Victorious British armies had shared with the
Americans the reconquest of Italy, France and
Germany in arduous campaigns from the beachheads
of Salerno and Normandy to the Elbe.
What the British now feared was that the
Americans would depart from Europe and simply
return to pre-war isolationism and so leave Britain
facing the Soviet Union alone.
The British people rejoiced on VE (victory in
Europe) Day and saw it as proving the powers of
endurance and the superiority of the British;
Churchill’s government knew better and recognised
the serious problems that lay ahead. The war
in Asia against Japan had still to be won. Hidden
from general public recognition were other facts:
the bleak position of Britain’s financial resources,
its foreign assets decimated by the purchase of war
supplies; the extent to which the US had provided
essential foods, raw materials and weapons under
the wartime ‘Lend-Lease’ arrangement which
meant postponing payment, not avoiding it altogether.
Without US help, the British economy –
geared until mid-1945 to the war effort – was not
able to provide the British people even with the
standard of living possible during the war. And
now in addition came the cost of maintaining the
minimum living standards of the former enemy in
the British zone of occupation. The food
imported into Germany had to be paid for by
Britain from its small dollar reserves.
If continental Western Europe was to be prevented
from sliding into chaos and protected
from Soviet expansion or subversion, the active
support of the US was essential. Yet there were
considerable and persisting Anglo-American differences.
In the US there was still a widespread
belief that Britain remained an unrepentant
imperialist power and a potentially formidable
trading rival. British policies in Palestine restricting
Jewish immigration caused bitterness on both
sides of the Atlantic. Finally, despite his robust
language, President Harry S. Truman thought
that the US and the Soviet Union could reach an
accommodation and that it was Britain, bent on
defending its worldwide colonial interests, that
might provoke the Soviet Union into conflict.
Until the US was ready to recognise its new
responsibilities in regions of the world which it
had hitherto not regarded as falling within
spheres essential to its own security, Britain had
to fill the vacuum. Meanwhile, there was uncertainty
about America’s long-term commitment to
Western Europe, and about US readiness to
defend Western interests in Asia, the Middle East
and the Mediterranean. So, until March 1947, it
was Britain that financially as well as militarily
took up the burden of supporting the anticommunist
government in Greece.
With resources so overstretched, there was an
urgent need to limit Britain’s more costly responsibilities.
India had been promised its independence,
and after the end of the war it could no
longer be delayed. The Labour government
grasped this nettle: Lord Mountbatten arrived in
Delhi as the last viceroy to India on 22 March
1947. On 14 and 15 August India and Pakistan
gained their independence. Partition had proved
unavoidable, and the tragedy of communal violence
and murders marred Britain’s wise decision
to give up willingly the ‘jewel’ of its empire.
The first important post-war decision to be taken
was a political one – who was to govern Britain?
The election in July 1945 took place while the
war was still continuing in the Pacific. British
troops were fighting in Burma and the Japanese
were fanatically resisting the advance of the
Americans on the island approaches to their
homeland. The war was expected to last many
more months, until the atomic bomb revealed its
awesome power and unexpectedly ended the
fighting. But in the weeks following Germany’s
surrender all this was momentarily put aside. VE
Day, victory in Europe, was celebrated. There
were parties in every street. Burma was far away
except for those with relatives still fighting there
or whose next of kin were starving in Japanese
prisoner-of-war camps. The great majority of
people in Britain were now hopefully anticipating
the rewards of peace. Churchill wanted the coalition
with Labour to continue until the defeat of
Japan; when the Labour ministers in his government
rejected this proposal, he fought the election
in July on the appeal that he should be given
the mandate to ‘finish the job’.
Outside Britain it seemed incredible that the
British people, who owed so much to Churchill,
should now with apparent ingratitude turn him
out of office. Even in his own constituency the
Labour candidate attracted substantial support.
But the election was not about the conduct of the
war. Indeed, Churchill’s electoral tour was a personal
triumph, with ordinary people everywhere
mobbing him to express their gratitude and
genuine affection. The Labour leader Clement
Attlee appeared a colourless little man by comparison.
