The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (103 page)

Britain began with two representatives at Potsdam, Churchill (now heading a caretaker government pending a general election) and the Labour leader Clement Attlee. To the Tories’ and his own surprise Attlee took Labour to a landslide victory at the end of July 1945. It was the first Labour majority government. The population might love Churchill, the great saviour of his country, but returning soldiers voted to have the country rebuilt by Labour. To the British people the Tories still seemed ‘guilty men’, even at the end of the war–guilty of not caring enough in the 1930s and guilty of the appeasement which had led to war. In short the population did not believe that they would get the sort of social reforms from the Tories they were determined to have after six years of total war.

Attlee had been Churchill’s deputy prime minister. Although he looked disconcertingly like Lenin, he was a kindly former barrister who had spent much of his life on philanthropic projects in London’s East End, but he was a good judge of men. Many were surprised that the stately role of foreign secretary went to Ernest Bevin, who had no diplomatic background and a reputation for calling a spade a spade. He was then best known for being the robust head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and minister of labour in the wartime coalition. But Bevin was an honourable, fearless man who had always been passionately interested in international affairs and was known for holding his own in any debate. He had been one of Labour’s earliest critics of appeasement. Moreover, for many years he had fought the communists in the unions. Thus he had few illusions about the real nature of communist dictatorships and was ideally suited to dealing with the Cold War, as the continuous state of tension between Russia and her former allies was beginning to be known.

The Labour government began rapidly transforming Britain. The trade unions were liberated by the repeal of the 1927 Trade Disputes Act and allowed to recommence their fundraising. Heavy industries were nationalized. Plans were drawn up for new housing and an innovative free medical service. But the big problem Attlee and Bevin were wrestling with was what should happen to Germany after her division into zones.

It is hard to imagine more than half a century later the anger that was felt towards Germany at the end of the Second World War. German militarism had once again devastated the European continent and created a world war only twenty years after the first. The French had suffered three invasions, three destructions of their countryside, with two occupations of their capital Paris in seventy years. They simply did not believe that the Germans could be trusted with a national central government. Their experiences made them believe that the German nation was too warlike and powerful to be allowed to govern herself. The nature of the German people, the size of their country and her mineral resources made it inevitable that they would always want to dominate the continent. France’s view overshadowed post-war discussions.

But there was considerable delay as the allies argued about what form post-war Germany should take. Some believed that there should only be local state governments as before German unification, and that any government at federal level should be controlled by Britain and France. Controls were imposed on German industries, and anything which could be turned to military manufacture was forbidden. At the same time the French drew up plans for the international management of iron and steel manufacture in Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr.

Aside from long-term political and geographical solutions, the devastated country also presented immense and more immediate practical problems. Not only was the countryside of Germany itself ruined and burned out, but Europe was filled with homeless peoples and marauding Russian armies. Two million Germans were fleeing from what had become western Poland as a result of Yalta. The occupying Russian soldiers, filled with fury against the German people whose soldiers had ruined their homeland, continually avenged themselves on the German civil populations, particularly by raping women.

The occupying American and British armies were at first forbidden to speak to the German people. British soldiers were so appalled by the death camps they had liberated at Belsen, one of the several sites where six million people of Jewish origin had died, whether gassed, killed by disease or worked to death, that they had no wish to fraternize with them. Germans in towns nearest to these sites were forced to rebury the dead in individual plots, so many of them having been thrown into mass graves. But, as the year wore on, the physical plight of the German people became so frightful that compassion crept into the allied powers’ attitude to them. In a country with hardly a building standing they began to see the wisdom of Churchill’s advice not to insist on punitive reparations. Thus, though the Nazi leaders were tried in the German city of Nuremberg by a multinational court of judges for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, reparations (except to Russia) would come to an end quite soon.

From the start relations were bad between the occupying powers. The British and American occupying armies were outraged by the callous and brutal behaviour of the Red Army. Although it had been agreed that the Russians should be allowed to remove German industrial machinery as reparation for the destruction inflicted on Soviet plants, Britain and America had not anticipated the level of asset-stripping to which the Russians would descend, carrying off whatever German industrial equipment they could get their hands on. From typewriters to telephone lines, from rolling stock to whole factories of superb German machinery, everything movable was loaded on to Russian lorries and disappeared into the east.

As the dust settled and the world began to spin in its own peaceful orbit again it became clearer that democracy had not completely died in Germany. Some pre-1933 politicians who had survived imprisonment by the Nazis were the best hope of future democracy in the western allies’ part of Germany, such as Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne. The western powers concluded that the whole country should be united under one government. But it became clear that Russia had no intention of allowing that to happen unless it was to be under the communist parties which soon controlled all the state governments in the eastern zone. Meanwhile, after free elections the whole administration of the city of Berlin was in the hands of democratic socialists, the SPD, despite Russian intimidation of its members through arrests and assault.

Matters came to a head with the brutal winter of 1947–8. The weather seemed to conspire with a simple lack of money to put back post-war recovery in Europe for twelve months. Britain ground to a halt because the extreme cold prevented fuel from being moved. For much of the time coal could not be mined, massively upsetting an already teetering balance of payments. With most of Britain’s factories having been turned over to the war effort there was next to nothing to export to earn money. There were constant power cuts because of the weather and equally constant strikes in the newly nationalized coal industry.

The Labour government, however, continued to feel ‘exalted’, as Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the Exchequer put it, at the thought of the changes it was going to make to life in Britain. But those reforms needed a great deal of money. And despite higher taxation lack of money was one of the most striking features of the post-1945 Labour government. American credit, American generosity, had made it possible for Britain to continue in the war after 1940. But directly the war in Japan had ended in August 1945 the Americans had cut off the Lend-Lease loans. From September that year Britain was left floundering.

