THE Second World War was fought to a finish in Europe and had to be. Hitler could have ended it by negotiation because he was fighting for material things and might have decided at some moment or other that he had won enough of them. He wished to do so after the defeat of Poland and again after the defeat of France, although with the reservation that making peace on either occasion was only a prelude to a fresh bid for Lebensraum in the east. There was no lack of peace-makers: the Pope, Mussolini, the massed sovereigns of the Low Countries and Scandinavia, the King of Rumania, all tried to mediate in various ways and at various dates in the closing months of 1939. The inactivity of France and Great Britain during the obliteration of Poland gave Hitler and others grounds for believing that their declarations of war had been retractable formalities. Hitler could hardly conceive how, although they had been silly enough to go to war on behalf of Poland, they would continue at war on behalf of what had become non-Poland. With the Right preponderantly and the communists wholly for peace and with the knowledge, leaked by German counter-intelligence, that Hitler had given orders for an attack in the west in November, France and Great Britain could logically be expected to give up. But 1939 brought neither peace nor war. Hitler had to postpone his attack in the west and the peace offensive continued in 1940 up to and again after the German campaigns in Scandinavia and the west. Roosevelt sent his Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, on a long exploration in European capitals in February and March, and the Pope and Mussolini kept up their feelers. After the fall of France Hitler tried again to secure his gains and close the account but Churchill refused.
The hesitations in London about whether to seek terms or not in 1940 reveal the differences between Hitler’s war aims and those of his enemies. Great Britain, the sole effective combatant at this point, was fighting for no specific or material gain. It was fighting against Hitler and Nazi Germany. On the British side therefore negotiation meant not compromise but the abandonment of British war aims, which, in so far as they could be rationalized at all, were the surrender of Germany and the collapse of Nazism. Unconditional surrender was implicit in the nature of the war long before it was proclaimed at Casablanca. The alternative, for Great Britain, was to acknowledge that it had no war aims and had got into war by a mistake; but, once in, it could get out in this way only with the utmost difficulty, for a declaration of war is so weighty a pronouncement that it is intolerable to regard it as meaningless. To retire from a war with nothing accomplished and without being beaten requires a very unusual psychological effort. In this particular case it entailed also a sense of shame, for the evils of Nazi Germany had sunk in and making peace with Hitler seemed iniquitous. Although fearful of war in 1938 and glad to be spared it, the British were by 1940 determined to see it through.
So the war went on and the aim of surrender was achieved, although at great cost. Fighting on had not only a certain inevitability nor was it only the fulfilment of a praiseworthy obligation. It involved the deaths of millions of people, including victims of Nazism – like the Jews – who might have been killed anyway but might not, and countless other civilians who certainly would not have died the premature and often horrible deaths which came to them. To ask whether the frightful cost was worth it is to ask an exceptionally painful question, but Hitler’s régime was as horrible as any that Europe had ever seen and more horribly well equipped to pursue its fearful ends, and it may be thought that hardly any price could have been too high to pay for the elimination of the German Nazis. The tragedy was that the price had to be paid by so many people and so innocent.
As the Nazis recede into history they become objects of interest to historians, sociologists and psychologists, but they were in their own generation objects of pure horror. This horror can be expressed by saying that they represented a threat to civilized values and standards of behaviour; it can only be conveyed by recalling, with increasing effort over receding time, the things which they did to individual human beings. The battered but living skeletons found in the stinking degradation of the torture camps in 1945 are Hitler’s truest memorial.
Hitler was many things, including an archcriminal, a criminal over and above criminals. His principal surviving accomplices were arraigned and tried in a series of trials in which they were charged with violations of the laws or customs of war, with ‘crimes against humanity’ and with ‘crimes against peace’. The first of these categories includes offences such as the refusal to give quarter, the use of certain proscribed weapons (for example gas, expanding bullets) and the execution of prisoners of war, that is to say, acts which have become illegal by custom or have been declared illegal by international conventions. The most flagrant violations of these agreements during the Second World War were the execution of commandos after they had surrendered and the execution of commissars, or anybody said to be a commissar, among captured Russian soldiers. The expression ‘crimes against humanity’ was coined to designate acts which, although not explicitly proscribed by international pronouncement, are clearly contrary to law in civilized states independently of the existence of a state of war, such as the killing of men and women simply because they belong in certain categories and without any allegation of criminal acts committed by them; or forced labour. ‘Crimes against peace’ denoted the preparation and waging of aggressive war in contravention of international law.
War crimes trials are not new. The notion that wars have rules which must be observed is at least as old as classical antiquity. It was reasserted by such eminent Renaissance jurists as Vitoria, Suarez and Grotius, and the first adequately recorded war crimes trial in Europe took place nearly 500 years ago. During the Second World War Germany’s enemies and victims gave early warning of their intention to bring war criminals to justice. At the beginning of 1942 nine countries jointly declared that the punishment of war criminals by judicial process was one of their war aims, and shortly afterwards a War Crimes Commission was established to collect and sift evidence and consider what should be done about it. In November 1943 Germany’s three principal enemies declared that when the war was over criminals would be handed over to the governments of the countries where their crimes had been committed and that major criminals, whose crimes could not be attached to specific areas, would be tried by an international tribunal.
This tribunal, the International Military Tribunal, was formally constituted by an agreement signed in London in August 1945 on behalf of the American, British, Russian and (provisional) French governments and it subsequently conducted the most famous of all war crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1946. In addition the American authorities conducted twelve trials in their zone of Germany during 1946–9 under the provisions of a four-power ordinance (Control Council Law No. Ten) and the French held a smaller number of similar trials. The British, more tardily, put Manstein on trial on seventeen charges on nine of which he was found guilty, but dropped a plan to try Rundstedt, who had issued the commando order, on the grounds that he had become too old and feeble. The Russians held no trial under Control Council Law No. Ten. In Italy Kesselring was among the accused in trials held by the British. He was sentenced to death but this sentence was commuted to imprisonment, first for life and then for twenty-one years; and he was released on medical grounds in 1952. All over the rest of what had been occupied Europe, Germans from the SS, the armed services and the civilian administration had to face charges of murder, plunder and offences against the person of varying magnitude. Finally, the Germans themselves instituted similar proceedings when they recovered their juridical independence. Such trials were still occurring over twenty-five years after the end of the war as fresh facts came to light and criminals who had successfully lain low for years were discovered.
