[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.At best only half the loafof American war aims could be attained.Instead of Nazi autarky 154 WAR AND EMPIREthroughout Eastern Europe, Soviet communism would prevail, andwhatever access American corporations might have to trade withthis bloc it would not be on American terms.The cold hard factwas that at war s end the Russians occupied the same territory inEurope s east as had the Nazis.Some historians argue that if Roosevelt had been younger,healthier and able to continue he might have arranged a favorableagreement with Stalin that may have benefited both nations.FDRwould have faced the same bitter opposition his successor faceddomestically, but he was far more sophisticated a politician andmore of a realist.The Soviets had been portrayed in heroic termsby the US press and Hollywood while the war was still ongoing,but rightists and anti-communists in the US were already in 1945accusing Roosevelt of having lost Eastern Europe to the hatedReds, though the region was hardly America s to lose.In any caseRoosevelt died just as the war was ending and his place was takenby an inexperienced and easily manipulated, at least initially, HarryS.Truman, who was himself reflexively anti-communist and whoalmost immediately went on the political and ideological offensiveagainst yesterday s ally.YESTERDAY S ESSENTIAL ALLY BECOMES THE NEW THREATIn short order the Truman Administration claimed that the Sovietshad now replaced the Nazis as the principal threat to global orderand American national security.Less than three months after Japan ssurrender on 2 September 1945 the enormously influential Lifemagazine startled readers with graphic depictions of a Soviet atomicmissile attack on US cities, though pointedly the Soviets did notpossess an atomic bomb, and intercontinental missiles did not existand would not until 1957.Most mainstream publications followedsuit with lurid depictions of what the USSR could do to the USdespite its obvious weakness.3 In 1946 Admiral Chester Nimitz,hero of the Pacific War, declared, with no evidence whatever, thatthe Soviets were preparing to bomb England and launch submarineattacks against American coastal cities.Presidential adviser ClarkClifford claimed that the communist threat was so dire the UnitedStates must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare.Only five months after Germany surrendered, the Joint Chiefs ofStaff issued a report calling for the atomic bombing of 20 citiesin the USSR if that country developed either a means of defenseagainst our attack or the capacity for an eventual attack on the COLD WAR: THE CLASH OF IDEOLOGY OR OF EMPIRES? 155United States (author s emphasis).4 All this despite the fact that theUSSR had suffered the greatest devastation to its national territoryof any belligerent, worse even than atomically desolated Japan, andhad not the remotest possibility of attacking the United States.Nordid it have such an intention.All of European Russia s major cities and towns, estimated at70,000, were destroyed, its roads, and railways in ruins, its cropsand livestock dead or stolen, and at least 30 million of its soldiersand civilians dead.5 Though the Red Army was immense, and itssoldiers extremely combat-hardened, it showed no signs of movingbeyond the territories it had wrested from the Nazis with so muchblood.Nor did it seek territorial gains in Western Europe or theMiddle East.Yet, the American public was indoctrinated to believethat Soviet-led communism was on the march with the goal of world conquest.This was exactly the propaganda employedabout the Nazis and Japanese.The permanent enemy required fora permanent war economy had miraculously materialized.This is not to say that Soviet communism lived up to its promises,or functioned as a benevolent regime.Far from it.Russia wasbehaving as Russia had always behaved, and still does.The Sovietvictory enabled Stalin to re-extend control over some of whathad been lost to Russia s empire during World War I and whathe deemed Tsarist Russia s natural sphere.After two devastatinginvasions in a quarter century the Soviet general staff obsessed overterritorial security
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]