The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (102 page)

On D-Day, 6 June taking full advantage of allied air superiority, in an extraordinary logistical exercise the allies managed to land 156,000 troops, who were mainly British, Canadian and American, on the beaches of Normandy. Five days later, the rest of the soldiers had crossed from England along with 54,000 vehicles, and were creating an eighty-mile bridgehead, fanning out west and south. Although Field Marshal Montgomery, commanding the landing forces, would say that D-Day had gone like clockwork, its success was by no means a foregone conclusion. The weather was rough and stormy. Though this gave the expedition the advantage of surprise, as the Germans did not think the allies would risk a landing in such weather, there were very heavy casualties–some 10,000 among allied troops, with perhaps 2,500 killed outright on the beaches. But the losses might have been heavier had so many German divisions not been tied down in Italy. From small landing craft, thousands and thousands of gallant allied soldiers threw themselves on to the shore. Behind them the artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours specially built for the landings were towed in, allowing the disembarkation of supplies. Meanwhile American airplanes rushed in and bombed the bridges all along the Seine and Loire, preventing Panzer divisions from racing up to Normandy to stop the allied soldiers.

The Normandy landings signalled the beginning of the end of the Nazi tyranny. By September 1944, from east and west, from Russia and France and Italy, the allies were sweeping the German armies before them. That month France was liberated. Britain was no longer plagued by the V1s, the flying bombs or ‘Doodlebugs’, now that their launch-sites had been captured, but for a few months the new V2 rockets caused limited destruction. Also in September Montgomery’s advance into Germany suffered a setback at Arnhem in Holland when airborne troops dropped to seize bridges over the Rhine were killed or captured. But on the whole the allies were beginning to win.

In January 1945 Russian forces under General Zhukov captured Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which had previously been in German hands, and began moving through East Prussia. Soon less than 400 miles separated the Russians from their western allies’ most forward positions. Hitler, more alarmed by the approaching Russians than by the Americans and British, decided to throw troops at the threat in the east on the River Oder. This freed up the Anglo-American forces in the west and enabled them to get across the Rhine. After that, the end came very quickly. By the end of April the Russians were in Berlin, Hitler then committed suicide and on 8 May Victory in Europe Day was proclaimed after Germany had at last surrendered. The war against Japan continued for another three months.

In Britain people danced in the streets. Light-hearted with relief, they flooded into Piccadilly and the Mall to cheer Churchill and the royal family, who had refused to leave London. Every London landmark bore the scars of war, including Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, and most major British cities had been hit by bombs too.

Some 60,000 British civilians had been killed by the Luftwaffe; nine million people had been working for one military organization or another; almost every family had lost a son, brother or a father in the war. They had dug potatoes for victory as exhorted to by Churchill so that they did not have to rely on imported food, and they had lived on tiny rations. They had also paid higher taxes. America, by helping to finance the war, had given Churchill the tools he had asked for ‘to finish the job’, and the British had at last finished it.

By the end of 1945 Britain was a very different place from what she had been in 1939. She was far more unified internally. The camaraderie of total war had dissolved many class differences. Churchill’s government enjoyed unanimous support during the war and had outlined plans for social reforms that were welcomed by pretty well everyone. After such an epic struggle, most people in Britain believed that there should be a safety net to protect the poor and vulnerable, like the widows whose husbands had died for their country. There should be a good education for gallant soldiers’ sons. There was a new idealism after the ordeal of war. People had a keen sense of the fairer country that Britain should become.

At the same time the world and Britain herself were full of a gloomy pessimism. The terrible, unimaginable figure of fifty-five million people had died worldwide, five times the number who had died in the Great War, and there were around twenty million refugees in Europe. Unspeakably cruel things had been done to human beings, by the Nazis to the Jews, by the Japanese to their allied prisoners. But the allies had also unleashed a weapon of destruction on the world which would overshadow it for more than forty years–the atom bomb. In order to end the war in Japan quickly and to prevent its occupation by Russian troops, two atom bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each explosion killed approximately 80,000 people and caused birth defects to thousands more unborn Japanese children. Enormous mushroom clouds rising above white heat announced that man had discovered a power which could annihilate life on earth. Though nine-tenths of their shipping had been destroyed, the Japanese had been refusing to surrender, and they were still holding thousands of allied prisoners in conditions of extraordinary brutality. On 14 August 1945, one week after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Emperor of Japan announced that his country had surrendered unconditionally.

With the surrender of Japan the Second World War had finally come to an end. Though the British Empire still stretched far across the globe, it was a shadow of its former self. India was poised for independence, and the strength of anti-colonial feeling among British possessions in Africa and Asia suggested they wanted theirs too. Ties of affection between Britain and the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been strengthened by their shared struggle against Hitler. But after 1945 the Pacific Rim countries made treaties with America to protect them. It had after all been American forces which had saved Australia from the Japanese.

Reform at Home, Communism Abroad (1945–1952)

Peace came officially to a shattered Europe on 8 May 1945, when Germany surrendered unconditionally. Over that preceding week there had been a series of armistices on the different fronts in the west. Ever since the news that Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April the life had gone out of the German war effort, though it had been trickling away for some time. In early 1945, the sight of triumphant Russian armies swarming across Europe had brought a few high-up German officers like General Wolff of the Army in Italy into secret negotiations with the allies independently of Hitler. The Germans might hate the allied democracies, but they did not hate them quite as much as they feared the communism the Soviet Red Army represented. Many German officers believed that it would now be better to join the allies to defeat communism. But the allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender, and terror of Hitler, prolonged the war. In Berlin, while Hitler cowered in his bunker a hundred feet below the Chancellery, civilians fought the Russians street by street, from the suburbs to the centre of the city. They had the crazed bravery of the desperate.