Yet it was Attlee not Churchill who
entered 10 Downing Street after the biggest landslide
since the election of 1906, which had given
the Liberals victory. However much the British
‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system might exaggerate
the disparity of the parties’ fortunes, it was
a striking turnaround from the last election, held
in 1935, when the Conservatives and their supporters
had returned 432 members and the opposition
parties could muster only 180.
Why was the swing of votes to Labour so large,
especially among the servicemen? Churchill himself,
as the electoral asset on which the Tory Party
managers were banking, proved insufficient to
turn the tide. Conservative promises of a new
deal based on the Beveridge Report of 1942 were
not so very different from those of the Labour
Party, but the electorate doubted whether the
Conservative heart was really in reform. It is
also true that Churchill mishandled the electoral
campaign by overdoing his condemnation of
‘socialism’ as embodied in the Labour Party’s
programme. He denounced Labour as setting out
on a path to totalitarian rule that would lead to
a British Gestapo. He derided Attlee as a ‘sheep
in wolf’s clothing’. It was impossible to persuade
a sophisticated British electorate that Attlee,
Bevin and Morrison were now not to be trusted
despite their outstanding accomplishments as
ministers in Churchill’s all-party War Cabinet.
The Gestapo jibe badly misfired.
But probably none of this explained the magnitude
of the Conservative defeat. There was one
factor more powerful than any other: the memories
of the bitter hardship of unemployment
during the 1930s, of slums, of ill health and of a
society that had failed to provide fair opportunities
to the majority of the British people. In July
1945 millions of troops faced imminent demobilisation.
Were the Conservatives likely to have
their interests at heart? Would the government
ensure that worthwhile work was found for everyone
or would the employers be allowed to pick
and choose, to depress wages in free-market style,
careless of the poverty of the masses? It was this
deep distrust of the Conservative Party, regarded
by Labour supporters as the party of the well-todo,
that induced a larger proportion of working
people and soldiers than ever before, together
with traditional Labour supporters, to put their
faith in a socialist government and in a prime minister,
Clement Attlee, who had previously been
overshadowed by Churchill. Ernest Bevin and
Herbert Morrison had had a far greater impact
during the pre-war and war years. Yet Attlee
proved a most effective and even wily leader; with
his pipe, his baggy trousers and his mousey moustache,
his mild-mannered image was in sharp contrast
to the larger-than-life Churchill.
The transfer from military service to peacetime
employment was managed by the Labour government
with considerable skill, an effective
example of good planning. But the women who
had manned the factory benches now frequently
had to give up their jobs to the men. This time
soldiers, unlike after the First World War, were
demobilised in an orderly and fair fashion and
only as fast as they could be reabsorbed in civilian
work. This meant Britain still had more than
900,000 men in the forces in 1948. The free
‘utility’ civilian clothes supplied to everyone on
leaving the army were just the first sign that the
future had been thought out. Retraining facilities
and vacancies in industry became available as
wartime production was switched to that of
peacetime. There was great demand for goods
and a need for new housing and public works.
A most important feature of the celebrated
Beveridge Report of 1942 agreed by all three parties
at the time, Conservative, Labour and Liberal,
was a commitment that the government’s running
of the nation’s economy would ensure full
employment. Never again should the hungry
1930s, with the hated means test, be allowed to
return. Labour and Conservative governments
were able to fulfil that pledge for a generation,
unemployment rarely rising above 2 per cent
or half a million. The other promises of the
Beveridge plan, more wholeheartedly supported
by Labour and the Liberals than by Conservatives,
were to provide insurance for the whole of the
population for the basic needs of life, and on death
a grant for their burial. The state would take care
of its citizens from the ‘cradle to the grave’. A
health service would provide medical treatment
for the whole family regardless of who was working
and who was not. Together, these measures
laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state.
They represented a tremendous advance in working
people’s standards of living, an indirect ‘social
wage’ provided by the Exchequer from the differential
contributions and taxes of the whole population.
The Conservatives doubted from the start
whether the state could afford to make such farreaching
promises entailing vast expenditure.
There were reforming Tories in the wartime coalition
too, but by 1945 they had passed only one
important measure through Parliament, R. A.
Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which when
implemented raised the school-leaving age to fifteen
and reorganised the educational system so
that better opportunities would be opened to all.
