Outbreak of the Cold War

The **Outbreak of the Cold War** lasted from about 1945 AD until 1953 AD. It began with the end of World War II. It then ended with the end of the Korean War, the first “*Hot*” conflict of the Cold War.

The first few years after World War II brought an extraordinary realignment of the wartime alliances. The USSR and China, two of the five main Allied nations during the war, were now the feared Communist enemies of the West. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, the two main Axis powers that had been bombed to complete devastation during the deadly conflict, were reconstructed to become pillars of Western democratic capitalism. By 1950, East and West Germany became the frontiers of a polarised world, and the United States believed it was now in a war with the Soviet Union with the very fate of Western Civilization at stake.

## History

### Outbreak of the Cold War

Of the victorious allies, the only ones who gained anything from World War II were the Soviet Union and the United State, emerging as rival superpowers. Though her victory had been won at enormous cost, the Soviet Union now had greater strength than she had ever had under the Tsars. For the United States, victory had cost her little in comparison with her allies yet it had brought an empire, though it rested less on the occupation of territory than on a world-wide surge of indirect American power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, it seemed for a while that the Western democracies and Communist Russia could cooperate: the Russians were punctilious in admitting British, American, and French forces to Berlin and sharing the administration of the city they had conquered; they made no objection to British intervention in the Greek civil war from late 1944 against the Communists; and continued for a time to support the KMT government in the Chinese Civil War. Even in what would become the Eastern Bloc, during the first two years after the war, Stalin was remarkably liberal considering. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania all had multi-party elections that resulted in coalition governments in which Communists only shared power; that’s not to say that non-Communist parties did not suffer harassment. Only Yugoslavia and Albania became Communist dictatorships but that was as a result of indigenous Marxist groups, with little help from Moscow. Yet within just four years of the end of the war, the post-war division of the victorious allies was formalised by two hostile blocs, the United States-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The long Cold War period of political, economic, and military animosity between them would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race, proxy wars, and the space race. How did the state of tension between the former wartime allies deteriorate so rapidly and so badly?

In many ways, hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States was simply a return to their mutual distrust of the 1920s and 30s: the Western powers had all supported the Whites during the Russian Civil War; and the United States had refused to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviets until 1933. There were a number of factors that caused this. Firstly, the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945 was significant, for the Russia lost her biggest political ally, as well as a great deal of the credit she had earned from her heroic sacrifices resisting the Germans. His successor Harry S. Truman would prove himself just as guilty as Joseph Stalin of being needlessly antagonistic, while failing to appreciate the other's fears and painting their actions in the worst possible light. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, modern historians have been able to study their Cold War era secret files for the first time, which show that Soviet leaders were genuinely trying to avoid conflict with the United States. Secondly, the Western powers believed that Appeasement hadn't worked against Adolf Hitler in 1938, and were determined to stand-up to Stalin, who was painted as a Machiavellian despot determined to dominate the world. Meanwhile, the Soviets were convinced that hostility against Russia from the West was inevitable; not entirely unjustified as Soviet spies had learned of Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, plans for a theoretical invasion the Russia. Finally, the Cold War was in many ways simply a competition between the superpowers over their spheres of influence, albeit on a global scale. With so many nations of the world liberated from the Axis powers, devastated by the war, or emerging from imperialism, the opportunities for conflict were endless. The United States, determined to avoid another economic catastrophe like the Great Depression, sought to maintain her prosperity by opening the entire world to unfettered trade; a global market for her exports and unrestricted access to vital raw materials. The American vision of the post-war world conflicted with the goal of Stalin: an understandable obsession with national security after the staggering cost of her heroic resistance against the Germans. These conflicting visions were simplified and refined in national ideologies, between the ideals of Capitalism and Communism, that often assumed mythological overtones of "*good versus evil*". By painting the conflict in such stark terms, the West in particular was able to justify quite astonishing levels of hypocrisy: Washington purported to stand for freedom, democracy, and non-interference in other nations, while staging stage coups and destabilise governments deemed insufficiently supportive of the United States, and supporting some of the most corrupt and brutal rulers on the planet.

Relations began to gradually deteriorate between the end of the war and 1947. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a clerk working in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected and exposed Stalin's efforts to steal nuclear secrets. In March 1946, the Soviet Union refused to withdraw their troops from northern Iran on schedule, supposedly in support of Kurdish independence; after a month of Western pressure, Stalin eventually backed-down. In September 1946, the Western powers began to change their policy on occupied Germany. Until then, all the Allies had pursued the policy of partially de-industrialising Germany to half her pre-war output, to punish her people and to prevent her from ever being a threat again. The plan was abandoned by the Western powers out of feared that Germany would turn to Communism unless the people were offered some hope, and alarm at the scale with which the Soviets were carrying off capital equipment to the east; not without some justification since the Germans had destroyed 39,000 miles of railway track alone in their retreat.

