed poet. Spain was personal. He told True-man and Church-goer that, “By destroying the Spanish regime we shall be destroying the legacy of Hitler and Mussolini,” as if no one in Spain participated in their own nationalist revolution and Franco was just a stooge of the old Axis, who oddly just happened to still be there.
Stalin harped on the German Navy. What was to become of it? Who would get how much of it? Should the Allies sink and scrap it?
These three seem only to be bothering Russia. But Poland bothered everybody. The political situation in Eastern Europe needed to be settled now that the military situation was.
MIDDLE EAST PROBLEMS 1945
Lebanon and Syria had acquired genuine independence in the last phase of the war and France had agreed to relinquish it’s mandate. But now that the war was over France was having second thoughts, and in June 1945 began landing troops in these two countries against the wishes of its wartime allies. Lebanese resistance provoked French naval shelling of Damascus and other locations.
The president of Syria begged Truman for help as French bombs fell on Syrian cities. True-man sent a strong protest to Paris and reminded France that it had agreed to recognize these nations after the war.
A-BOMBS JULY-AUGUST 1945
By August 1 1945 it was the world vs. Japan. Even Germany was helping to defeat Japan. German industry had been in Allied hands for two months. German made bombs were falling on Japan!
A sane nation would have surrendered long before the first atom bomb was dropped, but the cult of military ego equaled practical insanity. They have only themselves to blame for being double-nuked. The war was over long before it was over. They should have surrendered. They had their chance. They have a lot of nerve playing victim. They started the war, murder millions of civilians by hand to hand method and then refused to surrender when surrounded by the cops. Now 60 years later they still claim to be victims of police brutality.
On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico. It went off better than expected. The news reached US leaders at Potsdam. Now the Americans knew that a nuclear bomb would work.
However this standard version of events is a little bit inaccurate. The bomb tested on July 16 was actually the second nuclear bomb ever made. The first one, the one that was dropped on Hiroshima was already armed and dangerous when the famous Alamogordo test of 7.16 went off. The US leadership was very confident that this uranium bomb would detonate. This U-bomb, was considered safely in the bank.
The one being tested on July 16 was the plutonium bomb. Pluto was the one the US wasn’t sure would work. The plutonium bomb packed a bigger punch. So when someone whispered to Truman at Potsdam that the bomb had worked, they meant the second better bomb. Professor Greenleaf states plainly that the Hiroshima bomb was ‘obsolete’ when it was used on August 6. The standard bomb was now plutonium, but since we had a working antique uranium bomb we might as well use it. People generally think that the first one was equal or better to the second because it killed more people. But that's only because the first bomb landed on the bulls-eye and the second one did not.
The city of Kyoto was originally chosen as the target for the first nuke. But Secretary Stimson had spent much time there as a young man and had a sentimental attachment to that beautiful Kyoto. So the people of Hiroshima took the brunt of the blast because Stimson met some nice geishas in Kyoto back in 29.
On August 6, 1945 a lone B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay (named after Eleanor Roosevelt) dropped a single uranium atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. It exploded with a pop equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. The world had no knowledge of such destructive force and the damage inflicted took even the bomb’s inventors by surprise. In an instant four square miles of Hiroshima ceased to exist. 80,000 civilians, many of them completely innocent, were killed.
Among the innocent were American POW's and no less than 20,000 Korean slave laborers, or one innocent dead Korean for every ton of TNT power. How could such a high percentage of the victims be slave labor Korean? Easy. More than half of the civilian population had been evacuated from most of the Japanese cities that were within the range of the B-29's. Kidnapped foreign civilian laborers were keeping the cities running smoothly while all but the lower classes of Japanese were safely in the countryside.
Like this story wasn't tragic enough already.
Three days later another B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb, the better bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. The bomb missed the target by a couple of miles so that ground zero was not at center city. Nevertheless Nagasaki was destroyed and approximately 40,000 people died. In both cities the most unfortunate lingered on in agony for days or weeks with nuclear poison slowly killing them. The lucky ones died in a single heartbeat.
After the second bomb, Japan decided to surrender. They could take a lot but this was a bit too much. Even Samurai morality could not justify hanging on stubbornly while city after city was wiped off the map while offering no resistance. They knew not that the US had no third bomb in the bank.
There is another possible reason why Japan gave up after the strike on Nagasaki. According to historian Bergamini, a captured American flyer was being tortured in a Japanese PW camp in order to extract information on where the next A-bomb would be dropped. The pilot had no knowledge on this subject, but to satisfy the torturers, he gave them the answer they were probing for: Tokyo. When this information was relayed to the Emperor he knew what to do. Japan surrendered.
Revisionist history has made America the villains for dropping ‘the bomb’ on so many innocent people. But the tally of critics reached impressive numbers only after the dangers and emotions of WWII began to fade.
Were there more humanitarian alternatives that would not have hindered the war effort? There were many in the US government who initially wished to see the bomb detonated in a public but safe place to demonstrate to Japan what was in store for them if they did not surrender. This idea was rejected on two grounds. Firstly, what if the bomb failed to go off? No one was certain it would work. Obviously that would be an embarrassment for the US and such an event might if anything, strengthen the resolve of the Japanese.
Secondly, there were only two bombs ready for deployment. One could not be sacrificed in a demonstration. If the US had 12 ready to rumble this probably would have been done. God knows whether it would have convinced Japan to give in. I doubt it. The first one dropped on Hiroshima did not cause Japan to surrender. Do the algebra. If wiping out Hiroshima did not make them give in, how in the name of Moses can anyone suggest then that a humanitarian demonstration bomb would have caused Japan to surrender?
Fortunately, Japan did not know how many more bombs we had or else they might not have bowed out. We were using a nuclear Texas hold 'em bluff card (I actually don't know the exact rules of T.H.E., but you get the point.) There actually was only one bomb left. If Japan had not surrendered after Nagasaki, the USAF would have nuked a third city in mid-September. But after that it would have been at least six months before the next one would have reported for duty. In the meantime the dreaded invasion of Japan would have been begun on bloody schedule.
The bomb saved more lives than it took. Many of the 1960’s college demonstrators against nuclear bombs would never have been born if their opinions had been honored in August of 1945. Estimates of US casualties in the arduous conquest of all four Japanese big islands run from 500,000 to one million casualties based on the small samples of Iwo Jima, Tarawa and Okinawa. There were two and a half million Japanese troops ready to fight and 28 million civilians more than willing to fanatically support them. US deaths would probably have surpassed the combined total in all the military operations of US history before and after 1945, that is, including Korea, Nam and Iraq. The bomb saved these deaths as well as the one million Japanese soldiers and civilians that would have perished in the estimated two-year struggle.
Japan would not have surrendered without the A-Bomb. Japan knew it was beaten but its culture did not allow surrender. The samurai code had painted the country into a deadly corner. But the A-Bomb enabled the Japanese to surrender because in the new situation they could do so without losing face. The national ego could not surrender as long as it could put up the remotest excuse for a fight on any front, air, land, or sea. But with single airplanes dropping single bombs wiping out entire big cities from 29,000 feet high, the pride issue was satisfied. On August 5 Japan was the boxer getting raked over the coals but still standing somehow. But on August 10 A-Bombed Japan was just a guy tied to a tree and getting beaten with a baseball bat. The A-bomb justified surrender as no other weapon could have.
School classrooms still debate the big question, should the USA, and should Truman have dropped the bomb.
No one was debating it at the time; Not in the White House, not in our diners, not in the press, not even in most of our churches. So debating it now is something of a cheap-shot against the American leaders and people who lived through these times.
Since WWII the nuclear powers have kept their nukes in the holster, even when fighting serious conventional wars. It's now unthinkable to use them. No-holds barred war was now a thing of the past, except for small countries with no nukes. Ironically, the bigger the country, the less it can use its best weaponry. This contributes to the rise or terrorism. The have nots not only can use all their weapons, they can use all their dirtiest cheap show below the belt weapons as a matter of policy.
But such restraint was already in play long before Hiroshima. The use of chemical weapons was a high art form by the time World War One was only half over. Yet World War II was fought without chemical weapons ever used once in combat. Both sides considered the mass murder of civilians and soldiers alike with such a sadistic weapon to be unthinkable. When a weapon is unthinkable even to Hitler, you know it must be pretty bad. (The Italians used poison gas in the Ethiopian War of 1934-6, but that was not officially part of WWII)
There were members of the US JCS who pleaded for permission to use chemical weapons against the Japanese caves on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They argued that chemical weapons would save more lives than they took. Roosevelt wouldn't hear of it. So we used napalm flamethrowers instead, a kindler, gentler approach to combat.
The United States continued to develop an advanced chemical weapons capability throughout the conflict, just in case the enemy used chemicals first. The invaders of Normandy had plenty of chemical weapons on hand just in case. They didn't have to use them, but if Hitler had unleashed them in 1944 it would have been a gas fight on a large scale.
“UNCLE SAM!”
It had required the destruction of two cities with two bombs but Japan finally threw in the meatball towel. The negotiation between Japan and the United States for surrender were held in in Geneva at the offices of the Swiss government. On August 12 word got through the Washington that things were looking good, but it wasn't finalized.
On August 14 the Swiss government called Truman and told him it was over. Japan had agreed to give in and say, “Uncle Sam.” Japan accepted the terms offered by the United States. Those terms, of course were no terms at all. It was unconditional surrender. On the other hand there was an unofficial unwritten understanding that the victors would not hang the Emperor, and that played a crucial role. Even with a hail-storm of nukes, the Japanese would never countenance the trial and execution of their God on earth, Emperor Hirohito. They worshipped this guy more than America did Michael Jackson in 1984!
MISSOURI NO COMPROMISE 9 2 45
Japan formally surrendered on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor on September second. My father later served on Mighty Mo during the Korean War. My grandfather had served on the USS Maryland in WWII. To keep the family tradition of naval courage alive I built a plastic model of the USS Arizona during the Vietnam War.
MacArthur presided over the surrender ceremonies.
Foreign Minister “Shiggy” Shigemitsu signed first for Japan. He seemed to stall before signing and Admiral Halsey later said he got so mad he wanted to slap him hard on the back and say, “sign, you dirty no good. ...”. But Shiggy (the American press called him that) was just confused because he didn't know exactly where to sign.
My favorite story of the Missouri ceremony involves alcohol. One member of the Australian delegation was totally drunk and made disdainful childish goofy faces at the the Japanese delegates all afternoon. He was close enough to get under their skin, and no one ordered him out of the line for being out of line. These Japanese delegates probably remembered those faces that guy made far more than anything else from that day. Decades later they can still see those drunken cross-eyed eyes and the tongue sticking out. Once in a blue moon, alcohol can serve a decent worthwhile purpose.
WE'RE NUMBER ONE!
Americans celebrated peace all over the country with a million parties. A half a million American families did not celebrate.
The United States probably should have hung the emperor as a war criminal but it was decided to let him live the same way the FBI lets arrested criminals plea bargain if they turn state’s evidence to catch more and bigger fish. If the Allies had tried, convicted and executed Emperor Hirohito the Japanese people would have protested violently and then resisted the occupation with unthinkable tenacity. Thousands would have died so that one guilty man could also die. Instead it was decided to let one guilty man go free so that massive amounts of blood in the streets could be avoided, much the same as with the OJ Simpson jury’s decision in 1995. Hirohito was asked to make a speech to his nation to facilitate a peaceful post-war occupation. This he did. Most Japanese had never heard their Emperor’s voice before the night they turned on their radios and heard Hirohito instructing them to lay down their weapons and cooperate with the Americans. They wept by the millions.
Hirohito was off the hook but nine Japanese war criminals were tried and executed after the war, far fewer than deserved it and far fewer than in post-war Germany.
Overall the US occupation of Japan from 1945-1955 was peaceful but naturally there was some bitterness on both sides. My close friend’s father Phil Crimmins was shaken up with post traumatic stress syndrome from his Pacific War service and it wasn’t from combat duty. He had served in the Army in Europe and was then transferred to Japan for occupation duty late in 45. One day he saw an old Japanese man approach a GI on a long high footbridge over a railroad yard. The old Japanese man asked the American for a cigarette. The GI yelled at the old man and threw him over the rail to his death. Crimmins was torn over whether to report the incident and never did. He wondered how many friends this GI had seen killed by Japanese and in the end decided to accept the insanity as a casualty of war, not a peacetime murder. Phil was plagued with horror, guilt, and nightmares from the incident for the rest of his life.
Self government was restored to Japan in 1955 but the United States had a lock on Japanese foreign policy for many years after that. To this day Japan is not allowed an offensive military capability and, more definitively, American military bases remain there, a piece of US territory on Japanese soil. These Guantanamos demonstrate that the war is not completely over in Japan.
COST OF WAR
Financially the war cost the USA 250 million a day. The government spent almost twice as much money during WWII as it had spent collectively in all the years of the republic up to 1941! In fact, America spent almost half as many federal dollars on WWII as Obama spends in a day!
The war cured the Depression and enabled history to think that the New Deal deserved the credit. The war factories produced 17 million new jobs. Real purchasing power adjusted for inflation was up more than 50% in 1945 for both farmers and industrial workers than it had been in 1941.
COULD THE GERMANS HAVE BEATEN THE RUSSIANS?
This was a question for discussion in a recent forum. Could the Germans have beaten the Soviets? Hmmm.
If Hitler had never attacked in the west, and then attacked Russia in May of 1941 with everything he had, I think it's more than possible he could have won. By September, with Russia backed up to the Urals, the Japanese might have reconsidered the Pearl Harbor plan and went with the Army leaders who wanted to strike west, not South like the IJN wanted. If Japan had then stabbed Russia in the back and joined with Nazi Germany by attacking from the east, it would have been Poland 1939 all over again. Germany and Japan combined could have finished off Russia and turned it into a satellite state while the US stayed out.
But from the moment when Hitler chose to expend his resources conquering the west, stalemating with the UK, and fighting an undeclared naval war with the US, Germany probably never had a real chance against the USSR.
Within what actually did happen, I think his real mistake was being too tempted by the oil fields of the Caucasus. If he had concentrated in the North and drove on Moscow immediately, he could have set up a grand sphere of influence in the North stretching from Brittany to the Urals, and shut the Allied Lend Lease flow by the Arctic route. Certainly a concentrated Northern German effort would have swallowed Leningrad and deprived Harrison Salisbury of his Pulitzer.
The even bigger mistake was no co-opting the dissatisfied Ukrainians, who welcomed the Germans as liberators and would have gladly fought for the Nazis. Even Goebbels urged Hitler to do this, the fuhrer refused because he had too much of a racial superiority complex to let Ukrainian sub-humans fight for the Fatherland.
The Soviets charged for decades that many in the west hoped for nothing more than to sit back and watch the USSR and Nazi Germany engage in a protracted and debilitating full-scale war. That's true. But it didn't work out as planned as we all got dragged in anyway.
COLD WAR BEGINS WITH GOUZENKO 9.5.46
On September 5, 1945 a Russian cipher clerk in Ottawa Canada
defected to the West with a satchel full of 109 incriminating documents proving that the Soviet Union had a major spy ring deep inside Canada.
This spy ring (including what would today be called “sleeper agents”) had been stealing the secrets to the atomic bomb, the same secrets the US was sharing with Canada.
The defection was kept secret from the public for five months so that the information could be utilized. Then in February of 1946 19 people were arrested and charged with espionage for the USSR. It was banner headlines in the United States for weeks. Gouzenko was a household name. The Cold War was up and running and out in the open as of Gouzenko February 1946. The free-world leadership had lost its naiveté about the USSR.
Gouzenko assumed a new identity and a new life in Canada under the SPP (Spy Protection Program.) Right up until the time of his death in 1982 he appeared on talk shows with a hood over his head, looking like the ‘Unknown Comic.’ Below is Igor’s standard 8x10 glossy.
“Now Take My Spy Ring, ..Please”
Gouzenko died more than 25 years ago and I don’t understand why all pictures of him remain the hooded kind. I think it’s safe for him to come out now. Did no one ever take a picture of him without the hood? At least Gouzenko saved a few bucks annually at Halloween.
Half of those arrested in the Gouzenko affair were innocent and half were guilty as all heck. The left historians shout about the innocent ones ignoring the sins of the guilty, and the right historian shouts about the guilty ones, ignoring the ruining of innocent lives as if a minor concern.
There was however no comparable attempt by the west to spy in the Soviet Union in the immediate months after the Second World War ended. They fired the first cloak-and-dagger dagger. Gouzenko proved it.
FOREIGN MINISTERS CONFERENCE 9 -1945
The Potsdam Conference of top dogs left many issues outstanding between the allies. Every time an impasse came up, the leaders delegated the resolution of that problem to the Foreign Ministers conference they knew was coming.
It was ironic. The more important the problem, the more they delegated it to the politicians one rung below them. Churchill, Truman, and Stalin always breathed a bit easier when an insoluble problem was settled by saying that the Foreign Ministers would work it out later. It was a total sweep under the rug of meat and potato problems and issues.
When this conference of foreign ministers met in London two months later it seemed that they couldn’t work out these problems either. What a surprise. Russia still wanted new territory in North Africa, control of the Dardanelles, Russian-controlled elections in eastern Europe and ten billion dollars in reparations. The only difference was that now it was Byrnes, Bevin and Molotov arguing bitterly over eastern Europe instead of Stalin, Churchill and Truman.
The Soviets still insisted that the elections in areas of Eastern Europe controlled by the Red Army were pluralistic and free. The western Allies said they were fraudulent.
The Soviets also once again insisted, as they had at Potsdam on a multilateral Allied occupation of post-war Japan. They wanted a piece of the Japanese pie. The USA said no way. But in keeping the Russians out of Japan the USA had to shut out its other Allies too.
Some of them resented it, Australia in particular for some pretty fair reasons. Australia had suffered, fought, and sacrificed heavily to defeat Japan in the Pacific. But the US couldn’t well say that we were going to let our other allies share in the occupation of Japan, but not Russia. So to keep up a cover story for blocking Russia out of Japan the US had to pretend it didn’t want any Australian help in the occupation of Japan.
The Soviet Union repeated its demand from Potsdam that only Russia and Turkey should be the guardians of the Dardanelles, the gateway to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. The Rooskies wanted the old Montreux Convention revised so that the fox could guard the henhouse. As at Potsdam the USA and GB rejected this outrageous demand for the dream of the Russians for centuries, control of the straights of Constantinople. This time they were going to pretend it wasn’t Slavic hegemony, greed and avarice, but the result by any other name would smell just as conquistador.
EASTERN EUROPE - THE BIG PROBLEM
What was wrong with these people? Didn’t any of them have brain?
The impasse over Bulgaria and Romania was insoluble but no one on either side would face it and they kept on pretending to negotiate in the clothes of allies as though the lines had not already been drawn and could not be merged.
Here’s how it worked and it wasn’t really complicated.
At Yalta Russia had lied in order to keep the second front coming by saying that when the war was over, the nations of Russian occupied Eastern Europe would be allowed to hold free elections under international supervision. The USA was stupid enough to believe them because FDR was fond of the Soviet experiment and always had been, and his naïve idiot pink attitude trickled down from the top.
Then when the moment of truth came the Russian did not allow free elections in Bulgaria and Romania while saying they were. The Soviet Union then feigned outrage that we would dare to not believe them.
Now the diplomats had to sit down and work this out. The USSR explains that for security purposes it cannot accept any governments unfriendly to Russia on its borders. Here is where the USA lost its guts. We should have laughed in their face and said “Make up your mind! Free elections obviously includes the risk that the results will install a government not particularly friendly to the Soviet Union. Free elections with a guarantee that they must go one way and not the other is a complete oxymoron. That’s like saying lets flip a coin but it must come out tails.” That’s what we should have said.
No, instead the USA was stupid enough to say, “Yes. we agree. The Soviet Union must had governments friendly to it on its borders, and we also must insist on completely free elections.” For the length of 1945 this ridiculous, ludicrous, preposterous, insane, mentally deranged equation sat on the negotiating table between the two counties and the UN. The both sides acted outraged that both contradictory things could not be worked out. Did the USA think that the free voters of Eastern Europe would elect to have a Communist and/or Russian controlled government ruling over them? The obvious result of a free election would logically have to be complete rejection of Soviet suzerainty. Why was the United States so naïve to think they could have it both ways?
At least the Russian could face the truth and had the decency to lie about it. We couldn’t face the truth and didn’t have the guts to lie about it. Instead we chose to lie to ourselves and told ourselves, our diplomats and the American people that “yes, we can demand free elections in eastern Europe and can also absolutely agree that the Soviet Union had to have friendly countries all around its borders.” Does anyone not see the stupidity in play here? Did the US really think that he USSR had not been hostile to freedom in its 28 year history and that the people of eastern Europe did not know that? Did we think they didn’t recall the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the invasion of Poland, the invasion of Finland and the general state of Hell that reigned inside Russia’s borders? Were we hoping the people of Bulgaria would freely vote for that?