The Labour government translated theoretical
welfarism into practical measures. The Insurance
Act of 1946 and – after a struggle between
Aneurin Bevan, the fiery Welsh minister of health,
and the doctors, which ended in a compromise
over the continuation of private medicine – the
National Health Service Act of the same year
were the two most important measures of the
new government, which carried out and extended
the Beveridge plan.
The commitment to socialism, however,
remained largely a matter of theory. In practice
the Attlee administration’s approach was pragmatic,
aiming at the gradual transformation of the
British economy. This reflected the electorate’s
mood accurately enough. The majority of the
people were interested, not in theories of socialism
but, rather, in gaining a better standard of living,
a fairer share of the nation’s production, more
equal opportunity – in short, ‘social justice’. The
continued rationing of food was one way of sharing
out what was essentially in short supply. Basic
foods were subsidised, so even the poorest people
could afford to buy their rations. The people had
never enjoyed better health. State ownership was
extended only where it seemed necessary. The
Bank of England was nationalised, but not the
commercial banks or the insurance companies.
The coal mines, civil aviation, the railways, and gas
and electricity production were also brought
under state control by the close of 1947, with the
employers and shareholders receiving compensation.
But although now ‘owned by the people’,
the workers did not play a new and significant role
in running state industries. The government
appointed a management team, who were frequently
none other than the former managers,
and the workers at best exchanged one set of
employers for another. Consequently nationalisation
had little impact on good industrial relations.
More important in this respect was the Trade
Disputes and Trade Union Act 1946, which
repealed the restrictions placed on trade union
power after the General Strike of 1926. A generation
later new efforts would be made by both
Labour and Conservative governments to restrict
trade unions once again in the actions they could
take without incurring legal penalties. By then,
the majority of the electorate had come to feel
that the balance of power had swung too far in
favour of the trade unions and against the
national interest.
The ability to feed Britain during the immediate
post-war years, to pay for raw material and to
revive industry was dependent not only on following
sound policies, which Labour did, nor on
the mobilisation of Britain’s depleted capital
resources, but also on American help. By themselves,
the British could not earn enough dollars
to pay for the imports necessary for Britain and
the German zone of occupation. There were no
illusions about the country’s plight in this respect.
The problem appeared to be a transitional one.
The Roosevelt administration had made it
clear that it was prepared to help in post-war
reconstruction and that it would not return to
isolationism. It was obvious that the US would
emerge from the war as the world’s economic
superpower unscarred and unscathed by the
ravages of fighting at home. In this task of reconstruction,
Britain was America’s principal partner,
and Anglo-American economic plans for the postwar
world had been prepared in continuous
rounds of discussion since 1942. They took concrete
form at a conference held under the aegis
of the United Nations in a Washington suburb at
Bretton Woods.
In their planning of the world economic future
the British and American administrations knew
they were dealing with crucial problems that went
far beyond technical details. If the mistakes after
the First World War, which led to international
economic warfare, mass unemployment and the
great depression, were not simply to be repeated,
a sensible method of achieving economic cooperation
and mutual support would need to be
worked out. The US would, for a time at least,
have to provide massive assistance. On this the
Americans and the British were agreed. It corresponded
to American custom that the form of this
cooperation should be institutionalised. At
Bretton Woods the foundations were soundly
laid, even though solutions were not found for
every international economic problem likely to
arise in the post-war world.
The details of the Bretton Woods agreements
are complex, but the essential points can be simplified
and understood without expertise in high
finance. The key was US concern about discrimination
in worldwide trade. Individual countries
in the 1930s had rigidly attempted to control
their foreign imports. One important mechanism
that national governments could most effectively
use to this end was exchange control: the imposition
of restrictions on the exchange of their own
currency for those of other countries. Sterling was
a currency used in world transactions; if its
exchange into dollars were restricted, then
Britain, the Commonwealth (except Canada) and
many other countries trading in sterling would
not be able to buy from the US, and worldwide
there would be a barrier to trade. An important
part of the Bretton Woods agreements was an
undertaking to make all currencies freely convertible
after a transitional period of five years;
exchange rates between currencies, including the
dollar, would be fixed and regulated by a new
international institution, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). It was intended that
exchange rates should be stable and that they
should be changed only with the consent of the
IMF. The resources of the Fund were to be made
up of contributions from each member country
in gold and currencies in proportion to the
strength of its economy. The US supplied by far
the biggest single contribution. Each country
could draw on the Fund to make up a shortfall in
foreign currency if its trade was not in balance;
but if it drew on the Fund beyond a certain limit
the IMF could prescribe conditions for its loan
and demand that measures it thought necessary
should be adopted to correct the trade imbalances.
