Following the surrender of Germany in May 1945, the “Big Three” Allied nations of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States began the massive task of recovering from the European phase of World War II. However, by no means did they agree on the manner in which to do so, and their differences in goals and political ideology threatened to plunge the world back into conflict almost as soon as it had emerged from it.

Europe After World War II

After the rationing of the war years, life in Europe did not seem much better in the months after the war, and Europe struggled to find its way. After the devastating impact of war, there grew a desire for a new and better future. Efforts to rebuild shattered cities and economies soon encouraged a spirit of unity and cooperation among European nations. There was also a renewed commitment to democracy, social justice, and human rights. Domestic policies that enhanced social security systems, healthcare, and education, also gained traction.

From Occupation to Recovery

The aftermath of World War II was the beginning of an era defined by the decline of the old great powers and the rise of two superpowers: the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States of America (US), creating a bipolar world. Allied during World War II, the US and USSR became competitors on the world stage and engaged in the Cold War, so-called because it never boiled over into open war between the two powers but was focused on espionage, political subversion, and proxy wars. Western Europe and Japan were rebuilt through the American Marshall Plan whereas Eastern Europe fell in the Soviet sphere of influence and rejected the plan. Europe was divided into a US-led Western Bloc and a Soviet-led Eastern Bloc allied with China (Figure 10.3)

As a consequence of the war, the Allies created the United Nations, a new global organization for international cooperation and diplomacy to replace the now defunct League of Nations. Members of the United Nations agreed to outlaw wars of aggression to avoid a third world war. The devastated great powers of Western Europe formed the European Coal and Steel Community, which later evolved into the European Common Market and ultimately into the current European Union. This effort primarily began as an attempt to avoid another war between Germany and France by economic cooperation and integration and as a common market for important natural resources.

The Allies established occupation administrations in Austria and Germany. The former became a neutral state, non-aligned with any political bloc. The latter was divided into western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the USSR accordingly. A denazification program in Germany led to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and the removal of ex-Nazis from power, although this policy moved towards amnesty and reintegration of ex-Nazis into West German society.

Germany lost a quarter of its prewar (1937) territory. Among the eastern territories, Silesia, Neumark, and most of Pomerania were taken over by Poland; East Prussia was divided between Poland and the USSR and 9 million Germans expelled from these provinces; and 3 million Germans from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany. By the 1950s, every fifth West German was a refugee from the east. The Soviet Union also took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon line, from which 2 million Poles were expelled; northeast Romania, parts of eastern Finland, and the three Baltic states were also incorporated into the USSR.

By the end of the war, the European economy had collapsed and 70% of the industrial infrastructure was destroyed. The property damage in the Soviet Union consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages, and 31,850 industrial establishments. The strength of the economic recovery following the war varied throughout the world, though in general it was quite robust. In Europe, West Germany declined economically during the first years of the Allied occupation but later experienced a remarkable recovery, and had by the end of the 1950s doubled production from its prewar levels. Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition, but by the 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth. France rebounded quickly and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernization under the Monnet Plan. The UK, by contrast, was in a state of economic ruin after the war and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow.

The Marshall Plan

The US effort to combat the expansion of communism also led to the creation of the European Recovery Program, named the Marshall Plan for Secretary of State George C. Marshall. In 1947, Marshall called for economic assistance to rebuild postwar Europe. Realizing the attractions of communism to impoverished, war-ravaged Europeans, Congress approved the Economic Cooperation Act in 1948 to pump an eventual total of $12 billion into Europe’s economy (about $147 billion today). The funds were vital in assisting Western Europe as a whole to rebuild its infrastructure and restore its industrial capacity (Figure 10.4). Because necessary materials often needed to be purchased from the United States, aid given through the Marshall Plan also helped ensure that the US economy did not slide into an economic depression now that the war had ended.

US aid was offered to all European nations, including Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin, however, rejected it and forbade Eastern Europe’s communist-governed states within the Soviet sphere of influence to accept it. Instead, the USSR proposed the Molotov Plan, which gave aid to and established trade agreements with the communist nations of Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet zone in Germany that later became the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany. Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany and was sped up by the liberalization of European economic policy that the Marshall Plan (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused. The post-1948 West German recovery has been called the German economic miracle. Finally, in 1949, the United States developed the Point Four Program to provide technical assistance to industrializing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for improving their standard of living.

The Superpowers Divided

The United States and the Soviet Union each saw themselves as the rightful leader of the world emerging from the ashes of the war. Although they had united to defeat Hitler, their deep-seated differences now returned to the fore. For the United States, the ideal world was one in which democratically governed nations would coexist peacefully, enjoying economic prosperity thanks to capitalistic endeavors. In the Soviet Union’s vision of the future, communism would lead the world’s countries to a peaceful, prosperous future, and it would never again fear invasion from the lands to its west. The latter goal was the reason Stalin insisted on establishing satellite states in Eastern Europe, countries the Soviet Union would control by installing communist, pro-Soviet governments within them.