The first protests against war crimes in the Second World War and the first enunciation of a determination to prosecute the criminals were attempts to put a curb on the atrocities which were being perpetrated in Europe, by reminding people at all levels that even in war certain things were not permitted and that those who ignored the law might be brought to account. Further, there developed during the war a desire to assert both the existence of international penal law and the practicability of enforcing it by judicial process. And if the perpetrators of local crimes were to be indicted and perhaps executed, it seemed right and necessary to indict also those at the top who had either inspired or commanded these crimes. Hence the trial at Nuremberg in which twenty-two men who had wielded exceptional power and authority were put in the dock. (The indictment named twenty-four but one, Robert Ley, committed suicide in prison and a second, the industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, was found unfit to plead because of age and infirmity.) The Nuremberg defendants included the principal surviving political figures of the Third Reich but this and later trials were not confined to Nazi Party leaders since the prosecutors wanted to establish also the accountability of all, irrespective of party affiliation, who had wielded and abused power: service chiefs, police chiefs, industrial chiefs, holders of high judicial office, scientists and doctors who had used human bodies for inhumane experiments, etc. Twelve of the twenty-two accused were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, four to terms of ten to twenty years and three were acquitted. All the death sentences were carried out except that on Goering, who committed suicide after he had been sentenced, and Bormann who was either dead or in hiding and was convicted and sentenced in absentia. In the next most important trials – the twelve American trials under Control Council Law No. Ten – 185 defendants were indicted. Of these 177 stood trial, twenty-six were sentenced to death (but two of these sentences were remitted), thirty-five were acquitted and the remainder received sentences ranging from life to small terms which in fact resulted in their immediate release.
These proceedings commanded something less than universal approval among the general public and in the legal profession. The general public was worried by the appearance of unfairness resulting from the fact that the defeated were tried by their conquerors. Even though the trials were not unfairly conducted they were, from this point of view, not unassailable. Alternatives had been considered but rejected as impracticable. A trial by Germans was ruled out by the farcical outcome of the attempt to get the Germans to do the same job after the First World War, and a trial or trials by selected neutrals offered complications of procedure and language even more daunting than those involved in the solution adopted –quite apart from the fact that there were few neutrals and they did not want to assume the required role. (There was at least one trial in the French zone of Germany at which French judges were joined by one Belgian and one Dutch judge.)
From the legal point of view the principal objection to the trials was the argument that, since there existed no international legislature to make international law, there was no offence of which the accused could be guilty or with which they could be charged. This argument raises a fundamental question about the nature of law: is it made by enactment, so that without enactment it does not exist; or can it evolve from some other source, so that it may be valid without enactment, in which case the enactment is not creative but declaratory? Murder, to take a simple example, has been regarded as a crime and punished in certain states before any legislative act declaring it to be a crime and saying how it would be punished. War crimes, properly so called, have existed independently of the Hague and Geneva conventions which regulate conduct in war. Neither in the case of crimes against humanity nor in the case of war crimes could the criminals of the Third Reich claim that they did not know that the actions which were subsequently held against them were criminal. Nor, given the warnings issued by their adversaries from 1940 onwards, could they claim that they had not been warned that they would be tried. Many of the offences laid to their charge were committed after this date.
The category of crimes against peace is not so clear cut, but the International Military Tribunal, presided over by a Lord Justice of Appeal from Great Britain sitting with eminent judges and jurists from other countries, held that preparing and waging aggressive war had been a crime at least since the conclusion of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928; that it was a crime which could be committed by an individual; that although it might be difficult to define aggression in general it was possible to recognize it in particular cases; and that eight of the accused had committed this crime.
Some of the Tribunal’s negative decisions were as striking as its positive conclusions. It refused to make any pronouncement on genocide in peacetime within a state’s legitimate boundaries. After the war a convention banning genocide was adopted by the United Nations and ratified by a number of states but this convention contains no adequate provisions for enforcement. The Tribunal also refused belligerent rights to non-uniformed partisans and held that there is nothing in international law to prohibit in all circumstances the execution of hostages. Finally, the Tribunal did nothing – because it was not asked to – to adapt the laws of war to the age of mass bombing. Since the international code of war had not been revised since the Hague Convention of 1907, throwing a bomb from a balloon was expressly prohibited but dropping one from an aircraft was not (unless the target were totally undefended) and it appeared that, although gassing people was clearly unlawful in the same way as poisoning wells was clearly unlawful, the unlawfulness of indiscriminate bombing remained open to debate.
As a normative body the International Military Tribunal had serious limitations. It was an international body created by agreement among only a few nations. Even though the laws which it applied were not new, their codification was ad hoc and post hoc; its Charter was devised for the specific purpose of trying individuals who, however much they deserved to be tried and condemned, were in everybody’s mind before the Charter or the indictment was drawn up. None but losers were tried. The judges, however fairly they discharged their judicial office, were provided by the victorious prosecutors from among their own nationals. There was therefore a risk that the principles enunciated at Nuremberg would lack moral backing and legal endorsement and that the trial itself would become a piece of history without contributing to international law.