The decision-making apparatus of the IMF
was a crucial feature. Members did not each have
an equal vote with decisions by majority on
important issues. It was intended that rates of
exchange, for instance, could be changed only by
a four-fifths majority of the Fund’s board of directors.
Each member country appointed one director,
but his vote was weighted in accordance with
his country’s share in the IMF. This gave the US
a preponderant influence, and the IMF is appropriately
located in Washington. In return for the
large US contribution to the resources of the
IMF, conditions were agreed that were aimed at
preventing discrimination in world trade, and
thus discrimination against the US for lack of
dollars. A twin to the IMF is the World Bank,
which provides development loans, but it has
played a much less important role than the IMF
in post-war international trade and the world
economy. But the hopes placed in these institutions
for facilitating the free flow of world trade
and the free convertibility of currencies were only
partially realised after 1945.
It is curious that, in the pursuit of freer trade,
import duties or tariffs did not play a more
important role in American thinking. The US
retained its own high tariffs against imports and
thought only in terms of their gradual international
reduction by international agreement.
The bargaining for reductions of tariffs began in
April 1947 when twenty-three countries met in
Geneva; in October that year they concluded the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
What the US particularly wanted to achieve was
the elimination of large trading blocks which
traded among themselves preferentially, erecting
higher tariffs against outsiders. The British
Commonwealth had set up such a system in 1932
by the Ottawa Agreement, which established
imperial preference. The American negotiators
offered large reductions in US tariffs, but Britain –
faced with myriad financial difficulties – clung to
imperial preferences until obliged to eliminate
most of them when joining the European
Economic Community in 1973. Further rounds
of trade bargaining continued under the auspices
of GATT without resulting in the freeing of all
trade barriers as originally envisaged.
The arrangements worked out at Bretton
Woods did not, however, solve Britain’s or
Western Europe’s immediate problems. With the
US alone able to supply what Britain and the
Western European nations needed for their
reconstruction, and with inadequate recovery in
Europe producing insufficient exports to the US,
not enough dollar funds were available to make
the necessary purchases in America. This was
called the ‘dollar gap’.
In fighting Nazi Germany, Britain had subordinated
all its economic policies to just one aim,
to maximise the war effort. As a result its export
trade had dwindled to a third of the pre-war level;
not enough was produced at home to match
wages, so inflation resulted; Britain’s dollar and
gold reserves and its large overseas assets had
been used to finance the war; Britain had also
accumulated large sterling debts as a result of
wartime expenditure; the national debt had
tripled and Britain’s industry, adapted to produce
armaments, now had to be transferred to peacetime
manufacture for the domestic and export
markets. The dislocation was enormous, in Britain
as elsewhere. Millions were still in the services and
could only gradually be demobilised. The
dilemma for Britain was that it had to import
food and raw materials to supply its people and
industry, and to pay for them it needed to export
manufactured goods as well as to earn returns
from the city of London’s financial and insurance
services (invisible earnings). It was impossible to
achieve such a turnaround from wartime production
instantly. During the war itself, Britain’s
essential needs had been met by American Lend-
Lease. Then came the crunch. In August 1945,
with the president’s economic advisers judging
that the special circumstances of war were now
over, and with Congress unlikely to agree to fund
the arrangement in peacetime, Truman abruptly
ended Lend-Lease.
Something had to be done about the yawning
dollar gap that was immediately in prospect.
Britain’s most distinguished economist, John
Maynard Keynes, was despatched to Washington
to negotiate a loan to tide Britain over. The
Lend-Lease debts now had to be settled. This
seemed especially unjust in British eyes since the
money had been spent fighting the common
enemy: furthermore, Lend-Lease had been made
available only in 1942 when Britain had been at
war for three years. By then Britain had already
spent most of its foreign reserves and assets. The
Lend-Lease debts were settled with a loan, not
cancelled. A loan of $3,750 million at 2 per cent
interest was granted to Britain to overcome its
dollar shortage. Repayments were to begin in
1951 in fifty equal annual instalments. The loan
was not as much as Britain had hoped for but the
Canadians helped with an additional $1,287
million. The total was sufficient to cover Britain’s
own immediate needs, including those of the
British zone in Germany, though not those of the
whole sterling area.
