"The Strange Alliance and the Onset of Cold War"
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Introduction
The final act of the drama known as the "Alliance of Necessity" to some and the "Strange Alliance" to others was truly ironic. The jubilant greeting between victorious Allied troops - American, British, and Soviet - at the Elbe River within a totally vanquished Germany that April day in 1945 totally belied the normal state of relations between the western democracies and the Soviet Union. For three and one-half years the Axis threat posed by Germany's conquest of much of the European continent necessitated an alliance based upon sheer pragmatism between long-time adversaries. Only mutual national survival motivated the three nations to temporarily set aside their historic antipathies towards each other. Even while allied with one another, relations were strained by fears about the future. Once Germany's defeat became apparent, the relationship began to disintegrate and affairs quickly reverted to the strains of the past. Now, however, the conflict between old adversaries would be conducted in an atomic environment and in skirmishes around the entire globe. The Second World War no sooner ended than a new war - a cold war - broke out between old comrades in arms.
The Historic Troubled Relationship, 1917-1941
From the inception of the Soviet Union in 1917 relations with the United States and Great Britain were strained at best. The emergence of the world's first nation with a socialist economic system struck fear into the hearts of the capitalist countries. The presumption had long been that socialism and capitalism could not coexist - one or the other had to triumph. Fears had been somewhat muted prior to 1917 given the fact that socialism was but a concept; now it was a reality with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. American and British leaders feared that socialism might well spread in the aftermath. The two western democracies were also enraged and threatened by one of the new Bolshevik regime's first actions - unilaterally withdrawing from World War I with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This would allow Germany to redeploy troops from the Eastern to the Western Front, greatly complicating the war effort for the United States and Great Britain. Motivated by these two considerations, the two nations immediately sent an expeditionary military force to Russia in hopes of toppling the socialist regime and installing a new government, which would reenter the war. The intervention was unsuccessful on both counts but tainted relations from the start.
The degree of American fear of socialism became apparent in the immediate aftermath of peace. The country witnessed a period of unprecedented paranoia in the "Red Scare" fearful that Russian immigrants to the United States were actually provocateurs intent of toppling the American government through violent revolution. This resulted in Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's deportations crusade and heightened nativism. Opposition was also apparent in the refusal of the United States to extend de facto diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union for a period of sixteen years until 1933. When recognition came it was more the result of hopes that it would lead to greater economic intercourse and ease the Depression's impact rather than an easing of tension and attitudes.
The Alliance of Necessity, 1941-1945
Americans were outraged by the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939, believing that the Soviets bore near equal responsibility with the Germans for the cruel dismemberment of Poland and the onset of World War II in Europe. Yet, both nations were at war against Hitler by the end of 1941 and felt forced by circumstances to work together as best they could against the common foe. This is not to say that the "Alliance of Necessity" was popular. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had put it in defending the working relationship, "If Hitler invaded hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Nor were all Americans comfortable in dealing with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Take for instance Senator Harry Truman's statement: "If we see that Germany is winning we out to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible…."
As 1941 drew to a close, the United States, of the allies, was in the best shape. While the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor, Hawaii at great loss, the United States was an industrial and military giant waiting to be unleashed. Great Britain, by contrast, had survived the Battle of Britain but was unprepared to launch major military operations by itself. The Soviet Union, invaded by Germany in Operation Barbarosa in the spring of 1941, was by 1942 fighting for its very existence. Germany's troops were deep within Soviet borders and major population centers including Moscow were under siege. Germany had in fact declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor believing that it was just a matter of days before the Soviet Union would collapse and surrender. The Soviets were fighting for their very national existence when the United States entered the war. Thus these three unlikely allies were forced to work together as best they could, combining their military and economic assets, to halt and then reverse the Axis powers' territorial conquests in both the European and Pacific theaters. While they would be allies for the next three and one-half years, the "Alliance of Necessity" was beset by troubles, fears, and suspicions on all sides.
Uneasy Relations
The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union as wartime partners agreed upon only one major point of military strategy: concentrate on the European theater of operations against Germany and Italy even if it delayed the effort to deal with Japanese aggression in the Pacific region. The Soviet Union had neither been attacked by nor was at war against Japan; its sole concern was saving the motherland from German invasion. While both British and American possessions in the Pacific theater had come under Japanese attack and both had declared war on the Asian power, neither felt that the Japanese represented a threat to their national existence. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, meeting in August, 1941 in a conference aboard naval destroyers in the northern Atlantic, had already agreed with one another that the European or Atlantic theater was far more vital to the national interests of both nations and that Adolph Hitler and Germany represented the gravest threat to their existence. Therefore, they had pledged themselves to concentrate on the European zone of operations. While the Japanese attacks on both American and British possessions in December, 1941 made it politically impossible to ignore the Pacific, both leaders agreed with Joseph Stalin and the Soviets to focus their attention primarily on Germany. On all other matters, there was disagreement over military strategy and how postwar security for all three powers was to be attained.
