Early Cold War

Lsn 28

ID & SIG:

• Bay of Pigs, Berlin Airlift, Berlin Wall, Cold War, containment, Cuban Missile Crisis, Greek Civil War, Hungarian Revolt, Kennan, NATO, Potsdam Conference, Prague Spring, Stalin, Warsaw Pact

Agenda

• The Cold War• The Truman Doctrine and the Greek Civil War

(1947)• The Berlin Airlift (1948)• NATO (1948) and the Warsaw Pact (1955)• The Hungarian Challenge (1956)• Bay of Pigs (1961)• Berlin Wall (1961)• Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)• The Prague Spring (1968)

Cold War

• A state of political tension and military rivalry between nations that stops short of full-scale war, especially that which existed between the United States and Soviet Union following World War II

Potsdam Conference July 17 to Aug 2, 1945

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam

By the time of the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had already installed communist governments in the central European countries under his influence

Marriage of Convenience

• “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”– Winston

Churchill

American Soldiers Liberate Paris

Russian Soldiers “Liberate” Berlin

• 90,000 women reported being raped in Berlin

• “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire has fun with a women or takes a trifle?”– Stalin responding to

complaints of Red Army atrocities in Yugoslavia

American and Russian Soldiers Meet at the Elbe River Apr 25, 1945

• But, with the common enemy gone, the marriage of convenience quickly dissolved.

• Europe divides; Cold War begins

World War II Casualties

Country Battle Deaths Wounded• Soviet Union 6,115,000 14,012,000• United States 291,557 670,846 • Great Britain 357,116 369,267 • Germany 3,250,000 7,250,000 • Japan 1,270,000 140,000 • France 201,568 400,000 • Italy 149,496 66,716

Source: Information Please Almanac (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1988)

Iron Curtain

President Truman at the podium with Winston Churchill in Fulton,

Missouri where Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech

Iron Curtain

• “From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe– Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength and nothing for which they have less respect than military weakness.”– Winston Churchill March 5, 1946

George Kennan and Containment

• Kennan was a Soviet expert and director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff

• In the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote an article under the pen name “Mr. X” titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”

• He described the USSR as being driven by an aggressive and uncompromising ideology that would stop “only when it meets some unanswerable force.”

George Kennan and Containment

• Kennan wrote that the US must adopt a “policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”

Greek Civil War

• During the German occupation of Greece during WWII, the Communists and other parts of the Greek Left formed a resistance army called the National People's Liberation Army (ELAS)

• By 1944, ELAS controlled large areas of the country and continued to have success against the British liberation force after the war

Truman Doctrine

• On Feb 21, 1947, the British informed the US that they were pulling out of Greece.

• On March 3, the Greek government requested US aid.

• On March 12, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine:– “I believe that it must be the

policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Harry Truman

JUSMAPG

• On 22 May, Truman signed a bill authorizing $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey.

• By 1952, Greek forces would receive $500 million in US aid.

• Even more important was LTG James Van Fleet and his 350-man Joint US Military Advisory and Planning Group.

Grumman Avengers and Curtis Helldivers aboard the USS

Leyte preparing for operations over Greece in 1948

Success

• Van Fleet set out to retrain and reorganize the Greek Army and cut off the flow of supplies reaching guerrillas from Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria

• On Oct 16, 1949, Greece’s Communist leaders announced a cease-fire

“As in Greece, the enemy strikes from sanctuary”

Occupied Berlin

Berlin Airlift

• In June 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to control all of Berlin by cutting surface traffic to and from West Berlin.

• The Truman Administration initiated a daily airlift which brought much needed food and supplies into West Berlin.

• The airlift lasted until the end of September 1949 -- although on May 12, 1949, the Soviet government had yielded and lifted the blockade.

The maximum effort of the airlift was the “Easter Parade” on April 16, 1949 when 1,398 sorties (one landing in Berlin

every minute) delivered 12,940 short tons.