There was also the serious problem of the
‘sterling balances’. (If all the sterling-area countries
sought to convert their holdings of sterling
at the same time, Britain could not have paid and
would therefore have defaulted.) At Bretton
Woods, Britain had reserved to itself the way it
would settle the large sterling balances with its
creditors during the transitional period, rather
than accepting American help and making a joint
Anglo-American approach to its creditors. Britain,
with some justice, was suspicious of US antiimperialist
attitudes and did not wish the
Americans to be able to meddle in Britain’s
Commonwealth and colonial relationships.
Nevertheless these sterling balances were a
Damocles’ sword overhanging the British
economy because they were so large at $3,355
million. The US, in loan negotiations concluded
in December 1945, made it a condition that
within one year of drawing on the loan (that is,
early in 1947) all current transactions by all the
sterling-area countries should be freely convertible.
As for the huge credits, the parties could do
no more than reach an agreement in principle,
without figures attached: some small part of these
balances were to be immediately convertible to
dollars; another tranche would become convertible
in 1951; and as regards the rest Britain would
seek agreement to write them off. Without figures
this was a pretty meaningless arrangement except
that in some magical way, which no one could
really envisage, the sterling balances would be
made to disappear. There was much opposition
to these American conditions in Britain, but there
was little choice. They were accepted.
In February 1947 Britain honoured the loan
agreement and made sterling convertible. The
result was a disaster. The British treasury could
not control all the countries that now converted
sterling into badly needed dollars. Not only
current transactions as provided for in the loan
agreement but some sterling balances held by
other countries were converted as well. In August
1947, with the dollar reserves near exhaustion,
Britain was forced to suspend convertibility. Its
recovery was not far enough advanced to stand
the strain. Exchange control was reintroduced
and thus one important plank of Bretton Woods
was abandoned. The Americans had misjudged
the situation and had forced the issue of free convertibility
too soon. By the 1950s sterling became
partially convertible and in December 1958,
almost thirteen years from the time of the first
dollar loan, it became fully convertible. By then
West European exports had recovered, the
European dollar gap had disappeared and
American overseas trade and expenditures were
beginning to move into deficit. Other planks of
Bretton Woods, however, continued to function
for three decades. Fixed exchange rates were
adjusted from time to time until they were abandoned
in the early 1970s. Back in 1947, for
Britain and Europe the situation would have
become serious, with a new dollar gap in prospect
once more, had not Marshall Aid come to the
rescue the following year.
The effect of these abstract financial matters on
the lives of ordinary people in Britain was very
damaging. The man-made financial crisis came on
top of an act of God, a terrible winter of heavy
snowfall and ice. Coal was running out, unemployment
temporarily soared, and now in the
summer the government announced an austerity
programme to cut imports. Rationing became
more severe. Sir Stafford Cripps, gaunt and
ascetic, symbolised the new era of austerity when
he took charge of the treasury as chancellor of
the exchequer in November 1947. Food rations
were small, though the population judged as a
whole was in better health than before the war.
Wages were low, and modest increases kept them
low. Working people were asked to produce more
without more pay – a theme to become familiar
in the post-war era. Britain was probably one of
the few countries in the world where a sense of
fair play and discipline could make rationing work
year after year without a large black market developing.
Output in 1948 was already 36 per cent
higher than before the war, and this production
was being directed to support an export drive.
Given the difficult conditions with which the government
was faced, it could take credit for its
achievements so far. ‘Better times’ for the people
were nevertheless still a long way off. Full employment
was taken for granted, so Labour would run
into difficulties when people tired of the unending
prospect of austerity.
Britain’s dire financial plight forced the Cabinet
to sort out British priorities in the rest of the world;
Hugh Dalton, when at the treasury (1945–7),
constantly urged Ernest Bevin at the Foreign
Office to cut back on Britain’s overseas responsibilities.