Why did we delude ourselves and play this embarrassing game of ‘how stupid can the USA get?” We always blame the Russians for the demise of democracy in Eastern Europe. Its largely our fault for agreeing that the Russians must have states friendly to it on its borders. That was like handing Eastern Europe to Russia. We clung to our proud rhetoric while keeping our powder wet.
The US refused to recognize the Soviet dominated nations of Eastern Europe and continued to insist that we supported the need for governments friendly to the USSR in the area. Doyeeeeeee! That’s like demanding that free elections in Harvard Square must go Republican.
It was clearly that silly and illogical. The more I read the more ridiculous it seems.
It would have been bad enough if we had foolishly insisted that the Soviet Union could have states friendly to it on it’s borders and that these states must have free elections. That was barely logical at face value but impossible in practice.
It would have been worse if we had insisted that the Soviet Union should have states friendly to it on its borders and that these states must have free elections. That would have been supporting the Soviet Union in its foreign policy goals for no good reason and more importantly, it would have been insisting on the impossible in theory and in practice.
But no, these two absurdities weren’t enough. The USA decided to agree and in fact insist that the Soviet Union must have states friendly to it on its borders and that these states must hold free elections. Every account confirms this.
Wow.
Now we were not only hoping for the impossible, as in the first example, not only supporting the impossible as in the second example, now we were actually demanding the impossible, painting ourselves into a corner and guaranteeing the launching of the Cold War by cutting off the face saving retreat position for Russia.
The only way for Russia to guarantee states friendly to it on its borders was to prevent free elections. This they did. Then we protested self-righteously for 44 years as if it wasn’t partly our fault for acquiescing like a bunch of FDR wimps in the first place. If we were going to agree that the Soviet Union must have friendly neighbors we should have lived with it and moved on without scolding them for what we permitted.
As is so often with the case of the Democratic Party national leadership in a foreign policy crisis, their need and desire to play both liberal and conservative simultaneously led to nothing but nothing at best and disaster at worst. It was time to pick a team. Were we going to play realist politics like some famous 18th century diplomat at Vienna dividing up Europe shrewdly and furtively, or were we going to be Wilsonian idealists free elections and high morals were our only positions? We tried to play both roles at Yalta at Potsdam and at all the post war confederacies. If only Teddy Roosevelt had been there at these gatherings instead of FDR’s boys, it would have been a different story. Teddy would have blown his cigar smoke right back in Stalin’s face and then blown out the match when Stalin tried to light his pipe.
Why did the USA put up with Soviet bullying for about a year and a half after WWII? Because we were drooling with hope and joy over the UN. Our idealist leaders and intellectuals were wiping away tears of joy, while Stalin was wiping up a beer spill with his copy of the UN Charter. US foreign policy was resolved on one thing as the primary goal. Nothing must come between the US and the USSR to ruin the UN. It was a triangle of capital U. Stalin’s emotions over the coming US. Getting tough with the Soviets was secondary and not even desirable at that. Stalin was testing us, seeing how far he could push us, and we kept turning the other cheek.
None of our diplomats were ever instructed with a walk position. There was nothing the Soviets could do or demand that would trigger a walk out. We negotiated every step of the way without a walk bar and only a fool does that. Granted, most walk outs are for show hoping the other party will back off and allow a walk back in, but if you’re not even willing to play that way, the other side can grab you by the scruff of the neck and work the rest of the deal form that perspective.
For all our military might, the US was being held by the collar by Stalin for the first months of the post war world, blackmailing us on 100 issues because of our desperate love for the UN. Truman got tough later on, don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling Truman a wimp. But at first he was handicapped by the inherited wimp legacy of FDR foreign policy which he had to respect. Truman tried to be an FDR wimp for six months or so and then guy that commanded an artillery battery in heavy combat in WWI came out and he became his own man. Harry had had enough. But by the time he snapped out of his FDR fog a lot of damage had been done.
THE USA RECOGNIZES AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY
There was a different situation in each state of Eastern Europe and clearly Austria was not dominated by the Soviet Union in anywhere near the same manner as in Romania or Bulgaria, even if it was largely occupied by Soviet troops. Therefore on October 20 the USA recognized the new government of Austria. Two weeks later the United States recognized Hungary. These gestures were largely to show Russia that things could be worked out in the other areas. But Austria and Hungary did not share a direct border with the USSR, so the Russians were willing to allow some semblance of free elections there, a chance they did not dare take on their pat borders.
OCCUPATION OF GERMANY 1945-47
The US had no troops in Berlin when Germany surrendered on May 5 1945, but Russia, the US and Great Britain had agreed in advance to a tripartite occupation Greater Germany. Within the Soviet sphere, Berlin would also be divided into three occupation zones of roughly equal size.
The US and UK would withdraw from much of its occupied territory and turn it over to the Soviets. In exchange, the Soviets would allow the other powers to cross Soviet held territory in order to enter Berlin. As the map will show, the city of Berlin was an irredentist time bomb, just waiting to go off and cause trouble. Berlin was in the Soviet zone of conquest but the powers had agreed to a join occupation so it became an island of trouble in the Red Sea. It was as if the South was administering half of New York City in late 1860.
France wanted in on the division of Germany but Stalin agreed to this only on the condition that the slice awarded to France came out of the territory allotted initially to the US and UK. Russia was not going to surrender an inch of its spoils to reward the French who had dropped out of the fight against fascism without valor, thus indirectly causing the death of a hundred thousand or more Russian men. Stalin never got over his anger towards the French.
The French were allowed in on these conditions and now the maneuvers began. The displaced populations in American held territory were given the option of leaving with the occupying GI’s or staying behind and waiting for the Russians to come. Nearly everyone chose to leave with the US or UK armies.
The west had given up its only trump card, the territory in the north and south of Germany which it had conquered by force but was in the post war Soviet zone of occupation. It was their one chance to extract reasonable and fair terms from the Soviets on Berlin and other questions.
The Russians marked a corridor for safe travel from western Germany into Berlin, a geographical highway through the red zone where US UK French forces would not be bothered. But in accepting this the Allies made a mistake. By this acquiescence they accepted the principle that the entire Soviet Zone was not open for safe travel. From now on the facilitation of traveling through the Soviet zone could be taken away later since we took it as something given to us, not a right as an ally in a winning war. In exchange for this limited right to travel to Berlin (a city of little real strategic value except as a symbol of former Nazi political power), the US and GB gave back hard-won valuable territory the size of two or three New England states. Later when Stalin closed Berlin to the outside world, it became clear we had been ripped-off. We traded much for the right to Berlin and then they tried to take that away from us with no compensation for our massive territorial withdrawals.
On July 4 1945 US forces entered Berlin. Each of the four powers agreed to a standing military force of 25,000 troops for their sector.
The four winning powers administered Berlin through an ‘Allied Control Council’. It was the French, not the Russians, who made this work inefficient at the outset. ACC decisions required unanimous consent and the French repeatedly said no to decisions the other three had agreed upon. Later of course, the Soviets played strong-armed hard-ball on Berlin in endless ways but some experts believe that the first setback in the cold war came from the inability to develop a united front through the ACC and that mostly as a result of French obstructionism.
The problems of administering Berlin as well as the rest of Germany were many. Food, currency, transportation, postal issues, repair and rebuilding of bridges of and roads, employment, water, denazification, prosecution, security, problems with Allies, and other problems made the work load large. It was a nightmare. To give one example, hundreds of Soviet soldiers had tried to stay behind in the American sector when Berlin was first divided. They were hiding in abandoned buildings with their rifles by day and foraging for food and plunder at night. When the US 82nd Airborne MP’s tried to arrest these men there were a number of gunfights in which Russians were killed. These Rooskies knew what FDR and the Allied Control Council did not. That the USSR was the new focus of evil in the modern world and had supplanted Hitler, rather than squashed his spirit form the globe. They would rather die at the end of an American bullet than face the consequences if arrested and sent back behind Communist lines.
In the middle of the mix was the problem of the German repatriation from Eastern Europe. Part of the postwar agreement between the four powers was an understanding that the Germans that were living in eastern Europe outside of Germany’s borders were to be sent back home. It was reversed lebensraum. It was a drastic solution to the German problem and as usual in harsh measures it was favored mostly by the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent by France. This was a holocaust of homelessness for Germans as punishment for the war. For every Jew that died in a concentration camp, a German was booted out of Eastern Europe after the war and sent packing back west. There were millions of homeless Germans from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Czechoslovakia and other locations pouring into Germany and creating stress for the winning four powers. Hitler had cleaned the Jews out of Germany but in the end he cleansed all the Germans out of Europe. The four powers were determined that German minorities in eastern Europe would stop causing world wars so they were forbidden from existing at all. Some American leaders thought that this was too rough of a punishment and caused administrative nightmares that made the morality of it not worthwhile but they were overruled for the greater food of four power co-operation, or ‘quadripartite government.’ At one point in 1946 the US reported more than 8 millions German refugees from Eastern Europe in its sector alone.
By the end of 1945 American military government in its sections of Germany was stable. At one point there were over a million American men in the occupation forces of Germany. That was reduced rapidly, first with deployment to Japan, and then in order to get the war weary veterans back home. About 300,000 were in place at the end of 1945.
The end of the war had not meant the end of the draft and the replacement troops coming over to Germany had been drafted to win a war that had already been won. When they were sent to Germany they created a morale problem. The GI's wanted to go home and there was pressure in the states to help get them back. The slogan going around was “Back alive in 45”
As long as Ike was in charge in Germany, his personal charisma and legend was enough to inspire at least a modicum of élan. But when he left for the states in the late fall of 1945, the situation among the neo-GI’s became problematic. They demanded to be sent home and at one point there was in Frankfurt a demonstration of angry US soldiers. Thousands marched in protest demanding that they be sent home at once. There was a similar event in Japan at this time. This would be shocking even today. In 1945 it was more so. The removal of Monty and Zhukhov from Germany completed the removal of the personal charisma factor. These three war heroes had helped maintain an atmosphere of co-operation and good-will between the three winning powers and the French tag-along.
A pressing problem was what do with and about the former Nazis in Germany. There are similarities in this situation to that of the USA in 1866. It was obvious that the US alone could not administer the government of Germany very long at every level local and national. Talented and efficient German political and administrative personnel had to be found and employed. But most of the talent in Germany in 1946 was ex-Nazi. The anti-Nazi people with talent were either fertilizer by now or had fled in time and were living in Chicago. Trying to find able and efficient Germans to run the post-war government who had never collaborated with the Nazis was an almost absurd goal.
Slightly more than 100,000 political prisoners were being held in the US zone. These were the Nazis that were considered a threat to internal security. It might have been right to arrest interrogate investigate and prosecute everyone that had done anything wrong as a Nazi, but it was impossible. A million Nazis got away with murder and miscellaneous other evil deeds because it was impossible in practice to punish everyone.
What made matters worse, the US and the world needed a strong economic Germany to keep the machine running. The UK and US appreciated this more than the French and Russians who had to see the Germans in their line of vision on the continent whereas the US-UK team did not. We had to pour money and help into a nation that had been trying to kill our young men for five years. A punishing occupation administration might well have been the most moral thing to do if evil must be punished in the name of justice, but it probably would have produced more bad than good. The cycle of forgiveness must be established in order for the cycle of revenge to stop. The punitive peace of 1919 and its disastrous results were well remembered. Punishing Germany would be punishing ourselves and might lead to yet another war down the road.
This was our thinking at least. The Russians were taking everything but the Elbe River back to Russia in a big truck. Skilled German workers by the thousands were kidnapped and sent back to Russia to work for the rest of their lives. The US protested and the Soviets laughed under their breath while they said they had no idea what we were talking about.
Some Americans tried to warn the Russian government that taking entire factories back to Russia on flatbed trains might not work out. The factory is an infrastructure built from the foundation on up and taking parts does not mean a successful recreation of the whole. Its one thing to take an old roller coaster from Coney Island and set it up at a new park in Ohio. Its another to take a tank factory in Frankfurt and try to set it up in Sverdlovsk. Many of these factory lootings ended up costing the Russians rather than benefiting them. Trains filled with rusting factory equipment were reported for years after all across central Russia, unable to do in the motherland what productive work it had done in the fatherland.
In US controlled Germany democracy was instituted in layers. It was not instituted from the top down. In January of 1946 Germans in towns of less than 20,000 people were allowed to vote for local officials. In June the franchise was extended to allow voting in larger towns and at the county level. Turnout was excellent. This was the birth of the democracy that is still living on in Germany today.
Currency was another postwar problem. The black market was a far too popular means of doing business. A special Allied military marc was used in the immediate post-war period in all sectors. The Russians asked for its own plates so it could print it’s own quota of the money. The Soviets promised they would provide verification on the amount of money they printed. They reneged on this and printed all they needed. The US at the end of 1946 designed its own military scrip for soldiers pay.
Article 14 of the Potsdam Protocol had dictated that Germany was to be administered as a singular economic entity, not four Germanys each with their own worlds of laws and regulations. But from the moment the peace celebrations came to an end, the Soviets in Germany reneged on the Potsdam Protocol.
Americans were being treated rudely by Soviet officials when they traveled to Berlin. A few who strayed from the narrow corridor permitted for travel across Soviet controlled territory were arrested and detained for days while US diplomats had to do handstands to get them released. This was in time of peace between supposed allies. Soviet authorities stopped US trains bound for Berlin for unannounced inspections looking for German Nazi collaborators. The United States protested both the substance and the spirit of these actions and assured the Russians that the only Germans on these trains were in the employ of the USA and had passed a competent screening for swastika tattoos.
The Soviets clearly were pretending to honor the Potsdam agreements while their actions showed otherwise. They were building the iron curtain in stages.
Truman wasn’t blind. His bifocals were working properly on October 27, 1945 when he made a key foreign policy speech in Central Park, New York City. He elaborated 12 points, two short of the old Wilson record. Points two and six are the most relevant to the situation in central Europe,
“Two; We believe in the eventual return of sovereign
rights and self government to all peoples who have
been deprived of them by force.”
You can bet your pay check he wasn’t talking about the use of force by the Nazis.
“Six; We shall refuse to recognize any government
imposed upon any nation by the force of any
foreign power. In some cases it may be impossible
to prevent forceful imposition of such a
government.”
Harry was letting the Russians know that he knew what they were up to in Europe (It would prove impossible for the USA to hold true to that threat. We held out on the Baltic states for decades but had little choice but to recognize sooner or later states like Poland, Romania, and Hungary even though their governments were imposed by force.)
Then there was the issue of German industry. Britain wanted German industrial might maintained with an eye to a strong greater-European economy. France on the other extreme, wanted Germany stripped to a pastoral, poor country with next to no industry at all, and with the Ruhr and the Saar given outright to France. Russia was closer to the French position than to Britain’s’ and the US was closer to Britain’s than to that of France.
France could not calm down enough to see any practical value in maintaining a strong post-war Germany. Toulon and Tours, and Fixin were too blinded by hate and fear to see thing rationally.
Russia of course, was dismantling East German industrial plants and hauling them back to Russia as reparations payments. The other three big powers had agreed to this. But Russia kept secret the exact figures of what it was taking which made it hard to manage industrial statistics for further decisions. The Soviets had also been promised a slice of the industrial might of Western Germany for reparations. But since this came out of our half of the cake, Russia was obliged to compensate western Germany and the Allies with product of equal value such as coal, lumber or food.
You can guess what happened. We kept sending them west German factories and they kept stalling and reneging on payment for these industrial reparations. In early 1946 the Americans and the British informed the Russians that since they had not paid their bill on what we had already given them from west German industry, the deal was off and no more was coming. The Russians had stolen a big chunk of industry from our zones of occupation at no cost, except in good-will, a commodity they had no real interest in anyway since every dictatorship represents the spirit of its boss in a true trickle down effect. The Soviets attacked the west in print continually for failing to deliver the promised West German industry while failing to tell the truth about their part in the stoppage.
In another incident two judges were arrested in early 1946 by Communist German police inside of the US controlled section of Berlin. These judges were not conforming to the party line and they disappeared. The police could not be identified but everyone knew. The US protested the violation of our colonial sovereignty in West Berlin
The Soviets in the spring of 1946 still did not yet have full political control of its occupied areas. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans were nominally independent and were setting up administrations which had Communist participation without Communist domination. But the military occupation of these nations was the all-powerful fact behind the scenes at all time and it has always been my opinion that the first battle of the Cold War was over before it started. The Soviet Union had won these lands and now had to play a cute game of fake democracy in order to create fake good-will towards the capitalist states which in turn would inspire the good-guys to leave Europe or at least downgrade the enormous Allied military presence in place in May of 1945. This is exactly what happened.
With each passing month the real democracies were demobilizing literally and figuratively. It wasn’t just troops and tanks that the west was downgrading in Europe. The Allies were also powering down in both military and political truculence while the Soviets in sly fashion were carefully consolidating and strengthening their position in Eastern Europe for the succession of coups which would make their domination official. By the time the Soviets made their play in Eastern Europe they had already taken over the balance of power in Central Europe. And they might not have dared the one without having the other first, so timing was everything.
It is noteworthy that when it came time to pull the switch on full Communist takeovers the moves came piecemeal. The west would have reacted viscerally if the Russians had pulled the trap on six or seven countries in the same week or month. But like a museum display with buttons that light up only one specific spot, Stalin swallowed only one victim at a time. When the spotlight went on one place the others went dark until the chosen turkey was in the Soviet shopping cart. Then another would light up and the pattern would repeat until the Iron Curtain was completed. (A similar pattern in reverse happened in 1989-1990). This was a strategy of divide and conquer with timing being the divider.
July 12 1946 was a watershed in the political settlement of post-war Germany. On that day the Council of Ministers met with all four powers represented as usual. But this time the other three had reached a breaking point with Soviet obstructionism and hostility. At this meeting the Allies decided to combine its three zones into a West German state where freedom had a half a chance and to let the Russians do what they were obviously going to do anyway in the east. The travesty of Soviet adherence to the Potsdam protocols was no longer taken seriously from this point on. We had tried and failed and the Russians were no longer going to make fools out of us.
In October of 1946 the city of Berlin had a free election for City Council. The votes would be counted in all for sectors The Soviets strong-armed the voters in their sector of Berlin but it was not enough to win. The Communist Party of Germany (the SED) won only 19 percent of the vote. The Russians learned their lesson and in the future were careful about participating in any election they could not control.
The spirit of four power co-operation was fading into a memory as 1947 opened. The Soviets were making aggressive moves in most of the other continental states of Europe through Communist organizations in those countries, backed by the threat of Soviet military power. The last meeting of the four power Council of Ministers held in Moscow in March was no longer taken seriously by the west. The USA had no hope for any results by now. It was going through the motions of an agreed to diplomatic summit but there was no longer any trust for the Russians under pay Joey. Secretary of State Marshall attended for the US and came back to the states to warn the people that we were in for a heap of trouble with the Russians.
In Berlin Soviet propaganda began to boast about Russian air superiority. To punctuate the boast the Soviets flew impressive formations of fighter planes over the city to shock and awe the populace.
On May 30 1947 General Clay sent a counterdemonstration of US fighter planes over the full city in formations spelling out the letters “U.S.” A short time later the Army Air Force sent a flotilla of B-29’s through the corridor and over Berlin much to the protest of Marshall Sokolovsky. This was the B-29 model plane that dropped the atom bombs on Japans and the moral of the story was not lost on Sokolovsky and Stalin.
The decision to join the British and American zones of occupied Germany into one unit, called “bizonal fusion, was taken with great reluctance. To the Soviet (or pro-Soviet) mind, this was done by the west for political reasons. But the real reason was economic. It was absolutely believed in the west that the economic recovery of Germany was going to be impossible if it was not united or partly united. Four separate Germanys could not gain prosperity. And all of Europe would suffer if Germany did not make a recovery, even if it were the new rural Germany that France was pining for.
The French and the Russians weren’t as long range in their thinking. Being on the continent they would maybe rather have to face a tough economy than that monster Germany back up on its feet. From their place of naval safety the US-UK combo could afford to be more magnanimous in rooting for a Germany recovery.
So the French were hesitant about a united Germany and the Soviets were overtly blocking a united Germany. But the USSR had agreed at Potsdam to a united German economic unit. Truman was mad about the duplicity and the feeling he had been made a fool at Potsdam. Stalin sent letters to Truman that were impolite in tone as well as confrontational in substance. Harry wondered in the early months of the post war period just how long he was going to have to put up with it before he snapped back. The problem was that we were pretending to be friends with these guys the Rooskies while they were playing us like a mandolin.