In order to give them a wider sanction the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1946 unanimously affirmed the principles recognized by the Charter and by the Tribunal’s judgement and asked the International Law Commission to re-formulate them. The Commission formulated in 1950 seven principles which have therefore, as a result of the war, become part of the corpus of international law. They proclaim: that a person who commits an act which is a crime under international law may be punished for it; that this liability is not avoided merely because the internal law of the accused’s country provides no penalty for the criminal act, or because the accused was acting as a head of state or government official, or because he was following an order from his government or a superior (provided, in this last case, that he had a moral choice); that any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and the law. The principles also defined three kinds of crime: crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity; and stated that complicity in any such crime was itself a crime under international law.
Crimes against peace are defined as planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international compacts, or participating in a conspiracy to do any of these things. War crimes consist (as they have done since ancient times) of violations of the laws or customs of war: examples given include the murder, ill-treatment or deportation – for slave labour or any other purpose – of civilians, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity. These definitions leave a lot of things open to argument, but they assert that it is proper to open the argument, to bring it before a judicial tribunal and to demand punishment. Finally, crimes against humanity are defined as certain acts against the civilian population when these acts are done in connection with any crime against peace or war crime. The acts are: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts, and persecution on political, racial or religious grounds.
The Nuremberg trial and its aftermath were an attempt to establish that war is not so much a visitation like a plague or an act of state like a treaty of alliance, nor even a duty like a just war, but pre-eminently a crime and a punishable one.
The prime cost of war is measured in death and destruction. By this reckoning the cost fell most heavily on the USSR. Perhaps 20 million died – more than all the dead of all nations in the First World War and a staggering death roll for the short period of four years. Another twenty-eight million were made homeless. In the territories which they had occupied the Germans (whose scorched earth policy in retreat was much more efficient than the Russians’ own destructiveness in 1941) destroyed half the living quarters in the towns and three quarters of it in the countryside. Two thirds of the wealth of these areas was extinguished. Over thousands of square miles the land was bared, neglected and almost uninhabited: no towns, no villages, no buildings to shelter man or even beast, hardly any beasts, hardly any people. There was one cow where there had been ten, one sheep or one goat where there had been four, one pig in place of two. Crops had to be sown by hand. Such machinery as could be seen was unusable rusting monuments to war but no longer aids to livelihood. The unoccupied areas had suffered too from neglect: in the oil industry, for example, technicians had had to go away and fight, leaving their machinery and installations to fall into shocking condition. Recovery was at first slow. Communications had been wrecked or worn out – 40,000 miles of rail track and a vast quantity of rolling stock destroyed. Production of many peacetime necessities had been all but abandoned – the output of tractors reduced from 116,000 a year to 8,000. Political conditions prohibited a quick reconversion of the economy – the American nuclear bomb had to be countered by a Russian one. So when in 1946 two thirds of the inhabitants of Stalingrad had returned to the city, only one sixth of its buildings had been patched up. Many of the rigours of war continued. There was little real improvement in living conditions for a decade. The memories of war were ineradicable and its consequences were prolonged with deep, if incalculable, effects on post-war domestic and international politics.
The next heaviest burden fell on the Germans. At least four and a half million of them died, including about a million civilians; their military dead were twice as numerous as in the first war. In Germany as well as the USSR material damage was very heavy. These two peoples – the Russian and the German – were the chief victims not only in the European war but also in the World War, since Japanese casualties were around two million. The one possible exception is the Chinese whose death roll, peculiarly difficult to assess, has been put as low as 2.5 million and as high as 13.5 million. Great Britain, France and Italy all suffered fewer deaths than in the first war. British fatal casualties, including civilians, were 450,000 with another 120,000 from the British Empire; in the first war the imperial total was nearly a million. France lost 200,000–250,000 in action and about as many civilians, as against nearly a million and a half in 1914–18. Italy, whose loss of life was greater than the French and not far short of the British, sacrificed 410,000 (one in every five a civilian) as against its earlier total of 615,000. Belgium’s military casualties were approximately the same in both wars but in the second it lost more civilians than servicemen. Norway, Denmark and Holland had been spared the first war. Their losses in the second were small by comparison with the figures already quoted but sizable in relation to their own populations and Holland had the highest number of civilian deaths (200,000 or more) of any country in western Europe other than Germany itself. In central and eastern Europe the civilian deaths were very heavy indeed, since they included 5 million Jews, another 4 million non-Jewish civilians and a further million Yugoslav Resisters. In their regular armies the chief sufferers were Yugoslavia and Hungary, which lost some 400,000 each, and Poland and Rumania, which lost 300,000 each. The price paid by Austria was also around 300,000. Bulgaria escaped comparatively lightly with 20,000 deaths, half of them civilians, but in Greece the dead exceeded 250,000, two thirds of them civilians. American casualties on all fronts, Pacific as well as European, were 290,000, nearly six times as many as in the First World War. These casualties would have been higher if the Americans had not had the best medical services among the combatants. All these figures are, in the nature of the case, not only approximate but disputable. They add up to something like 50 million.
No great European war since the Seven Years War has so little changed the map of Europe or so much changed the map of the rest of the world. If Hitler had won, his New Order would have transformed Europe, but since he did not win states and frontiers were more restored than altered. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were the principal victims, engulfed in the USSR, their populations removed wholesale. Parts of Finland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania (and Afghanistan) were also annexed to the USSR. Poland had to submit to being shifted, partly because the boundaries which it had won after the First World War were not ethnically easy to justify. In eastern Europe a few provinces changed hands. But there was no post-war conference to allocate real estate, as after the defeat of Napoleon. The reason was not merely the fact that territorial annexation was out of favour (although this was so) but also the fact that real estate was ceasing to be an index of power. Stalin, who was an expansionist and was in a position to incorporate large areas in the USSR, did not do so because he did not need to. Communists believed that new Soviet Republics would be created; that Yugoslavia, for example, would become one of the Republics of the USSR. But Stalin decreed otherwise. He told Tito that Yugoslavia and other nearby countries were to become People’s Democracies, juridically outside the USSR. He may have been deterred by the fear that the Americans would not tolerate the territorial expansion of the USSR but he did not need to put the issue to the test because Russian power sufficed to establish a new kind of Russian empire in central and eastern Europe – extending over much of the old Habsburg and Ottoman lands in Europe as well as those of the Tsars. Its authority could be assured by indirect rule through obedient communist cliques. It did not work in Yugoslavia but it worked everywhere else for the rest of Stalin’s life and many years beyond. Where the First World War had dissolved Europe’s empires, the Second resuscitated one of them and vastly enlarged it – in modern dress. The main thing for Stalin was to implant a particular social system where he could: annexation was not necessary for this purpose, occupation sufficed and occupation could be vicarious. He said to Djilas in 1944: ‘This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his armies can reach. It cannot be otherwise…’ But the determining factor was the radius of power of the army and not the legally established frontiers of states.
