Category Archives: war

by | 8 February 2024 · 3:04 pm

New Wealth in Britain, 1700s

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 13-15:

The 18th century in England was a time of enormous social, economic and political change. There were a multitude of reasons for these upheavals, but the principal ones were the all-embracing industrial and agrarian revolutions. These dramatically altered the lives of both urban and rural working classes by eroding traditional employment opportunities, and, ultimately, decimating the cottage-based industries. These changes took place when Britain’s colonial empire, along with its African slave trade, was burgeoning, but they also occurred in a period of major military conflicts with France, Spain and the American colonies. The burgeoning growth in international trade and commodity markets at the time contributed significantly to the overall wealth of the mercantile classes but, in most respects, it reduced the opportunities and living standards of unskilled and illiterate workers.

The advent of new industrial and transportation technologies proved a major factor in Britain’s increasing mercantile success. John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 and the carding machine in 1754 accelerated cloth weaving and were the forerunners of innovations that ultimately led to the complete automation of textile manufacturing. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1765; Matthew Boulton and James Watt began producing steam engines for factories in 1774. By 1780, the combination of Hargreaves’ inventions, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and the increased access to canals linking major population centres, made Britain a world leader in the manufacture of high quality textiles.

These industrial advances increased the prosperity, sophistication and leisure pursuits of the British upper and middle classes of society and provided the intellectual environment for the appreciation of progressive social concepts, including the abolition of slavery. The mid 18th century in Britain was a time of far-reaching intellectual advances in scientific knowledge, politics and philosophy and is commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment and Science. The outspoken views of William Wilberforce, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others, were discussed within literate and political circles and became catalysts for significant shifts in the social attitudes of the educated. The tolerant views of King George III cultivated a relatively liberal approach to social mobility and political change. George III suffered from bouts of porphyria during his 50-year reign but for most of this time he remained politically astute and active.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, economics, industry, labor, migration, slavery, war

by | 6 February 2024 · 7:02 am

Rooting Out Nazis in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 236-238:

The Spruchkammer tribunals were mocked for a good reason. They served mainly to whitewash suspect characters who needed certificates of good character, notoriously labelled Persilschein – after the washing powder Persil – to show they were ‘whiter than white, with all brown [Nazi] stains removed.’ The initial problem was to find anyone in the legal profession who was not themselves compromised – 90 per cent of German lawyers had been Nazi Party members. In Hamburg at the end of the war, every judge was a member of either the Party or an affiliated organisation. It was a dilemma that would never be resolved. So Nazi judges tried cases of Nazi crimes – including those jurists who had sent people to the gallows for ‘crimes’ that, until Hitler came to power, had not been offences, such as sexual relations between Jews and Christians. In the American zone not a single judge was removed from the bench after the war.

The majority of the police were Nazis, too, which ought to have prevented their involvement in such cases, but did not. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the SDP, had been assigned a five-man police guard by the British Occupation forces, who had assured him that the police force had been ‘cleared of Nazis’. But on 15 May 1946 he angrily wrote to British officials to say that, after overhearing his bodyguards chatting, he found that four out of the five had been in the SS. He was also profoundly shocked to learn that the British had just appointed a notorious SS man, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Shult, as head of the police in the British zone. An Allied Control Commission report to the British Foreign Office explained: ‘It is fairly clear that if the denazification of the police is carried to extremes there would be no police force left. With conditions…[in Germany] as they are it would perhaps seem that the essential thing is to have a reliable police force and this cannot be achieved without some sense of security…The need is…[to] terminate the process of denazification at some stage for these reasons…We will surely still need the police as an instrument of military government.’ In an apparently seamless transition, many senior officers kept their jobs, among them Wilhelm Hauser, Chief of Police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, who, when he was an SS officer in Byelorussia, had been responsible for countless wartime atrocities.

No German institution was entirely ‘cleansed’. Brown stains remained everywhere. More than three-quarters of university professors had been Party members, and even those who briefly lost their jobs were reinstated. Dr Hans Preuss, Dean of the Theology Department at one of Germany’s foremost universities, Erlangen, in Nuremberg, was a fervent Nazi who, in the 1930s had organised the burning of books in the university’s library written by Jews or Marxists. Preuss was sacked in the summer of 1945 but got his job back the following year. Around two-thirds of Germany’s teachers had been Nazis, and at the gymnasia, the best secondary schools, the figure was higher. Thousands had been fired in the three or four months after the end of the war. In 1946, 90 per cent of them were reinstated. The British poet Stephen Spender, then a civil servant, who had been despatched early in the year to report on education in the British Occupation zone, could see why. Visiting a school in Hamburg, he asked the children what they were studying. ‘Latin and biology,’ they said. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘No, sir. You see the history, geography, English and mathematics teachers have all been fired.’