The United States supplied most of the humanpower and the money for the bizonal occupation of the British and US zones. Some advised our leaders to more or less pull rank in any disputes with our English allies over decisions and procedures, and plenty of disputes did arise. The British would probably have been forced to acquiesce if we had taken that attitude. But Britian was holding the fort in post-war Europe for us, just as it had in the war itself and it was not in our best interests to reduce British prestige in Europe. To make the UK bow to our every wish because we were paying 93% of the bill would have damaged both the alliance and the perception of it to outsiders. The British were allowed to argue with us all they wanted on any issue in post-war Germany and we never did pull-rank as uncle moneybags.
There was long range hope for trizonal fusion. France was a pain in the neck but when all the dust was clear we knew (and still know) which side they were in fact on.
PATTON DIES IN CAR CRASH
On December 21 1945 sad news came out of Germany. General Patton was dead at the age of 60, having succumbed to injuries sustained in a car crash on December 9.
The general was in the back of a Cadillac in talking to another general when a big army truck cut in front and the two vehicles collided at about 17 miles per hour.
The Cadillac had very minor damage, and the truck none at all. It looked like everyone was all right when Patton slouched over helplessly. He had fallen forward and hit the metal partition and suffered vertibrae damage. He was paralyzed. They took poor Patton to a hospital in Luxembourg where he died 12 days later.
There is a book out called Target Patton. This Wilcox nut author thinks that the KGB killed Patton because he was talking too tough about getting tough with the Russians. They arranged an accident and a hit man shot Patton in the neck with spy ammo. When he didn't die, another KGB hit man iced him in his IC room.
One website insists that Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services (soon to change its name to the CIA assassinated General Patton. Donovan was afraid that Patton might start WWIII and ordered a five star whack, in the name of peace.
If Patton had a seatbelt on, he would have lived to 74 and would have written a much better book than War as I Knew It.
“FROM STETTIN IN THE BALTIC….”
On May 5, 1946 Winston Churchill gave a speech at Fulton Missouri in which he coined the term “iron curtain” to describe the dividing line in central Europe between free democratic west and the east Euro states under Soviet domination.
Churchill was against the Bolsheviks from way back when Lenin was healthy and he was one of the few leaders in the west who never bought our own World War II publicity about the Soviet Union. He knew that the world war alliance with the USSR was a matter of expedience for both sides. Churchill, it should be recalled, had in 1939 tried to order the British Army into action against the USSR, but Sweden would not allow the British troops to pass through Finland. If Stalin wanted to start trouble with the west, Churchill for one was ready to say ‘as you wish.’ The Fulton speech is a very good summation of the position of the good guys as the battle lines were being drawn in the new cold war. The speech had fighting spirit. Churchill opened by saying that “Stalin is a liar and a bully. And no one thinks more highly of him than I do.”
The press later asked Truman if he endorsed the speech. The president played dumb and said that Churchill was no longer in office and was merely expressing his own opinions. But Truman had conspicuously accompanied Churchill to Fulton and had introduced the former PM personally. That said it all. The great friendship which began with the sinking of the Lusitania was given another shot of cement at Fulton. It was going to be the eagle and the bull against the bear, with the frog looking on.
TOKYO WAR CRIMES
In 1946 the other Nuremberg took place in Tokyo. When it was all over only four Nips were nipped. The rest got prison sentences. It was a small price to pay for massacring a million Chinese civilians and about 30,000 POW's during the course of a most unpacific war.
The atrocities committed against the Philippino people alone was beyond belief. Four Philippino prisoners were tossed in a giant latrine to drown while the Japanese guards laughed. And people wonder why I have so little faith in human nature. I have faith in inhuman nature.
The Bataan Death March took 10,000 POW lives. But similar things went on all over the Philippines after the military battles were long over.
They hanged Tojo, but he swung for the crimes of Hirohito. Many books have come out since about 1970 proving that the Emperor was a war criminal and knew exactly what was going on and had plenty to do with ordering it. The myth of Hirohito as an innocent figurehead being led along on a string by his military clique is as bogus as a cruise ship comedian. I hate to be cruel, but it is that bogus.
Matsui was also hanged, probably for the home run he hit against the Phillies in game five. Doihara swung too and that was too good for him. It's appalling how many of these scums got prison sentence after supervising mass murder.
WALLACE FIRED 9.20.46
Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace also made a famous speech in 1946. But it was about foreign policy and it was critical of the Truman policies towards Soviet Russia. Wallace was a liberal dreamer from way back and his speech seem to label the United States of America as the main aggressor in the emerging Cold War. Secretary of State Jim Byrnes protested to Truman that the secretary of commerce was undermining administration foreign policy and Truman agreed. He fired Henry Wallace. Truman had approved the entire Wallace speech before he allowed Henry to give it, so by that measuring stick he might have fired Wallace unjustly. But the Wallace speech represented a general path that Wallace had been walking for some time. Wallace was not on the team. He had been the VP that was too liberal for FDR! He had been given commerce in 1945 by FDR in march 1945 and a consolation prize for having been dropped form the ticket in 1944.
Wallace was so gracious when he was fired that Truman almost considered asking him back. He was truly a liberal!
IRENE MORGAN VERSUS THE OLD DOMINION - 1946
Nearly ten years before Rosa Parks became famous for refusing to ride in the back of the bus in Alabama, a black woman named Irene Morgan deifed the racist laws of the bus business.
The Big Bonanza Bus Company in Norfolk refused to let Irene board the bus to take her to Philadelphia because of the color of her skin. The educated and articulate Morgan told the driver that, “My name is Irene Morgan and I am a human being and I know the law. This is an interstate bus and federal laws prohibit discrimination for interstate commerce.”
The bus driver said “Good-night Irene.” and slammed the door shut and drove off.
Irene Morgan went to a lawyer and challenged the right of Virginia to enforce its racist law on an interstate bus. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and in the landmark case of Morgan V Virginia, ruled that the bus driver was an ignoramus, Virginia was backward, and the Big Bonanza Bus Company was in the wrong. Thurgood do-good Marshall wrote the decision stating that Virginia had no right to stop Irene from getting on that bus and ordered Boanaza to give her a lifetime pass to ride anywhere she wants, free of charge.
The ruling was a warning to other states to keep their racist mitts off of interstate busses, but the practice continued for some time throughout the South. It was one thing to make an example of one case, it was another to think that blanket enforcement would be an easy matter.
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS OF 1946
Times were tough in 1946. There was a post war recession that was only beginning to fade. There were gasoline shortages, wage and price controls, and dangerously high inflation. Truman’s poll numbers were dropping by the day. The president’s approval rating was 87% at the end of WWII. By the fall of 1946 it was only 32%, or to put it another way, “we hate you now.” The dismissal of Henry Wallace caused a division of the Democratic Party, the liberal wing deserting in some numbers. It was easy to campaign against the party in power and the Congressional elections of 1946 went badly for the Dems. The Republicans regained the majority in both the House and the Senate.
The new tally was 247-168 in favor of the Republicans
Truman may have had plenty of support for getting tough with the Russians but he knew weeks before election day that the Dems were going to get clobbered. Someone asked him why and he said “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Shortages were the norm these days. The most important shortage politically was the meat shortage, not the oil. When price controls had been reinstated on meat in August of 1946 the cattle barons had showed their displeasure by withholding the product from the cities of America. They were using the beef to walk their picket lines. They were on strike against America for a higher price of beef and Truman wasn’t giving it to them. The meat shortage had the country in a bad temper just when election time closed in, and you-know-who always takes the blame; the party in power. The Democrats controlled both Congress and the Big White Jail so there was no one to pass the buck to. The Republicans campaigned in 46 on the slogan, ‘Had enough?’
Truman would have to run the rest of his presidency with an opposition Congress. When he ran for President in 1948 he ran against the Congress more than he ran on his own merits. Truman was a divider, not a uniter.
BARUCH PLAN 1946
The import of the nuclear bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not lost on the analysts of late 1945 and 1946. It did not take a genius to see the threat to humanity. Newspapers and radio commentators were typing up essays on a daily basis on how suddenly the very existence of the planet was now threatened. By the 1970’s the arsenals that could literally destroy the world were up and operating but it was not an unforeseen development that the folks in 1945 were naïve about. The doomsday nukes of the 1970’s and 1980’s were a train on the horizon in 1946 and that generation had it’s binoculars working.
The United States was still in 1946 the sole owner of the bomb, but knew that sooner or later the Soviet Union would develop one of its own, to be followed by a hundred and then a thousand. The world was looking to America to quell the fear of nuclear Armageddon.
A special plan for nuclear arms control was developed by Robert Oppenheimer, David Lillienthal, and Under Secretary of State Dean Aecheson. The UN on June 14 1946 was to hold the first big meting of the new Commission on Atomic Energy. Truman appointed Bernard Baruch to represent the US on the UNCAE and to present the plan to the UN. Aecheson opposed the choice because he felt that Baruch had no diplomatic skills and this one was going to be a tough sell with the Soviets. But Baruch was a close friend of Aecheson’s immediate boss at State, Jimmy Byrnes so that was that. (Baruch had many detractors and for years had a public “office” on a park bench near the White House where he mingled with random people to discuss politics.)
The plan proposed by Baruch to the UN created an international organization, the Atomic Development Authority, that would physically own and control all of the materials that make nuclear weapons. Nuclear bombs could only belong to the UN. Inspection team would have unlimited access every nuclear related facility in every country. There was one catch, however. The US could keep the nuclear bombs it already had.
One of the persons who insisted on this right for the US to keep its nukes was the grandfather of the current President of the United States. Senator Vannever Bush of Connecticut warned the Baruch think tank that the US was demobilizing its conventional forces rapidly especially in Europe, therefore if we dropped our nukes for some utopian dream we would hand the Soviets the balance of power overseas.
America never had to worry about getting the high-publicity Baruch Plan through the Congress. Stalin quickly rejected the Baruch Plan because he would not tolerate the presence of UN inspectors on Soviet territory.
Stalin was distrustful in the best of circumstances. In this latter stage of his life he was super-paranoid, hardly the man to sign a progressive heartwarming anti-nuclear treaty. The Marshall was an extremely paranoid The man was irrationally murdering members of his own inner circle. Those closest to him were afraid to breathe the wrong way or else they might wake up with their eyes already wide open and a garrote around their neck. Uncle Joe’s mental condition was extremely poor by all accounts. This was not the man that one would expect to wipe a tear of happiness for the Baruch Plan. It was the apex of the Soviet society of terror. Baruch was a great and one-sided idea that had no chance.
The Baruch plan would not have been acceptable to American leadership if the situation were reversed and the Russians had a monopoly and were offering us the same terms.
BOOM BEGINS
Late in 1946 the economy took off like a rocket. It was the beginning of a boom that would last for years. The boom surprised many experts who had predicted a post-war depression. It had been predicted that drastic defense budget cutting would lead to mass unemployment and severe recession, but it they never materialized. The nation had spent 90 billion on defense in 1945. It spent 20 billion on defense in 1946.
Leaps in consumer spending made up for whatever negatives the mass influx of returning troops might cause.
Nw inventions stimulated spending and made life a little better. Cigs had filters on them. Some autos had automatic transmissions (a more important invention than the atom bombs as far as I'm concerned.) Vynl records were being played in the home of rich swingers that sounded real good on these new fangled contraptions called “hi-fi's.” High fidelity was just a fancy techno word for amazing improvement in the quality and volume of the audio records.
Freezers weren't common in the US in 1941. They were the norm by the time Truman left office. We take them for granted today, but it represented a big change for most people.
Television came of age in Truman's years, although as an invention it had existed before the War. By the time Ike was sworn in, the whole world was watching it on TV.
TRUMAN DOCTRINE/MARSHALL PLAN 1947-48
America was the only participant to emerge from the war with a strong economy. Europe was plagued by a post war depression. There was hunger and widespread tuberculosis. The winter of 1946-47 was monumental in its severity.
In this background the Communists were solidifying politically what they already won militarily in Eastern Europe. But a few swing states were still being contested. In Greece the battle was joined in a civil war between the royalists and the Communists.
In February of 1947 the UK announced that it was no longer financially capable of helping Greece and Turkey in their struggle for recovery and their fight against Communists. Britain was broke. There was a severe a fuel shortage that left half the UK’s industry idle. The US would have to pick up the slack.
Truman, with the help of his powerful assistant Secretary of State Dean Aecheson, went public and tried to sell the American people the idea that the age of isolationism was over. America had an obligation to both help Europe recover from its current sorry state, and to help Greece and Turkey fight the Communists. Aecheson offered the domino theory long before Eisenhower coined the term. Aecheson simply used apples instead of dominos. In late February 1947 Aecheson told the nation that one rotten (meaning Communist) apple could threaten every other one in the barrel. He specifically mentioned the threat of the Russian menace to the oil fields of the Middle East. Greece and Turkey were one step removed from those oil fields. If they fell, then Arab oil was an open target for Soviet aggression.
On March 12, 1947 Congress approved 400 million dollars in military assistance to Greece and Turkey.
The next month the Marshall Plan was unveiled. Under the new plan, the list of recipients would expand to 16 nations. Originally it was going to be called the Truman Plan. But Harry rejected the idea, not out of modesty, for he had none. He was an egoist, but a wise one. Truman knew that the new Congress was now a Republican one and anything with his name on it would almost surely be voted down. President Truman insisted that the plan be named after the very popular General Marshall and as a result it was approved.
Not everyone wanted a handout. Eastern Europe countries in the Soviet orbit were offered aid but turned it down on Stalin’s orders; otherwise the list would have been larger. Liberal critics spelled it the ‘Martial Plan.’ Conservative opponents called it the ‘Share America’s Wealth Plan.’ Hungry Europeans called it welcome assistance.
17 billion was given to Europe over the time 1947-52. By almost every reckoning, the Marshall Plan was a success. Europe did make an economic recovery. The established conservative governments of Greece and Turkey won their civil wars. Truman won his good name as a Cold Warrior. TR would have slapped him on the back.
The Communists scored their victories too. Bogus elections in Hungary in 1947 placed pro-Soviet Communist puppets in power. In 1948 Czechoslovakia became officially Communist, although it had been conquered territory since the Red Army overran it.
ZINNOPHOBE VERSION OF THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
Lets pause to let the other side have their say. I tend to lean towards a face-value conservative version of American history, so lets let Howard Zinn have his turn here. His book A People's History of the United States is without a doubt the most commonly read general history of the United States in the United States. So we have to address his version of history as highly important one way or another.
According to Z, the Truman administration 'worked to create' the Cold War in order to further American aggression abroad and repression at home. That was Harry's motive. Truman, unlike the morally superior Zinn, had not a moral bone in his Missouri body. President Truman wasn't defending America or right vs, wrong, but rather Esso, Dow, and Chrysler. The Soviet Union is charged with no act of “aggression” in Zinn's book, but rather the Soviet Union was making an 'astounding comeback' and was only guilty of 'rivalry.' All of the openly Communist governments are not called that by Zinn ever, which is odd since they call themselves that themselves. No, they are called “revolutionary.” Left west partisan histories of Communist nations always avoid the word Communist as a standard operating procedure. The American people, by the way, wanted peace and disarmament, but American badness triumphed as always.
I am not isolating excerpts to misrepresent his position. If anything, fully quoted passages would make his opinions seem even more apologist for the USSR and Blame America First than I make it seem.
The thing about Zinn is that he is not original. He espouses more successfully, the same standard leftist interpretations that hundreds of other writers do. Zinn just happens to be more successful at it. The Forging of the American Empire, Nathan Olivers' books, and Choamsky all say the same thing. You can just pick which one to read and get the basics that they are all saying. Leftists are more orthodox than conservatives. They have their 500 rules for any given era and no one dares to stray or they might be expelled from the Sainthood.
At the lower levels, the positions are the same, the writing just isn't as good.
Zinn's extremism would be a dismissible joke if it wasn't so widely read and believed. To think that his is the only history book I ever see being read on the train makes me frustrated and sad for our great country. He would of course throw up if he heard me use the term 'our great country,' since he doesn't think its great at all. Not even a little bit. The young adults in college today think he is Jesus Christ. I read his book and try not to say that name exasperation.
Hey Howie, how did the Cold War begin? Did the Soviet Union commit any acts of aggression to provoke the west into defensive measures?
No.
“Here is what happened. When, right after the war, the
American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization
and disarmament, the Truman administration .. worked to
create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. True, the rivalry
with the Soviet Union was real – that country had come out
of the war with its economy wrecked and 20 million people
dead, but was making an astounding comeback. .. The Truman
administration, however, presented the Soviet Union as not
just a rival but an immediate threat.”
Ok, what have learned so far? The Soviet Union is an admirable rival and the United States is a conspiratorial aggressor. Let's continue,
“In a series of moves abroad and at home, it [the USA]
established a climate of fear – a hysteria about Communism
-- which would steeply escalate the military budget and
stimulate the economy with war-related orders. This combi-
nation of policies would permit more aggressive actions
abroad, more repressive actions at home.”
Fascinating. Truman contrived a Cold War so that the economy would be stimulated with war materials and he could wield repression in America. As for Communist aggression, what was that? That is not even in the equation. Communist aggression simply never existed. Next paragraph,
“Revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia were described to the American people as examples of Soviet expansionism. “
The nerve of some Americans to describe these wonderful revolutionary movements as 'examples of Soviet expansionism.' How absurd. Stalin was a wonderful guy, the Soviet Union never committed any acts of expansionism and the United States is always the bad guy. Notice he studiously avoids calling them “revolutionary Communist movements,” which of course they were.
Zinn describes the Greek civil war as an aggression of the right-wing west against a sincere and admirable revolutionary movement in Greece. According to Zinn there was absolutely no Soviet support or aid given to the left wing rebels in Greece, and Communism had nothing to do with it ever. The USA poured military aid into fascist Greece including piles of napalm which they bad Greeks (conservative Greeks) used in
“ .. forcibly removing thousands of Greeks from their homes. ...
With that aid the rebellion was defeated. ... Investment capitol
from Esso, Dow Chemical, Chrysler, and other US corporations
flowed into Greece. But illiteracy, poverty and starvation
remained.'
As if the United States was to blame for the poverty and starvation in Greece because we helped one side in a highly political civil war. The United States did 20 times more to relieve starvation in Europe in the immediate post-war situation in Europe than Russia ever did in the entire 20thcentury. And what is America's reward? Condemnation as the promoter of poverty and repression.
If only Zinn were some obscure radical writer who only sold books in Cambridge Mass and Berkeley California. Then I could read it once in disbelief and toss it into a fireplace on a cold night. But millions of Americans read this insanity and take it seriously! Howard has his nose so far up Stalin's colon he can see out of out his mustache. What did Zinn do when Communism collapsed in the early 1990's and the world rejoiced? What did Zinn think and say when even the Russians admitted their sins and renounced their past as a big mistake, an experiment that failed miserably?
With books like this determining the mainstream thought in American historical science, the old-fashioned conservative version becomes a big joke for the young trained left to scoff at as reactionary insanity. Never mind that 98% of all Americans felt this way at the time and there must have been a reason. This revisionist left wing extremist who hates America (he really and truly does) apparently knows more about the truth in 1947 than the 170 million American who were adults in 1947. His version is what the majority of young adults in American believe today.
One guy came up to me on the train last week and saw I was reading a book on George Washington. “Have you read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States?” he asked. “Yes, I have,” I replied. He proceeded to rave about it to me, killing five minutes of my reading time and showing no interest in my own opinion. He commented on what he liked best about Zinn's work. “He writes with a sense of humor. I like that.”
Did anyone see anything humorous in the tone or substance of the excerpts I quoted above? Yeah, funny stuff Howard. The United States is very bad and the Soviet Union is very admirable. Ha ha hardy har har. We exploit and destroy the souls of our workers while the Communists (excuse me the revolutionary movements) treat their workers well. My stomach is sore from the laughter. The United States started the Cold War and for the lowest reasons, while the Soviets are practically blame free. What a knee-slapper!
NATIONAL SECURITY ACT 7 26 47
One of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed in US History was the National Security Act of 1947. By this act, the military underwent a serious organizational change, as did the intelligence gathering community.
There are few things more frustrating than to read of battles in World War II in which the different branches of the US armed forces were so chauvinistic of their particular branch that instances of serious and deliberate lack of co-operation took place. Many men died in battle because the Army was jealous of the Navy or the Marines were determined to get the glory for themselves and withheld cooperation with the Army. The same thing happened often on the enemy side and has happened in warfare for centuries. It is the stupidest thing of all time. The idea of waging a war for a national cause is to win for one’s country, not for one’s particular branch of the armed services. Whenever I see or read in fact or fiction the men of one branch of the service getting into a barroom brawl with the men of a rival branch of the service I just shake my head. Aren’t we all in this together fighting for the flag of our country?