Postwar Goals

At the Moscow Conference of 1944, which US president Franklin Roosevelt did not attend, Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to let Stalin install Soviet-allied communist parties to control the governments of Romania and Bulgaria, which had been German allies during the war. In exchange, Stalin promised to leave control of the Balkans to the British. By the time the victorious Allies met in Potsdam in the summer of 1945 to finalize plans to partition Germany and its capital city of Berlin, Churchill no longer wished Stalin to exercise so much power in Eastern Europe. He warned the new US president, Harry Truman, who was unaware of what had been agreed to at the Moscow Conference, of the danger of allowing the Soviets to control the region. But Stalin then consolidated his grip on Eastern Europe by placing a pro-Soviet government in power in Poland.

In March 1946, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill warned his audience that “an iron curtain” had cut Europe in two, trapping half the continent under Soviet domination. This division of the world into United States–allied and Soviet-allied halves characterized the Cold War, a contest for ideological, social, economic, technological, and military supremacy that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The war was “cold” because it did not include actual fighting between US and Soviet forces. (A “hot” war is a conflict in which countries engage in armed conflict with one another.) The splintering of Europe that Churchill described deepened in 1948, when a government composed of both communists and non-communists in Czechoslovakia was toppled and replaced by an all-communist government loyal to Moscow. In 1949, Hungary also came under the control of a communist party closely allied with the Soviet Union. The chief strategy of the United States in the Cold War was containment—an effort to limit the influence and expansion of communism and the Soviet Union. Containment was first mentioned by George F. Kennan, a US diplomat stationed in Moscow, in a message to the State Department known as the Long Telegram. Kennan described the Soviet government as paranoid and committed to a war against capitalism. Soviet leaders, he believed, could not be moved by reason and understood only force. Their attempts to spread communism must thus be met with strong resistance.

The foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union following World War II were directly opposed to those of the United States. The USSR sought to protect itself and bolster its economy by strengthening its control over the communist states of Eastern Europe. It also encouraged communist revolution in other countries, including China, Greece, Vietnam, Korea, and Iran, and maintained close ties with communist parties throughout the world. The Soviet Union regarded itself as the chief opponent of Western European and US imperialism, and in this role, it supported independence movements in colonies in Asia and Africa. To the Soviet leadership, the United States was an aggressor nation bent upon world domination, and the spread of communism reduced the threat of future wars. To protect its own interests and those of its allies, the Soviet Union needed to be militarily and technologically superior.

The Truman Doctrine

The first test of US resolve to counter the forces of communism came in 1947 in an unexpected place—Greece. During World War II, resistance to the German army occupying Greece had come from both supporters of the country’s Communist Party and loyalists of its monarchical government. In 1944, shortly after the withdrawal of the Germans, the occupying British forces and Prime Minister George Papandreou, who had returned from exile, jointly called for the disarmament of these resistance groups, and violence erupted. In 1946, following the triumph of monarchists in an election the Greek communists boycotted, civil war broke out. Communist forces sought the overthrow of King George II and his government (Figure 10.5). To prevent this, Britain provided the government with economic and military assistance, an extension of the aid it had given during the war. In 1947, however, Britain announced that it would no longer do so, most likely because it was experiencing economic problems.

The events in Greece worried the US government. Neighboring Turkey was regarded as the gateway to the Middle East with its crucial supplies of petroleum, upon which Western industry and transportation depended. Truman feared that, should Greece become a communist country, a communist uprising might occur in neighboring Turkey as well. This belief—that the neighbors of communist countries would in turn become communist themselves—is known as the domino theory.

On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress and requested aid for the governments of Greece and Turkey. He framed the appeal as part of the struggle against communism and argued that it was the duty of the United States to oppose “totalitarian regimes.” Congress approved his request for $400 million (approximately $5 billion in today’s money). The president’s pledge to help “free peoples” resist communist expansion, a promise that became known as the Truman Doctrine, formed the basis of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Following the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, Stalin channeled material support for the civil war to Greece’s communists, but covertly.

Western and Eastern Blocs

The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that had built up slowly through the later 1940s came to a head in 1948. Believing a strong Germany was vital to Europe’s economic recovery and a necessary bulwark against the spread of communism, the United States, Britain, and France planned to reunify the three zones of Germany they had occupied since the end of World War II. United, these zones would dwarf the Soviet zone in size, population, and wealth and, by sharing a single currency, play a major role in Europe’s postwar economy.

The Soviet Union hoped to keep Germany disunited and weak and thus objected. In March 1948, it withdrew from the Allied Control Council that coordinated Allied actions in Germany. In June, the United Kingdom and the United States introduced a new currency, the Deutschemark, into their zones as well as into the western portions of Berlin they controlled, in order to dispense Marshall Plan funds. Infuriated, the Soviet Union cut off all ground routes into West Berlin. No food or fuel could enter the city by road, railroad, or canal. The Soviets planned to starve the Western Allies out, forcing them to abandon their sections of Berlin and thus their toehold within the Soviet zone.

