Well before the war ended military planners were determining the elements of this reasonably clear Cold War strategy. The first priority was the extent to which British national interests could be protected and perhaps even advanced after the war. What was to be its global strategy?
Strategic thinking involves not only geography, but also ideas. The British had wrestled - literally as well as intellectually - with both German nationalism and Communism in the first half of the twentieth century: how to live with Bolshevism had concerned Whitehall even as the First World War was coming to a close (the choice between the 'Boche or the Bolshie’). The effort of trying to compare the threat of Communism from 1917 onwards with that of the rise of Nazism and fascism had played havoc with traditional 'balancing’ notions that dominated British thinking about the European continent and had contributed to the scarring debate about appeasement in the 1930s. The period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact between 1939 and 1941 confirmed Whitehall’s distrust of both Germany and the Soviet Union, a distrust that was in reality not much mitigated by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Thus anti-Communism and anti-Soviet thinking were already firmly part of the British cultural landscape in the 1940s.
It was the military chiefs and intelligence officers who were the main driving force of Britain’s future Cold War strategy. New evidence confirms the extent to which intelligence, and those with access to intelligence material, played a central role and generated a mindset about Soviet intentions that was to dominate thinking for the next fifty years. 131 The Joint Intelligence Committee was at the apex of the intelligence-gathering system, and was chaired by a senior Foreign Office official with a membership drawn from the Chiefs of Staff. In 1943, a Post Hostilities Planning Committee was established; its work was overseen by a ministerial Armistice and Postwar Committee, chaired by the deputy prime minister of the coalition government, Labour’s Clement Attlee. This committee was at the centre of intense arguments about the extent to which the Soviet Union should be considered a postwar threat.
These committees were examining Soviet capabilities as well as behaviour. Assessments were based upon a mixture of ideological predisposition to distrust Soviet intentions, as well as geostrategic analyses, although some thought that such radical debates should be off-limits while the war was still being fought, as any leaks to the Soviets might create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet planning had to be concerned with the balance of power rather than with nebulous indications of goodwill to the Soviet Union.132 An anti-Soviet mindset can be detected in the intelligence community from 1943 onwards, with racist attitudes towards the 'semi-oriental’ Soviet forces, and an appreciation on the ground of how the Soviets behaved which was confirmed from the very top of the military hierarchy, chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke himself.133 The Foreign Office was more ambivalent about seeing the Soviet Union as the next great challenge for British interests while the war was still on and while the Soviets remained an important military ally, although there was still considerable apprehension about Europe’s postwar future. In a revealing exchange of minutes as early as mid-1942, it was observed that the current trend of Soviet policy would amount to the extension of exclusive Soviet influence over the whole of Eastern Europe. Britain could not stop 'the establishment of Russian predominance in Eastern Europe if Germany is crushed and disarmed and Russia participates in the final victory’. In this case, it would seem that the worst fears of 'the Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks & Turks are justified, and their only hope for the future lies in a Germany strong enough to counteract Soviet predominance’.134
As the war drew to a close, strategic planning for the postwar world became more intense. Although Britain had gone to war in 1939 in defence of Poland, Poland’s fate was not now the primary concern of British decision-makers. British national interests centred, first, on Germany, as it remained the fulcrum of the European continental balance of power; and, second, on the future of Britain’s imperial holdings, particularly in the Mediterranean region. Ostensibly, the coalition government sought a four-power plan and a United Nations; however, the military were sceptical about both ideas. They did not see how Britain could work constructively with the Soviet Union, did not like the idea of a United Nations, and thought China was 'rather a joke’.135
Yet this change was an uneven process. Churchill’s lack of serious consideration of postwar planning, and the uncomfortable coexistence of his own anti-Communism with his personal respect for Stalin, meant that wartime planning exercises within Whitehall were often incoherent. Opportunism rather than ideology framed Churchill’s attitude towards the Communists, although he wrote to his foreign secretary Anthony Eden in April 1944 that, though 'I have tried in every way to put myself in sympathy with these Communist leaders, I cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them.