The Foreign Office, which rapidly came to
admire him, had never known a foreign secretary
like the tough, blunt and ebullient Bevin, proud
of his working-class background and his long
experience as leader of the largest trade union,
the Transport and General Workers’ Union; he
had also been an effective minister of labour in
Churchill’s wartime coalition. Deeply committed
to the democratic left, he was just as determined as
Churchill not to allow communism any power base
in Britain or in any region abroad where vital
British interests were involved. Nor did he lag
behind Churchill when it came to safeguarding
Britain’s empire. Thus he supported Churchill’s
policy of suppressing the communist-dominated
front (EAM) in Greece despite vociferous protest
from the British left, because, as he put it, ‘the
British Empire cannot abandon the position in the
Mediterranean’. In Europe, Bevin in 1945 still
regarded resurgent Germany as a greater danger
than the Soviet Union. He shared Roosevelt’s
vision rather than Churchill’s realism, however, in
his belief that war could be avoided by a strong
world organisation, the United Nations, with the
US, Britain and the Soviet Union each guaranteeing
the peace in its own global region. Bevin was at
first more ready than the Americans to accept the
place of the Soviet Union in this scheme as having
special interests and security concerns in Eastern
and central Europe; he believed business could be
done with Stalin. In the conduct of that business,
Bevin’s lifelong experience as a negotiator helped
him to appreciate when to be tactically aggressive
and when to be emollient. He did not wish to see
the wartime Allies split into Eastern and Western
blocs, and he was in any case suspicious of US policies.
In speaking to Stalin in December 1945, he
made it clear that Britain’s intentions were peaceful,
but that ‘there was a limit beyond which we
could not tolerate continued Soviet infiltration and
undermining of our position’.
The hostility of Soviet propaganda until the
summer of 1946 was directed mainly against
Britain, with threats to Turkey and Iran and complaints
about Allied policies in Germany souring
British relations with the Soviet Union. In March
1946, at Fulton, Missouri, Churchill delivered his
famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. He saw Britain in
the front line of halting communist expansion and
subversion beyond the Soviet Union’s own
acceptable sphere of power in Eastern Europe. He
was now trying to get the Americans to take these
threats seriously. Bevin also saw the Soviet threat
but he had not yet given up trying to persuade
Stalin to work out problems cooperatively while
remaining firm towards him. A Western alliance
directed against the Soviet Union would only
provoke it, and Bevin regarded public condemnations
such as Churchill had delivered as
counter-productive. Patient firmness was Bevin’s
policy until 1948; meanwhile his suspicions of the
Germans continued to play a considerable part in
his European outlook.
Bevin’s main worry was that the US would
carry out its stated intention of completely withdrawing
its military forces from Europe. He
therefore encouraged the French to play a role in
Germany as Britain’s ally, but the Anglo-French
relationship was not an easy one. After much difficulty,
particularly over the French desire to
detach the Ruhr from Germany, something
Britain opposed, the Dunkirk Treaty of alliance
was concluded with the French on 4 March 1947.
Its terms were designed to meet the danger of
renewed German aggression, but it was also
intended to serve as the nucleus of a Western
European grouping of nations without causing
offence to the Soviet Union and so ruining any
chance of future agreement and cooperation. The
grouping would strengthen social democracy
internally in Western Europe – after all, the communist
parties were strong in both France and
Italy. In following this policy Britain provided the
important lead that two years later became the
sheet anchor of Western security, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
In 1947, Bevin was faced with two difficult problem
areas on opposite shores of the Mediterranean
– Palestine and Greece. The intractable forces
problem of Palestine did more than anything else
to cast a shadow over his reputation and indeed
over the morality of the whole of Britain’s attitude
to the persecuted Jews since before the war, when
the British government had restricted the entry to
Palestine of the Jews wishing to escape from
Hitler’s Germany to no more than 75,000 over a
period of five years. As a result fanatical Zionists
accused Britain of acting as an accomplice to the
Holocaust, though other countries, especially the
US, were even more reluctant to accept Jewish
refugees. During the war British warships had
patrolled the Palestine coast and prevented escaping
Jews from landing (the Jews were not inhumanely
sent back, however, but were interned in
Mauritius). This set the secret Jewish militia, the
Haganah, against the British. More extreme
groups, such as the Irgun Zwai Leumi (National
Military Organisation) and a small terrorist group,
the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (known as
the Stern Gang in Britain after their leader), began
attacking British policemen and installations in
1943. In November 1944 the Stern Gang assassinated
Lord Moyne, the British resident minister
in Cairo. Nonetheless, the majority of Jews in
Palestine and those who lived in Allied countries
fought with Britain against the common enemy.