This new Russian empire was the product of circumstances and not of compact. The western leaders have been accused of handing over half Europe at Yalta to Stalin – as they have likewise been accused of cheating China at Teheran of its rightful claims in Asia. But Stalin would have established his empire even if there had been no Yalta conference. In the war on Hitler’s eastern front, which was largely independent of the land, sea and air campaigns in the west, the Russian armies beat the German armies. Power in central Europe passed therefore by conquest from Germany to the USSR. What Roosevelt and Churchill tried to do at Yalta was to prescribe limits within which Russian power would be exercised. They have been criticized for not doing more to shackle that power. It is conceivable that, at Teheran fourteen months earlier, they could have driven a different bargain but it is unrealistic to forget that the circumstances of 1943 were inappropriate for driving post-war bargains at all. The Teheran conference was a war conference between partners intent on keeping each other in the war. Post-war problems – which is a euphemism for foreseeable and foreseen post-war disagreements – could only be raised at Teheran at some risk to the common war effort. Yalta was a different kind of conference, but by February 1945 Stalin’s local power in eastern Europe could not be gainsaid. Roosevelt and Churchill extracted from him the declaration on liberated territories which was intended to assure basic democratic rights and procedures, but when Stalin disregarded this declaration there was nothing that any western power could do in the Russian sphere of influence created by Russian arms. All they could do was retaliate elsewhere. The creation in 1949 of the German Federal Republic and of Nato was a kind of retaliation against Stalin’s exclusive and authoritarian hold over eastern Europe.
The biggest changes occurred in Germany. Since Hitler was not displaced by his army or his people, the surrender of Germany and the collapse of Nazism occurred simultaneously. They were a single event. Germany therefore was laid completely low. This had been envisaged: German power would disappear at the end of the war, in some versions for ever. There would of course be Germans and they would inhabit a place called Germany but this Germany would not exist as an independent unit in the power political structure. It was easy to see that this would be a fact immediately after the war. Less thought was given to how it would be perpetuated. Germany might be deprived of its industry, pastoralized, occupied, but the essential requirement for its indefinite subordination was the maintenance of an invincible alliance against its resurrection. This was assumed, if only superficially, and did not turn out to be so.
One of the main reasons why it did not turn out to be so was that Germany ceased to exist as such. Instead of persisting as a unit reduced to insignificance, it became divided into two units which rapidly became politically and militarily significant. This consequence of the war was entirely unforeseen and by removing Germany as a unit from the political scene it removed also the allies’ main incentive to maintain their alliance. There was no Germany for them to keep down: the alliance brought about in 1941 for a limited purpose had achieved that purpose with the surrender of Germany and its subsequent partition. There were instead two Germanies to be kept up, each appropriated by the one side or the other. The Cold War might have developed in any case. Probably it would, but the division of Germany fundamentally impelled and shaped it. To some extent a consequence of the Cold War, this division was also –more perhaps than has been appreciated – a major formative factor. Moreover the division of Germany, besides dividing the allies, did more than anything else to keep the Americans in Europe. They stayed, first, to administer Germany and argue about its future; later to defend Western Germany and their own positions in it. When the anti-Nazi alliance was converted into a duel between the victors, the Americans were still in Europe and acquired new reasons for staying there.
The Nazis and their fascist like had been defeated by the combined forces of liberal democracy and totalitarian democracy. In the exuberance of victory there were those who hoped that the alliance of the anti-fascists would endure, but soon these two traditional streams – the sources, as noted earlier in this book, of the collapse of Europe’s anciens régimes –found themselves no longer side by side but face to face. Europe’s triangle of forces resolved itself into the duel called the Cold War.
In terms of Europe the Cold War was an ideological contest between liberal democracy and totalitarian democracy; the simpler description of it as a contest between communists and anti-communists is misleading since not all anti-communists are liberal democrats. The Cold War was at the same time a power struggle between the United States and the USSR. Had this contest remained European the principal issue would have been the possible revival of Fascism, the reconstitution of the triangle of forces, and the manoeuvres of its three elements to make a pattern of two against one either in the same way as during the war or in some other way. War, being by its nature dual, had forced the triangle to conform for a few years (1941–5) to its law which says that there can be only two sides. After the war and the elimination of the one side the surviving forces moved from identity to opposition and so formed a new pattern, rigid until the appearance of some third element to give it mobility.
In the late forties and fifties this third element was neither European nor fascist. The Second World War, as has already been said, changed the map of the rest of the world as markedly as it left the outlines of the map of Europe recognizably familiar. The Seven Years War had decided that Great Britain and not France should have the lion’s share of the dark continents in which Europeans had been seeking profit and adventure. North America and much of southern Asia were secured for Great Britain. France, the Netherlands and Portugal retained positions in Asia and, with Belgium, Germany and Italy, also shared in the later partition of Africa. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of these European empires. The Second World War was the centrepiece of the last act of the story; the generation after the war was kept busy with the epilogue. As a result the nature of world conflict changed. This conflict had been a dispute centred in Europe, a dispute over political forms coupled with a struggle for power. It became a worldwide contest, still ideological and strategic, but one in which the third element was the significantly dubbed Third World which ceased on decolonization to be part of the Western World.
