The Yalta Conference

The Yalta Conference, which had been code-named Argonaut, set in motion a series of events with implications that are still being felt today. Foremost was Stalin’s unapologetic plan to extend the Communist sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, a situation that would quickly lead to what became known as the Cold War. Indeed, the decisions made during that weeklong conference have been influencing world events up to the present.

One of the first and most important decisions made at Yalta was the division of occupied Germany. The conference participants—known in the press as the Big Three—had previously agreed to three occupation zones under the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. At Yalta they agreed to coordinate administration and give France a fourth zone, which would be taken from the U.S. and British zones. In addition, Stalin demanded that Germany pay reparations, though the amount and other details would be determined later.

Figure 20-1 Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives (111-SC-260486)

Not surprisingly, the arrogant and manipulative Stalin all but dominated the Yalta Conference, using it as a springboard to expand Soviet control throughout the region. Though he paid lip service to free elections and the creation of democratic interim governments in the soon-to-be-liberated German-occupied territories, Stalin had little intention of honoring such promises. The nations that would fall under Soviet control would not experience true democracy until the Communist collapse in 1989.

During the Yalta Conference, Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan only after extracting concessions that greatly benefited the Soviet Union from Churchill and Roosevelt. Specifically, he demanded the return of Russian territory held by the Japanese since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, including the Chinese territory of Port Arthur, and the joint Soviet-Chinese administration of the Manchurian railroads. The latter demand did not sit well with China’s leaders, who were angered that such decisions were being made without their input or consent.

Brief Friends

When the war finally ended, American, British, and Soviet forces made a public show of camaraderie. Countless photos were taken of Soviet and American troops shaking hands and sharing hugs as they met throughout occupied Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other locations. Democracy and Communism had come together to defeat a common enemy. But could they remain partners? The answer was no. The United States and the Soviet Union soon came to view each other more as enemies than friends, and the situation grew worse with each passing year.

Though Stalin had depended heavily on aid from the United States and other Allied nations to defeat Germany, he wasted no time in eliminating such facts from state-revised Soviet history. According to Stalin, the Red Army had won the war almost single-handedly. No mention was made to the Soviet people of the more than $11 billion the Soviet Union had received through the U.S. Lend-Lease program, or of the millions more raised by concerned Americans for the Russian Relief Organization, or of the huge amounts of war materiel provided to the Soviet Union by the British. Instead, Stalin promoted what he called the Great Patriotic War, in which the mighty Soviet bear had taken on and defeated Hitler’s best. It was a mountain of revisionist lies, one laid on top of another. In many cases, the truth would remain hidden from the Soviet people for decades.

Stalin’s drive for power in Eastern Europe had concerned the other Allied leaders long before Germany’s unconditional surrender. One of their worst fears was the installation of Communist governments in Germany and nearby nations. British and American leaders were aware of Stalin’s not-so-secret agenda and understood that the Soviet Union would have to be closely watched lest its ambitions jeopardize the rest of the world. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany as the greatest enemy of world freedom.

The Stand Against Communism

In the months following the end of World War II, President Harry Truman tried to assuage the fears of U.S. allies in Europe by making clear that any serious aggression by the Soviet Union would be decisively met with atomic weapons. Faced with a weapon of such awesome power, the thinking went, the Soviet Union would never risk an all-out war to spread its political ideology.

However, Stalin wasn’t particularly intimidated by U.S. atomic weapons because the Soviet Union was close to creating a nuclear arsenal of its own—an achievement that would influence the coming Cold War like no other. More important at the time, Stalin steadfastly maintained a strong military presence in Eastern Europe as other Allied forces were rapidly withdrawing. With nothing to keep him in check but threats, Stalin had little difficulty installing Soviet-controlled Communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Later, the Soviet sphere of influence would claim Albania and Yugoslavia.

The United States, Great Britain, and France occupied western Germany, and the Soviet Union occupied eastern Germany, with Berlin—also with three parts controlled by the western Allies and one by the Soviets—stuck in the Soviet occupation zone. The United States, Great Britain, and France struggled to get the Soviet Union to agree to a unified Germany, but Stalin held firm. He used this foothold to maintain Soviet power in the region, and the other occupying nations soon realized that no agreement would be reached with their former ally.

In June 1948, hoping to hold the Soviet Union in check, the United States, Great Britain, and France decided to unify their occupation zones into an independent nation to be known as the German Federal Republic. The Soviet Union retaliated by cutting off all road, rail, and boat traffic to Allied-controlled West Berlin and stranding its more than 2 million residents. Stalin’s goal was to force the western Allies to abandon their plans for a free German republic by starving the residents of West Berlin. But the United States and its Allies refused to cave in. Instead, they initiated the Berlin Airlift to deliver food by plane to the trapped West Berliners. Allied supply planes landed every six minutes, twenty-four hours a day, until Stalin finally lifted the blockade after 318 days.

Fearing that Stalin would next try to bring Communism to war-torn France and Italy, U.S. officials made a pre-emptive strike by sending food and billions of dollars in aid to Europe. The massive assistance program became known as the Marshall Plan after its designer, former Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who had become secretary of state in 1947. In 1953, Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

In May 1949, the United States joined with eleven other nations to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Uniting primarily for protection against Soviet aggression, the member nations agreed that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all, and that they would react accordingly. Turkey and Greece joined NATO in 1952, and when a newly armed West Germany joined in 1955, the Soviet Union responded by forming the Warsaw Pact, which included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany. The division between ally and enemy had never been more sharply drawn.