While the great majority of Zionists condemned
terrorism, British sympathies for the Jews
after the horrors they had suffered during the
Second World War were tempered by the effect
that terrorism against British soldiers had on
British opinion. One of the worst incidents was
the blowing up on 22 July 1946 of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the
British army headquarters. Ninety-one people
were killed – forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight
British, seventeen Jews and five of other nationalities.
Another outrage that caused the deepest
revulsion was the hanging of two British sergeants
in ‘reprisal’ for the execution of two Irgun terrorists.
In all, some 300 people lost their lives as
a result of terrorism between August 1945 and
September 1947, almost half of them British.
After the war, the British government was pilloried
for continuing to prevent large-scale immigration
of Jewish survivors interned in Europe.
Truman pressed for 100,000 entry permits, a plea
that Bevin condemned as cynical political pandering
to American-Jewish voters. The newsreels
meanwhile were showing film of the Royal Navy
intercepting ramshackle boats overloaded with
refugees and forcibly detaining the ragged passengers.
Britain’s policy was far from heroic but it
should not be saddled with all the blame for what
happened. The search for a peaceful settlement
between Arabs and Zionists had been going on
since before the war. It always ran into the same
blind alley. The Jews were not willing to live in
an Arab state; they wished to create their own
state in Palestine and to allow unrestricted access
to all Jews who wanted to come. This meant
some form of partition, which the Zionists would
accept. But the Arabs rejected the partition of
Palestine, so if partition was the only solution, it
would have to be imposed on the Arabs by military
force. Yet Britain was not willing to use its
troops to fight the Arabs, given its widespread
interests in the Arab Middle East. In any case,
why should Britain alone be made responsible for
the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine? It was
an international obligation.
There was thus a certain logic when Britain in
April 1947 decided to end its thankless responsibilities
and to hand them back to the United
Nations, the successor of the international organisation
that had conferred the Mandate on Britain.
Britain gave the UN until 15 May 1948 to find a
solution. But Bevin’s last hope, that the terminal
date of British rule in Palestine might, as in India,
force the contending parties to the conference
table, proved a vain one. Meanwhile Palestine
descended into civil war. It was not so much
Britain that seemed to abandon the Jews to the
apparently superior might of the Arabs surrounding
them, as the nations at the UN, which duly
voted for partition but, just as Britain had done,
then left the Arabs and Jews to fight out the consequences.
For the time being at least the British
had safeguarded their own interests in the Middle
East, and the Americans had done the same.
The need to safeguard British interests, in the
Mediterranean as well as the Middle East, also lay
behind the support for the royal Greek government
against the communists. It was largely due to
British intervention that Greece was not taken over
by the communists after Germany withdrew in
October 1944. The Greeks had fought the invading
Italians and Germans courageously in 1940–1,
and had been defeated despite the spirited intervention
of British troops. In December 1944
British troops returned, for Greece, with Turkey,
occupied a vital strategic position in the eastern
Mediterranean. Stalin had accepted Western predominance
in Greece and did not challenge
the British directly, but communist Albanian,
Bulgarian and Yugoslav partisans provided aid to
the communist-led Greek National Liberation
Front (EAM), with its military wing, ELAS. EAM
had earned the admiration of the Greek people by
their resistance to the Germans during the occupation.
George II, the Greek king, was in exile
with his government in Cairo. The majority of
the Greek people did not wish to return to prewar
political and social conditions, with the result
that EAM received wide support among noncommunists.
Opposed to EAM and ELAS was
another, much smaller republican resistance group,
EDES. Fighting broke out in Athens in December
1944. With the assistance of the British, EAM was
prevented from taking over the country. A truce
was patched up in January 1945, but it was to provide
no more than a pause in the mounting tension
(with atrocities committed by both sides) that led
to the outbreak of civil war in May 1946. Britain
insisted on elections in March 1946, but these
were boycotted by the left, so a right-wing government
came to power and, with a plebiscite in
his favour in September 1946, the king returned to
Athens. British troops continued their support, but
EAM retained strongholds in the devastated countryside.