Eisenhower felt that service rivalry was one of the most if not the most difficult obstacle he was consistently faced with when conducting operations in World War II. Truman agreed and the two of them helped structure a plan to organize all of the armed services under a single chief, the Secretary of Defense, who would be answerable only to the President and independent of any favoritism towards any branch. The Secretary of Defense would be a civilian and beneath him would be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This chairperson would work more closely with the individual branches of the armed services. The Chairman of the JCS would be a member of one of the armed services on a rotating basis.
The Navy was the most obdurate in opposing the plan. Navy felt that the Army would take the lead in any new organization and the Navy would be made subordinate in practice if not in formal structure.
The National Security Act combined the services, but not as thoroughly as Truman would have liked. For starters Truman wanted to put a damper on the Marines. The Marine Corps is a subdivision of the Navy (hence the term marine as in water) but had grown into an independent branch with a lot of political clout. Truman and some of his advisors wanted it virtually abolished as an independent branch, but the effort failed.
The NSA of 1947 also created an independent United States Air Force. I once had a foolish minor argument with my father in law as I insisted that the United States Air Force had existed in World War II, while he tried to explain to me that it was part of the Army back then. What the hell did he know? All he did was fly P-47’s and P-38 Lightnings in the Pacific theatre for the US Army in 1944 and 1945. What did he know compared to a comedian bookworm armchair general?
The NSA of 1947 also reorganized the old O.S.S. (Overseas Secret Service) the military intelligence branch headed by ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. In its place a new organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, was created, although it went by a different name at first, the NIA, the National Intelligence Agency.
Harry Truman did not like Bill Donovan. Truman was wrong on a lot of things. Bill Donovan was a brave, courageous, brilliant and innovative national leader, with a tremendous last name. His bio is aptly titled, The Last American Hero. ‘Dunnie’ did not want to see the military intelligence profession subordinated to purely civilian control. This is exactly what Truman did want, and why the OSS was abolished by the NSA of 47.
Every intelligence gathering organization in existence was opposed to the NIA/CIA because they wanted their little fiats to remain undisturbed. This was especially true of the FBI under its insane leader J. Edgar Hoover, a man whose reputation outpaced his performance.
Truman wanted a truly Central Intelligence Organization that would work with other intelligence groups as the top of an organized pyramid of united information effort. But the military intelligence groups and the FBI were monkey wrenches in the concept. The CIA therefore came into being as a strictly foreign intelligence agency. It would have no control over domestic issues and little over military ones. The CIA was the best Truman could do at the time and the creation of it led to many controversies over the next several decades. But it was originally supposed to be a supreme intelligence organization for both foreign and domestic affairs.
Because of brainwashing from movies over the past 30 years, many young Americans today think that the CIA is in business only to kill people for the most flimsy reason. The CIA is primarily involved in deep cover operations all over the world for no valid reason except that they are the bad guys and that’s what the bad guy’s do.
America was way behind in the spy wars when the Cold War began. Europe and Asia had long been in the game but the United States lagged naively behind. Billy Donovan’s OSS was a relative novice compared to the GPU of the USSR, G-7, the famous spy services of Great Britain and the Gestapo of Germany, and the famous “Frog Squad” of France.
There was some talk of forbidding any U.S. covert activity for any reason under any circumstances by the new intelligence agency as a matter of national moral principles. As we know, things didn’t work out that way.
One thing was made clear to the NIA, soon to change its name to CIA. It was not to spy on Americans. Foreigners maybe, but Americans never.
That was the FBI’s job.
LOYALTY PROGRAM
Hoover was a right-wing extremist and a weirdo. His FBI was properly vigilant about fighting Soviet spies, who did indeed lurk in our government and industries and had to be rooted out by force. Much of the Communist witch-hunt was justified. What was wrong was that Hoover spied on Americans, not just Soviet spies. J. decided that Americans didn’t have a right to believe in Communist or Socialist principles, which of course is completely un-American. The House Un-American Activities Committee should have investigated itself. Its one thing for Americans to think we have to make a radical change in our government and to propose can support candidates and referendums for those changes. It was another for a foreign agent to spy and commit theft and sabotage to achieve the same goal. There is a double-standard and Hoover should have respected it. Leave the home grown rads alone you transvestite political lunatic!
Why is the FBI Building in Washington still named after this un-American scoundrel? They should name it the Donovan Building after Wild Bill, a true American hero with the cool name.
TITO TOO - YUGO YOUR WAY 1945-9
The Cold War had it’s contradictions. There were divisions in the enemy camp, most notably the famous “split” between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
There were generally two types of Communisms in the states of Europe in the immediate post-war period. Those with weak Communist parties controlled almost totally by Moscow from the outside, with token opposition parties. The other type was ruled by strong Communist parties from the inside, and fully occupied by the Red Army. In the second case the Communist party was the only power and there was no political opposition. But in both cases, the parties were controlled by Moscow.
Yugoslavia, however, did not fit either familiar pattern. After being under Nazi occupation for years, the Yugoslav Communists had won their own struggle for independence and power. Belgrade, unlike Warsaw and Budapest, was not liberated by the Red Army, but by the Yugoslav resistance, combined with German general collapse. The toughest partisan resistance to the Axis invader (as in China) came from the Communists. So we had a new national Yugoslav pride, this time anchored on Communism, rather than Democracy. The Yugoslavs had embraced Democracy after it gave the a nation after world War I. But now things were different. Democracy had brought ruin and fascist lack-lash and war. The Yugos said 'Lets try Communism. Let's see if that works. After all we've been through, why not give it a shot?'
This proud new Communist nation was proud to be part of the Communist bloc,. But it said ‘wait just a minute’ when Stalin tried to tell it what to do. We won our independence without the Red Army. We believe in the cause of Communism, not Soviet world domination.
Tensions ran high between these allies. Two Yugo emissaries went to Moscow to meet with Stalin personally and try to smooth things out. This was in 1947. Stalin tried to bully these two guys like a Ribbentrop browbeating a tiny state leader in 1938. They were not intimidated and returned to Belgrade to report their rude treatment. This more or less sealed a major split already developed between the Yugoslav Communist state and the Soviet Communist state. Until now the USSR had always been the undisputed queen bee of Communism. Everyone looked to the Soviet Union as the leader and protector of the movement. Now little Yugoslavia refused to go along. 'We have our own hive, Dzhugashviili!' (Stalin's real name.)
The United States cautiously welcomed the Euro-break-up in the enemy camp. But still Communism was Communism and the cold warriors here were not exactly buying ‘Go Yugoslavia’ coffee mugs. US relations with Yugoslavia had been strained since the end of the war due in some part to four incidents between 1946 and 1949 in which Yugoslav defense forces shot down four U.S. planes. These American planes were unarmed food relief planes. That'll put any country in a bad mood.
This Yugo-Soviet Split, the first major split in the Communist bloc, was genuine. But later Soviet regimes staged fake ‘splits’ with other Communist states in order to disarm the West into thinking that Communism was disunited and therefore not a threat.
SUBHUMANS FREE AT LAST
The events of the Indian sub-continent were almost as earth-shattering as the Cold War in Europe, but few westerners pay much attention to the region.
In August of 1947 John Bull finally let go of the leash and let India go free at long last, after so many decades of British imperial oppression.
But hatred of of the British was only one of the problems to be solved. The Sub-continent humans also hated each other. They weren't so holier than thou when it comes to human nature. The Hindus and the Moslems
both wanted to get the British off their rickshaws, but they didn't want
to be part of the same nation.
To avoid a civil war, the British arranged to leave the Indian subcontinent divided into two nations, not one greater India. The provinces of West Punjab and East Bengal were Moslem. They became the bizarre geographical nation of Pakistan, two regions and one nation separated from each other by the land mass of India. It would be as if New York and California were a nation with the rest of the North American continent part of some other unfriendly country.
India in the middle became India. King George agreed as part of the deal that he would no longer be allowed to walk into a bar and say, “How bout a drink for the Emperor of India,” which he apparently did a couple of times in 1946 until the queen told him to knock it off.
At midnight on August 15 1947 India became independent.
To give you some idea of the resentment of the sub-continent towards Britian, the Indians who co-operated with the Japanese during World War II should have been prosecuted and the British tried to in late 1945. But these jerks became superstar heroes overnight and mass demonstrations took place on their behalf until the Brits had to call off the dogs and just let it go. When you think of the millions of civilians that the Japanese massacred all over Asia, this story doesn't sit right. All right, let me rephrase that. When I think of the millions of civilians that the Japanese massacred all over Asia, this story doesn't sit right.
BERLIN BLOCKADED 1948
Three years of Soviet belligerence and lack of co-operation on trying to resolve the Berlin dilemma was enough for Truman and his striped pants tough guys. They came to a decision on Berlin. The Allies would take their three quarters of Berlin and make it one city. What happens in the Soviet sector stays in the Soviet sector.
To Stalin this was unacceptable. The Berlin blockade was about to begin.
The trigger was currency. The goodie Allies had printed tons of new currency to be put into action on June 20 1948. The Soviets had their own currency in Berlin but since they had walked out on Allied Control Council talks, they also decided not to get involved in the new currency conversion Allied plan. They were invited and declined.
Overnight the Soviet currency became worthless. Banks would not even allow the old inflated Soviet scrip to be converted into the new bills.
The Soviet response was to blockade East Berlin off from the rest of the city. Now they could declare that their worthless bills were not only of value, they were the only bills to be accepted in the East German zone. They captured their own people and captured their own poor monetary system. This kind of banking mercantilism would hurt the Russians for the next 44 years. If not for Russian stubborn economic isolationism, the entire euphoria of the collapse of Communism in 1989 might never have happened because it might never have been necessary. Peaceful co-existence should have and could have been facilitated with money because 'it's all about money.' If only Stalin had taken a heart attack in early 1945 the entire Cold War might have been avoided and ABC never would have made The Day After.
The decision to blockade Berlin wasn't made in Berlin. Stalin of course made it in the Kremlin. Suddenly the only obvious way the Western powers could feed the 2 million friendly people of West Berlin was to drive armed divisions across West Germany and run the clear risk of starting World War III.
Truman chose saw a third choice to capitulation or dangerous brinksmanship. The Truman Administration initiated the Berlin Airlift. Thousands of cargo planes overflew East German airspace and landed food and other critical supplies to the Berliners. Now the Communists would have to fire the first shot and take the blame as the aggressors. It's not that easy to blockade a plane. You have to chase it down and fire on it. A truck convoy can be stopped one 60-year-old man felling a few trees. 'Sorry, looks like we had a lighting storm. You fellas are gonna have to turn back to West Germany.'
The Berlin Airlift was such a sensation that it has capital letters on both words. Its part of our history textbooks. There's always room for a few paragraphs on the Berlin airlift, no matter how small the history book. It was the focus of the world’s attention for almost a full year. Cargo planes landed at Berlin’s Templehof airport every three minutes night and day.
In May of 1949 the Communists gave in and said, “Uncle Sam.” East Germany called off the blockade and land travel was resumed between West Germany and East Berlin. The event was considered a victory for the West against the Communists forces. Truman’s popularity rose significantly …. for now.
ELECTION OF 1948
The Democratic Party was not thrilled to have to run Harry Truman in 1948. He was seen as a tool of a big city boss that got lucky in 1944 by getting on an unbeatable ticket with FDR with no particular qualities to lend himself to the office of president. He was not much of a public speaker, couldn’t see five feet past his desk even with his thick glasses on, and was a stubborn uncompromising man who lacked any powers of persuasion. He had not won the office on his own, who knew if he could? The cynical slogan in his own Demo Party became “I’m Just Mild About Harry” a spoof of a popular Showboat song, “I’m Just Wild About Harry.”
Truman won the election of 1948 by campaigning against the Republican Congress rather than against his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey of New York. Harry turned a liability, the opposition Congress, into an asset by blaming them for everything that was going wrong in the country. In every campaign speech he attacked the Republican as a party.
The Democrats in 1948 first tried to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on their ticket. Truman was even willing to step aside and allow Eisenhower to be the party choice. Harry actually sent a secret memo to Eisenhower stating this. But Eisenhower still wanted no part of political office and did not reveal his political preferences to anyone.
As the election of 1948 closed in, it was a sure thing that Tom Dewey was going to be the winner. Life magazine had a cover story with the caption beneath his picture reading ‘The Next President of the United States.’ Good call, Life.
It was easy to understand Life's arrogance.. The country was not exctly feeling ebullient. There were labor problems, inflation, and accusations of scandals in his administration. Liberals thought he was a reactionary, and conservatives thought him weak on Communism. He didn't have the oratorical skills nor the charm, to make himself beloved even in tough times, the way an FDR could.
But Harry had one tremendous political quality and that was utter tenacity. I get the feeling about Truman that if he was your co-worker and you two were feuding for years for whatever reasons and you two agreed to 'have it out' 15 rounds in a gym with the gloves on, he would either win or not admit defeat if you won. He would follow you home demanding a sixteenth round and would never leave you alone until you gave him one, then another and another. I think I'd want him in a foxhole with me because not only would he not run, he would actually hated the enemy, “every last one of em.” He could do the fighting of three soldiers in a war. As commander of of a WWI artillery battery, the man had shown he was very tough, and cold though too. Overall I think I'm giving him a compliment but its not the most lovable quality in the world. (I feel somewhat the same way about Bill Clinton, but he tried to smile and play charming when he attacked and fought. Truman was true to his pugilist self in the way he expressed himself.)
The Republicans settled on Thomas Dewey of New York at their convention in Philly. He told them he would only run of they promised to name a thruway after him.
Dewey had a nice appearance, with round dark eyes and a movie star mustache. But he was very short, to the point where people could make fun of it. It was said in that on election night he paced up and down under his bed. He also had an excessive perfection about his appearance. He made Dan Quayle look like Keith Richards. He might have been better off with some quirk like a cowlick or a big nose, or an idiosyncratic smile. If Dewey only could have gotten himself arrested for playing dice illegally in an alley with winos it probably would have helped his career. The guy couldn't loosen up to save the universe. One Republican supporter complained, “How can you vote for a man who looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake?”
Dewey was born in 1902 in Michigan. He was a talented guy. Tommy could even sing. Dewey had won the Michigan State Singing Championship in high school and he made enough extra money with his crooning to help pay his way through college. But the only thing he sang on election night in 1948 was the blues.
The Republicans chose Earl Warren as Dewey’s running mate. The California Governor later became famous as the leader of the ‘Warren Commission’ that investigated the murder of JFK.
Truman had major problems on both flanks.
On the left was Hank Wallace, FDR's former Vice President. Wallace led a splinter party of the left, the Progressive Citizens of America. Wallace had long represented the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The left was very unhappy with Truman’s conservative positions in the Cold War. Wallace, for example, promised to make peace with Russia. He promised it so much it seemed to a lot of people the it was a promise to make peace with Russia at the price of appeasement.
Back in 1945 when Truman took over on day one, Eleanor Roosevelt told him famously, “You're the one who's in trouble now.” She should have warned him, “Especially because of me. I'l try my damnedest to make sure you don't get elected in 1948.” Eleanor and an assortment of prominent liberals helped to form a new “Progressive Party.” It's first mission was to dump Truman. Wallace was their man. The old leftist White House alliance of 1943 between Eleanor and Henry was back in town.
The Progressive Party held its convention in Philadelphia in July. For the #2 spot they picked Democrat Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho. The PP supported the idea that the UN is the centerpiece of our foreign policy. The Wallace party also called for “progressive capitalism” whatever that is.
Current events in the Cold War did not politically favor the Progressives. The nation turned more conservative with each new friction between the US and the USSR, and the Wallace candidacy was on the decline by Election Day.
On the right, the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948 was centered around Truman's policy on civil rights. Apparently Harry Truman wasn't racist enough for these “Dixiecrats” as they called themselves. I say drop the c and add a hyphen. They were actually Democrats who walked out of the Democratic convention to form a third party just for this election. It was shades of 1860.
Strom Thurmond went on to serve in the US Senate until the next century as a Republican. His son is in the Senate now (not now this minute – its 1:45 in the morning, but now in December of 2009.)
Almost every expert predicted an easy victory for the Republicans in 1948. Truman’s approval ratings were in the thirty percentile. There was a severe housing shortage. Inflation was a nightmare. Most people felt that Truman was an accidental president and was no FDR. Throughout 1948 every poll indicated that a randomly chosen wino would defeat Harry Truman in the upcoming election for president - even if the wino's campaign posters were a picture of him passed out and shoeless. That's how bad it looked for Truman.
In the early summer Truman’s team went on a train ride across the country in a last ditch effort to save the election. Truman visited twenty and thirty towns a day giving great speeches. They were short visceral extemporaneous speeches from the back rail of the caboose to throngs of dazzled locals. Republican Senator/sniper Taft scoffed that Truman was speaking “at every whistle-stop in the country,' meaning every rinky-dink useless spot that train happened to pass through. 'Whistle-stop was supposed to be a playful put-down of these little places but the Dems used the bricks others threw at them to build a house. The Dems made use of the crack, posing now as the defender of small town USA. In a speech in LA, Truman spoke of this being one of his ‘whistle-stops’ and the crowd laughed and cheered and in that moment a new phrase entered the American dictionary. Taft and Truman had invented the term whistle-stop and it now means any whirlwind multi speech cross-country political campaign, especially one from a train.
1948 was the first election that was covered by television and the last one where television was not a dominant factor. There weren’t enough Americans with televisions yet for the coverage to make a difference. To make it easier for the new TV invention however, all three parties agreed to have their conventions in the same city, Philadelphia.
The Democratic leadership feared that the Convention might draft Ike in a spontaneous demonstration. They persuaded Eisenhower to make a high profile public statement that he would not run even if chosen by the DNC.
The Democrats had absolutely no idea whom they would choose as Truman’s running mate. The few they wanted, such as William Douglas of the Supreme Court, wanted no part of being on a ticket they were sure would lose.
On the second night of the Dem Convention Senator Alben Barclay of Kentucky gave such a great speech to rousing cheers that his name suddenly became a front runner for the VP spot. Albie heard about this and sent word that he was definitely available for Vice-President. Word came back on an index card, “OK, Albie, You're in! - HT” Alben was a bit old for the job at 70, or a bit too young to be a presenter on 60 Minutes. Barclay's nickname around the White House was “The Barker”
On Convention roll-call night, the Southern white racist block from Mississippi and Alabama got up and bolted the convention in protest of the Civil Rights platform that Truman had insisted on keeping in, in spite of warnings of just such a consequence.
So to repeat, Truman got squeezed from both sides. The left wing bolted the Party to run as the Progressives under Henry Wallace. The right-wing bolted to run as the Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond. Ydet this wingless torso of a Democratic Party in 1948 still managed to win.
Possibly, in some ways the wings helped to cancel each other out and actually helped Mr. Truman. The Dixiecrats made Truman look more liberal on Civil Rights than he actually was and perhaps won a black vote for every lost white vote. The leftist Wallace, by accusing Truman of being a reactionary, cancelled-out the Republican effort to paint Truman as being too lenient on Communism.
On election night few people thought Truman would win. There is of course the overexposed photo of Truman holding up the erroneous headline in a Chicago newspaper, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN! All right, all right. I’ve seen that picture like 700 times.
Wallace cost Truman the states of New York, Michigan and Maryland and if he had the chance might have cost him Illinois. But Hank was not on the ballot as the result of a legal dispute. Thurmond’s secessionist Dixiecrats won four deep Southern states. One elector from Tennessee voted independent of his state results and chose Thurmond when the Electoral College met in December.
Truman's Cinderella upset of has evolved into a mirage for trailing politicians. Now every politician running for anything who is hopelessly behind in the polls has to cite Harry Truman’s miracle win over Dewey as a reason to keep hope alive. But 1948 lightning can’t strike twice. Dewey skywrote a warning against overconfidence and complacency for all candidates for all time. No one is going to ever make that mistake again. Dewey didn’t campaign hard because he thought it was in the bag. His defeat changed the playing board forever.
ISRAEL 1948
The new nation of Israel came into existence on May 14, 1948. Would the United States extend recognition and/or support? Many leading figures in the State Department advised against it. It would earn us the eternal enmity of the Arab people and we needed their oil. General Marshall was strongly against recognition and argued with Truman to the point of disrespect. But Truman respected Marshall so much that he allowed Marshall to speak to him like a defiant teen-ager standing-up to his parents.