Tension dramatically escalated from 1947. In a special address to Congress in March 1947, Truman announced that the spread of Communism represented a threat to international peace, and the United States would now pursue the foreign policy of containment; the support of foreign governments resisting domestic Communist revolutionaries or “outside pressures”, meaning Moscow. The polarising language of the **Truman Doctrine**, though eventually weakened by the Vietnam War, would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades. As historian Eric Foner described it, the Truman Doctrine "*set a precedent for American assistance to anti-Communist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic*”. The first real test of it came in 1947 in the civil war in Greece, and Turkish Straits Crisis, both of which received millions in US economic and military aid. The other aspect of US foreign policy was the **Marshall Plan** (1948-52), an initiative to rebuild war-devastated Western Europe with $13.5bn in economic support. There was an element of self-interest in Marshall's proposal: to combat the economic instability that provided fertile fields for Communism; and to open up the British and French Empires to free trade with the United State. Japan was similarly rebuilt, where General Douglas MacArthur was basically a dictator, forcing through a new democratic contribution and making it an important base for US troops. Stalin protested the Marshall Plan in the United Nations, accusing the United States of using economic relief to needy nations as an instrument of impose its will on other independent states, as well as to expand her markets; not without some justification. Stalin forbade all the Eastern European countries from participating in the Marshall Plan, and instead established Comicon, a Soviet version of the plan. He also responded by now establishing undisputed control over the Eastern Bloc, as a buffer between Moscow and Western Europe: the king of Romania was forced to abdicate literally at gun point; and a Communist coup took control in Czechoslovakia. Once the dust of war settled, the reality of a dividing line through Europe was unmistakable, with Soviet satellite states established in Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Poland, and soon East Germany as well.

The final breakup of the wartime alliance between the United States, Britain, France, and the United States came in Germany. After the war, Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, coordinated by the Allied Control Council. The city of Berlin was divided in a like fashion, despite being deep in the Russian zone. The growing Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe was all the more menacing because the old traditional barrier to Russian power – a strong Germany and Austria – was no more. By 1947, the Western powers were pushing for an economically self-sufficient Germany, which meant that the American, French and British occupied zones were becoming increasingly distinct from the Russian zone. In early 1948, American, French and British merged their occupied zones, introduced the Deutsche Mark as a new German currency, and announced plans for free elections to establish democracy. Stalin was not even consulted. In June 1948, Stalin cut-off all road, rail and canal links from the Western zones to Berlin, in hope of gaining full control of the city; the **Berlin Blockade** (June 1948-May 1949). Truman responded with the Berlin Airlift, seeing Berlin as a test case for the policy of Containment, and wanting the city to be a “*symbol of freedom*” behind the Iron Curtain. For ten months, the Western powers landed about 4,000 tons of supplies per day to the West Berliners. In May 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and lifted the blockade. That same month, West Germany or the Federal Republic of Germany was formally recognised; East Germany or the German Democratic Republic was created in October.

In direct consequence to the Berlin Crisis, in April 1949, eleven European nations and the USA together form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (**NATO**), a mutual military defensive pact and the formal end to any friendly relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviets would eventually respond by forming the Warsaw Pact in 1955 when West Germany joined NATO, an organisation with the added advantage of allowing large numbers of Russian troops to be moved into Soviet satellite states. Meanwhile in August 1949, the Soviet’s successfully detonated their first atomic bomb years ahead of schedule, to the astonishment of the West. That same year brought another major development, victory for the Communist in the Chinese Civil War, emerging as the People's Republic of China. The year 1950 bought the first military action of the Cold War in the Korean War (1950-53).

### Chinese Civil War Second Phase

With the Japanese surrender in August 1945, most observers believed the Chinese Civil War would resume between the KMT government and the Communists. Because the KMT had held almost all the cities before the war, their territories took the brunt of the Japanese assault. Meanwhile, the guerilla tactics of Mao Zedong were much more effective against the Japanese occupiers, and he was able to use his handful of victories to drive recruitment. As the tide turned in the Pacific theatre of the war and Japan withdrew from China, it became a mad dash to see who could liberate the occupied territory, and in the end the Communists were able to expand their territory much further than before the war. Meanwhile in last weeks of the war, the Soviet Union occupied Manchuria in the north-west. With the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Chiang Kai-shek of the KMT government and Mao Zedong of the Communists met in a series of talks brokered by the United States on the formation of a coalition post-war government.