Many of the clergy, regardless of denomination, had also been Party members. After the sacking of numerous German civil servants, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, preached that they had suffered too much and were the victims ‘of extremely skilful propaganda…[most] had joined the Party thinking of the public welfare. They did not identify themselves with the regime.’ He was perhaps also thinking of himself. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, arguing that he had done so ‘in good faith…believing it could produce a religious revival,’ though he later began to oppose the regime and was removed from his bishopric. The American Religious Affairs Division of the Occupation reported to Clay that it knew of 351 active clergy in the American sector. Of these, only three were defrocked. In the summer of 1946 the Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, nicknamed ‘Brown Conrad’ because of his fervent support for the Nazis, issued a pastoral letter to his flock in which he blamed the rise of Hitler on ‘secularism’, neatly absolving the Church and the people from responsibility for what had happened over the last dozen years.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, education, Germany, military, nationalism, philosophy, religion, U.S., war

by | 5 February 2024 · 6:13 am

Dilemma of Imperial India in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 212-214:

For [Viceroy] Wavell, a respected general with a reflective mind – his collection Other Men’s Flowers is one of the most entertaining of all English verse anthologies – Britain ‘made an entirely wrong turn in India twenty-five years ago.’ He thought that if the Indians had been seriously offered the kind of Dominion status within the Commonwealth that ‘white’ territories such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had obtained around the time of the First World War, there would have been a good chance of keeping India united. In the early 1930s Gandhi and other Congress leaders went to London for talks and were assured that soon India would gain a kind of self-government – but not yet. No date was given, and all goodwill with the nationalists was lost when in 1939 Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on Germany ‘on behalf of India’ without consulting any Indians at all. The Australian and Canadian governments, for example, were asked beforehand and made the decision for themselves. The British expected a million Indians to fight against the Germans.

Nehru, who loathed fascism and the Nazis rather more than some of Britain’s ruling elite did, said that it was hard for the people of India to fight for the freedom of Poland when they themselves were under foreign occupation. ‘If Britain fought for democracy she should…end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India. A free and independent India would gladly co-operate…with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.’

The British establishment tended to believe the dictum of the most magnificent of all the imperial grandees sent to oversee the smooth running of the empire: Lord Curzon. As Viceroy at the turn of the century, Curzon had declared, ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power…The rest is redundant.’ Few believed this as instinctively as did Winston Churchill, the most romantic of imperialists, who had battled all his political life to maintain British rule in India. Yet Churchill probably did as much as anyone to hasten its end.

When he was Prime Minister he had no intention of ever giving up the Jewel in the Crown. He told the War Cabinet that even if he was forced by the Indian nationalists into making some concessions, ‘I would feel under no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty.’

Churchill regarded any notion of Britain leaving India, or even India being granted Dominion status, as ‘criminally mischievous’. He retained the sentimental attachment to the idea of the Raj that he had held as a junior cavalry officer on the North-West frontier in the 1890s. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war, said, ‘Winston knew as much about India as George III did of the American colonies…He reacts instinctively and passionately against any government for India other than the one he knew forty years ago.’

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Filed under Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, Germany, nationalism, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, war

by | 4 February 2024 · 6:44 am

Tito vs. Stalin in Greece, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 258-259:

One country, however, did want to help the Greek communists. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito began sending large quantities of weapons and money to the Greek Left – partly out of zeal to help comrades in need, but also to assert an independent line, what he called ‘a national route to Socialism’ – heresy in Stalin’s eyes. Tito, who had been in Moscow exile for years in the 1930s, had in many ways modelled himself on the dictator in the Kremlin. Already he had established a terrifying secret police force, the OGPI, led by the thuggish Ante Ranković, which had murdered thousands of opponents. Stalin distrusted the Yugoslav dictator, who he told Beria and Molotov was too ‘ambitious, too ardent and full of zeal’. In Eastern Europe only Yugoslavia had liberated itself, albeit with money and weapons from the Russians and Britain – but without the need of Soviet troops. Tito resented being ordered around by Moscow, as he told his cronies in comments that he knew would get back to the Kremlin. He had ambitions to be the most powerful communist in the Balkans, which would give him a big power base. Tito resented the Soviet Union’s interference in Yugoslavia’s territorial demands. For months after the war the Yugoslavs had laid claim to Trieste, and thousands of partisans surrounded the city, but the British insisted that it must remain under Italian sovereignty. Tito continued to protest and threatened a full-scale invasion. Finally, the Soviets ordered him to give up his claims on Trieste and grudgingly he agreed, though he could not hide his frustration. He said he did not want to be ‘small change in the politics of the Great Powers’.