Some historians suggest that Truman's support of Israel in 1948 was largely an election year play for the Jewish vote in the United States. I don't buy it. Truman was not that weak of a man that he would make a serious moral decision like that based on political opportunism. Truman was President when the concentration camps were liberated and he was the first President to see the film proving what the Nazis had done. FDR had only heard stories. HT was the president when the war criminals were hung at Nuremberg. I believe him when he says that he felt a special obligation to support the Jewish desire for a homeland based on their special suffering in the holocaust.
Truman got his way and the USA has been a close friend and strong supporter of Israel since its formation as a nation in 1948. Our support for Israel has earned us the enmity of the Arab world or at least parts of it, ever since and still going. The Arab supremacists attacked World Trade Center was attacked in 1993 and 2001 not because the Arabs hate what America stands for at home. The WTC was attacked primarily because we support Israel. That's the number one bug with them, not our cultural decadence.
ZHANDOVISM USSRR
The Cold War began, according to one American writer in Moscow, with the advent of the policies of A.A. Zhandov in the post-war world of Russia. Beginning in 1946 Zhandov put an end to all hope of Soviet co-operation by his propaganda campaign against the west.
All that good will with the USA and everyone else went out the window. From now it was a return to the bad old days of the dictatorial teaching and enforced belief in Soviet cultural and intellectual supremacy. Zhandov was the Goebbels of post-war Russia.
Stalin was a paranoid Russo-Communist chauvinist, therefore all Russians had to be paranoid Russo-Communist chauvinists. Anyone who wrote a book or an article that was the least bit open minded about the qualities of people or life in any non-Communist country was censured or arrested. Zhandov predicted that the United States was in the beginning stage of an economic collapse that would destroy it from within by revolution. Anyone who wrote an article that suggested otherwise was arrested. It was as if the radicals of the old Comintern were wimps by the new standards. It was hateful aggressive political behavior. Zhandov was the cat's paw for Stalin's hostility towards America and everyone else. The hate started in Russia. The reaction set in in America. Yet almost all the US historians emphasize the needless hostility of the United States and the poor victim role of the USSR. They write about US actions while failing to mention that they were reactions to off the scales hostility from the USSR.
This cultural hatred for all outside cultures and philosophies extended to everything. Anyone caught listening to a short wave radio broadcast of a New York Yankees baseball game had to walk to Siberia with no shoes on. Anyone caught saying anything good about any other world leader soon disappeared.
Mikhail Rubenstein was a Russian historian of some renown but in 1947 the Zhandovist revisionism decided that his earlier acclaimed books were unpatriotic because they had said some good things about the west and had not properly proven that Leninist dialectic analysis had the answer to everything. Ruby had to declare that his award winning 1941 Moscow-published history book was completely foolish. He would have been foolish not to do as he was told. Freedom of thought was now a sign of “bourgeois thinking.” To be closed minded was the highest goal. Open minds and the research of the seeker were “obstacles to the building of a socialist society,” at least according to drips like Zhandov.
People who sought the truth were not patriotic because Marx and Lenin had already found it and made the map. In this post-war era it was time to obey the truths already established and bring this socialist baby home to victory. Truth seekers were denying the absolute genius of Marx and Lenin and of Stalin for pointing out that they had found all the answers already.
Science was not objective, but a directive. All intellectual contact with the west was outlawed. Russia taught its children that all inventions, all great ideas were invented by Russians, especially in the socialist era. If for example it could be proven or even claimed that one Russian had one thing to do with one aspect of the invention and development of electricity, then the schoolbooks said that electricity was a Russian invention that the rest of the world should be bowing down and thanking Stalin for. Freud got all his ideas from a Russian. Robert Fulton stole his ideas for a steamboat from a Russian. Poker was invented by a Russian. All the great poets were Soviet Russians. Shakespeare was actually born in Novgorod. Abner Doubleday was actually named Vladimir Doublovda, and the Russians invented baseball.
In the field of language Odessa native Alexander William Marr had written a widely acclaimed 1934 book about language and how it had evolved globally into the beginnings of a super-language that would one day rule the globe. Post-war Zhandovism now condemned Bill Marr as “an insincere big mouthed shallow ignoramus” whose foolish theories failed to realize that all language derived from the Russian and the destiny of all world language was the finalized Russian language. It was perfectly nauseating and every Soviet citizen had to say it was the truth. Post-war USSR made 1938 Nazi Germany seem like the land of intellectual freedom.
All previous revolutionary theories were re-written to suit Stalin and Zhandov's latest whims. Lenin and Marx had stressed a revolution without states, the class of the proletariat superseding nationhood in revolutionary leadership. Now Soviet Russia was the hero state and the Red Army, not the proletariat, was the front line of revolution.
This was the nation that the USA was so wrong to not appease in the Cold War era. If only needlessly scared America showed them more understanding and compromise, the Cold War might never have started, but there was no stopping US arrogance. That is the historians take on these years for the most part today.
ALGER HISS VS. WHITAKER CHAMBERS
In 1948 and 49 a controversy erupted in the US over whether or not a certain Alger Hiss, a former insider State Department employee, had been a Communist spy. Hiss accompanied FDR to Yalta as an advisor. The conduct of FDR indicated that he was following the advice of a Soviet spy, but it is unlikely that Hiss was a Soviet spy. However, like Ben Franklin who may not have actually been a British spy but always played a double-game with American and British interests, Hiss was probably a Communist fellow-traveler playing a double-game at the State Department.
It started with the May 1948 testimony of a Mr. Whittaker Chambers before the notorious HUCA, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Chambers was an American Communist in the 1930’s but repented after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.
During the war Chambers went to the government more than once with stories of USSR double-agents working within the American government. Some were foreign spies, but others were American citizens who had been turned and were now sleeper-agents working their way up into some dangerously high levels of the US Government. The FDR officials ignored the Chambers tales as paranoia.
Now, three years after the war, HUAC had summoned Chambers in its search for Commies within. He was happy to oblige. In these Cold War times, finally, someone would listen. Whit named four higher-ups inside Washington who were traitors. The highest up was Alger Hiss who worked at the upper floors of the State Department and had written many of the Roosevelt statements at the Yalta conference in 1943.
Hiss contacted HUAC and said that he wanted to testify in his defense and no question would be of limits. He said he was innocent and wanted to clear his reputation. Contacting the HUAC for a voluntary testimony under questioning in 1948 was like requesting an audit from Internal Revenue. 'Are you out of your mind?’ But Hiss was not afraid.
Under questioning, the learned, articulate and likeable Hiss stole the show. He denied that he ever knew a man named Whittaker Chambers, let alone conspired with him for Russia and that the whole thing was an outrageous lie. Hiss made it look like HUAC was so wrong that it was an embarrassment to the whole country that he should even have to defend himself. Hiss never took a defensive or hostile tone with his accusers, thus making them that much more the ogres. The press and the visitors gallery were packed and loaded in his favor. He’d make a little joke about the silliness of some charge and a snicker of laughter would spread around the room. No one hissed Hiss.
One member of HUAC had doubts about the charming Hiss. Richard Nixon was a rookie Congressman from California and an anti-Communist of the first order.
Nixon and the other members of HUAC became the national villains overnight. The anti-Communist witch-hunt had reached an unacceptable stage of looking publicly foolish as well as unfair. Nixon calculated that only a counter case against Hiss could save HUAC from being drummed out of office by a tidal wave of public opinion. Even President Truman came out against the unfair charges by HUAC against Hiss!
Nixon had to find the weak spot in the Hiss case. He noticed that Hiss was always careful in his wording when he denied having ever known “a man named Whitaker Chambers.” Nixon knew that underground Communists worked with fake names as a Party tradition, so there could be a plausible denial legal loophole that Hiss was using to deny with. Sure enough, when Chambers was collecting Communist Party dues from Hiss, it was done under the pseudonym of “Quigley.” A rose by any other name smells just as traitorous. Nixon focused not on whether Hiss was a Communist but whether Hiss was a liar when it came to whether he knew Chambers. A witness caught lying on one part can legally be mistrusted in others.
In a session closed to the public, Hiss proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he had known Chambers well. Although Chambers was somewhat discredited by some charges against his personal character, he was able to prove conclusively that the he and Hiss had been close friends. He knew the nicknames of the Hiss kids, his golf handicap, and the moniker on his college tie clips, and that he once had a green parakeet named 'Peggy,' a mysteriously mean green bird with a tinge of blue who liked to bite people, but the entire Hiss family still cried when a cat got in and killed it. And that the family laughed about it for years about how upset they all were even though limey had never had a friendly moment since the day they brought it home from the pet store. He also knew that his wife called him “Hilly,” and he called her ‘Bon Bon.’
Chambers could not possibly have known all these details if the two had never known each other. A jury convicted Hiss of perjury and sent to jail. One juror told the NY Times that the Peggy the parakeet story was what really convinced her that Hiss was a perjurer. “No one would invent a stupid story like that,” she said.
Hiss most certainly had been a member of one of the Communists Parties in the USA in the 30’s. The charge that Hiss was a spy has lingered on unproven and still uncertain. In the mid-1990’s Hiss contacted Soviet historian Dimitry Volkogonov to try to prove his innocence. Volkogonov wrote back that he examined all the KGB archives and there is no evidence that Hiss was ever employed as a spy by the KGB. That proves a lot, eh? The fox is still guarding the henhouse, even if the fox is reformed. Volkogonov retreated from his position after Hiss died.
The Alger Hiss case made Nixon a national name. It looked like Hiss was going to get away with his lies until Nixon turned up the heat on him at the HUAC hearings. Over his career people have criticized Nixon for his conduct in the Hiss interrogation. The Hiss case was a red herring, they charged.
Two things are certain about the Hiss case. One. It has not been resolved, and the truth may never be known. Two, If he was a Soviet spy, he did a heck of a good job for his team at Yalta.
NUCLEAR MONOPOLY ENDS 1949
The Russians detonated their first nuclear bomb in 1949. It was explosive news. The United States had lost its ability to rule the world by force if it wanted to. The United States had 230 nuclear bombs at the time the Soviets successfully tested their first.
The detonation of the bomb was a double-edged sword for Stalin. Thanks to the fear aroused in the United States by this event, massive military appropriations were approved by Congress. The USSR could not keep the detonation a secret if it tried, so the spectacular headlines helped right-wing Congressional leaders get the big budget military programs through. Even with a lead of 231 to -1 in nukes, the American people were scared of the Rooskies. All it took was one to kill 10 million New Yorkers.
WHITE HOUSE WEDDING BELLS 11 49
The widower Vice President Alben Barclay fell in love with a woman about 760 years younger than he was. They were married in late November 1949. Their courtship and marriage were major news.
The new medium of television was all over it. The most popular show in this infant stage of the infantile boob tube was a puppet show starring the wooden wise-acre Charlie McCarthy. When Gloria Gregg said yes to the Vice President Barclay, the Charlie McCarthy show was interrupted with a news bulletin telling the big news.
Millions watched the wedding ceremony a few weeks later. TV pop culture was out of its crib and learning to walk and talk. It would grow into what it has become today, a monster that stifles intellectual progress, some news programs notwithstanding (the “political junkie” is considered an anomaly, hence the playfully derogatory nickname – normal people watch reality TV and fictional murder stories – odd-ball minorities watch news programs.)
A 1949 fluff romance story interrupting a puppet show that was already mesmerizing the country in the first place; wow. It’s all downhill from here.
INDOPENDENCE
On December 27, 1949 a new nation appeared on the global stage. The old Dutch colonial islands of Indonesia at long last threw off the shackles of cracker oppression and joined the family of nations.
The new country took the name of the United States of Indonesia. Millions of happy people gathered in the streets of all the towns and villages of the islands chanting, “USI! USI! USI! USI!”
The new president was Sukharno. He was a delightful man who had fully co-operated with the Japanese during the WWII occupation and had looked the other way as thousands of native Indonesians were tortured, raped and killed because they did not co-operate. The Japanese gave him a special awards ceremony in late 1943 for all the hard work of anti-freedom he did for them.
The Dutch had ruled the Islands for some time, but when Hitler wiped Holland off the map it was hard for the natives to accept that they were still the subjected property of a nation that did not exist. From May 1940 to February 1941 the people of the islands were in Limbo, a lull between conquerers, the eye of the hurricane. Then the Japanese came in and replaced the Dutch and no good avaricious oppressors.
No sooner did the Japanese agree to surrender than the Indonesians proclaimed their independence. This was in August 1945. The Dutch did not feel that they were supposed to lose their colonies in Asia just because they lost a war to the genocidal Nazis in Europe. Now they had their original country back and they felt that this meant that the old contract with their colonies was back in effect. The Indos did not seeit that way.
Over the next three years the Dutch fought a counter-revolution to take back their old colony. The Dutch won, but their hold was tenuous and the casualty count was high on both sides. The native Indonesians did not accept defeat and fought an endless guerilla war of terrorism until the Dutch masters put out their arrogant cigar and called it day. Indonesia was now a country.
Incidentally, when President Sukharno visited Washington in the early 1960's he shocked President Kennedy by his lewd minded conversation. Kennedy tried to talk politics, and Sukharno wanted to talk about nothing except “broads.” It was no small task to leave Jack Kennedy disgusted with that sort of mind-set in a world leader, but Sukharno did just that and that is a true story.
NSC 68
68 is a think tank document recommending some changes in US policy regarding Communism, containment, nuclear weapons, and American commitment to the defense of Europe.
There's a couple of left-wing books that talk about NSC 68 as though it is this super-secret document which proves that the people in charge of the US nukes in 1949 were lunatic hawks. They were lunatics because they had the nerve to sit back and rationally discuss the different scenarios involving nuclear war between Russia and the United States. These authors think that just by planning for nuclear war, the United States was in fact, risking provoking it. “Nuclear war planning” was insanity per se. That point of view has never died and stillc an be heard today in some circles.
But the memoirs of those who drafted NSC 68 indicate that they aren't the least it embarrassed to have been part of it. They figured it was their job to envision a lot of worst case scenarios and come up with some guidelines for how America should respond to them. Someone's gotta do it while everyone else is singing, “I ain't gonna study war no more.” They sang that essential tune all over Europe in the 1920's and 30's and look where it got Europe.
Until 1949 the US foreign Cold War policy was to rely on the nuclear deterrent alone to protect America and Europe indefinitely. This way we could bring our troops home, cut the defense budget in half, and basically relax. As long as we had the nukes and the Russians didn't, that seemed like a bright idea. As long as the Soviets were “contained” it seemed wise. In addition, we could reduce West Germany to a disarmed agricultural country without worrying that this might make all of Europe more vulnerable. We didn't have to fear a conventional Soviet attack anywhere, because we had nukes.
But the Soviet nuclear test, and the Communist victory in China made the US mili-brains think twice about our nuke-em-high policy. The nuke eggheads also began to fear what later became understood by nearly everyone, and is no orthodox philosophy. Nuclear power was in large part neutralized because they were morally indefensible to use. Stalin and Mao knew that it was one thing for America to act threatening with its nukes. It was another thing for America to actually use them ... again. The world was beginning to condemn America for the two it dropped on Japan. Truman and his boys were beginning to get it, that nuclear weapons could hamstring US foreign policy because they could only be used once and then it would make us look real bad, no matter what the justification. Nukes were like the magician who brags to the audience that he has an amazing trick where he blows himself up, “But this particular trick I can only do once.”
NSC (or NCM National Security Memorandum) 68 recommended that the United States reverse the four year trend of downsizing conventional capabilities. It was time to have military options for every level of political crisis. It was not good to only have the nuclear option in our game plan and think we could rule the world by that threat alone.
The United States (said 68) had to take a more responsible economic and military approach to protecting Europe from a Soviet invasion. Europe could not pay for its defense at this time, so it was up to America to bankroll it. That was a lot for the press, Congress and people to handle, and it would have to be presented in stages and delicately to an electorate screaming already about hard times. But what was worse, putting strain on an already strained American economy, or inviting utter disaster on an already prostrate Europe? Telling the American people at some point in the near future that taxes were going up to pay for increased defense spending on our conventional capabilities and Europe's would not be an easy sell, but it had to be done.
On top of all that, 68 recommended that the Morganthau Plan to punish Germany forever by making it completely de-militarized and rendered agrarian should be scrapped as an obsolete emotional relic of a past era. Even though 1945 was only four years ago, it was already another era.
The study was completed and delivered to Truman just three months before the outbreak of the Korean War. And the Korean War proved it right. This was no time to power down the US military conventional force capabilities. There were plenty of sharks in the water.
McCARTHYISM 1950-1952
He was only a freshman Senator in the minority party in a state famous for agrarian leftism. He was on no important committees, and he certainly wasn’t a household name when elected. But anti-Communist fanatic Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy became one of the most important people in the country for a run of about five years beginning
in 1950.
It started with a famous speech in Wheeling West Virginia in 1950. he said to the crowd and the gathered press,
“I have in my hand a list of 204 persons within the State Department who are known to have Communist ties.”
Soon McCarthy was dragging people before HUAC and accusing them of having Communist ties, scarves, and cufflinks. Anyone accused by McCarthy of being a Communist faced career ruin even if the charges weren’t proven. Just to be accused was to be partly guilty. The more one denied it in public, the more the accusation became planted in the minds of millions. It was a no-win situation for those charged with being red.
One woman, for example, was suspected of being a Communist actress. She indeed had the name of a Communist actress but was herself an old-fashioned US grade A conservative. Conservative Nancy Davis was getting heat for what Communist Nancy Davis was doing. So she contacted Ronald Reagan the president of the Screen Actors Guild and they went to dinner while she explained her story. He took care of the problem and married the non-Com Davis in the bargain.
There have been hundreds of books written about McCarthyism, and all of them have an absurd bias.
90% of them make it seem as though McCarthy was completely wrong and unfair in all of his accusations. The truth is that while most of his work was unfair and inaccurate, the fact was that the State Department was riddled with Soviet spies and sleeper agents. The information released from secret Soviet archives following the collapse of the USSR confirms this.
The other school of (very recent) books suggests that McCarthy was actually right all along and maybe we should reconsider him as a hero. This is an even more absurd position.
But only one side of absurd is still believed by the general public, and that is the idea that all of McCarthy’s points were wrong and that therefore all anti-Communist activities in the US in the McCarthy era were fascist witch-hunts by evil Americans. So the worse of the two theories (that he was a hero) is less dangerous because it is believed by only a handful of people. The lesser falsehood is more dangerous because it is considered so widely believed as to be a common fact, not an opinion or theory to be believed or disbelieved. You can look up McCarthy in any encyclopedia and find him indicted, convicted and condemned as a lunatic hate-mongerer, while the Communists who really were infiltrated the USA are not even on the map, let alone excoriated.
Joseph McCarthy had been a tail gunner on a bomber in WWII. His opponents saw the opportunity and cleverly gave him the derogatory nickname “Tail Gunner Joe,” which of course implied that he was a cheap-shot back stabber.
NUCLEAR JELLO – ROSENBERGS ON TRIAL 1950
The most spectacular trial of 1950 involved a box of Jello brand gelatin and the secrets to the nuclear bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in 1950 of treason. They were procuring important US information on how to build the nuclear bomb and giving it to the Rooskies. The Rosenberg's dominated the headlines for some time, even at the height of the Korean War.
Back in 1944 the atom bomb was being designed and built in Los Alamos New Mexico. Julius Rosenberg was working there. His sister Ethel had a brother named Davey Greenglass. Davey alleged that Julius had approached him with a request to help get nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union. Greenglass worked as a machinist at the Manhattan Project.
At the trial, Greenglass claimed that he had drawn diagrams of nuclear detonators for the bad guys and that Rosenberg was going to help him get in touch with the bad guys for delivery of the vital info. Julius gave Greenglass half of the top of a torn box of Jello gelatin. Greenglass testified under oath that Julius Rosenberg had told him to wait until he was approached by someone who produced the matching other half of the torn Jello box. The mysterious contact would also have a password, “I come from Julius.” In June 1945 the Russian agent, an American named Harry Gold allegedly showed up with the magic torn Jello piece of cardboard that matched perfectly and on demand, the info for the bomb detonators was turned over by Greenglass to Gold.
It was largely on the basis of the Jello story that the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage and sentenced to die.
There is some evidence that the witnesses who helped put the Rosenbergs away were themselves suspect. Gold was already in jail for espionage and cut a deal for a reduced term in exchange for his testimony in the Jello gang witch-hunt. Greenglass was being charged with a serious spy crime, and was also offered a deal for his testy testimony.
The GG team of Gold and Greenglass sometimes contradicted themselves during and after the trial. For example, the password, “I come from Julius.” later was changed to “Julius sent me.” Later on Greenglass said he didn't remember at all what the secret password was. Then he said that it actually might have been, “Charlie sent me.”