The new states which emerged from the dissolution of Europe’s overseas empires, in far greater number than those which had emerged from the dissolution of its continental empires after the First World War, decided for the most part not to attach themselves to either side in the Cold War but to take up a distinct, non-aligned position. So far as the Cold War was ideological they sensed, correctly, that the ideological issue was a European one and had little to do with their immediate needs. Further, they diagnosed the Cold War as essentially a struggle for power which was bound to hurt them and which they must therefore try to stop. They rejected neutrality – opting out – as neither possible nor desirable. The Second World War had shown how little a neutral could rely on having his neutrality respected; the changes in the nature of war suggested that neutrality was a thing of the past. The neutral’s claim to stay out of a war required certain conditions which were disappearing. It rested upon the assumptions that a state of war was clearly distinguishable from peace and that a given war could be restricted to certain areas and prevented from leaking through the frontiers of the neutral state. But the very expression Cold War showed that the concept of war as something overtly declared and conducted with lethal weapons against proclaimed opponents no longer sufficed; guerrilla and subversive wars, whose techniques had been expanded in many parts of the world during the Second World War, also increased the uncertainty about what was a war and who was a belligerent. Air warfare eroded the significance of frontiers; nuclear fall-out abolished it.
For all these reasons attempts to keep out of war by choosing the classic posture of neutrality seemed to make little sense. Keeping out was no longer a guarantee of safety. Those who wanted to fend off war could no longer seek to barricade themselves against it; they must actively try to prevent or extinguish it. Thus third parties came to believe that they must in their own interests – to which it was easy to add the moral imperatives of the peacekeeper – play a part in international affairs rather than abstract themselves from the scene. Leaders of new states were in any case inclined towards a negative non-alignment: their consuming preoccupation with independence made them eschew alliance with a dominant power, their pressing economic needs made them seek trade and aid in all quarters, their concern for the cohesion of their new and often divided societies counselled them against a foreign alliance which would offend a particular domestic faction of the Left or the Right. But their non-alignment was not merely negative. Despite their weaknesses, of which they were only too well aware, they adopted a policy of positive non-alignment, that is to say intervention, in order to ensure the survival and independence which other states had tried in the past to safeguard by going into political purdah. And because they mattered to the protagonists in the Cold War, at least to the extent that each of these wanted to stand no less well than the other with the non-aligned, their emergence from European dominion into statehood after the war altered the terms and area of international politics.
Yet important though they were this widening of the scene and multiplication of the cast were almost trivial beside the irrefragable involvement of the United States in the world’s proceedings. This involvement after the Second World War has become as much a commonplace as American isolationism after the First, and at times pushed to equally questionable limits. It was the war which marked the change.
The American experience of war was different from all others. First, the United States had war aims, in the sense of purposes to be accomplished by going to war as opposed to the bare winning of a war that had happened. Taking part in a European war which they did not feel obliged to fight in response to an external threat, the Americans needed war aims. A people which is not forced to fight must have a reason for doing so. A people which has no choice needs no aims, but a people which has a choice must have aims. To Europeans the American preoccupation with war aims seemed either unreal or hypocritical. Europeans had no war aims except the aim first to survive and then to win, and these were not aims freely considered and adopted but simply a formulation of the force of circumstances. (The Resistance did develop war aims, but these were adopted in the course of the war and not as a reason for going to war; and they touched only a proportion of Resisters and a very small proportion of the whole people, which is one reason why they were so thinly attained.) But Americans, who had not been attacked and were not fighting for survival, could not be led into war without some explanation of why they should do any such thing, and the simplest way of satisfying this natural requirement was to present a statement of what the war was about and how the world could be made better by helping the right side to win it. Such statements are necessarily vague and often grandiose. Therefore they are easy to contemn. But for a people not under compulsion they are a necessity.
They also colour that people’s outlook after the war is over. If a war is fought and suffered for certain purposes, there is a duty – not least to the dead – to see that the purposes are achieved. Where victory is the end of war, the war ends with the victory. But Americans believed that there were other ends and that the war had been fought to rescue and restore values such as freedom and justice, which Nazis and fascists had scorned and destroyed (and imperialists, in their less brutal ways, were also ignoring). Americans were not more devoted to these values than good men elsewhere but they were more committed to doing something to secure them. The sins of communist governments could not be overlooked. Therefore the war spirit which had animated the United States in the war was not assuaged when the fighting – against the dictators – ceased but oppression and injustice did not; and Americans carried into the more complicated world of peace politics the guiding principles which had sufficed in the simpler world of war. They remained campaign-minded.
Secondly, the American homeland remained inviolate. Although the American contribution in manpower and materials was enormous, the men and women with their equipment went out of the United States to battle and never imagined doing battle in it. Nor did those left behind know, at first hand, anything of bombardment or the fear of bombs, resistance, evacuation or privation. At second hand, through press and radio, they knew more about distant events than a people at war had ever known before, but the events themselves remained distant. It was the kind of war which had once been familiar to Europeans but had ceased to be so. Although in material terms the American war effort was the most up-to-date imaginable, in social terms it belonged still to an era in which combatants set sail while non-combatants stayed safely behind. War fosters and sanctifies material effort: in the United States the materialism promoted by military exigencies was not countered, as in Europe, by the social emollients produced by shared dangers. In this respect the American experience of war brought changes which were comparatively less abrupt during the war but, as with the effects of war aims, comparatively more potent after it. The United States took the war in its giant stride but did not afterwards look nearly as much the same as Europe did ten to twenty years after the war ended.