Stalin now instructed the Yugoslavs to stop aiding the Greeks. He told two senior officials from Belgrade, Milovan Djilas and Edward Kardelj, that the insurgents in Greece ‘have no prospect of success whatsoever. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States – the most powerful state in the world – will permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. The uprising in Greece must stop, and as quickly as possible.’

But Tito defied the Russians. He continued sending arms to the Greek communists, in increased quantities. The consequences were soon dire for hundreds of thousands of loyal communists throughout the Soviet domains. It was the first sign of the spectacular Soviet–Yugoslav split which would dominate Eastern Europe over the coming few years – and the seeds were sown for a mass Stalinist purge throughout the ‘socialist camp’. Alleged Titoists would be murdered and tortured in Eastern Europe, as ‘Trotskyites’ had been in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Again the Bolsheviks devoured their own children in an orgy of bloodshed. In Greece, the fighting would continue until 1949, leaving more than a hundred thousand dead, around one million homeless – and would increasingly turn into a front line in the Cold War conflict between East and West.

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by | 3 February 2024 · 5:55 am

Japan’s No. 1 Problem in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Amidst the rubble of the cities, one of the saddest sights was that of orphaned children with white boxes hanging around their necks. The boxes contained the ashes of their relatives. In some cities, more than a quarter of the population was homeless – with a mass influx returning home from the front. More than five million Japanese were repatriated in the eighteen months after the war. Around 80 per cent were soldiers and the rest were colonists and their families from the empire Japan had conquered but had now lost. They were seldom welcomed back with open arms. Soldiers, in particular, were widely despised – and this in a country where propaganda, and long tradition, had conditioned its people to hold officers and men from the Imperial Army as the fount of all honour. ‘We were not invincible, as we had been told by our superiors,’ one officer recalled wearily, many years later. ‘The big shock was coming home and being shunned. People did not look us in the face.’ Army and people together were not ‘a hundred million hearts beating as one’, as the military mantra went. The people now regarded soldiers not as returning heroes but as discredited failures, and treated them as pariahs. But it was not only that the military had failed lamentably in its mission and left the country starving and ruined: since the defeat, the public had also been inundated with information about the atrocities Japanese soldiers had committed in China, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and South-East Asia. Japan had been dishonoured in the eyes of its own people, for which the Japanese blamed their own soldiers.

But in the immediate aftermath of defeat questions of honour took second place. For at least the next two years food remained the biggest issue for most Japanese. Much of Japan had gone hungry long before the surrender. Shortages had been acute since the fortunes of war had turned in favour of the Western Allies and by the end of 1944 the majority of Japanese were malnourished. South Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) had been colonies since before the First World War and had produced large amounts of food for the home market. But the sinking of Japanese ships in the Pacific meant that these supplies were not getting through. American bombing of the cities had also disrupted food distribution, and 1945 saw the worst harvest since 1910. At the end of autumn 1945 the country was almost entirely out of rice. Thousands had starved to death and officials warned that ten million people now faced imminent starvation. They were exaggerating, but their panic prompted swift action from the occupying army.

MacArthur’s first, decent, instinct was to alleviate hunger and avoid famine. He cut through red tape, ordered the seizure of 3.5 million tons of food that the US Army had stockpiled for emergencies and had it shipped to Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the House Appropriations Committee were indignant and demanded an explanation, but he responded with customary arrogance.

Among my more vivid earliest memories of Japan in the early 1950s was the sight of former Japanese soldiers, dressed all in white except for their green field hats, often missing a limb, begging in pedestrian underpasses or other unobtrusive places with lots of passing foot-traffic.