For the Soviet Union, literally fighting for its very existence, an immediate invasion of occupied France by the United States and Great Britain was clearly the most appropriate strategy. Only an immediate, full-blown, all-out invasion of Western Europe, the "Second Front," would force Hitler to redeploy massive numbers of German troops from the eastern front deep within the Soviet nation. Less forceful and more indirect operations in other areas would not provide the Soviets the relief that was required to guarantee survival.
At the other end of the spectrum lay Winston Churchill and the British. For them, an immediate direct frontal assault on the well-fortified wall of Hitler's Fortress Europe was military suicide. The two western powers were inadequately prepared to launch such an immediate assault. They had amassed neither the manpower nor the equipment, vessels, vehicles, weapons, and ammunition needed to give such an amphibious invasion even the most minimal chance of success. Years of preparation would be required.
Instead, Churchill argued that the western powers should concentrate their military efforts on the periphery of Fortress Europe in areas where the Germans and Italians were weakest. This periphery strategy called for joint British-American operations against Germany's Afrika Korps in North Africa followed by sequential invasions of both Sicily and Italy. They could, thus, come up through the soft underbelly of Fortress Europe where the Axis were the most vulnerable. If such operations were successful, they could be followed up with a joint invasion of Greece with British and American troops racing northward to the Baltic Sea, cutting off German troops from Germany proper and rescuing the Soviet Union. Only then could the D-Day "Second Front" invasion of France begin.
Franklin Roosevelt, the other member of the Big 3, did his best to forge a compromise between these two forceful leaders. A politician above all else, FDR succeeded in temporarily placating both Stalin and Churchill by forging an agreement that the western powers would pursue the periphery strategy while they undertook preparations for D-Day. As soon as those efforts were complete, England and the United States would invade occupied France.
In actual application, the delay of the "Second Front," while perhaps sound military strategy, created incredible suspicion and tension between the Soviet Union and its western allies. The Soviet leadership, based upon the historic antipathy with the West, feared that the United States and Britain were intentionally delaying the attack in hopes that the Soviets and the Germans would bleed each other to death. The two nations would launch the invasion then and only then in order to establish Anglo-American hegemony and control over all of Europe, including the Soviet Union. These fears heightened as 1942 gave way to 1943 and then 1944 without D-Day.
The Soviets' exclusion from the joint British-American effort to build an atomic bomb also stressed relations between the reluctant allies. The effort, code named Operation Manhattan, began shortly after the United States entered the war. Fearful of Soviet postwar intentions and a possible return to the prewar animosity and friction with the socialist power, the United States and Great Britain decided to wage the effort as a joint project, excluding their wartime ally. The super-secret project, however, was quickly compromised. Soviet espionage agents operating in both the United States and Great Britain discovered the undertaking to build an atomic bomb. Already fearing that the western powers were intentionally delaying the Second Front to bring down the Soviet Union, now to find out of their exclusion from Project Manhattan also exacerbated tension and ill will. Were they not to be trusted? Were they not full partners? Was this the super weapon the western powers would use to establish their domination of the Soviet Union?
The western powers had their own fears and suspicions regarding their socialist ally. Winston Churchill and, to a lesser degree, Franklin Roosevelt worried about Soviet postwar intentions. If the Soviets survived the German onslaught, would they try to expand their presence into eastern and central Europe? Would the global threat of Germany give way to that of an expansionist Soviet Union? There was a solid basis for such fears.
Once the success of the long-delayed D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 and the existence of the Second Front forced Germany to redeploy massive numbers of troops from the east, the Soviet Union's survival was assured and an Allied victory guaranteed barring some military reversal of incredible proportion. Soviet leaders were now indeed intent on creating a buffer zone for the motherland by imposing socialism and their control on all of the nations of Eastern Europe they would now be liberating from German control. Only then, they reasoned, would the Soviet Union be safe from any future attack and the west's unending ambition of overthrowing socialism once and for all by thwarted. Even as one invader was being ousted from Eastern Europe, another was already imposing its system and control.