Realizing that air was their only way around the blockade, Britain and the United States swiftly formulated plans to supply the besieged city by plane. For nearly a year, they carried out the Berlin Airlift, an extensive operation that at one point had a British or US plane taking off from Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport every forty-five seconds (Figure 10.6). Recognizing they could not defeat the resolve of the Western Allies, the Soviets ended the blockade in May 1949. Two weeks later, the Western Allies unified their occupation zones to form the new country of the Federal Republic of Germany, usually referred to as West Germany, with the city of Bonn as its capital.

Cold War Strategies

The Cold War between West and East was fought on many fronts with many strategies. Both sides provided aid and technical assistance to countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, many of which had been European colonies until the end of World War II. Through such aid, the United States hoped to contain the spread of communism by depriving countries of an economic reason for aligning themselves with the Soviet Union.

Communism was attractive to many poor people. It promised that a nation’s wealth would be used to provide for all its citizens, and under the Soviet system, people were provided with jobs, housing, education, health care, and public transportation. Although the standard of living was lower than in the West, for poor people who lived with the constant threat of hunger and homelessness and saw no chance of improving their situation, communism was an attractive alternative.

Propaganda in the form of literature, visual imagery, and films was also used by each side to shore up support for its policies and political ideology, and to damage the credibility and prestige of the other side. In 1950, the US-funded Radio Free Europe began broadcasting news to the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and in 1953, Radio Liberty began broadcasting to the Soviet Union. Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Committee, an organization of American business executives and lawyers established by the US government, printed leaflets and posters touting the superiority of life in democratic, capitalist countries and dropped them from weather balloons over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

Soviet propaganda stressed the USSR’s desire for world peace and praised the communist ideals of a classless society in which people were treated equally regardless of race or gender. This message had a strong appeal for people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Some African Americans, confronted by racism and segregation in the United States, were also attracted by these promises. Indeed, opponents of the civil rights movement in the United States often denounced it as communist in nature.

Sometimes propaganda took the form of athletic competitions in which each side used its swimmers, runners, weightlifters, and gymnasts to display the superiority of its system. Sports and news broadcasts kept a close watch on the number of medals won by US and Soviet athletes during Olympic competitions. At other times, cultural exchanges took place. Soviet ballet dancers toured the United States, while American jazz musicians and symphony orchestras visited Eastern Bloc countries.

Both sides highlighted their ingenuity and technological achievements. At a 1959 exhibition in Moscow, US vice president Richard Nixon proudly showed off American technology to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the form of a model kitchen. Khrushchev’s response to the labor-saving gadgetry on display was to inquire whether American families also had machines to save them the effort of putting food in their mouths and swallowing it. The two countries competed to dominate space as well. In 1957, the United States suffered a serious blow to its pride when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite (Figure 10.8). In response, in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on Congress to establish an agency to explore space. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established that year. In 1961 the Soviet Union sent the first astronaut into space. In 1969 the United States put the first humans on the surface of the moon.

Espionage was another important tool, carried out by the United States through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) formed in 1947, and by the USSR with its spy agency the KGB. Besides surveilling the other nation, these agencies also plotted, assisted in, and carried out acts of sabotage and the assassination of those deemed enemies of their country. Both the CIA and the KGB fomented discontent in foreign nations as well, trained fighting forces, and encouraged revolution and insurgency to topple foreign governments and install leaders who would be friendly to their respective countries. The CIA, for example, trained Cuban insurgents with the goal of overthrowing the Caribbean island’s communist government under Fidel Castro in 1961.

Similarly, the KGB gave assistance to Vietnamese communists attempting to defeat the government of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The most dangerous venue for competition, however, and the two sides’ chief means of reining in aggression on the part of the other, was the stockpiling of massive nuclear arsenals. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, ending the US monopoly on nuclear weapons. In 1952 the United States took the next step, one opposed by some of the same atomic scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and developed the hydrogen bomb, testing it on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok in 1952. This missile was one thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. US development of such a weapon meant the Soviet Union needed to do the same.

In the 1950s, both the United States and the USSR developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well. Now missiles armed with nuclear warheads could be launched from within the home country’s own territory or within the borders of satellite nations; an air force capable of intercepting bomb-bearing planes was no longer sufficient to protect against nuclear attack. Although countries in both the Western and Eastern Blocs prepared for potential war by creating shelters to protect citizens in the event of nuclear war, neither side put great faith in its ability to emerge victorious. Both the United States and the USSR quickly came to believe that the key to survival lay in building an immense retaliatory capacity, the ability to unleash devastation so great that the other side would never detonate the first bomb for fear of its own annihilation. In the United States, this defense policy came to be referred to as “mutually assured destruction” (MAD). Should these nuclear stockpiles prove unsuccessful at deterring a conflict, the large military forces the rivals built up during the Cold War, along with billions of dollars’ worth of battleships, submarines, and fighter jets, ensured they possessed the capacity to fight a conventional war as well.