The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951 and sentenced to death. Those who believed or wanted to believe that they were innocent began to form defense committees to save them from the chair. “Rosie's Riveters” made a lot of noise for a couple of years but could not prevent the execution.
Julius and Ethel were zapped at Sing Sing on June 19 1953, and for the next 40 years the left has insisted that they were both innocent victims of the Communist hysteria of the 1950's. But documents released by the Soviet Union after it became the former Soviet Union indicate they they were not innocent and that there may be tons of self-righteous leftist writing on them that are simply wrong. The Soviet Union didn't add that part at the end. I did.
DENNIS VERSUS THE UNITED STATES
The feds arrested a bunch of no-good Commies in 1948 and convicted the lot of em. The charge was conspiracy to overthrow the US government. One of the perps was Francis Xavier Waldron. His fake name, his more famous name. was Eugene Dennis, and he was the US Gensec of the American Communist Party.
Dennis was born in Seattle in 1905. He was a leader of the I.W.W. the Industrial Workers of the World and when he got tired of the state of California trying to charge him with sedition, he fled in 1929 to the Soviet Union of uncle Joe Stain.
When he came back to the states a few years later he adopted the show biz name of Eugene Dennis.
Dennis and his lawyers protested their right to free speech under the first amendment to the Constitution. The appeals made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court which handed down its ruling on June 4, 1951.
Dennis vs. United States ruled that sedition, the advocating of the violent overthrow of the government, was not protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The Court didn't really explain why, they just said it did not protect Communists. The law is always flexible and expedient and always adjusts itself to conditions and events. By 1951 any law that protected Communism in America was likely to be re-written, and, as we see, any law that wasn't changed, was re-interpreted.
Dennis went to jail, as did many other American Communists. A few deserved it, but so many really did not that the net result is embarrassing to US history.
THE KOREAN WAR
On June 25, 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States, using the political authority of the United Nations, repelled that invasion, then invaded North Korea. Just as the UN/US coalition seemed like it was about to wipe North Korea off the map, the Communist Chinese intervened with a mass of infantry divisions which threw the US/UN boys back the the original battle lines of June 1950. The war stalemated for two years and was settled diplomatically just after Truman left office. That's the short version of the Korean War.
But the North Koreans did not act on their own. They had plenty of training, help, and support from Moscow. Almost everyone that counted for anything in the USA believed then, and some still believe to this day, that the Russians were, in essence, behind the whole thing. I certainly believe it. Others scoff at this idea as paranoid reactionary lunacy.
The Korean War, or the “Korean Conflict,” as it is often called since the US never formally declared war, was an attempt by the Communist bloc to overrun an annoying thorn in Joe and Mao's side, a non-Com presence on the Asian mainland.
The Communist bloc conceded the Democratic bloc its ring of defenses from Japan down to the Philippines. This was an acceptable off-shore Cold War boundary line. But having an anti-Communist South Korea so close to both Russia and China was another matter - too close to home. It was time to make a move.
Leftists then and later (more so later) gave a lot of publicity to the corrupt nature of the South Korean government we were supporting and trying to save. South Korea was no democracy, so how could we claim to be fighting for democracy against totalitarianism in Korea with a straight face? It was the same argument we would hear later on over Vietnam and Kuwait.
All right, so South Korean President Rhee was no Thomas Paine, and free elections in South Korea were a sham. But as with Vietnam, the Communist version of freedom to the north was many times a worse evil than the imperfect freedom in the south. Free elections in the north were not even a concept that could be abused. North Korea was an unabashed totalitarian fascist regime, and still is.
The president of North K was Kim Il Sung, backed by Russia and China. He was eager to attack the south and “reunify” the nation.
In the South Rhee wanted to attack the north and “reunify” the nation too. Both sides were all in favor of national unity provided they could launch a war and ensure and era of good Korean feelings by force. Once everyone who disagreed with them were dead or in prison, then the Korean nation would stand united.
There was one key difference however between the two men and their goals. The USA very much did not want Rhee to attack the North, and the USA refused his requsts for weapons systems with offensive capabilities. Thee Russian and Chinese on the other hand asuredly supported Sung’s dream of taking down the South and making the peninsula a Korean Communist empire. The newer history books stress that either side was just as likely to invade the other, but that is a liberal lie. Equality of blame is the goal of the guilty, and the sort of attitude that made Reagan so angry, “the desire blithely declare both sides to be equally at fault,” when it isn't so.
The Truman administration pulled US troops out of South Korea by the end of 1949. That alone discouraged any offensive plans in South Korea. Weapons systems given to South Korea were so limited as to preclude even any practical wargames for an offensive to the north, let alone an actual offensive. SK didn't even have the tools for a mock invasion. South Korea got short range fighter planes and second-rate tanks and artillery. These were good enough, theoretically, for defense but not good enough for offense. Even some of the defensive weapons were needlessly poor.
The situation on the other side was sunny for Sung. His army was supplied, trained and advised by the Soviet Union with the fraternal assistance of Communist China. Sung, Mao, and Pal Joey connived to invade the South. Stalin was absolutely convinced that the USA was such a softy that it would not defend South Korea. He thought this was a freebee. The Soviets had watched the USA demobilize it’s forces all over the world. The USSR knew that the US was in the middle of some troubling economic times. Joseph thought that America would huff and puff and do a lot of condemning in the UN, but that we would never risk American lives and come to South Korea's aid. Like Hitler in 1939, and Sadaam in 1990, Stalin and Sung underestimated the wrath of an aroused democracy. These egoist knuckleheads associated affluence with an indigenous pacifism.
Liberal historians of course believe that the invasion of South Korea by the North was not part of a Communist conspiracy to expand their ideology and empire. These historians think that anyone who believes that the North Korean invasion was indirectly a Russian invasion is an uneducated simplistic reactionary ignoramus to be laughed at as a paranoid Mccarthyist neophyte.
FAILED INTELLIGENCE IN KOREAN OUTBREAK
Two events of 1949 directly led to the 1950 attack on South Korea. The detonation of a nuclear bomb plus the Communist victory in China inspired the invasion. The world playing board had changed and the time was ripe. Bomb plus China = Korea.
One State Department expert, Douglas James, approached Aecheson Ball, and Nitze with a prediction that the North Koreans with Soviet leadership and funding were likely to invade South Korea
In the weeks before the invasion, the Koreans, with Russian, aid built new railroad track leading up to the 38th parallel. They were preparing to strike.
General MacArthur commanded the armed forces in the far Pacific. He was 70.
MacArthur had predicted all of this then changed his prediction. From Japan in his weekly report in early March, 1950 Mac wired back to Washington that North Korea might invade the south by the end of the month. But then he sent in several reports over the next two weeks saying in effect, “forget it, I was just being an alarmist.” Turns out he was right the first time.
Another guy who looks good in the prewar weeks is a CIA officer named Hoenikker. This man was quite alarmed at the signals in Korea. Hoenniker wasn't even in Korea, but in his job as CIA analyst, he was actually doing the work CIA was founded to do, analyzing intelligence. The signals and info he was getting from Korea told him that North Korea was planning to invade full scale and was going to do it soon. Hoenniker brought reports to all the American military chieftains and made them sign an index card that stated that they had received it and read it. They signed off and did nothing.
IKE CAUSED THE KOREAN WAR
In a longer term appraisal of the origins of this was the blame must fall in large part on the hero of WWII and the future President Dwight David Eisenhower. In 1947 it was Ike who, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended that the United States withdraw its 45,000 troops from South Korea. Some department heads were reluctant to see the United States leave South Korea so vulnerable, but Ike insisted. He said that Korea was simply not vital to US security and did not have to be defended. The State Department and the national Security Policy Planning Staff (big shot brains like Nitze, Ball, Marshall, and Bohlen, to name two) also disagreed with Ike's assessment of the value of and the threat to Korea.
Of course, once the North Korean attack began, it took exactly five days for the United States to completely change its mind. If only Ike had been overruled in 1947 there is no way the North Koreans would have started that war. With even one US Division on the other side of the border, the North Koreans would have known that an attack on South Korea would have engaged them in a war with the United States. As things stood, they were taking a chance that the United States would not intervene, or that they could at least wipe SK off the map before the US had the chance to.
During the 1952 campaign for President, Ike blamed “Truman and his advisors for the needless debacle in Korea.”
THE WAR BEGINS
On June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army launched the full-scale attack on South Korea, smashing their way across the 38th parallel due south. 90,000 troops with excellent armor, naval and air support exploited the advantage of surprise and sent the small and weak South Korean armed forces reeling. The blitzkrieg in six long columns was an unprovoked act of naked aggression worthy of the admiration of Hirohito or Hitler. The Communists were showing off the reasons that anti-Communists are the way they are.
Less than 40,000 South Korean troops were stationed near the 38th parallel and many of these were on leave. The attack was a complete surprise. The attack was launched on a Sunday morning, just like 12.7.41
PT BOAT
The attack began in earnest at 5 am, but just before that a key incident took place off the southeastern tip of peninsula. This was also reminiscent of the story of 12.7.41. Back then a Japanese midget submarine was sighted and destroyed at the entrance to Pearl Harbor by a US destroyer. Two hours later we were at war.
Just before 5 am on the 25th of June a ROK PT boat spotted two transport ships hovering about off the coast near Pusan. They were obviously not friendly transports. The skipper of the PT boat knew a threat when he saw it. He sped after one transport intending to attack it. That ship went back to North Korea in a hurry. The other ship didn't run. The ROK PT boat fired a torpedo into the other transport and sank it.
It turned out that these two transports were each loaded up with 500 North Korean troops. Their mission was to take Pusan by surprise and establish a beachhead there. If these NK commandos could hold Pusan for a few days, more troops would be sent in quickly.
The North Korean invasion across the 38th parallel was highly successful and the South Korean and UN forces held on for dear life on the little box known as the “Pusan perimeter.” If those transports had landed that pre-dawn morning, there might not have been a Pusan perimeter to fall a back on. The retreating South Korean forces might have been surrounded and demolished somewhere in the middle of South Korea.
A single South Korean PT boat may have saved South Korea from being wiped off the map! If North Korea had won, the Cold War might have turned out differently. Yes, a single PT boat may have won the Cold War.
The key disadvantage for Southie was not troop numbers but heavy armaments, especially tanks. The North Koreans had about 150 T-34 Russia-made tanks while the South Koreans had no tanks at all; zero. Not only that, the South Korean Army did not even have anti-tank weapons, not even some antiquated systems that might get in a lucky shot. Part of the reason the South had no tanks was that the US feared that Rhee might use them in an offensive capacity. So he and his country were left with no defensive capacity.
In the air the South Koreans were especially outgunned. North Korea had more than 100 Russian-made Yak-7 fighters, top notch planes for the time. To meet these jet birds the South Korean had five Sopwith Camels from World War I, and four of these were in the shop. Again, the United States had deliberately left the South Koreans so short of offensive capacity that it backfired when the invasion came.
Was the invasion an act of Soviet expansionism, using North Korea as a cat’s paw for Stalin’s goal of world domination? To this day we don’t know, but the orders to attack were transmitted in Russian. The Soviets certainly provided all the military hardware in the first place that the North Koreans used. Soviet military ‘advisors’ were in place at every level in every branch of the North Koran military.
Yet the newer history textbooks are quick to exonerate the Soviets from any blame for the attack, and mock the earlier belief in Soviet culpability. But Soviet military and political advisors permeated every corner of the North Korean armed forces. Nothing could logically happen without their connivance.
I don’t suppose it counts for anything to the liberal scholars of today that 99.9% of the people in the United States in June of 1950 believed that the invasion of Korea was an act of aggression by the Soviet Union with the at least tacit support of Red China against an open ally of the United States. This includes the unemployed laborer and the member of the US Senate. It was common knowledge that Russia was simply invading South Korea by proxy. But today its almost common knowledge that they weren't! How does that work? Historians of later generations always seem to have more insight into the events of past generations than the people who were on the ground at the time. It was like the Civil War when everyone knew it was all about slavery and 100 years later all the historians explain that it had nothing to do with slavery.
Truman made his decision immediately on how to respond. It was time to make a stand against the Stalinist bullying that had been going on since Potsdam. The Cold War was getting hot and maybe it was about time. The Commies had been pushing around poindexter with the glasses since Potsdam, and it as time to make a damn stand. Truman was up to the task. Who did the Communists think they were dealing with? Harry Truman had already shelled German trench-lines in 1918 and nuked two cities. Harry wasn't about to back down now. We would go to war for Korea.
There was, however, considerable concern in Washington that this might be an attempt by Stalin to prepare for a Soviet invasion of western Europe by first tying down US forces in Korea. The US was not capable of full scale intervention in Korea without precariously decreasing its defense capabilities in Europe. Although there had been popular support for the decision to fight for Seoul, there was not a rush of volunteer enlistments. This was a situation much removed from the emotions following the Pearl Harbor attack, and the armed forces had been steadily downsizing since 1946.
The Yank units stationed in Japan were largely under-trained, the officer corps notwithstanding since most of them had served in WWII.
Before the US could properly mobilize these troops to come and help, the South Koreans were almost wiped off the map. They were reduced to the Pusan Perimeter. (map)
Truman dodged the Congress, whose Republican members he hated so much, and went straight to the United Nations Security Council. He set a dangerous precedent by taking the USA to war without a declaration of war. Democrat and Republican administrations in the future would imitate the dodge..
The vote was 9-0 to condemn the People's Democratic Republic of Korea for it's unprovoked invasion and demanded that North Korea withdraw its forces back where they came from.
The USSR could have vetoed the resolution but Mother Russia was pouting. Russia was boycotting the UN Security Council because the UN had refused to seat the Communist China of Mao in the UN. Stubborn Stalin was shooting Russia in the foot. The Security Council had a single veto rule. The entire war was fought under UN, not US authorization. The Soviet Union could have vetoed the entire effort and put Truman in a more difficult position. You dummies!
With UN support now behind him, Truman found it a simple matter to get support at home. The US would supply the muscle and the UN the foreign diplomatic support.
Truman had not gone to the Congress for a declaration of war. But he hadn’t conducted military operations by Presidential decree either. He let the UN fingers do his walking. The UN umbrella worked on many levels.
Truman officially authorized the deployment of US troops to the scene on June 27, 1950 and by the 29th of June 1950 few companies of US soldiers were on the ground at Pusan. By the Fourth of July, thousands of American boys were shooting it out in Korea. US reinforcements were arriving at the Pusan perimeter as quickly as they could be mobilized and transferred from Japan. Soon the Korean/American forces were ready to try to break out from the PP and begin the counterattack.
But Douglas MacArthur had other plans. He wanted a landing deep behind enemy lines at Inchon, the harbor that served the South Korean capitol. Not one person of authority thought it was a good idea except MacArthur. There were so many formidable geographical obstacles to the landing that it seemed impossible. But that was exactly why DM wanted to try it there. There would be no expectation of attack there and the geography would therefore be the only obstacle.
The landing at Inchon was a spectacular success and the high water mark of the Generals reputation.
MacArthur may have made blunder when he followed up the Inchon landing with a strike north to liberate Souel, the SK capitol. If he had marched east and created a block against the retreating Communist armies, the results would have probably been far better. He could have placed the NK's between his armies and the steadily reinforced UN units counter-attacking from the South. Instead two divisions of crack NK troops made up back North to fight on for the rest of the war.
The forces in the Pusan perimeter made a successful breakout and within a week the Pusanians linked up with the Inchonians. Now it was the North Koreans who had to flee in wholesale retreat.
MAJOR FOREIGN POLICY SIDEBAR – NSC 79 – NOVEMBER 1950
The war had proved the vulcans correct. 68 had only recommended that the United States begin to rebuild its conventional military force options and power. NSC 79 was drafted after the Korean War was in full swing. Truman was now more closely involved with drafting its tenets. 79 was not about whether to rebuild, but how, where and what systems. NSC 79 also re-evaluated American foreign policy all over the globe in a hawk directions.
38 AUTOMATIC COLT
When MacArthur and the advancing forces of good reached the 38th parallel the USA and UN had to face a tough political decision. The North Koreans had invaded the South and now that invasion had been reversed and the invaders expelled. Did this mean victory accomplished, or was the war now to continue into an invasion of North Korea? If so, why? Was the war aim now to conquer North Korea and make the country a united nation under US-approved democracy? Or was the later decision in 1991 in Kuwait to be applied here, the invasion has been reversed, now lets stabilize the recovered territory and go home. If this GHW Bush formula had been applied, perhaps a lot of lives would have been saved as well as much political turmoil both domestic and international.
Nitze and the Vulcan Policy Planning Staff was frantically preparing a paper to present to Truman advising MacArthur to stop at the 38th
parallel. Its not as if the PPS weren't hawks. They were super-hawks. But they also had brains, unlike Dugout Dumbbell. They felt that the UN/US could win a key victory in the Cold War and in “containment” by exploiting the current position of strength and striking a glorious political bargain. For once the insanely stubborn Commies might be willing to compromise. The North Koreans could keep their country in exchange for freezing their military strength at the reduced conditions at the time of the truce, and promising never to attack the south again. NK would agree to build no new airfields, and build up no new significant land divisions. Restrictions would be placed on the size of the North Korean Navy of the future. If they didn't like these terms from the 'good cop' State Department and policy advisory teams, they could face MacArthur the “bad cop” who just wants to beat them up, and didn't care about the law.
On the morning of September 29, 1950 Nitze was just putting the finishing touch on this interesting proposal (I'm not sure how he expected this visionary idea to be enforced, say, six years from now) when he got word that it was too late. General Marshall had wired a fatal telegram to Big Mac,
“We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.”
On September 30th the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent MacArthur a second letter making it very clear that he was not to provoke the Chinese or the Russians by getting too far north and threatening their borders. He was to clean out enemy formations in the Korean heartland and leave the UN in a position to dictate the terms of peace. But he was not to start political trouble in his military mission and if the Chinese did intervene, he was supposed to fall back in an intelligent retreat, not slug it out stubbornly deep in the northern part of North Korea. Many in the Washington think tanks scoffed at the idea that MacArthur would obey orders. The general hated Washington and everyone in it, and had felt that way for decades, to the point where the man needed professional help. Douglas would be delighted to disobey any orders “that turkey farm in DC” as he always called it and everyone in it.
THE YAHOO AT THE YALU
Truman and Marshall specifically told MacArthur, above all else, to at least stay at least 12 miles short of the Yalu River. The Yalu was the border between North Korea and China.
The bum of course knowingly and with pre-meditation disobeyed the order with relish. Did Mac really think the Chinese would accept US troops a George Washington's throwing arm stone's throw from China proper? He was received unambiguous orders to avoid the short strip of land where the Soviet Union shared a border with North Korea. But he was told to pursue the Koreans deep into their own territory.
A vaguely worded UN resolution now authorized the continuation of the counterattack into North Korea after the fact.
As UN/US forces marched north they moved closer and closer to the Chinese and the Russian border. Only a fool could not see the danger here, and if the foolish shoe fits, MacArthur wore it. I'm disgusted that we were both born on the same day, January 26th.
The Americans advanced up both shores of the Korean peninsula, but neither spearhead was able to link up with the other. The center was still unchallenged in North Korea. The Soul drive up the west coast was paralleled by a second front that opened at Wosan on the east coast of North Korea. The amphibious landing there by the Americans was supposed to outflank the Koreans, ala Inchon, but the South Korean Army had already taken the city before the Americans landed. In fact, Bob Hope was in Wosan before the Marines. Hope was driven there for a USO show and had to wait for his audience to land by boat. The situation was far from Hopeless.
The Wosan corps marched up the east coast and turned inland towards the soon to be infamous Chosin Reservoir.
China sent send unveiled warnings that if the UN occupied North Korea, it would intervene in strength from Manchuria. Douglas scoffed at what he considered to be a bluff. No one would dare attack an American, army, thought the chauvinist.
The same prospect that was unacceptable to the UN in the South, was equally unacceptable to the Communist block in the North. If the USA could not accept the loss of South Korea with no compensation, so too couldn’t the Communists. MacArthur had visions of free elections in a united Korea under UN/US supervision.
But how realistic was it to think that China would sit passively while US troops wiped their ally was off the map, and installed an unfriendly Democratic Korean regime 100 yards away? Even if the Communists had been the aggressor that started the war, it didn't mean that could stand.
Chinese troops began infiltrating North Korea preparing for a massive counter-attack against the Americans front and rear. They managed to get on all sides of the American positions. When the big red attack came, the GI's were disorientated outnumbered and on the run. Severe fighting went on for weeks in the vicinity of the Chosen reservoir
RED ROUTE 2
Now the bad guys had the good guys on the run. All the gains of the counter-strike into North Korea were lost as Red China (oh I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to call it that) invaded their own ally to liberate it in the name of oppression.