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Filed under economics, food, industry, Japan, Korea, migration, military, nationalism, Taiwan, U.S., war

by | 2 February 2024 · 6:05 am

Japan’s Abdication Crisis, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was the first member of the Japanese imperial family to break ranks and say it publicly. On 27 February 1946 he told a journalist from the New York Times that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favour of his son and a regent be nominated until Crown Prince Akihito, then aged twelve, came of age. Higashikuni, the Emperor’s uncle by marriage, was one of the few members of Japan’s ruling circle in the 1930s to have opposed war in Asia and to have warned against embarking on a route bound to result in conflict with the United States. After Pearl Harbor he had continually sought ways to bring about peace. Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he became Prime Minister, charged with overseeing the cessation of hostilities and reassuring the people that the Japanese empire was secure, despite the defeat. After two months he retired voluntarily, but he remained one of the most influential members of the government. Now he admitted that in Tokyo court circles the idea of abdication had been discussed for months; just a few days earlier he had told the Emperor in a private audience that he should stand down. He had said the same thing at a Cabinet meeting. Hirohito, he declared, bore ‘moral responsibility’ for the nation’s defeat, ‘to the dead and to his bereaved subjects’.

These unprecedented comments caused a sensation. Japan was a strictly hierarchical society. The imperial family and leading aristocrats seldom spoke out of turn or manifested any sign of disloyalty. A few days later the Emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Misaka, declared that Hirohito should accept responsibility for defeat and graciously volunteered himself as the regent. Another brother, Takametsu [sic, Takamatsu], was also suggested. Despite hunger and extreme hardship being uppermost in most Japanese minds, much of the country was talking about the possible abdication. The censored press, however, barely mentioned the issue, although there was a huge stir when one of Japan’s foremost poets, Miyoshi Tatsuji, published an essay urging the Emperor to step down as he had been ‘extremely negligent in the performance of his duties…[and] was responsible for betraying the loyal soldiers who had laid down their lives for him in battle.’

But the most powerful man in the country had decided against abdication. General Douglas MacArthur, the proconsul in charge of America’s occupation of Japan, was insistent on Hirohito staying on the throne – and whatever MacArthur wanted in postwar Japan he got. America would remake Japan from the top down and turn it from semi-feudal despotism into a model twentieth-century democracy rooted in Western precepts of freedom. The Americans would impose democracy by fiat on Japan, whether the Japanese wanted and liked it or not, but they would do so using imperial institutions, including the existing civil service. They adopted as their principal ally and functionary in the task an Emperor who just weeks earlier had been regarded by his people, and by himself, as a descendant of the gods. Despite such obvious ironies, the creation of the new Japan was a remarkable achievement – practical, efficient, bloodless – and of lasting importance in re-ordering not just Japan but, by example, much of the Asian continent.

At the beginning of 1946 neither princes nor poets would have dared to question Emperor Hirohito’s right to rule, despite the humiliation of total defeat. But early in the New Year, the Emperor issued a statement proclaiming himself human. It was the first stage of a process that turned Hirohito from an absolute ruler, literally worshipped by his people, into a constitutional monarch.

This chapter is perhaps the weakest in the book. Many small typos indicate it was neither written nor proofread very carefully, or that he relied only on occupation-era English language reports. For instance, it spells Daiichi [第一 ‘No. 1’] Bank as ‘Daichi’ Bank, Prince Takamatsu [高松] as ‘Takematsu’; Atsugi [厚木] Naval Air Base as ‘Atsugii’.

But the most egregious error in his account of the war in northern China was relying on outdated (and false) Chinese Nationalist sources that blamed Japan for destroying the Yellow River dikes that flooded huge areas and killed millions of people, but allowed the Chinese Nationalists time to withdraw their armies and capital deeper into the interior.

Disasterhistory.org offers a more up-to-date corrective.

Many people drowned in the flooding; far more would succumb to illness or hunger in the difficult months and years that followed. To the east, however, the river’s diversion halted the invading Japanese, who abandoned their westward march. The vital railroad junction at Zhengzhou was held for the time. The city of Hankou, China’s provisional political center after the fall of Nanjing, won a temporary breathing spell.