However years of mistrust thwarted these efforts, and the second phase of the Chinese Civil War broke out in July 1946. China’s fate would essentially be decided in Manchuria. As the Soviets withdrew from the region, they handed over to the Communists large stocks of weapons seized from the Japanese. In 1947, the KMT launched a major offensive on Manchuria but by March 1948, with more than a million KMT troops killed, it was firmly in Communist hands. The tide of the civil war had turned, and the grand Communist offensive began. In January 1949, Beijing and Tianjin fell, and the north-east of China was entirely conquered. April saw them take Nanjing, then Shanghai, and lastly Guangzhou. One after another cities fell to the Communists. On 1 October 1949, fifty-five year-old Mao addressed the nation from Tiananmen Square in their capital of Beijing proclaiming the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. In the weeks after this momentous declaration, the Red Army chased the KMT government across the country, until in December 1949 they retreated to the island of Taiwan. Thus Taiwan which the Americans defended with their navy has ever since proclaimed to be the legitimate government of mainland China, and in turn Communist China has consistently claimed sovereignty over Taiwan.

In 1950, the Chinese also annexed Tibet, an isolated region with a highly distinct cultural and religious community. It had had an ill-defined relationship with China throughout the Qing Dynasty (1722-1912) as well as the Yuan Dynasty (1240–1354); at various times it could have been seen as an ally, a tributary state, or a region within Chinese control. Tibet’s incorporation into the People’s Republic of China has remained a highly charged and controversial issue.

### Korean War

The **Korean War** (1950-53) was the first “hot” conflicts of the Cold War. Since the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire. During their occupation, Koreans developed a deep hatred of their Japanese overlords, and tended to look favourably towards her regional rival Communist Russia. After World War II, with no native government, it was agreed to divide Korea along the 38th parallel into zones of occupation by the Soviet Union and the United States, similar to Germany, governed by a Joint Commission and with the intention of uniting the nation after five years. As the relationship between the superpowers froze in the late 1940s, the United States decided to hold decided elections in Korea, but objections from the Soviets meant these were only held in the south and were boycotted by many southern politicians determined to prevent the division of their nation, that had existed for thousands of years as a unit. Nevertheless there emerged two Koreas: a capitalist south under Syngman Rhee who used far from democratic means to gain power and brutally suppressed Communist opponents while in power; and a Communist north under former guerrilla leader Kim Il-Sung. Ironically historians generally accept that Kim Il-Sung was fairly elected in the Soviet zone. Neither leader was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, with the south lacking industry and the north lacking agriculture, and border skirmishes were so common that nearly 10,000 soldiers were killed before the war even began.

In June 1950, with the Russian and American forces having largely withdrawn, North Korea launched an invasion across the 38th Parallel, which came as an alarming surprise to the United States. As far as they were concerned, this was not simply a local dispute, but the first step in a war with the Soviet Union with the very fate of Western Civilization at stake. In fact, archival material suggests the decision to invade was Kim's own initiative, not a Soviet one. Stalin offered only tacit support to North Korea and a few light tanks, and made it clear that Soviet forces would not openly engage in the conflict; some Russian pilots did covertly participate in support of Chinese forces in the final phase of the war. Under pressure from the United States, the United Nations condemned this aggression and authorised military intervention; the Soviet Union were boycotting the UN at the time because of their refusal to admit Communist China. Nevertheless, neither South Korea, the United States, nor the UN were prepared for war, and the North Koreans quickly overran almost the whole peninsula except for the areas around the port of Pusan that became known as the Pusan Perimeter. UN forces under US general Douglas MacArthur finally arrived in the region in September; 21 countries contributed forces, with the US providing 88%. On 15 September, MacArthur planned and executed a masterstroke, a daring amphibious assault on the Korean port of Inchon, halfway up the peninsula and twenty mile from Seoul. Trapped between these two forces, by the end of September the North Korean army in the south had been decimated, and Syngman Rhee restored to power in South Korea. On 1 October, at MacArthur’s insistence and with American support, UN forces were sent north across the 38th Parallel, as the conflict transformed into a war to “*liberate*” North Korea from Communism. Within three weeks they’d taken Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Still they pressed on, every step bringing them closer and closer to the Yalu River and the Chinese border. As far as Mao Zedong was concerned, this was blatant imperialist aggression. At the end of October, the vast armies of China, battle hardened by years of civil war, were ordered across the border. Overnight the conflict was transformed into a clash between a modern mechanised army, and wave after wave of Chinese infantry. One after another, the UN positions were overwhelmed, many falling back in disarray as the bitter Korean winter set-in. In January the Chinese even captured Seoul, though two months later a UN counter-offensive had push them back to the 38th Parallel.