Thirdly, there was the sheer size of the achievement. Over 15 million men and women were summoned to do services of one kind or another – as compared with 22 million mobilized by the USSR, 17 million by Germany and 12 million by Great Britain, the Dominions and colonies. Gross national product was nearly doubled, rising from $91 billion to $166 billion. Overall industrial output was doubled, while at the same time agricultural output also increased by more than a fifth. New industries were created (synthetic rubber) or given an enormous boost (electronics). The expansion of American shipbuilding from one to 19 million tons a year has already been mentioned. Such efforts were common. Aircraft production rose from below 6,000 a year on the eve of war to more than 96,000, the numbers employed in the aircraft industry from 46,000 to more than 2 million. Altogether the Americans made 275,000 aircraft, of which 40,000 went to their allies. American aircraft provided the RAF with an increment of 20–25 per cent over and above what it obtained from the British aircraft industry.
So too with tanks. American tank production, negligible in 1941, rose to 14,000 and 21,000 in the next two years. The American Sherman became the mainstay of the western allies. The British army possessed 3,300 Shermans on the day when it returned to France in 1944. The Sherman did not give the western allies the superiority over German models which they were looking for, but the Pershing, which came into service in 1944, proved a match for the last German tanks, the Tiger and Panther. British industry, obliged after Dunkirk to replace losses as quickly as possible, began by supplying current obsolescent models and the newer Churchill and then developed the Cromwell and the Comet which reached fighting units towards the end of 1942 and 1944 respectively, but tank design and production were, by agreement, primarily an American commitment and the resulting models were American designs with the incorporation of as many British ideas as fitted them. In addition to the first essentials of aircraft, tanks and shipping the United States produced a total of 64,000 landing craft (to Great Britain’s 4,300) and equipped its allies as well as itself with practically all the transport aircraft, self-propelled artillery, amphibian vehicles and heavy trucks which they required. That remarkable vehicle the jeep was produced in such quantities that the Americans were able to spare 86,000 for the British. (The Germans had a jeep too, which was water and sand proof.) As a result of this war effort the United States, uniquely among the combatants, began the next phase of its history materially better equipped than before.
Fourthly, the war altered the distribution of power in the United States geographically and politically. It accelerated the shift of money and people from the east to the west coast and gave the south the boost which it had never had since the Civil War. Industry invaded the west where it had been relatively inconspicuous and the south where – outside Texas, already well supplied with capital from oil – it had hardly been at home at all. As the aircraft and telecommunications industries expanded into the south, employment and communications boomed. Atlanta, for example – designed by geography to be as much a natural centre in the age of aircraft as in the age of rail – a city where the complete devastation of the Civil War had opened the way for a post bellumentrepreneurial class to supplant the old upper class which had remained sufficiently dominant elsewhere (in Mississippi for example) to impede rejuvenation – had at last the opportunity to join the mainstream of American modernization and prosperity. The demands of war gave a new mobility both to southern whites who moved to the nearest city and to negroes who, whether through the calls of economic expansion or through conscription, moved to all parts of the country, including parts where they had been little seen before. These shifts and needs helped the anti-discrimination cause. Roosevelt gave a pledge of no discrimination in industry, wrote non-discrimination clauses into the government contracts upon which industry increasingly lived during the war and created a Fair Employment Practices Commission. (But the pledge was widely evaded and the Commission harassed. In the armed services negroes continued to be relegated to subordinate positions. Secretary Stimson debarred them from equal opportunities on the grounds that they were incapable of learning the necessary skills. Secretary Knox was even firmer. The negro was not integrated in the armed services until the Korean War.) Thus the primacy of the old centres of wealth (and liberalism) in the north-east was eroded and movements of population, begun in the First World War but arrested by the great depression, were resumed. The consequences of these economic and social movements began to become apparent only in the generation which followed the war years.
The balance of political power was affected by more than geographical shifts. As the British and the Germans both discovered, war is a mighty centralizer. For the United States too the same proposition held good. War necessitated an immense increase in federal budgets and federal spending. The proportion of federal to other taxes grew. This centralization of authority accelerated a constitutional trend, as between the federal government and the states, but did not inaugurate any economic or social revolution, as between government and private interests. Roosevelt had to combat the marked reluctance of American society to entrust the government with regulating powers. His administration had at first no adequate control either over the estimates made by the armed services of their requirements and so of their demands on industry, or of industry itself, and it was not until 1943 that Roosevelt succeeded in imposing centralized government control over activities traditionally jealous of government interference. American capitalism produced the goods but it wanted also to remain sovereign in its own house, and resisted government direction until complaints of the monopolization of government contracts by the bigger corporations and rumours of scandals gave Roosevelt the opportunity and the necessary backing to create new government agencies to fix priorities, allocate orders and at the same time check inflation by price, wage and rent control. The Congress mistrusted the vast increase in the government’s powers which accompanied the vast increase in the nation’s efforts. It was only with difficulty persuaded that the one required the other. The unions too bridled against the shift which the war imposed on the balance of power between government and unions, and at one point Roosevelt was forced to nationalize the coal mines in the face of strike threats from John L. Lewis, the leader of the mineworkers. Roosevelt eventually secured control over the economy through the Office of Economic Stabilization, the Office of Price Control and his annual Finance Acts. The latter raised the income tax and extended it to whole classes which had never had to pay it before; federal income tax rose, at the top level, to 94 per cent. A corporation tax rising to 50 per cent was imposed and an excess profits tax was introduced which rose by stages to 95 per cent of the excess. Yet government expenditure on the war grew so fast that during the four war years only 41 per cent of it was covered by taxation. For the rest the government had to borrow and to control the consequent inflation by the statutory regulation of wages and prices.
The war finally brought the great depression to an end, but at the same time the semi-socialist New Deal gave way to a fully capitalist war economy. This war economy performed prodigies of productive valour in the service of the military. The achievements of the partnership were miraculous, so much so that they stamped a pattern on the further development of the American economy and American society in the nuclear age.