Strategically, breaking the dikes may have bought the Nationalist army time to withdraw and regroup, bogging down Japanese tanks and mobile artillery in fields of mud as Chinese forces secured their defenses around Zhengzhou. By preventing the Japanese from taking the railway junction, some scholars argue, the river’s diversion postponed the seizure of Wuhan by several months, giving the Nationalist government time to relocate its capital to southwest China in the city of Chongqing. But the Japanese simply redirected their advance from a north–south land attack along the railways to an amphibious assault along the Yangzi River that combined naval and infantry forces. Wuhan fell in October 1938, after the Nationalist central government had withdrawn into China’s interior.

…

Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.

…

On shifting representations of the flood disaster see especially, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014), 447–469.

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by | 26 January 2024 · 6:29 am

Fraternization in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 49-52:

The Occupation armies had been promised swift demobilisation. But while they waited to go home, many were determined to make the best of their lot. At first, Allied generals issued strict edicts against fraternisation of any kind with Germans. Relations between victors and vanquished were to be strictly official and formal. The Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered American soldiers not to have any contact with locals. They could not visit German homes; no drinking with Germans in bars was allowed, nor shaking hands; no playing games with German children or sports with adults; no inviting them to Allied concerts, cinemas or parties. GIs faced a sixty-five-dollar fine for breaking the rules. Similar orders were issued by British commanders, mainly, as they admitted, as a sop to public opinion at home. Most crucially, there was to be no contact between soldiers and German women. It was hardly surprising that the rules proved impractical, almost impossible to enforce and so frequently disobeyed, they had to be dropped – first by Montgomery and then by the Americans.

…

For German women, friendships – or more – with Allied soldiers – were often the difference between life and death for them and their families; the GIs and Tommies gave them food, milk, medicines, and even luxuries, such as cigarettes and stockings, that they had been without for so long.

…

The conquerors had other attractions, too. There was an acute shortage of men. Two German men out of three born in 1918 did not survive World War Two, and a third of all children in Germany had lost their fathers. In the Berlin suburb of Treptow in February 1946 there were just 181 men for 1,105 women aged between eighteen and twenty-one. Major Arthur Moon, a Guards officer, was struck by what he saw: ‘In our thousands of miles that we travelled Germany, the most outstanding fact of all was the total absence of men aged between seventeen and forty. It was a land of women, children and old men.’ The Lucky Strike cigarettes, fresh coffee, nylon stockings and chocolate bars were appealing, but for the most part the relationships were not just transactional. American and even British men seemed far more attractive than the crippled veterans, returned prisoners of war, with the weariness of defeat about them, and the old men who were left in Germany. The occupiers seemed glamorous and desirable – not least since so many foreign films, books and music had been banned in the culturally oppressive Third Reich.

…

Social liberals were as shocked as moralists by illegitimacy levels. Nearly a hundred thousand babies were born to unmarried women in Germany in 1946, around a third of all births and three times the 1945 rate. Officially recorded abortions were more than twice that number, but the real, hidden, figure was assumed to be many times higher, though nobody knows for certain the exact figure. The cost of an abortion in 1946, illegally and dangerously obtained in back streets, was high, around a thousand marks – or, in the currency used far more widely, two cartons of Lucky Strikes and a half pound of coffee. A perhaps happier outcome was the number of GI brides: around twenty-five thousand in 1946/1947.

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Filed under Britain, economics, food, Germany, labor, military, U.S., war

by | 25 January 2024 · 7:38 am

Perils of De-Nazification in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 36-37:

Early in the afternoon of 20 February a massive gas and coal dust explosion ripped through the Monopol-Grimberg mine at Unna, around twenty kilometres east of Dortmund. Nearly five hundred men were trapped underground. Just weeks earlier most of the mine’s inspectors and managers had been fired because of their Nazi affiliations. They had been replaced, as a temporary measure, by long-retired inspectors who were no longer up to the job, or young men who had been press-ganged to work in the mines but had very little experience. The rescue crew sent to free the trapped miners had no training and was totally incompetent to handle a disaster of this scale. There was only one manager left at the Unna colliery with any expertise or knowledge of the mine. But as Street told Montgomery in his second report on a Ruhr mining disaster in weeks, this man, a chief inspector, was unfit for work.