After seven months of war, once more the two sides were back to where they’d been when the war began. To break the stalemate, general MacArthur, obsessed with an absolute victory, publicly demanded the authority to attack China itself, and even the option to use nuclear weapons. However, fearing the outbreak of World War III, President Truman took the brave decision to dismiss the hugely popular general. His replacement Matthew Ridgway instead established an entrenchment defensive line along the 38th Parallel, while US bombers targeted the Chinese supply lines. In April 1951, the massive Chinese Spring Offensive was launched involving three field armies totalling 700,000 men including a reborn North Korean army. Although they overran several UN positions, they were unable to gain the strategic breakthrough they needed. It was to be the last major assault of the war. Both sides realised that neither side could win control of the whole peninsula. Peace negotiations began in July and would drag-on for over two years. In the meantime, vicious battles for minor stretches of tactical ground continued, and the casualty rate soared. Despite minor crises, on 27 July 1953 an armistice was finally agreed. It established a 2.5 mile wide demilitarized zone between North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. South Korea refused to sign the armistice and no peace treaty has ever been signed, so technically the two Koreas are still at war even today, and the border remains heavily militarized.

The Korean War was exceptionally bloody, with atrocities committed by all sides including the United States. Modern estimates put the death toll at over 1.2 million on all sides. After the war, Syngman Rhee's southern regime became even more authoritarian, and his presidency only ended in 1960 following popular protests. With his departure, South Korea only became more unstable, and it was only in the 1980s that it really enjoyed stable democracy and sustained economic growth. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung developed a full-scale personality cult, and ruled until his death in 1994. It remains one of the most underdeveloped and secretive countries in the world. The legacy of the Korean War continues to haunt the United States, with the modern day crisis over the North Korean nuclear weapons program. The war also helped stabilise the Chinese Communist Party in power by standing-up to the West after her Century of Shame. It also ingrained anti-US sentiments into Chinese culture. Yet the Korean War only set the stage for America’s longer, more destructive, and better known war in Asia; the Vietnam War (1955-1975).

### Russia

Though the victory for the Soviet Union had been won at huge cost, she now had greater strength than she had ever had under the Tsars. In the aftermath, the mild political liberalisation, that had taken place in the Russia during the war, came to an abrupt end in 1945. Post-war reconstruction proceeded rapidly, but as the emphasis was all on heavy industry and energy, living standards remained low, especially outside of the major cities. Meanwhile, Stalin and the Communist Party were given full credit for the victory over Germany, and generals such as Zhukov were demoted to regional commands. As his health began to deteriorate in the early 1950s, he was rarely seen in public and died of a stroke on 5 March 1953. He left a legacy of hundreds of thousands of deaths and repression, as he turned a backward Russia into a world superpower.

### United States and McCarthyism

To the United States, victory had cost her little in comparison with her Allies and the war brought a new empire, though it rested less on the occupation of territory and more on a world-wide surge of indirect American power. The elimination of Japanese naval power and American naval and air bases round much of Asia turned the Pacific into an American lake. Her economic strength and industrial power was only enhanced as her old commercial rivals staggered under the troubles of recovery. And she was also a great creditor nation with the dollar firmly replacing the British gold standard as the reserve currency in the international financial system. Her citizens had actually seen their standard of living rise during the war.

In these tense post-war years, there was as much fear of Communism at home as in foreign affairs. This was not new. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been created in 1938 to seek out subversive activities by anyone with links to Communism; a small American Communist Party was founded in 1919. HUAC's activities acquired a much higher profile after the war, particularly when it investigated Hollywood on the premise that many films supposedly contained subtle Communist propaganda, ranging from anti-war to anti-imperialism sentiments, from anti-capitalism to anything remotely left-wing. The investigations led to an ever-growing “*Hollywood blacklist*”, making employment impossible, and eventually including more than 400 actors, screenwriters and directors, many of them well known like Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and Orson Welles. The witch-hunt became even more extreme and alarmist in the hands of a little-known Republican senator from Wisconsin, **Joseph McCarthy**. McCarthy came to sudden national attention when in 1950 he claimed to have a list of Communists working in the State Department. The nation-wide press response to this, led to McCarthy’s wide-reaching investigation that became known as the McCarthyism. From 1952, his aggressive interrogation in the Senate of witnesses from government officials, the media, homosexuals, and even the army occupied the public spotlight for two years. Yet he was unable to substantiate any of his claims, and in December 1954 the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. Though he fell from the public eye, he continued his obsessional anti-Communist witch-hunt until his death in 1957. He was widely regarded by then as a dangerous demagogue and as an embarrassment both to the Senate and to the nation.

### Israel and the Middle East

After World War II, the colonial powers were increasingly keen to withdraw from their mandates in the Middle East. In British Egypt, French Lebanon and French Syria they faced strong independence movements. Between 1943 and 1947, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt (except for the Suez Canal area) all emerged as independent states.