Stalin Spurs Advances Within the Soviet Union

Even though Stalin was spending much of his time grabbing what he could in Eastern Europe, he wasn’t ignoring the home front. Realizing the need for a strong military force in the new world order, he authorized an all-out modernization of the Red Army and a dramatic increase in Soviet naval capability, including the construction of new battle cruisers, aircraft carriers, and submarines—many of them based on revolutionary concepts from the Nazis.

Indeed, the Soviet Union benefited greatly from information derived from captured German technology and the scientists who created it, particularly in the area of rocketry. Soon after the war, the Soviets began experimenting with a wide variety of missile concepts. The program would eventually lead to the launching of Sputnik—the first man-made object to be sent into Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik fueled the Soviet weapons and space programs and sent waves of fear down the backs of many Americans. Would the Soviets use this new technology to attack America from space? Not to be outdone, the United States initiated its own space program, and the so-called space race was under way.

In September 1949, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb. In that instant, the United States lost its military superiority. To deliver its new weapons of mass destruction, Soviet scientists built a fleet of bombers based on the U.S. B-29 Superfortress. The information they used came from three of the American planes that were forced down in Siberia in 1944 after bombing runs against Japan. Soviet researchers secretly took the planes apart, studied their design, and were able to recreate them almost exactly. The threat of Soviet attack would be a cause of concern for many years to come.

The United Nations

The first use of the words United Nations was by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was referring only to the Allies. The term soon came to mean a world body, one that would succeed—and definitely be stronger than—the failed League of Nations.

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was the driving force behind the organization, helping write the charter. He is often referred to as “the Father of the United Nations.” Discussions on the particulars of the U.N. took place in the late summer and early fall of 1944 at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C. Attending those talks were representatives of China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Major details were worked out at this conference, paving the way for the formation of the world body. Discussions continued during the next several months, culminating in the United Nations Conference on April 25, 1945, in San Francisco. Two short months later, representatives of fifty countries signed the U.N. Charter. The United Nations officially began on October 24.

The Postwar Pacific

Postwar occupation and rebuilding went far more easily in Europe than in the Pacific, where Japanese troops were scattered throughout the region, requiring a huge influx of Allied occupation forces. The occupation of Japan went relatively smoothly once the nation had officially surrendered, but bringing peace to other regions proved far more difficult.

In China, for example, the civil war between General Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-tung quickly resumed. The Communists held much of northern China—an area invaded by the Soviets during the final weeks of the war—and were given key ports in the region by their Soviet comrades. At the same time, the Soviets refused to let Nationalist forces enter the region.

Figure 20-2 A Chinese soldier guarding a line of P-40 fighter planes.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives (208-AA-12X-21)

In September 1945, the United States sent 53,000 marines into northern China to oversee the disarmament of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops there. The Chinese Communists vowed to fight if America tried to take Communist-held territory, and a few skirmishes between American forces and Chinese Communists did occur. By 1946, it became apparent to almost everyone that Chiang Kai-shek’s government could not win against the better-led Communist forces. The United States tried to negotiate a peace agreement between the Nationalists and the Communists, but the talks proved fruitless. In mid-1949, Chiang Kai-shek led what remained of his army and his government to the island of Formosa, now known as Taiwan; and in October of that year, the Communists established the People’s Republic of China. However, the United States refused to recognize the Communist regime and for many years afterward continued to view the Nationalist regime in Formosa as the rightful government of China.

Korea

Equally problematic was the occupation of Korea. The Soviet Union had sent forces across the Manchurian border into Japanese-occupied Korea on August 12, 1945, just before Japan surrendered. American occupation forces didn’t arrive until early September, at which time the two nations tried to work out an equitable occupation arrangement. After much discussion, it was determined that the thirty-eighth parallel would be a temporary demarcation line between the two forces. In December, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed that a provisional government would be established in Korea, though the Soviet Union did everything in its power to prevent this from happening. The standoff was broken in 1948 with the creation of a democratic South Korea below the thirty-eighth parallel and a Soviet-supported Communist North Korea above the thirty-eighth parallel.

A restless peace continued between the two Koreas until June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea with the intent of reunification. The United States immediately sent military support, including ground troops, to the overpowered South Korean army in an attempt to keep the Communists at bay. The resulting war, which also drew in the People’s Republic of China, lasted three years and cost 54,000 American lives. South Korea and North Korea finally agreed to a cease-fire in 1953.

Vietnam

Korea wasn’t the only Pacific nation to be divided in half after the world war. Vietnam, formerly under French colonial rule, was under Japanese occupation during the war. However, the Japanese were strongly opposed in the northern part of the country by a Communist faction known as the Vietminh, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. During the war, the Vietminh received arms from the Allies and in turn offered aid and rescue to Allied fliers forced down in the region.

After the war, the Vietminh declared an independent nation and took control of much of northern Indochina, including the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. Japanese troops in Indochina surrendered to British and Indian forces in the south, who tried to return that area to France, and to Chinese forces in the north. The Chinese then recognized the Vietminh as the region’s official government and provided aid and arms in its battle for independence from French colonial rule. France began trying to re-establish control over Indochina in September 1945. It started in the south and in 1946 moved into the north, where it met strong resistance from Chinese troops aiding the Vietminh. Chinese forces later withdrew, but China continued to supply arms to the Vietminh. The French had great difficulty trying to dislodge the Communists, and the fighting came to a head in early 1954 when French troops in the town of Dien Bien Phu found themselves overwhelmed by well-armed Vietminh forces. The United States discussed sending troops to aid the beleaguered French, but public opinion strongly opposed American intervention. Dien Bien Phu fell in May 1954, and a peace conference resulted in French Indochina being divided into two regions: Communist North Vietnam and democratic South Vietnam.

Continuing hostilities between the two nations would eventually bring American advisers and, later, American troops to the aid of South Vietnam. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict would end in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon and unification of the nation under Communist control.