‘Towards midnight on the day of the explosion it became clear that operations were not proceeding to any set plan, although ample material and sufficient appliances had been provided,’ said Street, and the inspector in charge was suffering from a serious breakdown. ‘He was unable to concentrate on his work and…[was] extremely nervous.’ A week earlier he had been denounced by workers at the mine as an enthusiastic National Socialist and arrested by occupation investigators, whose job was to cleanse Germany of fascism. He was released pending further enquiries and was, for the time being, allowed to return to work. But he was a broken and terrified man – ‘not suitable to be in charge of rescue work,’ Street stated. In the early hours of the morning the former director of the mine – a well-known Nazi Party member from the early 1930s, much loathed in the neighbourhood – was released from jail to manage the crisis. With some quick and effective action he was able to save 57 of the trapped miners, but 417 men died. It was the worst coal-mining disaster in German history.

The two accidents might well have happened anyway. It is unlikely that the absence of senior mining officials in Germany at the time was the only, or perhaps the principal, cause of the disasters. But many Germans believed that it was and saw their occupiers’ efforts to seek out and condemn ‘ordinary’ Nazis as unjust, futile and counterproductive. More to the point, the Allies, at least the British, Americans and French in the Western zones, soon came to see things the same way. The accidents at Unna and Peine starkly highlighted the dilemma the Allies faced – and marked the turning point of the Occupation, transforming it from an act of retribution into an experiment in paternalism; from reforming zeal into crowd control. The Germans were starving, and millions of desperate refugees were streaming into the occupied zones. The most pressing need was to revive the country’s failing economy and rebuild its ruined social structure. Without the mines to fuel the engine of German industry, it couldn’t be done.

And it couldn’t be done without the Nazis. A month after the explosion at the Monopol-Grimberg mine, Arthur Street wrote to his superiors in London. ‘We are very much alive to the dangers inherent in too drastic a policy of de-Nazification in industry. These…[mining] disasters may well be an indication that we have already gone dangerously fast in pressing our present policy.’ In the first six months after the war 333 mining officials in the British zone had been fired, jailed, or suspended while they were investigated for Nazi Party affiliations. Within weeks of the Unna disaster 313 of them had got their jobs back.

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by | 24 January 2024 · 2:19 am

Soviet Famine of 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 84-86:

Stalin saw threats everywhere, even from those who were starving. The war left famine in its wake, the worst in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and early 1930s. The 1945 harvest was poor, followed by terrible weather in Ukraine, drought in Moldova and unseasonable rain which destroyed crops in Siberia. The following year’s harvest was one of the worst on record. The grain crop was a third of its 1940 level, the potato yield less than half. Between one and a half and two million people died from starvation. And the famine was exacerbated by ideology: the Soviets were sending large quantities of food to East Germany and other parts of its new empire in an attempt to prop up the popularity of local communist parties. They were also stockpiling food in case growing international tensions led to war.

The Kremlin used the same methods that had been adopted in the 1930s – grain was requisitioned from the collective farms and the peasants were accused of hoarding. Stalin sent his henchmen to demand delivery of the quotas of grain each region had been ordered to hand over to the State. Unsurprisingly, the results were the same; the famine worsened.

Typically, Stalin had little sympathy with the victims and blamed them for their own plight. Khrushchev was sent to Ukraine, as he had been in the 1930s when he was Party Secretary there. He was hardened to suffering in the Soviet countryside and had caused a good deal of it himself, sending thousands of people to their deaths in the camps. Now he reported that famine in Ukraine was ‘dire’ and that people were resorting to cannibalism. Stalin reproved him: ‘This is spinelessness. They’re trying to play tricks on you. They are telling you this on purpose, trying to get you to pity them and get you to use up your grain reserves.’

The State raised prices and halted bread rationing among workers in rural areas, but not the peasants on farms, meaning they had virtually no bread though they were producing the grain to make it. The same day, the little economic freedom that they possessed was taken away. Farmers on collectives were banned from growing produce for themselves on the tiny plots of land they had been allowed before.

Thousands of people who complained about the famine publicly were sent to the Gulag. Predictably, theft of food increased. In the summer and early autumn of 1946, 53,369 people were charged with stealing bread; three-quarters of them were sent to jail. New laws were introduced to raise sentences from three months to three years; at the stroke of a pen Stalin personally increased the sentence to five years – and more for repeat offenders. Starving people were sent to labour camps for years for stealing potatoes lying in a field.