Meanwhile in Palestine, Britain found herself in intense and often violent conflict with the Zionist Jewish community over immigration limits, to which the Arab community was violently opposed; by now Jews made up more than a third of the population. In 1947, the British government announced it would withdraw from Palestine, stating it was unable to arrive at a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews. The problem was handed over to the newly created United Nations, who proposed two states roughly of equal in size. Soon after the plan was announced the region descended into civil war; the **First Arab–Israeli War** (May 1948-March 1949). While the Palestine Arabs were numerically superior and had the nominal supported of the surrounding Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, they were deeply divided amongst themselves, being faithful to various local clan leaders. In contrast, the Jews enjoyed unity of purpose under Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, and despite the international embargo on weapons to both sides, had more contacts in Europe through which they used ingenious means to gained superior arms. After ten months of fighting, interrupted by several truce periods, the Israelis won an advantageous armistice which saw them controlling almost half the territory originally designated to the Palestine Arabs by the UN. Meanwhile, Jordan and Egypt annexed the remaining Palestine territories; the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To the Israelis this war became the beginning of their nation. To the Palestine Arabs, it was their catastrophe leaving 800,000 stateless refugees. The war years had also revealed a factor that would remain a constant in the region. The Arab nations had been shown to be disorganized and weakened by rivalries, while the state of Israel had discovered a national cohesion, a passionate commitment by all its citizens and a military strength that would stand it in very good stead in future conflicts like the Six-Day War.

The United States was one of the first countries to recognized Israel, with Truman hoping to win Jewish-American votes, and capitalise on public post-war sympathy for the Jewish people. The departure of the European powers from the region led to a growing presence of the United States in Middle East affairs, and a dominant position in the regions oil industry.

### Indian Independence and Partition

Almost 200 year of British colonial history in India that dated back to the Battle of Plassey (1757) would come to an end in 1947. The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, as a secular all India political party, is widely regarded as a key turning point in the Indian independence movement. Despite the tremendous diversity of the sub-continent, it was remarkable in achieving a broad consensus over the decades, though splits were frequent too, especially between those who believed that violence was justifiable and those who stressed non-violence, as well as between those who advocated working within the Raj to weaken it and those who wanted to distance themselves from it. Meanwhile, the Hindu Renaissance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played an important role in reawakening Indian minds and nationalism. It started in Bengal, where a unique blend of religious and intellectual society produced some of India's greatest social reformers, patriotic orators, scholars, literary giants, and scientists. During this period, India witnessed an intellectual awakening that questioned existing religious orthodoxies, particularly with respect to women, marriage, and the caste system.

The towering figure of the Indian independence movement was Mahatma K. Gandhi. Born into a middle caste family, Mohandas Gandhi’s upbringing was steeped in Vaishnavism, Hinduism with strong tinges of Jainism, whose chief tenets are non-violence, vegetarianism, fasting, and mutual tolerance. He gained a law degree in London, and in 1883 accepted a contract with an Indian firm in South Africa where he lived with his wife and children for twenty years. Gandhi was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian immigrant in South Africa; although not yet enshrined in law, Apartheid was very much in evidence at the turn of the century. On a train voyage in June 1893, he was forcibly thrown out of a first-class compartment after refusing to give up his seat to a European passenger. This proved a turning point in his life. Gandhi led a series of civil disobedience campaigns opposing the introduction of registration for all Indians, which would last for the next eight years and see him imprisoned several times, though he eventually won some important concessions. Returning to India in 1915, Gandhi founded an ashram in Ahmedabad that was open to all castes. He continued to develop his practice of non-violent non-cooperation campaigning still further, for various social causes including Home Rule for India. As his fame spread, in 1921 Gandhi assumed the leadership of the Indian National Congress, leading nationwide campaigns using non-violence, strikes, and boycotts on British good which achieved varying degrees of success, including the famous two-month 250 mile Salt March in 1930 challenging the British-imposed salt tax. These mobilised the masses on the one hand, while provoking the authorities into increasingly draconian repression. Much to his distress, self-restraint among his supporters often gave way to violence. During World War II, Gandhi turned directly to achieving Indian independence from Britain, through his Quit India movement; he saw no reason why Indians should fight against tyranny, when they were subjugated at home. As a result, he was arrested in August 1942, and imprisoned for two years; his wife died in the same prison three months before his release in 1944. Gandhi was far from alone in the struggle for independence with other key figures including Vallabhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Within months of the end of the war, it was glaringly obvious that Britain lacked the means to defeat a renewed mass campaign by the Congress Party. With the Labour Party in power in Britain, who were traditionally supportive of Indian claims for self-rule, and US foreign policy pressurising for the end of Western imperialism, India moved quickly towards independence. Negotiations over the transfer of power began in March 1947 between the British, the Congress Party and the Muslim League. Muslim separatism had grown steadily from the late 19th century, not helped by the British policy of divide and rule, and by the 1930s the rise of communal violence meant Partition was increasingly inevitable. Gandhi was strongly opposed to Partition, and worked tirelessly to show that Hindus and Muslims could live together peacefully. However, Muhammad Ali Jinnah the leader of the Muslim League was as inclined to distrust Hindu rule as to resist the foreign Raj. In August 1947, Lord Lord Louis Mountbatten, India's last viceroy, granted independence, with the Indian Subcontinent partitioned into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