Fifthly and finally, the United States was not only transformed domestically but also was seen to have become to an unprecedented degree the world’s most mighty power. This power, however reluctantly acknowledged, had played some part in propelling the United States into war. Even before the mobilization of its resources in manpower and production the United States possessed enormous industrial and military might. Its low posture in the twenties and thirties was out of line with its capacities and Americans were perhaps readier than appeared at first sight to be up and doing – preferably with a good cause – because the sense of power possessed is itself an incentive to the use of power. The war destroyed reticence. Victory destroyed bashfulness, since victory was seen as a triumphant use of power for good ends. Then the power itself was vastly accentuated by the American monopoly of the nuclear bomb, but neither victory nor the bomb was the source of American power. They were on the contrary among its consequences. Yet the bomb created a new situation since it made the United States more powerful than all other states put together, not merely more powerful than any other state or any conceivable coalition of states. It could impose its will universally, should it be prepared to threaten and resort to nuclear war. And, so it seemed in 1945, it might maintain this position indefinitely since it was widely, if wrongly, assumed that no other state would be able to make nuclear weapons for a long time to come.
The appearance of nuclear power as a military factor coincided with the disappearance of a system of international politics in which several states of roughly equal strength predominated. Although this system left its mark on the nascent United Nations, where five states were held to be superior and were given a permanent place and a veto in the Security Council, the new reality was a bipolar system in which predominant power belonged to the United States and the USSR, each of whom was accepted as markedly superior to everybody else. Since these two powers were presented and accepted as the protagonists of two opposed ways of life, the bipolarity was also inherently an actively hostile confrontation. Europe was the chief object of this ideological and power conflict.
Yet the universality of American power was, despite first appearances, limited. The Americans recoiled from the use of nuclear weapons. The novelty of these weapons made them more awful than anything that had gone before, even though the two occasions on which they had been used (described in the ensuing part of this book) had not caused as many deaths as some more conventional instances of slaughter. Their continuing toxic effect, vaguely apprehended, added to the revulsion. There was widespread feeling in the United States that nuclear weapons should not be used again. But if this were so, the threat to use them was not a threat but a bluff. Thus, even before the USSR itself constructed a nuclear bomb, the American monopoly had been negated and the American omnipotence converted into a predominance paralleled by Russian power. The American monopoly was both a fact and a myth.
In Europe in particular, American power was countered by Russian power. The Russians occupied half Europe and maintained very large armed forces within and beyond their borders after the war ended; Stalin, with a ruthlessness reminiscent of his war on the peasants in the thirties, gave an absolute priority to war industries and war research, in particular to discovering the scientific and technological secrets of nuclear power which Russian experts were already close to mastering. By postponing for a generation the amelioration of the quality of life in the USSR Stalin ensured that power in Europe should be shared.
The Cold War, which is the name for the rather novel way by which this contest for power was initiated and then conducted, was something that Roosevelt certainly, and Stalin probably, would have wished to avoid. It represented Europe’s continuing claim on the attentions of the world’s two super-powers and it was the principal outward and visible sign of the post-war involvement of the United States in international affairs. This involvement would probably have come about in any case, but historically it followed from the recognition of the facts of power and geopolitics, brought about by war and Roosevelt. The direction of the involvement, on the other hand, was determined by pre-war concepts and Truman. Shortly after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR Truman, then a Senator, said that the United States ought to help the Russians so long as they were being beaten by the Germans but that, if the Russians began to win, then the United States should help the Germans, so that as many as possible of both might be killed. This was a denial of the thesis that the war was a war against Fascism and a reassertion of the thesis that liberal democrats and communists could not live together amicably. Truman, like Stalin, belonged emphatically to the pre-war generation. He was also, unlike Roosevelt, relatively inexperienced in international affairs and so more dependent on the State Department and more receptive to an official line on the USSR which was harder than Roosevelt’s had been. Those who believe that men make history will say that two men in particular, Truman and Stalin, made the Cold War. Those who believe that men operate only on the surface of deeper currents will point to Truman and Stalin as examples of the strength and direction of those forces which, having been driven underground for a space like the fountain of Arethusa, re-emerged after the defeat of Fascism to take control once more of men’s conflicting destinies and destinations.
How events were shaped is a matter for debate. The events themselves are clearer. In June 1948 the United States formally abjured isolationism by the Vandenberg resolution adopted by the Senate, and ten months later it signed the North Atlantic Treaty in company with Canada and ten European states. These two events marked the end of isolationism – with a particular intent.
The cost of a war in men and materials, and the redistribution of territory and power which it brings about, are only two parts of the consequences of war. There is a third, less tangible but at least as important.
Wars intensify simple emotions and they also create opportunities and heighten expectations. Wars are horrible and bearing them is only made possible by hating one’s enemy and by believing in a better future for one’s self.
The hatred cannot be switched off. It may abate, though slowly, but since the Second World War the hatred felt for Germans in those years among Russians, Jews and others who suffered terribly has remained a factor in European affairs. It may be exaggerated for purposes of propaganda but it exists to be exaggerated and is easily rekindled. One of the war’s many causes was the madness which took hold of Germany and one of the war’s effects was to spread this madness and fill all Europe with violence and with the toleration, even the applause, of violence. There was in this respect a difference between the war in eastern Europe and the war in the west, and this difference has affected post-war emotions and therefore post-war political attitudes. The German onslaught in the west was less savage than in the east and German barbarity in western occupied territories was episodic whereas in the east it was planned and persistent. Consequently the western response was less vicious too. It is difficult to gauge the feelings of those who rejoiced, in Great Britain for example, at the news of the destruction of German cities. There was a certain grim Old Testament satisfaction, but there was little exultation and the dominant feeling was probably the thought that such blows must hasten the end of the war. There was much bitterness but little of the sheer hatred which disfigured the First World War, and although the two catastrophes were only a quarter of a century apart the generation of the second war would have considered it absurd to boo dachshunds in the London streets as their fathers had done. There was a certain sobriety.