Force and facts are their only realities.’136 So, as the Soviet armies began to move west, it was becoming clear that an expansionist Soviet Union possibly controlling a communised Germany would require a very different kind of peace settlement from anything envisaged during the early part of the war. The Soviet Union’s own wartime experience would mean that it would never co-operate in any revival of Germany that it could not control. So the question became one of how Britain could build a coalition to contain the power of the Soviet Union, by working with France and maybe even Germany itself. As the Soviet Union could threaten British interests worldwide, American balancing support would also be required. Indeed, as the war ended, and knowing of the impending US test of the atomic bomb, Churchill even asked for plans - Operation Unthinkable - to be drawn up for an immediate non-nuclear-based invasion of the Soviet Union. These plans left officials - even Brooke - aghast.137
Finally, the strategists were all too well aware of the financial disaster that could descend upon the country as the war ended. Britain was bankrupt. The costs of war had emptied British coffers, and had also placed a huge strain on its imperial creditors. Yet even this was seen as only a temporary phenomenon: it was the price of victory, and a price that the Americans would surely help to pay. National retreat from global status after military victory was entirely counter-intuitive for both British bureaucrats and politicians.138
Yet, for the British electorate in 1945, it was the domestic agenda that was most important. The Labour Party had promised to implement the ambitious Beveridge Report of 1943 and to create a genuine welfare state. This would ensure that the postwar traumas of the 1920s and 1930s became nothing more than a distant memory. So, flushed with its success in the 1945 general election, Labour now had to balance Britain’s overseas interests with the demand for domestic reconstruction. They had to manoeuvre through uncharted waters, between the commitment to reconstruction, the tough geostrategy required to sustain British global and imperial interests, and the containment of Communism and the Soviet Union. This had to be done in spite of the noisy opposition that came fTom the left wing of the Labour Party itself.
8. Housewives queuing for potatoes in London, 1947. Domestic priorities competed with Cold War imperatives.
Britain’s Cold War abroad: the 1940s
It is not surprising that the tough three-power Potsdam Conference was seen as a watershed in the politics of the wartime Grand Alliance.139 The British negotiators were reminded that Britain had earlier failed to heed warnings about Hitler’s intentions and should not now repeat the error of appeasement, but should instead confront Stalin’s 'ideological Lebensraum’. If the German question - what Germany would do next - had dominated the interwar years, now it was the question of what to do with a defeated and occupied Germany.140 For Germany was the geostrategic and economic powerhouse of Europe. If the Soviet Union was to be successfully contained, US support in securing the West German zones would be vital even if most of Eastern Europe was 'lost’. Worse, if proper attention was not given to western Germany, a new Rapallo mentality might emerge as Germans turned once again towards the Soviet Union.
Soon after the war, senior Foreign Office officials extrapolated from what they could see ofSoviet behaviour in postwar Germany as well as in the Soviet Union itself, and they shifted closer to the Chiefs of Staff s wartime line of argument, accepting an anti-Communist Soviet agenda as the organising principle of British postwar foreign policy, arguing that 'in seeking a maximum degree of security Russian policy will be aggressive by all means short of war’.141 The diplomat Christopher Warner, who had been optimistic about the postwar world, now concluded that the UK had been chosen by the Soviets for a political and diplomatic onslaught. They 'have decided upon an aggressive policy, based upon militant communism and Russian chauvinism. They have launched an offensive against social democracy and against this country _ The Soviet Government makes coordinated use of military, economic, propaganda and political weapons and also of the Communist "religion". It is submitted, therefore, that we must at once organise and coordinate our defences against all these, and that we should not stop short of a defensive-offensive policy.’142
Labour’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was confronted with these perceived new realities in Soviet policy, and, in May 1946, Bevin himself warned the Labour Cabinet of the new dangers. A Russia Committee to lead policy was established in the Foreign Office.143 A rear-guard attempt by Prime Minister Clement Attlee at the end of the year to argue that the eastern Mediterranean was now essentially undefendable was overridden by Bevin, himself backed by the Chiefs who threatened to resign en masse if Attlee got his way.
This important row indicated that it was a Cold War mindset that now dominated Whitehall, even if some politicians were slower to grasp this: now 'Communism [was] the most important external political menace confronting the British Commonwealth and Western democracies and [was] likely to remain so in the foreseeable future.’144 The new mindset was also shaped by the dispatches of the Foreign Office diplomat, Frank Roberts, who thought that Britain had to show it was the champion of a progressive faith and way of life 'with an appeal to the world as least as great as those of the communist system’.145 The Communist menace was not yet simply or even primarily military, but was driven by a Marxist ideology that assumed expansion, caution, and the use of every political and economic trick. Communism was a form of religion that placed ideology even above national loyalty, so how the Soviets organised Communist Parties abroad - including that in Britain - was also of great importance. In short, as well as being a potential long-term challenge to territorial defence, the Cold War was conceived as a war of ideas, of loyalty to beliefs, and of all political mischief short of war.