As some 10 million displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new homelands, religious violence broke out especially in the Punjab and Bengal; it’s estimated as many as a million people lost their lives in the bloodbaths. Gandhi eschewied the official celebration of independence in Delhi, to visited the affected areas attempting to provide solace. Afterwards he undertook several fasts in an attempt to stop violence. Unfortunately, his efforts to unite the opposing forces proved his undoing. He championed the paying of restitution to Pakistan for lost territories as outlined in the Partition agreement. On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic enraged by his efforts at accommodation. His death was mourned nationwide by Hindus and Muslims alike, and indeed throughout the entire world.

Meanwhile, the violent nature of the Partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that has plagued their relations ever since. Conflict broke out almost immediately over the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu, a predominantly Muslim population ruled by the Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh; the **First Kashmir War** (October 1947-49). Following partition, the rulers of princely states were allowed to choose whether to join India or Pakistan. Muslim tribal forces pre-empted any decision by occupying parts of the princely state, all but forcing Hari Singh to join India to gain Indian military aid. The frontier gradually solidified over the course of the conflict along what came to be known as the Line of Control, with India retaining about two-thirds of the Kashmir.

It is incontrovertible that Britain had benefitted greatly from the British Raj (1858-1947). It provided a captive market for British goods and services, and allowed her to maintain a large standing army at no expense to the British taxpayer; more than 2.5 million Indian soldier fought in World War II. Whether the Raj benefitted India herself remains a far more controversial topic. On the positive side: the British invested heavily in infrastructure like railways, canals, irrigation works, and mining; established an education system in English, as well as law and order creating suitable conditions for the growth of industry and enterprise; and commercialised agriculture, integrating India into the world economy. Conversely, the British are criticised for: leaving Indians largely impoverished, and prone to devastating famines; exhorting high taxation to pay for an expensive bureaucracy, an army beyond India's own defence needs, and to service the huge British national debt; and retaining the levers of economic power firmly in British hands to the detriment of indigenous enterprise.

### Britain

World War II had a profound impact on British society. Rationing had been in place almost from the start of the war, including most basic foodstuffs like meat, eggs, butter, sugar, tea, milk, cheese, jam, sweets and chocolate, as well as clothes and petrol. Because everyone was subject to the same restrictions, joining equally in the war effort, there was a marked reduction in class barriers. The other ironic effect of providing everybody with the same simple but healthy diet was that the war generation in Britain was the first in which the very poorest families ate adequately. By the end of the war, Winston Churchill was probably the most popular British prime minister of all time. Yet in the election of 1945, he reverted unashamedly to the role of Conservative leader. He lost by a landslide to the Labour Party of Clement Attlee with a seductive message; for a post-war change of direction towards a new and fairer society. Attlee achieved an impressive program of reforms: the National Insurance Act (1946) extended state benefits for sickness, unemployment and old age; the National Assistance Act (1948) did the same for the relief of poverty; and most profoundly the National Health Service Act (1946) provided for free medical, dental and hospital services to all. On the economic front the Bank of England was nationalised in 1946, followed by the coal mines and the railways in 1947, and the gas and electricity companies in 1948. Yet the question of how to pay for the welfare state, and how to modernise old nationalised industries to make them efficient, had remained an ongoing political issue. Yet the reality of post-war Britain meant that these were still years of austerity; rationing dragged on until 1954. The international situation made a rapid return to peacetime conditions equally impossible. The manpower requirements of the British zones in Germany and Austria were soon followed by new obligations in Greece from 1944, Korea from 1950 and the increasing tension of the Cold War. Conscription would not end until 1963, with some 2.5 million young men compelled to do their time in National Service.

Although Britain was one of the victorious allies, the defeat of Germany had been mainly the work of Soviet and American power. Britain had survived, but its prestige and authority, not to mention its wealth, had been severely reduced. The Attlee government began the dismantling of the British Empire as it gradually transformed into a Commonwealth of independent nations. In addition to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Iraq all won their independence between 1947 and 1948. The imperial endgame would be all but complete by the mid-1960s. As the process of dismantling the British Empire accelerated, people from the colonies began for the first time to make their way in large numbers to the “mother country”. With the post-war reconstruction, there was a shortage of labour and the government encouraged immigrants to make the journey. The first to arrive were Jamaicans and others from the British Caribbean. These were followed by arrivals from Africa, from the Indian Subcontinent, and from the Jewish community. Britain was gradually being transformed into a multi-racial society.