The UN team was pushed back across the 38th parallel, suffering one defeat after another. Seoul fell to the Communist troops for the second time in the war.
But also for the second time in the war, the Reds overextended themselves. This time there was less panic in the democracies. They were confident they could ride out this counterattack and regain the initiative. With more UN help in place and the Communist too far ahead of themselves, there would be no second PPP (Pusan Perimeter Panic.)
After being pushed back into South Korea the US/UN again counterattacked, with the help of the F-104 fighters. The 104's were winning their dogfights consistently with the Russian Migs.
It was at this point that Big Mac decided that full-scale war with China would smooth things over.
The entire war wasn’t horrible enough, now MacArthur had to throw his hideous concepts of diplomacy into the mix. Clausewitz said that war was a continuation of politics by different means. Mac felt that politics was a rude interruption to the endless state of war that he saw as the staff of life. His idea, one that he advocated strenuously, was to attack China. We should also attack Russia if necessary. MacArthur was certain that they way to win the war was to attack Chinese troops and support facilities in Manchuria and to blockade and attack Chinese cities all along the coast of Asia.
Naturally this would have meant world war between the United States and China. If we had listened to this maniac fool, countless thousands of people would have needlessly died, and relations between the US and China would have been poisoned for about 300 years.
And how could China have defeated a military power like the USA? It couldn’t have. And how could the United States have defeated China with its limitless land mass, limitless population base, its Soviet ally, and its home field advantage? It couldn’t have.
The answer is that neither side could have won and a million people would have perished to satisfy MacArthur’s lunacy. He would have drawn us into a world war III that no one was capable of winning. The casualty figures in a five year war to beat China could have made the Somme look like a skirmish.
Truman would not give DM the authority to launch attacks on China. So Mac began complaining to the press and to sympathetic politicians back in the states. One of these pols read a long letter from MacArthur into the Congressional record in which the general ripped Truman’s weak conduct of the Korean War. DM knew how to push the ‘right’ buttons. Overnight the rednecks were pacing the floors of the United States with anger towards the President.
It didn’t seem to matter much to Mac or his millions of supporters that the President was the Commander in Chief of all the armed forces, including popular military heroes.
Harry Truman was not going to start a war with China and he thought MacArthur was guilty of both madness and insubordination. Truman decided he had listened to enough of this guff. He fired Douglas MacArthur. It was one of the most spectacular political decisions in all of history. The landing on the moon in 1969 wasn’t as big of a headline.
The decision was not popular. The pols, press, and public largely vilified Truman as a weakling and a petty jealous man. Truman took it on the chin while MacArthur returned to a hero’s welcome. He was actually given a ticker tape parade in New York City attended by hundreds of thousand of cheering supporters.
What a profound demonstration against the president. A ticker tape parade for getting fired. When I got fired from radio station WGHT, NY for putting down Santa Claus on the air, the only thing I had waiting for me was six months of unemployment checks. This guy gets fired for trying to send 30 million Chinese civilians and soldiers and 1 million American soldiers to needless death and gets a parade.
I know that there are a million good men and a few women who loved this guy and swear by him. But there were also stories throughout World War II from people who strongly disliked his big ego. A lot of Mac's fans don't know all the stories about what a foolish jerk he could be.
Truman’s popularity plummeted. Like Bush in 1991, he was taking the arrows from both sides for having the wisdom and courage to take the middle course. Both in 1950 and 1991 the left thought the war was a mistake and that we shouldn’t be there, and the right thought that the United States didn’t go far enough because the enemy was not completely conquered. Truman’s answer to the charge that apparently we aren’t over there to win was,
“No, we aren’t over there to ‘win’ anything. We are over there to ‘stop’ something, namely aggression.”
Professor Bailey says that whatever one thinks of Truman’s decision to remove MacArthur, there can be no doubt that the summary and public manner in which he did it was a catastrophic error.
I do not agree.
I think it sent a positive message: a loud and clear message to the nation and the world that in this country the military power is subordinate to the civilian; a clear message that only the President is the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces; a clear message that if the trafficking in political ideas among Army privates is considered improper, than it is just as improper among generals. Important principles were on the line. Shout it from the tallest mountain, Harry. ‘I’m firing this insolent militarist bully. How dare he try to make political decisions in his uniform.’ And Harry fired the Mac. Right on brother, right on. Harry Truman, Democrat, my main man!
Pershing, Eisenhower and Grant had never been so glorified in victory as MacArthur was for being fired in the middle of a stalemate.
FADE AWAY… PLEASE
On April 19, 1951 MacArthur addressed a Joint Session of Congress that had convened only to honor him. Some bi-partisan support for the President this was. The sound byte that has come down to history for the convenience of the lazy student is him saying in closing, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” Ask anyone at a bar who said that and they’ll say “Douglas MacArthur.” But he was quoting an old West Point ballad and gave full credit. But the sentence has trickled down to history as if these were his words.
What is more important about the Congressional speech (besides that fact that Harry Truman allowed it and might have been able to prevent it if he had tried) was the fact that it contained an offensive an outrageous lie. Douglas claimed that his policy of winning in Korea, while not backed by Truman, did indeed have the full backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces.
Wrong.
The JCS never backed MacArthur’s escalation policy of attacking and blockading China. The JCS was in line with the President on policy even if most of them loved Mac as a man. When MacArthur told the Joint session that he had the support by the Joint Chiefs the joint went wild. He got an ovation for his dirty filthy stinking disgusting offensive lie.
After the speech MacArthur was got the ticker tape parade down Broadway in Manhattan. People lined the route screaming for reinstatement of Doug and for the scalp of Truman. “Impeach Harry the Hat!” ran one sign. Another said “You Call This a Fair Deal?” Another said simply, “Harry, We Hate You Now!”
My Uncle Sonny served in Korea. He’s living in a nursing home now. The last time I saw him I asked whose side he was on in Korea, Truman or MacArthur. He said “MacArthur of course. He was there with us. Truman wasn’t.”
But MacArthur may have fooled Sonny a little with his act, wading ashore for the cameras in the Philippines while some people more in the know were giving him the negative nickname “dugout Doug” for his lack of real exposure to enemy fire. Not everyone shared Sonny’s view. One Marine wrote to Truman in support of the Mac sack. He said, “Mr. President we had a little ditty we recited in the trenches, “Stick with Mac and you’ll never get back.” (Incidentally, Sonny never got a purple heart but he may have deserved one. He was driving a jeep when it hit a mine and he was thrown out. The passenger soldier was killed and his body landed on Sonny with such force as to cause a severe shoulder injury that put Sonny in the hospital. The Army decided that getting hit by a dead body did not constitute a combat wound. It was deemed more or less an accident same as tripping down some stairs on the way to the mess hall.)
The lie that the JCS had backed MacArthur inspired Congress a week later to convene hearings on the justice of the MacArthur firing. Doug started the proceedings with three days of testimony that did not win his case. He was full of contradictions. Because he was so full of it he did not acquit himself well. When DM resumed his blunt talk about attacking China the spirit of ticker-tape faded flush out of the room and Senators retreated from the gung ho support they had given him a week earlier. General Bradley added cool water to the fire when he testified that MacArthur’s Korean strategy of escalation would involve the US “in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.” That toned down the calls for Truman’s neck. (The four wrongs quote was adopted verbatim by John Kerry when he ran for President in 2004 in describing the War in Iraq.)
After MacArthur was canned, people could start thinking about peace again. The battle front had stabilized along a jagged 38th parallel. While the fighting never completely stopped, it did subside and become sporadic in character for the last year of the war. Truman passed the hot potato on to Ike, who settled the War by showing off the brand new rolling artillery pieces at his inaugural, artillery pieces that fired small nuclear shells. They had been in development for some time, and now Ike was very happy to have them operational, just in time for negotiations with North Korea.
MACARTHUR CONSIDERED
Sometimes I like MacArthur, sometimes I don't. More often I don't.
He was a stubborn Scotsman. His grandfather Arthur MacArthur was governor of Wisconsin for five days, and went on to become a justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia until he died in 1890 while standing at the front of the beach and watching the surf come in at Atlantic City New Jersey.
Doug's dad was also named Arthur MacArthur. In fact, his middle name was Arthur. He was Arthur Arthur MacArthur. When AAM was 16 years old he met Abraham Lincoln in the White House. It was 1861. The boy was seeking an appointment to West Point and Lincoln told him he was all out of appointments. But Lincoln put his hands on MacArthur's shoulders and told him he would be a soldier soon enough. The President would put him near the top of the list for next year.
Arthur MacArthur fought in many of the campaigns of the Civil War.
KOREAN FALLOUT
One historian on the war calls it “The first war we lost.” I don't quite buy that. For starters we showed all our allies and our potential allies that we stood by our friends. Countries on the fence between the western and the Soviet bloc could see that the US and the UN offered military protection, not just words, and that Americans would even shed blood for a worthy cause that was not directly their own. Europeans felt more trust and leaned more towards collective security with the US. We had a better reputation with our friends in 1953 than in 1949.
POSTWAR INDOCHINA/VIETNAM WAR BEGINNINGS
Much has been made of the support that US covert forces gave at the end if WWII to the Viet Minh. These were the same revolutionary Communists that fought the USA in Vietnam later. So why did we support them in 1945 and bomb them in 1965?
Bao Dai was Emperor of French Vietnam before World War II. When the Japanese seized control of Vietnam but let the French run the place in a way similar to that of Vichy France, Dai co-operated with the plan. He became a puppet Emperor under Japanese rule.
After the war the French used Dai as the ruler of a separate Vietnam from the Communist one in the North. Later in the 50’s, Dai’s Prime Minister would become President of an Independent South Vietnam. The US would support this man Thieu, until 1963. So we went into South Vietnam to support the Prime Minister of a puppet of the Japanese during World War II.
Bao Dai Put His Stamp
On Vietnamese History
The Viet Minh were helping us to harass and attack the Japanese forces of occupation in Indochina. They didn’t do too much of military value but naturally they had our political support. In the immediate aftermath of the war the situation was chaotic. France wanted back in, the Viet Minh wanted independence and the United States was caught in between with little enthusiasm for either side.
It is partisan exaggeration to suggest that we backed Ho Chi Minh at the outset of the Vietnam War, as is often claimed. The Viet Minh had a dust trail of leftover support from the Second World War that we initially had no reason to strongly repudiate. By the end of Truman’s term, the US had clearly shifted its support to the French, and for one simple reason. By that time China had gone Communist and that was the key to our entry into the Vietnam War, not support for French colonialism.
In fact as early as July 1945, when the war was not yet concluded, Truman let De Gaulle know that the United States would not interfere with any attempt by France to resume control over its former colonies in Indochina.
Some suggest that the US in this policy was a hypocrite since Truman and his doctrine was supposedly all about supporting peoples who wanted independence against minority oppressors. The US complained because Eastern Europe was being subjugated by Communist ruling-class oligarchies. So why would we support France in treating Indochina the same way?
By the summer of 1945 Truman realized what he was up against in the USSR of Joey Stalin. The Soviets successfully bullied Roosevelt at Yalta and to a lesser extent, had strong-armed Truman at Potsdam. Truman was a tough man and he had had enough. Stalin was breaking promises faster than he could make them and was clearly subjecting eastern Europe to a totalitarian rule only slightly more lenient than that of the Nazis. Harry had both eyes wide open by the middle of July 1945. He knew that he would need France in Europe to help stop the Russians from taking over the continent either politically through Communist revolution, or by overt military attack. Truman decided that it was worth turning a blind eye on Indochina if this was what it took to win solid French support in Europe. Ike would continue to reluctantly support the French in Vietnam for the same reasons when he became president.
Secondly the US knew that France contained many leftists who were not in favor of the mission to contain and reverse the tide of Soviet expansionism and Communism. He didn't want to get France all riled up internally by supporting a Communist revolution in French Indochina.
The famous leader Ho Chi Minh declared Independence for Vietnam from Hanoi on September 2, 1945. At this point he and his followers had done nothing to earn it except to walk into a vacuum left by the departing Japanese in the interim before the French could come back. Ho and his followers had not earned independence. The dead Americans on Iwo Jima had won it for them. The Japanese did not take heavy losses in Indochina during their occupation from July of 1941 to August of 1945.
The French Army came back to Vietnam in 1946. The Viet Minh were in control of the Northern portion of Vietnam by that time although their grip on the region was tenuous at best. General de Clerk was scheduled to arrive at the Hanoi airport to take over. The Viet Minh and the French were for the moment cautious allies.
Ho Chi Minh ordered his second in command, general Giap to welcome De Clerk at the airport. Giap said, “Ho, I'll shine your shoes, and I'll clean latrines for the cause. I will risk my life in battle for you and for Communism. But I'll be damned to hell before I will welcome that Frenchman back to Vietnam. Do it yourself!”
Ho remained calm for he understood that some members of Giap's family had been tortured and killed by the French prior to the outbreak of World War II. He told Giap, “You sit down and have a good cry. Then you go and welcome General De Clerk like he is your best friend. The time will come later when you can settle your score with the Frenchies.”
Giap swallowed his pride and did as he was told. But he was so effusive in his fake friendliness that few missed the sarcastic message. Giap extended his hand with a frozen smile and said,”Welcome brother! The first resistance fighter of Vietnam welcomes the first resistance fighter of France.” The clueless De Clerk bought it, even though the subtle hostility was supposed to be as transparent as glass.
The Viet Minh and the French spent most of 1946 trying to work out a deal whereby the French would still rule in Vietnam, but the Viet Minh would have some degree of autonomy. But this town wasn't big enough for two sheriffs and on December 19, 1946 a bloody civil war broke out in the streets of Hanoi. The first of three Vietnam Wars was on. This one would end in defeat of France in 1954. The second would end in a thinly disguised defeat of the United States in 1973, and the third would end in the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975.
HO HO HO
Who was this George Washington of Communist Vietnam?
The standard slanted versions of the war all stress that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist, not a Communist. Besides, even if he was, it would make no difference to many a leftist writer. Anti-Communists are demonized in American history books far more than any Communists are.
Ho Chi Minh was a founder of the French Communist Party in the Paris of the twenties. He went to the School of Communist Revolution in Moscow. Ho only left Paris when the Nazis came in and would have been happy to stay in Paris forever if not for that. In 1940 he went back to Southern China to join up with Communist revolutionaries there. Ho hid out from the Japanese in Chinese caves and developed a high-hills following of Vietnamese Communists. HCM lived in a mountain he named Marx and fished in a river he named Lenin (I'm serious.) Yet we are constantly informed that he was not a Communist at all, but only a Vietnamese nationalist. Those who feared his Communist orientation were paranoid fools. It makes no sense.
Look at the slick writing of University of Kentucky Historian George C. Herring as he explains the admirable innocence of Ho and his followers.
Herring writes that they,
… tapped the vast reservoir of Vietnamese nationalism,
muting their commitment to a social revolution and
adopting a broad platform stressing independence
and “democratic” reforms.
The phrase ‘muting their commitment to a social revolution’ is a deliberate knowing bias euphemism. The true phrase as applicable here would be, ‘hiding their commitment to a Communist revolution.’ Nice try. As if Ho was ever anything remotely resembling a socialist. Ho never joined a socialist party in his life. Only Communist. Ho would more likely be found drunk on beer in a Peoria Knights of Columbus Hall than in any gathering of mainstream socialists in southeast Asia.
Ho Chi Minh has long had more apologists in US Universities than he ever had in a Communist country. The Vietnam national website today has much unabashed information on Ho’s overtly Communist life story, yet US Vietnam War history books downplay his Communism with zeal. The left simply ignores facts that do not fit their fiction. The Vietnam website openly tells of Ho’s attendance at Communist Universities in Moscow while western writers deliberately omit this part of his life story every time! From the Vietnam website.
After World War I, using the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), Ho engaged in radical activities and was in the founding group of the French Communist party. He was summoned to Moscow for training and, in late 1924, he was sent to Canton, China, where he organized a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. He was forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities, but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International. In June 1931 Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces.
Official Vietnam Website 2007
The left still refuses to accept that Ho Chi Minh was ever an aggressive international Communist, loyal to a movement. Yet they can read this above passage with a straight face. Vietnam openly proclaims this today and the western historians here still won’t concede the point.
You can watch any documentary on the Vietnam war and every western talking head will say that Ho was not really a Communist. Maybe America is embarrassed to lose to “those Communists,” so we declare that we withdrew from a civil war we hard no business being part of, wheres the truth was that we lost a tough one to the Commies. The Cold War was on. We'd won a close one in Korea, there were litt skirmishes all over the globe, and then we lost game 6 in Nam. But if feels better to explain that they weren't really Communists, hence Ho wasn't one. The winners have no need to twist the facts. The South rewrite the US Civil War the way it didn't happen, not the North.
I say that Ho Chi Minh was a mass murderer that deserved to be executed by any assassin that could have snuck into his tent. Sadaam with a long beard and sandals. Bin Laden, only three feet shorter. Ho Chi Mihn's North Vietnamese Communists murdered at least 100,000 landowners, intellectuals and village leaders long before the first American soldier set foot on Vietnamese soil, and long before the Geneva accords divided the country in half in 1954.
Then the Viet Minh murdered tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese people for not accepting and supporting Communism, again long before the first American helos arrived. We should have blown Ho away with an air strike early on. It would have been a better planet without him.
Did I mention that as a young man he sold out a fellow Communist for French gold? The fellow Communist was executed while Ho counted his money. That's a true story and he didn't even deny it, but justified it on flimsy grounds that the money served the greater good. Some crusader. Some hero.
Western biographers who admire Ho can go to hell and play cards with him when they get there.
And why is Pol Pot a demon, while Ho a hero? Mostly because there were no western reporters with cameras recording the mass murders of Ho in the North in the 1950's. If they got three seconds a year, it was fuzzy grainy black and white. Pol Pot did his mass killing in the 1970's when the western media was within striking distance with color camcorders shooting up the bodies, so Pol is another Hitler. Ho's mass murder of North Vietnamese Catholics and innocent landowners happened too far back in time and too far back out of camera range, so he's cool. His cruelties get just a passing apologist mention in the schoolbooks, while Pol Pot is a major demon of history.
Let's jump ahead a little for an illustration of Ho's image here in America. Many of the leftist demonstrators in the United States in the late 60's and early 70's carried placards with Ho pictures on it. My father, a Boston police officer and not a political man, used to come home from anti-war demonstrations very choked up with hurt and anger describing the crowds that chanted, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” at the Boston cops who were just trying to maintain order.” Even though I was slowly evolving into a long haired lefty hippie at the time, the hurt in my father's voice gave me great pause, and I will never forget it. What a positive figure Ho was to many Americans. That a crowd of demonstrating youths in a conservative city like Boston in 1968 could chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Mihn” at the Boston Police says a lot to me. It's wrong. The crowds, by the way, also threw bags of feces at the cops. And if some cops reacted they were labelled fascist pigs. How would you react? I'd buy a flamethrower and come back the next day with refills. I'd make them all do their Saigon Budhhist monk impression for me. Dad had some tough arguments with my older sister who took the side of the demonstrators. Usually I just listened. However there was there was an almost tragic one-hour slugfest over the meaning of the term, “Off the Pig!” That was a popular slogan with the demonstrators back then. You could literally buy that bumper sticker and I saw it myself, but I never recall seeing anyone actually have the guts to put it on theor car. But I did see it for sale and it was a very commonI took Dad's side on that one. I didn't interject much, but I took his side with my one or two sentences.
1950 was a real pivotal year for Nam and America’s reaction to it. Red China and the USSR in January recognized the Ho Chi Minh government as the rightful government of all of Vietnam. The United States reacted by saying no, the true ruler of Vietnam was the Emperor Bao Dai, a man who favored limited democracy, opposed the Communists and was something of a puppet for continued French colonialism.
The choices were both bad, but anti-Communism was always US default position.
In June the North Koreans poured across the 38th parallel and the Cold War got very hot. American support for anti-Communists in Indochina instantly went from passive to active. 10 million dollars was appropriated for Bao’s government in the South.
Truman passed this Vietnam hot potato on to Ike, who passed it on to Kennedy, who passed it on to Johnson, who passed it on to Nixon, who passed on to Ford who dropped it and the American people applauded him for it.
COLD WAR STATUS JANUARY 1 1953
As Truman prepared to leave office, the Cold War was at full-scale. The Korean War was winding down, but it represented an overt military clash between friends of Sam and friends of Stalin, and was an attempt by both sides to assert its' dominance in a key corner of the globe.