There were also expectations and, after the war ended, a balance to be struck between satisfied and unsatisfied expectations. Making the world a better place to live in meant, in Europe, political, economic and social changes, a further instalment of the long-drawn-out revolution promising freedom, equality and brotherhood; outside Europe it meant, in the first place, the end of foreign and colonial rule. Of these twin aspirations the second was substantially satisfied in less than a generation after the end of the war and in some places within a few years. The British, French, Dutch and Belgian empires in Africa and Asia (but not yet the Portuguese) dissolved. They were doubtless already dissolving but the war accelerated the process by weakening the resources and the nerve of the metropolitan powers and by a revolution in thought which made empire seem in 1945 much more old-fashioned and dubious, as well as impermanent, than it had seemed six years earlier. By 1960 these empires were extinct or vestigial. Their demise constituted the greatest change ever made in a short space to the map of the world and to the mechanisms of international relations.
Within Europe the revolutionary current stimulated by the war was less successful. The old order proved remarkably tenacious, perhaps because the economic stringencies of the aftermath of war, on top of the strains of the war itself, drained the life out of reform movements. There were gains. In Great Britain, for example, the creation of a free public health service transformed the lives of millions of people not only by relieving or preventing sickness but also by removing the hideous worries of those who had had to endure illness or watch it in their children without being able to pay to do anything about it. In other countries too social services and social experiment received a fillip and even right-wing parties and governments took to thinking and acting in terms which they would have abhorred before the war. In eastern Europe civil liberties were obliterated by the political repression and economic obscurantism, worthy of Tsar Nicholas I, which Stalin and his successors in Moscow felt impelled to adopt, but in the USSR itself the government was the legatee of its own wartime promises of a better life and of wartime measures of toleration – such as the toleration of religion, the reappearance of priests, more freedom for writers, the appeal to popular sentiments in place of the use of disciplinary threats. Post-war stringencies produced a retreat from this tentative liberalization but did not altogether kill its seeds. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution. But nobody has said what is the period of gestation. The revolutions of 1848 occurred thirty-three years after the end of Napoleon’s wars.
Finally there is the Middle East. Hitler’s climax to Gentile persecution of the Jews – a drama unequalled for shame in the history of European civilization except by the slave trade – was effected with horrors even more appalling than the pogroms in Russia and Roumania in 1881 and 1905. It piercingly and urgently sharpened the desire of the survivors to depart to Zion. It probably also sharpened the desire of guilt-laden Europeans to see them go and it certainly accentuated the sympathies of some Gentiles for a people whom they had too often and now too fatally reviled. But Zion was no empty haven waiting to receive them. For half a century Zionists had been resolved to find a home in Palestine for the Jews and to create a Jewish state there. Some of them had imagined a state under Ottoman suzerainty and later some of their successors thought of an autonomous dominion within the British Empire, but most Zionist leaders realized from the first that what they sought must be an independent sovereign state. They also realized that it would be impolitic to say so, since the creation of this new state would entail the dispossession, or at least the subjection, of the existing Arab inhabitants of the lands for which Zionists yearned as a refuge and a religious fulfilment.
When the war ended, the Zionists, who had refrained from harassing the British in Palestine so long as the war lasted, resorted to violence in their turn. They took up arms and drove the British out. They then defeated the Arabs who came against them, jointly but hardly unitedly, and so won their state and enlarged it by provoking the Palestinians by terror into flight. Zionism was not only rendered more urgent by Nazi brutality; it was also itself brutalized. Israel’s doors were, as a matter of principle, open to all Jews whencesoever, and the Jews of Europe hurried to it – except those in the west who were too comfortable to move and some in the east who were not allowed to. This migration, which was supplemented by similar migrations of non-European Jews, opened a new chapter in the history of the Middle East by implanting the state of Israel in a part of the world which Arabs regarded as theirs, which they had hoped to inherit from the Turks with British help in 1919, which they had seen the British take for themselves, and from which they were now not only debarred but actually – by arms or by fear – evicted. The Jewish problem had been off-loaded by Christendom onto Islam. But it did not cease to concern Europe: for the Middle East remained what it had been for centuries – one of the world’s most convenient highways – and what it had become in the twentieth century – one of the world’s primary sources of mineral wealth – so that the world’s Great Powers could not ignore it.
But their continued intervention took new shapes. The Second World War destroyed the pattern imposed after the First. Then the British and French had established a post-Ottoman condominium, in despite of the Arabs and to the exclusion of the Russians. But the Second World War eliminated first the French and then, more gradually, the British and so created new opportunities for Arabs – and Russians. These new opportunities coincided with swelling revolutionary and nationalist currents in the Arab world which offered Arabs a new Arab-Russian alliance in place of the Arab-British association which had governed Middle Eastern politics during the First World War and after it. Against this potential Arab-Russian entente Israel and the United States constituted, however loosely, a counter-system. Thus the Superpowers who, in Europe, were the protagonists in the Cold War were, in the Middle East, antagonists in an area where keeping the peace would require them to restrain not themselves but others.
It has been said that wars settle nothing. This is too caustic a dismissal of human endurance and human striving. At the end of this great war in Europe the Nazis and their fascist allies were beaten. Things would have been very different had they not been. Fascism, perhaps not irretrievably but yet at this point decisively, was defeated.
A famous Russian historian of classical antiquity has judged that Greece declined because men came to distrust reason and Rome fell because it tried to maintain an exclusively privileged society wherein the rich were enervated and the poor alienated. If these judgements on the ancestors of Europe’s civilization have any bearing on its own fate, then the Fascism of the twentieth century begotten of anti-rational and anti-democratic authoritarianism was a malign cancer and its defeat in 1945 at least a reprieve.