Berlin Airlift

Berlin Airlift

NATO and Warsaw Pact• In 1949 the US, Belgium, Canada, Denmark,

France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to provide collective security against Soviet aggression

• Provided a military and political complement to the Marshall Plan

• Greece and Turkey joined in 1952• NATO admitted West Germany in 1954 and

allowed it to rearm• The Soviets respond by creating the Warsaw

Pact in 1955

NATO and Warsaw Pact

The Hungarian Challenge

• The most serious challenge to the spreading Soviet control of eastern Europe came in 1956 when large numbers of Hungarian citizens demanded democracy and breaking ties with Moscow and the Warsaw Pact

• Massive street demonstrations ensued

The Hungarian Challenge

• The Soviets viewed these developments as a threat to their security system and sent tanks to Budapest to crush the uprising

• Hungarian dissidents appealed to the US for help, but short of full-scale war, there was really little the US could do

• Additionally, the recent British, French, and Israeli invasion of the Suez had damaging Western credibility as non-aggressors

Fidel Castro

• In the early 1950s Cuba was controlled by a moderate right-wing military regime that was friendly to the US government and businesses

• The US supported Fulgencio Batista as an anti-communist and a proponent of the US in domestic and international policies

• However, in 1959 Fidel Castro was able to mobilize the disaffected rural peasants and topple Batista’s regime

A Cuban crowd listens to Castro after his takeover

Fidel Castro

• Castro assumed dictatorial powers and announced his goal was to create a society based on Marxist principles

• He nationalized large-scale landholdings, sought economic aid from the Soviet Union, and tried to export revolution throughout Latin America through peasant and urban guerrilla warfare

Che Guevara directed many of Castro’s Latin American operations

until he was killed in Bolivia in 1967

Bay of Pigs

• The US could not accept the presence of a revolutionary Marxist government so close to its borders and President Eisenhower authorized planning for a force of anti-Castro Cubans to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro

• When Kennedy became president he authorized the invasion but stipulated that the US not be involved in the landing itself

Bay of Pigs

• The invasion took place at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 and proved to be a disaster

• Instead of rallying to the invaders, the local population supported the Castro government

• The failure embarrassed the US and weakened President Kennedy in the eyes of the Soviet Union– However, it strengthened

Kennedy’s personal resolve to act more vigorously in any future crisis

Castro helping to repel the invasion

Berlin Wall

• By 1961 a steady flow of refugees to West Germany was hemorrhaging East Germany

• In August the East Germans began construction of a wall to divide the cities of East and West Berlin

• Guards were ordered to shoot to kill

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

• The Wall was 107 kilometers long and 4 meters high in most places.

• About 100 people died trying to escape past the Wall• The last was on June 2, 1989

Cuban Missile Crisis• Castro feared the US

would try again to overthrow him and he called for additional support from the Soviet Union

• Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev responded by sending medium-range bombers and missiles to Cuba to help defend Castro and threaten the US

• In Oct 1962, US spy planes discovered missile sites under construction in Cuba Map used to brief the range of missiles

and bombers being deployed to Cuba.

Kennedy’s Response

• Kennedy responded decisively, demanding that the Soviets remove the missiles and bombers or face their destruction by air strikes or invasion

• He also imposed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba

Quarantine

The US destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy stops, boards, and inspects a dry-cargo ship of Lebanese registry under Soviet charter to Cuba on Oct 26, 1962

US Victory

• On Oct 28, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles

• “Eyeball to eyeball, they blinked first.”– Dean Rusk, US

Secretary of State

• The Cuban Missile Crisis had shown the dangers of nuclear apocalypse in the bipolar world

• It was a major Cold War victory for the US and a major loss of face for the Soviet Union and Khrushchev

1962 British cartoon showing Kennedy and Khrushchev arm wrestling on top of nuclear

weapons

“Prague Spring”

• In 1968 Alexander Dubcek launched a “democratic socialist revolution” in Czechoslovakia known as the “Prague Spring” which promised to be “socialism with a human face”

• The Soviets feared such ideas could spread and threaten their control over Eastern Europe so they dispatched troops, along with Germany, Bulgaria, and Poland, to crush the movement

“Prague Spring”

• Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev justified the action by the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which reserved for the USSR the right to invade any socialist country that was deemed to be threatened by internal or external elements “hostile to socialism”

• The swift Soviet action in Czechoslovakia reasserted Soviet control over its satellites

Cold War Society

Next

• Korean War