The USSR had emerged by 1 1 53 as a nuclear power. The United States had a big ad in delivery systems and in number of bombs, but one Russian nuke on New York City = enough said.
There were Cold War hot spots in Korea, Indochina, Berlin, Turkey, Iran, and the United Nations. But what was most important, Stalin was still alive. Uncle Joe had only three months left to live. Truman would be out of office when Ike reaped the benefits of the thaws in the Cold War that came when (ironically) Stalin turned to ice.)
A lot of Americans had trouble admitting it, but the USSR had emerged in the post-WWII world as the number two industrial power in the world, and after these two, there wasn't really a close number three. For more than a century from 1830 to 1940, Great Britian and Germany, not Russia, were the big guns on the industrial power battleship. The United States didn't even get to number one until the 20th century began, but again, no one really saw Russia as a great industrial power, not even one about to emerge as one.
For five hundred years the west had laughed at Russian backwardness, and for five hundred years intelligent Russians had been embarrassed and frustrated to admit it.
Peter the Great began the process of progress in industrial affairs, but his effort was only a dent in the wall. It took many Tsars and Commissars before the corner was turned, and it turned in Truman's time.
From 1945 to 1952 the Soviet Union closed the gap by more than half. In 1926 the United States was ten times the industrial power that the USSR was. The math had not changed much in 1940, the last year of Russia at peace, and the math did not change much during the hardship of World War II. If anything, the Russians fell even further behind during the fighting, as its land was ravaged by war from sea to burning sea, while the United States was virtually unscratched except for a single attack on warships at bay at a territorial possession.
But after the war, the Russians had some advantages in industrial rebound that enabled it to reach the higher league of industrial competition at a remarkable rate. By the time Truman said bye bye, the Russians were one third the industrial power of the United States and equal to the industrial power of Britain Germany and France combined. Few would have forecast this in the 1920's when the USSR launched all these big publicity “Five Year Plans” to reach fantastic industrial goals, and fell short of them time after time, sometimes starting new “Five Year Plans” before the earlier five years were even expired. Experts in the west had become used to not taking these Soviet industrial goals very seriously except for naïve leftists in the USA like FDR and some of his pink-admiring advisors. (Note: I didn't say they were pink, I am saying that they looked up to the USSR as something to admire and emulate, and that it was a shameful chapter in American political history that these men so close to the top and at the top felt that way.)
So the average expert and citizen in America had to make quite a readjustment when the Soviet Union emerged in the post war years as a military and industrial giant. Previously, the USSR was sees as a land of much land, and little real power. Remember, the Poles in 1939 didn't even want Soviet protection from Hitler because it honestly thought that the Red Army would make no difference against Hitler, that's how bad the Poles thought the Red Army was. When Russia was thrown back on the defense after it attacked Finland, the world took note at how weak the Soviet Army was, yet again. Hitler became that much more convinced after this “Winter War” of 1939-1940 that Russia had no real industrial military might and that defeating it in 1941 would be a piece of cake. When Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, the oddsmakers in Reno gave 14 to 1 on Russia to win the war. If you wanted to bet Hitler you had to put up $1,400 to win $100. The Germans were the prohibitive favorites to win World War II in Russia.
The point being that even during the war, it didn't dawn on many people in the west that Russia was the new great power in the world.
The United States from 1945 to 1952 grew enormously in industrial and economic power also, but the Soviets grew so much, that it closed the gap and surpassed the old states of western Europe.
There were three main reasons why Russia shot up like Jack's Beanstalk after WWII, and why it did not by comparison after WWI, when it Five Year planned to.
After World War One, Russia was in a state of utter chaos and collapse. Starvation swept the land, Civil War joined the cauldron, the Allies sent in a military intervention, and the Russian Empire was chopped off in the west. Poland, Romania, and the Baltics gained territory from the Tsarist empire. To make matters worse, the Communists at first tried to seriously implement its noble goals of caring for the workers on grand marxist principles. On top of all this came the world-wide great Depression. And on top of all of this was a political civil war within the victors of the Civil War, that is, Stalin vs. Lenin Trotsky Zinoviev, ect, plus Stalin's insane purges and kill-kulak campaign that imposed mass man-made starvation over and above all the starvation that was happening anyway. All these factors contributed to turning the “Five Year Plans” into a laughing stock for western conservative anti-Bolos.
After World War II almost all these factors were completely reversed.
Russia emerged from World War II in a state of stability and political unity, it's national morale never more solidified. With the help of its Allies, Russia was hungry, yes, but starving, no. There was not a trace of civil war to worry about, nor any threat of an Allied military intervention, since the USSR was ostensibly still allied with the rest of the Allies and in fact all were planning to remake a positive post war world.
After World War I the USSR was Red with rage against the west, even more so than its war opponent, Germany. In fact it didn't even call itself the USSR until four years after WWI ended. But it did call itself a dedicated enemy of all the western capitalist nations, including the United States, and dedicated itself to the overthrow of all of their evil governments. After WWII there was no such monkey-wrench dividing Russia from her war allies. The same nation that went to war in 1941 finished the war in 1945, unlike the situation between 1914 and 1917.
In 1945 the USSR gained territory in the west, the reverse of 1917-19. Russia regained the lost lands of Poland, Bessarabia, and the Balitcs, and added new conquests that even Catherine the Great could never have fantasized about. Russia now owned its lost lands of pre-1914 plus political occupation and control of all of Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, not to mention occupation of Chinese Manchuria. So another negative from Post WWI is a positive in post WWII. The western Allies even agreed that Russia was entitled to no less than 10 9145 billion dollars worth of reparation from the occupied lands. Russia made sure it took even more than that, removing small industrial cities almost literally on trains back towards the Urals.
Stalin was in complete dictatorial control over the USSR after WWII so there was no political civil war to worry about, no bickering unless you want to die at sundown. So that helped.
But what was probably most helpful of all in the USSR achieving its grandiose Five year Plan goals in the post-war era was the complete laughing disdain and abandonment of any sincere Marxist principles.
The Soviet Union in 1946 was about as Marxist as Texas in 1840. Its not happening except in rhetoric over loudspeakers in public squares. The Russian workers did indeed put out some herculean efforts to raise Russia from the ashes of war. But it was all done at gunpoint and the workers were not rewarded in the least. Marx would have had the workers rewarded. Stalin was not Marx.
The United States, if it had applied the Soviet formula, would have stayed 8 or 9 times ahead of the USSR in this era, but we like to pay our workers for their work, and we allow labor unions and legal recourse and all kinds of stuff like that to make sure of it. In other words, American post-war industrial output was slowed down a bit by the fact that American wages and living standards were raised up along with the output. The USSR was under no such noblesse oblige. The Russia workers performed miracles and got a lump of coal as a reward. All of the increased productivity went to the state and none to the workers. The USSR was able to build new fantastic factories and produce bombers and aircraft carriers, creating a new world perception of Soviet industrial power, and did it at the expense of the workers. The country that was supposed to at long last protect the workers form the evils of oppressive industrial capitalism did just the opposite.
The Russian worker and peasant lived the same miserable life in 1950 that he or she was living in 1938. In order for the big socialist experiment to catch up to the capitalist king, it had to prove to the world that it wasn't socialist at all, just a big totalitarian thug state that no one in their right mind would want to visit, let alone live in.
SUPREME COURT
Truman named four men to the Supreme Court; Harry Burton, Freddie Vinson, Tom Clark, and Sherman Craig Minton.
Minton only made it up the ladder in life because he was friends with a nut. Mr. Minton had been classmates at Indiana University (where he was a star hoosier basketball player) with Paul McNutt who went on to become governor of Indiana. In 1933 McNutt gave Minton a job as public counselor for Indiana. From there he rose up the ladder till he reigned supreme.
CONCLUSION
HT was not our happiest president. He didn’t relish every minute of it like Reagan or Clinton. Harry referred to 1600 Pennsylvania as the ‘Big White Jail.’
Truman is remembered by people who never lived under him as one of our greatest and most admirable presidents. We have the Democratic bias of the history profession to thank for that. He was never very popular as president, except briefly at the beginning of the Korean War. In the fall of 1952, even though he had strongly indicated that he did not intend to run for second full term his name was placed on the New Hampshire primary ballot and he was soundly defeated by the obscure and unloved Senator Estes Kefauver. What little doubt remained in his mind was removed and Truman shortly thereafter pulled an LBJ and announced that he did not seek nor would he accept the nomination of his party for president.
Truman wrote to a friend near the end of his term that he had been, ‘roundly abused and misrepresented in certain sections of the press.’ The historical press has made up for that, Harry. The more I study Truman the less I like him and I began studying his administration with a favorable slant. My father had often told me that he liked Harry Truman and Dad served in the US Navy under his watch.
The revisionist haloization (as opposed to demonization) of Truman is frustrating to witness and endure as a Republican sympathizer. Truman rose to power as the pawn of a corrupt big city boss, made Vice President as a sheer accident and then accidentally presided over one of the most tumultuous eras in the history of the USA. His job performance under the gun was better than average, especially in Korea, but the personal conceit and arrogance, as well as the demented hatred of the Republican Party are a bit much for this student.
I like to find a story for each president that best illustrates the person. Harry Truman had an old World War I pal named Harry Vaughn. They had shelled Germans together and that made for a beautiful friendship.
When he became President, Truman gave Vaughn some very important inside positions in government. To a man and woman, all of the top brains trust in the Truman Administration knew that Vaughn was corrupt and had to go. His presence in important positions was hurting the country. Aecheson and Ball thought so, Nitze thought so, Barclay thought so, Marshall thought so, and even Truman's private secretary thought Vaughn had to go. Truman could boldly fire MacArthur, but he had a double standard for his friend Harry Vaughn.
Aecheson was griping about Vaughn for the 10 millionth time when Nitze told him, “As Secretary of State you have an obligation to go up to the White House and tell him that Vaughn has to go. I'm just a policy advisor. I don't have the kind of access you do. You gotta do it, Deano.”
Aecheson told Nitze that it was pointless. “All he will do is hit the roof and toss me out of his office!”
Nitze then told Aecheson that, “I agree. But still, you have a moral obligation to try. Its not right that no one will at least try to stand up to Truman and tell him the truth. You owe it to your country to at least try.”
Aecheson knew that Nitze was right and yelled, “Paul, I hate you!”
The next day Aecheson walked into Nitze's office.
“Well, Deano, how did it go?”
Aecheson responded, “Harry hit the roof and threw me out of his office.”
That story says it best about Harry Truman. No wonder he disliked Ike and MacArthur. It takes an ego to resent an ego.
SOURCES
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford – c) 1961 D.C. Heath
Two of my top ten historians and one of my favorite quarterbacks of all time came out of Stanford. Bailey and John D. Hicks wrote the books and Jim Plunkett threw the footballs. Interestingly, Plunkett majored in history and Bailey played varsity football as a Stanford undergraduate in 1922.
Bailey, in the light of PC presentism looks like a right-wing regressive at times. He writes of “the little men of Japan” trying to “get back on their sandaled feet” after the war, and “benefitting from the adoption of 'de-mok-las-sie ' ”
Get it? They talk funny. Whoa.
Bailey takes a correct view of the Soviet problem, making the great point that Russia only hurt itself when it played its nasty games after WWII. The United States was in a generous mood with money and if Russia had played ball, the USA would have given it billions. Instead the Russians got tough and lost a great chance to grow its economy,
“Instead of milking America, the Russian rulers disdainfully kicked her in the teeth. In doing so, they all too openly revealed that they had not abandoned their zeal for Communist world revolution. They further betrayed their aggressive aims by crying “capitalist encirclement” - at the very time when we were hastily demobilizing our armed forces and they were bolstering theirs.”
Right on, Tommy. It's a shame how many modern American historians buy into the Soviet line of early cold war “capitalist encirclement” and write of the era as though Russia was indeed the victim, and as if this passage by Bailey is laughably naïve, which it is not. It is naïve to think that this passage was naïve.
Conflict and Crisis, by Robert Donovan – Volume one of two chronicling the Truman presidency. Donovan writes very well. It's fun to type that up.
Counsel to the President, by Clark Clifford – A great book! - Clark was a lawyer’s lawyer and close advisor to several presidents. His name is nowhere nearly as famous as it probably should be considering his historical contribution. Counsel is a brilliant book because the content is snobby but the writing is not. Also, it was published just in time. Clifford’s name crashed shortly after the book became a success when he was fingered in a major international banking scandal. This untoward BCCI story would have killed his manuscript if he had waited a few more years before writing it. Clifford’s ego is too large for any scale of measurement, but at least he earned his bragging rights.
Clifford’s book discusses the dilemma of being a liberal in an age that demanded conservatism in foreign policy,
As liberals, we saw ourselves as the true
internationalists, the Americans who best
understood the dangers of both communism
and fascism, while conservatives, many of
whom came out of an isolationist background,
saw the world in grossly simplified terms.
No way.
The Conquerers, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Germany, 1941-1945, by Michael Beschloss – c) 2002 - Simon & Schuster
Not my favorite writer, but MB is so renowned that I have to know what his latest research says on it.
A Country Made by War, From the Revolution to Vietnam – The Story of America’s Rise to Power, by Geoffrey Perret, c)1989 – Perret claims that the biggest problem with American ground forces in WWII was a lack of killer instinct at the foot soldier level. GP writes that bombers crews and artillery units did their part as long as they could not see their enemy as they killed them. But “only one rifleman in four could bring himself to fire his weapon in combat.”
I find that hard to believe.
The Crucial Decade-And After, America 1945-1960, by Eric F. Goldman, c)1960
Crusade in Europe, by Dwight D. Eisenhower – For the story of the final drive into Germany in April-May 1945. Maybe the best war book of all time.
Decision in Germany, by Lucius D. Clay – Excellent book and a priceless primary source for events in the Allied administration of post-war Germany.
Delivered From Evil, by Robert Leckie – c) 1987
He fought on Guadalcanal. He fought on Saipan. He fought on Iwo Jima. Then he wrote a 948 page history of WWII. Leckie is seldom dull, usually opinionated, and has no pity for the enemy in his writing. He describes the slaughter of Japanese troops with prolific relish. The poor man. He suffers from PTSS and he doesn't even know it.
Eagle Against the Sun, The American War With Japan, by Ronald G. Spector - c) 1985 MacMillan
This is a deeply insightful account of everything by a military snob scholar. Stuffy Spector is stuffed full of knowledge.
The End of a Revolution, by Fritz Sternberg – c ) 1953 - Fritz was German Jewish Marxist in pre-war Germany who saw the light in 1933 and got the hell out of there. He escaped the Nazis disguised as a ski-athlete. Sternberg literally skiied his way to freedom. My analysis of the growth of the USSR in the post-war world is derived in part from this interesting book. No one can explain the faults of Marxism like a disgruntled Marxist.
From Hiroshima to Glasnost, At the Center of Decision, A Memoir, by Paul Nitze – c) 1989 – One of my favorite books of all time. Nitze is a great man. What a career. First he's partly in charge of getting tough with the Russians in Stalin's time, then he becomes one of the chief negotiators in nuclear arms reductions in the 70's and 80's.
History of a Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon of Phillips Exeter Academy, and Samuel P. McCutchen, Chairman of Social Studies, New York University – c) 1954
Get it? A history of a free people as opposed to those currently enslaved under Communism. This book is not only written at the height of the Cold War, this book is in and of itself, a cold warrior.
A History of the Soviet Union, by Georg von Rauch – c)1957 Praeger
This is more a polemic in favor of Germany than a history of Soviet
Russia.
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, by Davis Bergamini – The story of the tortured flyer came from this remarkable book. JIC claims that Hirohito was not the innocent front for Japan’s militarist leaders, and that, in fact, was the great leader of Japan’s military mission, directing and approving every action from Pearl Harbor to the Kamikazes.
Korea, The Untold Story of the War, by Joseph C. Goulden
The Korean War, by Dean Aecheson, - This is the Korean War chapters from his best-seller Present at the Creation. Aecheson is the Phileas Fogg of American History.
The Last 100 Days, by John Toland – c) 1965 Random House
One of the more popular and detailed accounts of the fall of Nazi Germany in the spring of 1945. Three fourths of the time he's a very good writer. The other quarter of the time either he's not a great writer or I'm not a great reader.
Meeting at Potsdam, by Charles M. Lee Jr. - c) 1975
This books stinks of 1975. A lefty historian is an oxymoron, except in 1975 when there was no way anyone with any other angle could get published on anything to do with war.
It's bad enough that every moral in the tale is a lefty finger pointing message, Lee is also an annoying writer.
The National Experience – Part Two A History of the United States Since 1865, by John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward – c) 1981 Fifth Edition – First edition was out in 1963.
This is a general history for high school seniors by some heavyweight scholars.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
He makes a very interesting argument that Russia was not behind the decision of North Korean invasion of South Korea because otherwise they would have made it a point not to absent from the UN at that moment.
Then he shocks me by suggesting a U.S, backed Chiang would have been able to successfully invade China, but maybe it all played out for the best anyway, because the Soviets might have intervened,
“MacArthur proposed to bomb bridges over the Yalu, bomb the Chinese assembly area north of it, facilitate the invasion of China by Chiang's army on Formosa, and blockade the entire Chinese coast. It is possible, even probable, that this would have worked; for when communists are faced with resolute, determined, and superior force, they usually retreat. But would Russia have come to China's aid? That is the big question.”
No, the big question is why are you drooling at the thought of a massive land war in China that never happened, and what on earth makes you think it 'probably' would have succeeded when the Communists clearly had the support of a huge majority of the mainland population and a much bigger army than Chiang?
As for the communists being traditionally intimidated by a resolute foe, come on now, please. The warriors of Ho Chi Mihn at Dien Bien Phu? The Long March of Mao? Come on, Sam.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – This is the outrageous liberal US schoolbook history. They are really too kind to Harry Truman.
Present at the Creation, by Dean Acheson, c) 1969 – Truman's Secretary of State offers us a valuable insider account if you can make it through his astounding aristocratic conceit without losing your lunch. Dean is a very snooty writer. If this guy ever made it within three feet of a poor person on the street I'm sure he would have broken out in hives.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia University – c) 1966 – c) 1977 Harper & Row
Garraty takes the typical lib university angle on the Cold War – That means not so much 'Blame America First' like an over the top lefty, but 'Blame Both Sides Equal.' I hate that when they do that because I don't feel that way. I think the USSR was the instigator the provocateur, the aggressor, the troublemaker in about 95% of the Cold War. Garrity clearly does not,
“The Marshall Plan led to the seizure of Czechoslovakia, the buildup of Germany to the Berlin blockade, the creation of NATO to the multilateral military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. Whatever the origins of the contest, both sides contributed by their actions and their continuing suspicions to the heightening of Cold War tensions.”
The origins of the dispute are irrelevant according to this clown. So what if they invaded Korea, enslaved and mass murdered millions of their own people, and enslaved about 12 nations? What matters is that America is exacerbating the situation with its needlessly “suspicious' behavior.
JAG blames the Marshall plan for the seizure of Czechoslovakia and clearly says that it was NATO that created the need for the backlash of the Warsaw Pact. This is offensive material.
Speaking Frankly, by Frank Byrnes – A fine and extremely political memoir by a high participant. Any book by a Secretary of State can't be bad. Frank doesn’t waste much time on flowery descriptions of rooms where meetings were held. He speaks frankly.
The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron – c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
Aaron wrote a book called Writers on the Left. As a former member of the Communist party, Dan should know a lot about this.
United States Foreign Policy and World Order, by James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, c) 1985 – In this book the Blame America First twins let “US” have it for 445 subtly slick pages. At least Al Franken (who hilariously sent me a request for a campaign contribution in today’s mail) and Howard Zinn are blunt and clear with their bias. Nat and Ollie don’t pretend to be objective. On the global level the US is always the worst bad guy (they reluctantly concede when absolutely unavoidable that our adversaries occasionally do something bad, and that only because we provoked them) and within our borders the Republicans are bad and the Dems get cut a break now and then.
In telling of the approaching 1946 Congressional elections the authors take sides,
“What the Truman administration saw .. was a
Republican majority that had lambasted the
Democrats the previous November for their
appeasement of Communism
The Way We Go To War, by Merlo J. Pusey, c)1969 – A chapter on Korea.
To Win a Nuclear War – This is a brilliant sneaky slick left-wing attack on everything to the right in US foreign policy since 1940. It gives a lot of weight to the importance of NSC 68.
Years of Decision, by Harry S. Truman – A pleasure to read. Harry never admits to making a mistake ever. He full of rage towards anyone who ever criticized him. He's the worst porcupine that ever lived in the White House. He hates the opposition party almost as much as the opposition armies.
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