The shift in Whitehall towards a Cold War mindset was momentous, if not unexpected. Now, suspicion of the Soviet Union, and of Communism in the UK, in Europe, and the Empire-Commonwealth would dominate policy planning and implementation for the next fifty years. But, over the next two years, while working out how to manage the new threat, the British government was also simultaneously involved in efforts to plan collectively for the postwar world through a United Nations organisation and the Bretton Woods institutions. This was the public, optimistic, and co-operative face of British diplomacy. The failure to establish effective institutions of collective security, and the retreat of the United States into isolationism during the interwar period were powerful reminders ofthe public responsibilities that the British had to bear to ensure that international institutions worked this time round. In the peace treaty talks, they also worked hard to retain their influence in the eastern Mediterranean in particular, where imperial and trusteeship interests were at stake, while access to oil and to strategic land and sea routes gave the area a special importance that continued to shape British policy. There was also some early optimism about the potential of France to act as a European and imperial partner in the creation of a third world force that would balance both US and Soviet power, but, although this notion was not formally abandoned until 1949, it seemed an increasingly weak strategic response to the new realities.146
However, the logic of bipolarity became increasingly potent. Negotiations in the torrid atmosphere of successive Council of Foreign Ministers meetings brought to fruition a Cold War policy that predicated the need for a viable West Germany with first US, and then later French, backing to balance Soviet power in Central Europe.147 Then, over the summer of 1947, the outline of the Marshall Plan was laid down.
In British eyes, the Marshall Plan was an indication that the United States had finally realised that incremental help through loans to Britain and France was not of itself going to bring the economic revival of the western zones of the defeated Germany, or the wider West European economy. While some may have hoped for an all-Europe recovery programme, most people in the UK and the United States were by now working on the principle that an East-West breakdown was inevitable, but wanted to put the blame fairly and squarely upon the heads of the Soviet leaders, even as aid was given to the capitalist countries of Europe. As Bevin whispered to his principal private secretary, Pierson Dixon, in the crucial Paris meeting of June-July 1947, 'we are witnessing the birth of the Western bloc’.148 Shortly after this the Soviets stormed out. Britain’s role was crucial in ensuring this breakdown, and then in persuading the United States that the organisation of the programme should meet UK expectations, and certainly not be the first step to a more politically integrated Western Europe. The Marshall aid programme did stimulate the wider West European economy and also served to assist domestic restructuring in Britain. Britain’s financial problems were vast, however, and the quest for resources and the constant sterling crises were an uncomfortable backdrop to activist policies at home and overseas. Most important aid eventually provided a psychologically comforting basis from which to build ‘the West’.
Within this seam of Cold War politics lay the issue of British-American relations. From 1945, it had been clear that the United States was essential to all Britain’s international diplomacy. Without US leadership nothing would happen. Relations were frequently very close in areas such as intelligence, and informal contacts based upon Joint Service operations during the war were sustained into the postwar era by British-American co-operation over access to materials and the sharing of staff.21 However, tensions between the UK and the United States were considerable: they covered the management of Germany (the United States had even volunteered to swap German zones in 1946, if the British felt they could not do the job), bases, and nuclear politics, as well as aid and reconstruction funding. Indeed, the secret decision to build a British nuclear bomb had been in part the result of a breakdown between the British and the Americans over access to nuclear technology.
Part of the reason for the difficulties in the British-American partnership in the early postwar years resulted from suspicion about US intentions and its reliability that was widely held in the UK. While some Conservatives wanted to base British foreign policy upon old imperial precepts, others - particularly on the left of the Labour Party - feared that Bevin’s hard line against Communism revealed him to be some kind of American lackey. In November 1946, some members of the Labour Party even sought in the House of Commons to bring a vote of no confidence in Bevin.
Yet 1947 saw a sea-change in British politics, in which the voices of opposition to its Cold War strategy were drowned out by evidence of the threatening behaviour of the Soviets in Eastern Europe and over Germany, and the real prospect of American financial aid for Western Europe through Marshall aid. However, the path to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty was not easy, although after its signing Marshall aid and NATO were conceived of as the two halves of the same walnut, delivering economic and military security, as the response to the Berlin blockade was already showing. Yet, in 1948, Bevin had hoped instead for US backing for a security grouping that was West European, which would have given the British greater freedom of manoeuvre. The five-power Brussels Treaty of 1948 was, however, soon overtaken by the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed in April 1949 by twelve powers, including the United States itself and to which Greece and Turkey were admitted in 1952, and West Germany in 1955.22 It fulfilled Britain’s need for an American guarantee to Europe against an outside threat, and met the obvious new reality of the late 1940s - the new balance of power was global, not just European. 149 150
World History