The German fear of the Red Army soon proved justified. It was spread right across eastern Europe and showed every sign of remaining there. Under the extraordinary General Zhukov, victor of Stalingrad, the heroic feats of the Russian army had acquired a legendary reputation. At the cost of twenty million dead, its soldiers had driven the Germans out of eastern Europe: first out of their native land, then out of Poland, Hungary and Austria; it had fought across half of Germany to reach Berlin. But in the process the Red Army occupied those countries and would continue to occupy them after the war was over. It was the price the allies now paid for allowing the Red Army to liberate the continental landmass from the Nazi tyranny.

Roosevelt and Churchill had proclaimed that their countries sought ‘no aggrandizement, territorial or other’, and that they respected ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. Their ally Stalin’s war aims were exactly the opposite. But to keep Russia on the allied side Roosevelt and Churchill had to accept her demands that eastern Europe should become her sphere of influence. Stalin intended to re-establish Russia as the great power she had been before the end of the First World War. To prevent a strong central European power like Germany arising to threaten her, Stalin’s plan was to ensure that all the countries which touched Russia’s borders became her loyal satellites or client states–that is to say, ruled by communist regimes run by leaders trained in Moscow.

Unfortunately the American State Department took an overly benign view of Stalin, whom one historian has called ‘that charming temporary gentleman Uncle Joe’. Unlike Churchill and the more wary British Foreign Office, the US made the naive assumption that Russia’s eastern European client states would be set up on British or American democratic lines. The US government believed that Stalin would mysteriously change his spots and permit free elections throughout the Soviet sphere of influence.

President Roosevelt had been crucially important to Britain’s war effort when she stood alone against a Nazi-controlled Europe, not least by unofficially financing Britain’s fight-back before most of America would have been sympathetic to participating in the war. But he was not as interested in the shape of post-war Europe as he should have been, partly because he was a dying man. Unlike Churchill, he did not square up to Stalin at the strategy conference held at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. In the confusion after Roosevelt’s death, with the excellent but very inexperienced President Truman at the helm, America’s attention had not been focused on what Stalin was up to in eastern Europe. But Churchill’s was.

With his usual sense of strategy, Churchill had seen that as the war ended it was important for the western powers to prevent the Red Army pushing too far west. Once the Russians entered a country it would be very hard to get them out without fighting them, which Britain did not have the manpower to do. If allied soldiers got to Prague, Berlin, Vienna and Warsaw before the Russians and liberated them there would be no reason for the Russians to go near those capitals. But American commanders were not interested in politics and there was no keen American president above them to order them forward, so they refused to press on further east. Churchill’s desire to keep the Soviets at bay was thwarted. With Soviet armies stretching as far as the eye could see, Stalin was more formidable than ever.

It soon became clear as peace resumed that Russia’s export of world revolution, which had been on hold during the war, had resumed. The Red Army was a far more effective way of spreading communism than the Comintern had ever been. Free elections in Poland after the war had been one of Churchill’s demands to which Stalin had agreed. But Stalin had lied. In 1945 the wishes of the Polish government-in-exile in London were ignored–its leadership was in any case divided and ineffectual after the mysterious death of the premier General Sikorsky in 1943. Poles trained in Moscow appeared in Warsaw to set up a communist government, and non-communist leaders of the other political parties were arrested, taken for trial in Moscow and executed. And that was only the beginning of what Churchill would in 1946 call an ‘iron curtain’ descending over Europe from ‘Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. In country after country which had divisions of the Red Army stationed in them at the end of the war, voters–under the eye of soldiers with red stars on their lapels–returned communist regimes.

Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia all went communist, and would remain so for the next forty years. Indeed until they were liberated from the late 1980s onwards, when the
glasnost
era broke up the Soviet Empire, there seemed no reason why things should ever change. The countries of the eastern bloc appeared doomed to a one-party system of government in which dissent was punished by death. Despite their long and colourful histories, by 1946 a dreary grey uniformity had been enforced across what became known in 1955 as the Warsaw Pact countries: their peoples had little to eat, few medicines and lived their lives in fear. In 1948 Czechoslovakia became part of the unhappy band. When the foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell out of a window in his office in Prague, almost certainly having been pushed, it was the beginning of the end. By September Czechoslovakia had joined the Soviet bloc.

It was in Potsdam in occupied Germany at the peace conference held in July 1945 that the post-war governments of the democratic west and the autocratic secretive communist east rubbed up against one another. There were some hopeful omens. The United Nations, an international organization intended to keep the peace the way the League of Nations had never succeeded in doing, had been created at a conference in San Francisco the previous month. Fifty nations signed the organization’s Charter and began to meet at the General Assembly, a sort of world Parliament in New York. Reflecting the UN’s origins at the end of the war the great powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France became the only permanent members of the organization’s Security Council, each of which possessed the right of veto.

But at Potsdam the burning issues were what should happen to Germany, Austria and, to a lesser extent, to Italian possessions. Though Italy had fought on the allied side at the end, she had to yield some of Istria and the city port of Fiume to Yugoslavia and the Dodecanese islands to Greece; she also renounced her African empire. Austria was to remain divided into British, French, US and Soviet zones of occupation until 1955, when she became strictly neutral.

It had been agreed that Germany was likewise to be divided into four zones to be occupied by those same four powers. Though France had been defeated in 1940, Britain argued successfully that she should be included in the army of occupation. The German capital Berlin was also divided into four sections among the four powers. Unfortunately Berlin lay some distance by rail and road from the zones of the western powers: it was situated in Russian-occupied territory in old Prussia. This was soon to raise problems.