By the time of the king’s return the civil war
had begun. For a country that had already suffered
so much from foreign occupation and starvation
during the war, this was the crowning
tragedy. With the help of communist neighbours
Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia, EAM was able
to continue the civil war for three years until
October 1949. The great majority of the Greek
people may have been in favour of change and
moderate left policies, but the country was being
destroyed by extremists.
The civil war in Greece played a major role in
the post-war relations of the Second World War
Allies. The communist insurrection, it was
assumed, was being masterminded from Moscow.
As with later crises producing great international
tensions, the ‘domino theory’ was brought into
play. It was suggested in London and Washington
that if Greece fell to communism the whole Near
East and part of North Africa as well were certain
to pass under Soviet influence. Bevin was in a
dilemma. He had no sympathy for the corrupt
royal Greek government and sensed that what the
Greek people really wanted was social and political
change. But his paramount motivation lay
in his anti-communism. The foreign secretary
decided on a bold stroke to help rivet US attention
on the Soviet threat in the Mediterranean
and at the same time relieve the financial burden
on Britain. On 21 February 1947 he sent a
message to Washington that British economic aid
to Greece would have to be terminated by the
end of March. Militarily the British actually continued
to support the royalist government until
the communists were defeated in 1949. The US
stood in the financial breach. This took the dramatic
form of the Truman Doctrine announced
on 12 March 1947, which pledged American help
to defend the cause of the ‘free peoples’.
The Truman Doctrine was followed in June
1947 by the offer of Marshall Aid. Bevin promptly
responded by concerting with the French a
positive Western European response. Stalin, on
the other hand, ordered the Eastern satellite
nations to pull out of the conference in Paris
which met from July to September 1947 to discuss
the details of Marshall Aid. The division of
the East and West was becoming ever clearer, as
was America’s support for Western Europe. But
this support still fell short of a firm military commitment,
let alone an alliance. Thus in 1947,
despite its weakened state, Britain was still the
only major power that could be relied upon to
defend Western Europe.
The breakdown in December 1947 of the
London Foreign Ministers’ Conference on the
question of the future of Germany had finally
convinced a reluctant Bevin that priority would
have to be given to strengthening Western
Europe economically and militarily. The communist
coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was
interpreted in the West as signalling a new phase
of Soviet aggression. But Bevin was not willing to
place total reliance on an American readiness to
defend Western Europe and Western interests in
the Middle East and Asia. It was true that Britain
and Western Europe were shielded by the
umbrella of the US monopoly of nuclear
weapons, but America had only a small stockpile
of atomic bombs and not until the Berlin crisis of
1948 were US bombers sent to Britain to act as
deterrent to the Soviet Union. So Western
Europe had to grasp the nettle of providing for
its own defence. Bevin tackled this energetically.
The outcome of his diplomatic efforts was the
conclusion of the Brussels Treaty in March 1948,
an alliance between Britain, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. Its aims
were not only to promote economic collaboration
in Western Europe; Article IV provided for military
assistance to any member of the alliance who
became ‘the object of an armed attack in Europe’.
Although the preamble of the treaty referred only
to Germany as a potential enemy, the defensive
alliance applied to any aggressor in Europe – and
the aggressor warned off in March 1948 was the
Soviet Union. Britain had now joined a Western
bloc and Bevin was its principal architect.
The Labour government’s vision of acting as a
peacemaker and mediator without exclusive
alliances with any one group of nations, a vision
that corresponded to a long tradition in British
foreign policy, had been abandoned by Bevin and
the Attlee Cabinet as the post-war dangers inherent
in the Cold War became ever more apparent
in 1948. But it was only a partial abandonment.
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour intended
to join a united Western Europe, a supra-national
Europe. Britain’s alliances with its continental
neighbours were not exclusive: it valued its worldwide
Commonwealth ties too highly. Bevin also
believed that Western Europe was not strong
enough to defend itself. For him, the Brussels
Treaty was a stepping stone to a wider transatlantic
alliance to be constructed when the US was
ready for it. In the event, that was not to be until
1949, when NATO was created. Thus in a significant
sense the British foreign secretary was a
principal architect of the most important Western
post-war alliance.
World History