In Ukraine, some people fought back. Partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya), fought a low-level guerrilla campaign against Soviet forces, predominantly in western Ukraine and the eastern part of Poland in the Carpathian mountains, where at one point it numbered more than 30,000 soldiers. The UPA’s dream was an independent Ukraine of ethnic Ukrainians and for much of the war they had been fighting Poles as hard as they had fought Soviets. The sporadic fighting was little more than a minor irritant to the Kremlin, though Stalin took no chances. He sent more than 100,000 troops of his own, and pressed the Polish army to join the Russians in combating them. He used tried and tested methods – between 1945 and the end of 1947 more than 182,000 Ukrainians, mostly peasants or civilians who had nothing to do with the UPA, were despatched to the Gulag. The UPA fought on until the end of 1949, when they were finally crushed by the Soviets, though at the cost of over 1,200 Red Army casualties.

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by | 23 January 2024 · 5:47 am

U.S. Status in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 12-14:

The US experience of World War Two was entirely different from that of every other combatant nation. There was much hardship, to be sure, and loss of lives. But America was the only country to emerge from the conflict better off than when it entered it in 1941. No attempt had been made to invade and occupy the country; no cities were destroyed by bombs. There were no refugees roaming the American countryside, desperately searching for food and shelter as in much of Europe and Asia. There were no direct war casualties from military action in mainland America. Around 420,000 Americans from the services died in combat or went missing in action, which, given the scale of the fighting on three continents, is a modest number. British losses, at around 330,000 service personnel, were lower, but from a population about a quarter of America’s size. And combined American and British losses were fewer than Russian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad alone.

America’s economy boomed as never before. Its annual GNP doubled between 1940 and 1945 from $102 billion to $214 billion. Unemployment fell from 14.6 per cent to a historic low of 1.2 per cent. The war dragged the US out of the Depression. There had been rationing on a range of products such as milk, sugar, gasoline, rubber for tyres, some meats and vegetable oils, and even typewriter ribbon. But for most people, living standards improved dramatically as incomes rose by more than 50 per cent. The war was a leveller economically, unusually so in American history. The share of income of the top 5 per cent of the population fell by almost a fifth and remained that way until the gap began widening again in the 1970s.

America was the granary of the world, and its industrial workshop. At the beginning of 1946 more goods were manufactured in the US than in the rest of the world put together. During the war, America had created a new financial system that ensured the US dollar would become the world’s chief trading currency, which it continued to be well into the twenty-first century. Most Americans believed not only that US soldiers had done most of the fighting to win the war but, justifiably, that American money had bankrolled the Allies to help with the rest.

Immediately post-war, Americans wanted a brief period to celebrate victory. After that, the demands were equally uncomplicated. Dean Acheson, an advisor to the President who would become US Secretary of State three years later, put it in straightforward fashion. ‘I can state in three sentences what the popular foreign policies are among the people of the United States. 1. Bring the boys home. 2. No playing Santa Claus. 3. Don’t be pushed around.’ They also wanted the security that wealth could provide.

Before the war the only substantial US military base outside homeland America was in the Philippines. But Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of America’s development as a military superpower. In 1946/47 the defence budget was $13 billion, 36 per cent of national spending and thirteen times more than it had been for each of the nine pre-war years. It was to remain at similar levels for the next three decades. By the end of the war, new naval and air bases had been leased in the Americas, in Iceland, Greece and Turkey, in Korea and the Middle East. More than half a million US troops were stationed in Europe. As it turned out, many thousands would remain for the next forty years – and America would be the strongest military power in Europe. But however counter-intuitive it might seem in retrospect, at the time it was assumed on both sides of the Atlantic that the GIs would soon return home. When the final details of D-Day were being planned in spring 1944, the US military’s top brass asked President Roosevelt how long he expected occupation troops to stay in Germany and elsewhere after the war was won. The Commander-in-Chief was explicit: ‘At least a year, maybe two,’ he replied. But not more. That was still America’s clear intention throughout 1946. It changed only when the Big Three alliance began falling apart and perceptions in Washington hardened about the USSR’s objectives in Europe. Meanwhile, America’s allies – including the Soviets – believed the same. Winston Churchill wrote a note to the British cabinet before VE Day emphasising the point: ‘We must not expect that the United States will keep large armies in Europe for long after the war,’ he said. ‘I doubt there will be any American troops in Europe four years after the cease-firing.’

There was to be no return to isolationism. US soldiers, engineers and an army of idealistic bureaucrats would remake Japan as a modern democracy in the American image, but disarmed so it could never again pose a threat to its neighbours or to the United States. And though the plan was to bring the troops home, it was never the intention to withdraw from European peace-making and diplomacy.

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