### France

France emerged from World War II a ruin. During the war, the Nazis had stripped the country of everything that wasn’t nailed down to feed their military machine. In their retreat, the Germans, the Allies and the French Resistance had between them destroyed ports, bridges, railroad tracks, roads, and nearly half a million buildings and factories. Meanwhile vast swathes of land needed to be de-mined. The French population was sick and very, very hungry; two-thirds of children were suffering from rickets. After liberation, reprisals swept France against collaborators, including official of the Vichy government, black marketeers, and citizens, as well as the ugly carnival of shaving the heads of women who’d had relationships with German soldiers; many of whom had been forced into prostitution to feed their families. A more systematic retribution followed with some 55,000 trials during the next six years, including Philippe Pétain the former head of Vichy France who was executed. Nevertheless trials were limited, and there were conscious efforts in France to forget Vichy, the collaborators, and complicity in Nazi atrocities. Instead the myth was glorified that almost all the French supported the Resistance movement, and hated Vichy France.

A provisional French government was established under Charles de Gaulle. However, adding to French humiliation, he was invited to none of big post-war conferences like Yalta and Potsdam, and though they were allowed to occupy part of Germany, it was a sector of little consequence. De Gaulle wanted the new French constitution to establish a powerful President similar to the United States, believing the lack of a strong executive had contributed to the fall of France in 1940. Faced with opposition, de Gaulle suddenly resigned from the government, apparently expecting that a wave of public support would bring him back to power with a mandate to impose his constitutional ideas; he would spend 12 long years in the wilderness for his hubris. Instead the French Fourth Republic (1946–58) was a parliamentary democracy remarkably similar to that of the Third, driven in part by fears of the danger of a dictatorship on the right remembering Napoleon, or a Communist revolution on the left; Communism’s strong participation in the French Resistance now made it a political force in the Fourth Republic. In many ways de Gaulle was right, and the Fourth Republic was very unstable with 21 different coalition governments in its 12-year history. The magnitude of France’s post-war economic devastation forced France to turn to the United States for loans as part of the Marshall Plan. This aid did not come without strings attached, with the US insisting that the French Communist Party must be excluded from government; Washington stridently condemned Soviet crackdowns on non-Communist parties in the Eastern Bloc, but had few qualms about excluding freely elected Communists in the West. In addition, all French barriers to American exports had to be removed, including limitations on Hollywood films. Nevertheless, the French economy gathered steam in the early 1950s with many new men emerging from the Resistance movement into business life, politics, and state bureaucracy. The only serious flaws in the modest boom were frequent union unrest and a nagging inflationary trend that weakened the Franc. The short-lived coalition governments were incapable of taking the painful measures needed to check these trends.

Another unfortunate aspect of post-war era in France was an urge to reassert her lost greatness on the world. This would lead to a rather nasty end to the French Empire. Independence movements in Madagascar, Cameroon, and Algeria were all violently repressed. When Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, nationalist Ho Chi Minh launched a push for an independent Vietnam, leading to the long and bloody First Indochina War (1946-54). When the Indochina War ended with defeat and withdrawal, France became almost immediately involved in a new and even more brutal conflict in Algeria; the Algerian War (1954–62).

### Germany

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the civilian population in occupied Germany were left in a pitiful state. All the victorious allies initially pursued a policy that no help should be given to the Germans in rebuilding their nation, save for the minimum required to mitigate starvation. Housing conditions were bad, with over 10 million refugees most living in camps, and the disruptions to transport, markets, and finances were slowed a return to normal. People lived at barely subsistence levels of food, receiving about half the nourishment that the Red Cross at the time were providing to refugees elsewhere; only in mid-1946 were international relief organizations allowed in to help starving German children. In March 1947, thousands took to the streets to protest the disastrous food situation. Despite this, Germany was obliged to pay reparations in various forms. Almost a quarter of her pre-war territory was annexed by the Allies: East Prussia was partitioned between the Soviet Union and Poland; the three eastern most districts were granted to Poland; and the rich mining district of the Saar was again detached and put in economic union with France. Millions of German POWs paid reparations in the form of forced labour to various countries, especially France, the Soviet Union, and Britain, often clearing minefields and doing agricultural work. Intellectual property was also harvested in terms of technological and scientific know-how, as well as thousands of German patents from the ejector seat to infrared scopes, from food preservatives to Magnetophone tape used in the film and music industries. It's been estimated that the value of these amounts to around US$123 billion modern terms. Capital equipment from some 1,500 manufacturing plants were also carried off by all the allies in a policy initially agreed by all of them of partially de-industrialising Germany to half her pre-war output.