Continually suspicious of Britain’s imperialist aims, the US had given no consideration to the sacrifices made by Britain to fight Hitler, which had consumed about a quarter of her national wealth and all her overseas assets. In order to defeat Germany, Britain’s manufacturing industries had been turned over to munitions factories, her heavy industry to warships, tanks and aircraft. America gave Britain no time to adjust to post-war dislocation. Two-thirds of the nine million people employed in the armed forces were going to be unemployed, even if it was only temporarily as old industries started up again. Nevertheless, returning to everyday production would be far from easy since many of the old pre-war overseas markets had been lost as the countries concerned had opened their own factories to replace British goods.

Dalton was allowed to borrow £1,300 million from America and Canada but only on condition that after twelve months the pound would be convertible to any other currency. But after six months the loan had been used up, and Dalton had made way for Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-minded but rather desiccated man whose name became a byword for austerity. In what is known as the convertibility crisis–a run on the pound as it was used to buy dollars to pay for the American goods which dominated the post-war world–the sort of measures employed in wartime Britain were implemented once again. Very limited amounts of cash were allowed out of the country. Rationing continued into the early 1950s as Britain did not have the money to import food nor the ability to grow it herself. The pound was devalued. Newspapers were permitted to print only four pages. Petrol could be bought for private use only for specific reasons listed by the government. The black market reappeared.

Britain was thus sinking psychologically under the combined effects of expensive domestic reforms and the cost of trying to reconstruct Germany when, like the rest of western Europe, she was rescued by the American Marshall Plan loan. Despite the western armies’ best efforts, the British and French governments were unable to afford the level of reconstruction needed in Germany after the war, whether it was laying new sewage pipes or rebuilding homes in the rubble of bombed cities. Fortunately for Britain and France in 1947 President Truman at last woke up to the dire straits the allies’ economies were in. Though he had none of FDR’s elongated glamour, the small tubby Truman was hard working and sincere. He had become alarmed by the shape eastern Europe was taking with the barring of anti-communist parties in the Soviet zone of Germany, as well as in the other Russian-controlled countries. He proposed the Marshall Plan to put Europe back on its feet and proclaimed what is called the Truman Doctrine: ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure’.

For 200 years America’s attitude to Europe had been that the republic should hold itself aloof from the decadent Old World which the New World had been created to escape. The Versailles settlement had foundered on America’s isolationist refusal to underwrite what President Wilson had devised. But from 1947 onwards the United States undertook to involve herself in renewing the prosperity of the Old World by underwriting the economic reconstruction needed so desperately after the war. Named for the US secretary of state General George C. Marshall, who announced it, the Marshall Plan poured £1,325 million into all the countries in Europe which requested funds through the OEEC, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. American dollars transformed the post-war European situation in return for very little. It was an altruistic action. This generous gift is sometimes regarded as a hedge against communism, but in fact it was offered to all countries irrespective of their political structures, but was turned down by Russia on behalf of all eastern European governments under her sway.

The Marshall Plan accentuated the line drawn down Europe by the Iron Curtain. On the western side the economies became prosperous. On the eastern side, however, the countryside was dotted with ramshackle buildings and rusty machinery. (Only in space was individual genius allowed to shine: Russia was the first country to put a man into orbit with Sputnik in 1957.) Stalin would not accept western aid. He continued to hope and believe that the capitalist contradictions in western democracies would make them collapse, as they should according to Marxist theory. The many partisan or resistance movements during the war throughout western Europe had had strong communist elements. The Russians were convinced that it was only a question of time before the communist parties took over.

As a result of the Marshall Plan, the western powers were able to reform the currency in their zones in Germany. The combination of a less punitive attitude towards German industry and agriculture had almost magical results when controls were removed. Until 1948 many industries using iron and steel had been banned in Germany, while any surplus produced by factories or farms above a certain level had been exported to allied countries as a form of reparation. Now, the black market died at a stroke, food appeared in shops, and money took the place of the barter system to which the German economy had sunk.

But the success of the western efforts in rebuilding Germany made the Russians feel threatened–they had been hoping that the whole of Germany would slowly go communist. When the western powers suggested spreading the helpful currency reforms to Berlin, the Russians reacted savagely. Believing that such reforms might lose them control of their zone, they took the extraordinary decision to close the roads from Berlin to the west. From June 1948 the Russians blockaded the city, even though a democratic local government was flourishing there, and even though it also contained the allied occupying forces of America, Britain and France. The Russians would allow nobody already in Berlin to go out, nor food to go in. These opening moves in the Cold War could have led to a third world war had it not been for Britain and America’s calm response. The skills of the US and British air forces made the Berlin Airlift possible: 240,000 tons of everything human beings needed to survive–foods, clothes, baby milk–were flown into the city in an unending succession of plane loads. The Berliners became heroes of the hour for their refusal to give in to the Russians, and the whole episode did much to draw western Germany back into the community of European nations. In May 1949 the Russians gave up the gamble and Berlin was reopened to the west.

Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall: there was to be no reuniting of the four German zones for the moment. The western allies therefore continued to organize their zones to operate on their own. The small town of Bonn became the temporary capital of a West German government. By August 1949 a constitution for the German Federal Republic had been approved by the western allies, and a free election made Konrad Adenauer the first West German federal chancellor. In October of the same year the Moscow-controlled eastern zone set up the German Democratic Republic. Berlin continued nevertheless to be too much of a magnet for young dissatisfied East Germans because it was a gateway to the west. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was put up between the two halves of the city by the Russians to end the stream of emigration. Crowned with barbed wire and guarded by sentries who shot to kill, then dragged the bodies of their victims back into their sector, it was the very symbol of the Cold War.