While Franklin Roosevelt and the United States placed their hopes for postwar security in its military might and a new collective security organization to be known as the United Nations, Great Britain, while willing to be a member of the organization, placed its hopes for the future in a continuing military alliance with the United States. What eventually became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would extend American military might across the ocean to guarantee the territorial integrity of England and Western Europe. Only with American assistance could Britain's security be assured in the face of feared Soviet expansionism after the war. Three very different visions of the future.
The upcoming clash became clear by the time of the Yalta Conference in early 1945. Here, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin began planning for the nature of postwar Europe. By that time, however, military realities were already determining the future. Soviet troops had already liberated most of Eastern Europe from German control and were already in the process of creating their buffer zone. Communist regimes had already been established in the Balkans and Poland. Hungary and Czechoslovakia had already been penetrated. While FDR and Churchill succeeded in getting Stalin to agree to "free and unfettered elections" as soon as possible in Poland, it was apparent that this was mere window dressing. The Soviets had Eastern Europe and there was nothing the western powers could do about it short of now declaring war on their ally. Public opinion in both countries would never countenance such a prospect.
Thus, even as the way against the Axis powers was coming to a successful end, the Alliance of Necessity began to dissolve. The only factor that had brought the unlikely allies together had been Adolph Hitler; once he had been defeated, there was the perhaps inevitable return to the status quo ante - conflict and confrontation. World War II gave way almost immediately to a new war, a cold war between former allies.
The Truman Doctrine and the Policy of Containment
The Cold War began in earnest between 1945 and 1947 as the European continent was divided into American and Soviet spheres of influence. The Soviet Union, determined to provide for its physical security, imposed pro-Soviet socialist regimes in those areas it had liberated from Nazi control. Thus the nations of Eastern Europe became a buffer zone for the Soviet Union - any future invasion pointed at that nation would be blunted in Eastern Europe by the peoples there before it ever reached Soviet soil. The forcible imposition of socialism was unacceptable to the United States because it violated the principle of national self-determination and seemed to threaten vital American interests in Western Europe. The United States not only reconstructed those areas it had liberated to create capitalist and staunchly pro-American governments but also responded harshly to events in Eastern Europe.
As your textbook states: "Instead of accepting him (Stalin) as a cautious leader bent on protecting Russian security, they perceived him as an aggressive dictator leading a communist drive for world domination." This perception led to the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine by president and Congress in early 1947. Reacting to the "loss" of Eastern Europe and the outbreak of civil wars in Greece and Turkey between socialist and non-socialist elements, President Truman characterized the Soviet Union as a ruthless nation bent on achieving global domination by whatever means were necessary. Not content with its subjugation of Eastern Europe, now the superpower of the socialist world was intent on seizing Greece and Turkey by support of armed revolutionaries in order to gain a foothold in the Mediterranean. Truman requested military assistance for the governments there but painted the picture of a struggle to the death between the United States and the Soviet Union all across the globe when he stated: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples fighting communism everywhere."
With these words and congressional acceptance of them, the United States was committed to a policy of containment. Literally, the United States would attempt to erect a wall of pro-American nations around the Soviet Union and its allies in order to protect American interests. If Eastern Europe had been lost, the American government was now determined to prevent any further spreading of socialism. It was committing itself diplomatically, economically, and, if need be, militarily all around the world.
The Truman administration set out to vigorously implement containment in Europe first. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Marshall Plan were part and parcel of the policy. NATO protected Western Europe and the Mediterranean from a Soviet military threat by stretching the American nuclear umbrella across the Atlantic. $16 billion in Marshall Plan aid sought to protect the region from internal communist movements by producing economic recovery and stabilizing the area. When the Soviet Union and East Germany attempted to force an American abandonment of West Berlin, Truman bloke the blockade by instituting a two year airlift and making a veiled nuclear threat to save West Berlin.
In Asia, the United States also drew a line of containment and, when Mao Tse-tung and his socialist followers triumphed in China after thirty years of war against nationalist forces, here the Truman administration witnessed greater difficulties. Critics assailed the administration for having "lost China" because it was less than vigilant in its policies against the socialist bloc. Therefore, when North Korea, a socialist Soviet ally created at the end of World War II, invaded South Korea, America's ally, Truman responded with the commitment of American troops to defend the policy of containment in Asia. For the next four years American soldiers would pay in blood to defend the line of containment at the 38th parallel in Korea.
The Truman administration actions were simply the opening events of the Cold War. All American presidents throughout the next four decades would battle against the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, and their socialist allies. Throughout the years, the conflict was the lynchpin of global affairs.