With the aggravation of the Cold War, the policy of the Western powers dramatically changed. A new directive recognised that to achieve an orderly and prosperous Europe required the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany. From 1948 onwards West Germany became a minor beneficiary of the Marshall Plan. In May 1949, the United States, France, and Britain combined their occupation zones into what became the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. The Soviets reacted quickly by officially announcing the German Democratic Republic or East Germany in October 1949. These actions in 1949 marked the end of any talk of a reunified Germany. For the next 41 years, East and West Germany served as symbols of a divided world, and of the Cold War animosities.

### Italy

In the aftermath of the war, Italy was treated as a co-belligerent rather than an ally. Various Italian possessions on Adriatic coast and Aegean Sea were ceded to Yugoslavia and Greece, and her African colonies - Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia - were administered by the Allies for the short period until their anticipated independence. King Victor Emmanuel III, having been thoroughly discredited through his close links with Mussolini, was narrowly ousted in a referendum. Thus Italy became a parliamentary democratic republic with a president as head of state and a prime minister at the helm. The election of 1946 brought to power Alcide De Gasperi of the Christian Democrats, a centre-left party with strong links to the Catholic Church. This set a long-term pattern in Italy with the Christian Democrats leading every government until the 1980s. An inevitable consequence of her fully proportional election system was that these were coalition governments, and invariably unstable. Coalitions and a fluctuating cast of prime ministers followed each other in such rapid succession that the Italian political system becomes one of Europe's standard jokes. Nevertheless, in this atmosphere of political chaos, Italy's economy prospered greatly, and in 1957 she was one of the six founding members of the European Economic Community, now the European Union.

The upheaval and chaos of the post-war era also provided a final boom for the **Sicilian Mafia**. The Mafia dates back to the abolition of feudalism in the post Napoleon era in the early 19th century. This was followed by a long period of lawlessness, when an increasing amount of property came onto the market without proper regulation. These conditions provided an opportunity for criminals to offer their own methods of protection, at a price. For more efficient exploitation of these opportunities, the criminals organised themselves into well-structured groups or “families”. They acquired a foothold in many fields of commercial and political activity until the rise of Mussolini who launched an effective campaign against the Mafia, trumping their threats with a stronger state-backed persecution of his own. With the downfall of Mussolini in 1943 and the incautious haste with which Fascist officials were sacked, it was easy for leading Mafiosi to soon find themselves in very useful positions of power. A state-funded post-war construction boom provided them with one among many opportunities. The downfall of the Mafia would ultimately be self-inflicted. The inter-family warfare from 1961-3 led to the first government response though it was ineffective. There was even more violent inter-family feuding from 1981-3 over control of the trade in heroin, from which the Corleone clan emerged the convincing winners. This led to the long process of prosecuting the Mafia; Tommaso Buscetta was arrest and turn informant in 1987, Totó Riina was convicted to multiple-life-sentences in 1993, Leoluca Bagarella in 1995, and Bernardo Provenzano not until 2006.

### South Africa and Apartheid

South Africa had been granted dominion status within the British Empire shortly after the Boer War in 1910, and became a sovereign state in December 1931. On independence, there were about 1.3 million white citizens of South Africa, about 10% of the population. Yet from the start, the government was dominated by this white minority. In the individual provinces of South Africa there were differing restrictions placed on the various non-white groups; only in Cape Province were they granted the vote provided they met the property qualifications, which few did since 90% of land was in the hands of the white citizens. When J.B.M. Hertzog became prime minister in 1924, he began to put in place legislation to protect the privileged position of South Africa's white minority. During the next fifteen years laws were passed to prevent Africans and Asians taking-up skilled trades, to limit their access to towns and to enforce various degrees of segregation upon the white and coloured communities. Even Hertzog's measures were too mild for some, like **Daniel F. Malan**. When Malan became prime minister in 1948 a new obsessive vigour was imposed on the systems of segregation; known as **Apartheid** from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”. A population register was established to fix the racial classification of every South African citizen. Marriage and even sexual relations between whites and non-whites became a criminal offence. The country was divided into racial zones, with non-whites needing a pass to travel into white areas to work. Universities were restricted only for whites, while “apartness” was carried to extreme lengths in schools, with separate facilities provided for different racial groups. In everyday life there were separate buses and trains, post offices and libraries, cinemas and theatres. The coloured citizens of the Cape Province were eventually deprived of the vote in 1956 after a long legal battle. The advocates of Apartheid claimed that these limitations were balanced by self-government in the coloured homelands, though their policies remained subject to veto by the national government.

The policy of Apartheid brought widespread international condemnation and isolation. After being censured by fellow members, South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961. In 1962, the United Nations called on member states to apply trade and financial restrictions on South Africa. Most African states complied, but most Western governments were reluctant, especially Britain and the United States; the US only imposed economic sanctions in 1986. Meanwhile popular revulsion at Apartheid also led to the isolation of South Africa in fields such as sport and culture; South Africa did not compete at Olympic Games from 1964 to 1988. Apartheid legislation would not be abolished until 1991.