THE LEGACY OF WAR

AND ITS POST WAR IMPACT

The end of the Second World War ushered in a period of world-wide political change. The invasions and counter-invasions of the aggressors and those who sought to liberate had brought forth from nations the world over an increased awareness of the meaning of freedom; of human rights; of the horrors of war. The bursting forth of Soviet socialism across Europe and Asia swept up in its wake proud nations whose history was as individual and as deserving of preservation as any on earth, and substituted a new tyranny for that which had so recently been defeated.

In the USA, the death in April of President Roosevelt, who had for so long believed that Stalin would not deceive him, brought to the Presidency Harry S. Truman, who recognised that the West had already been deceived, and that the USSR could be checked only by the nuclear deterrent. Truman dismissed Henry Morgenthau Jr, the Secretary of the Treasury whose extraordinary plan to pastoralise Germany into a purely agricultural community had come so close to being Allied policy. Under Truman, the USA took a more realistic view of Germay's future and sought to rebuild the economy of the new Federal Republic.

In Britain, Winston Churchill, having inspired and led Britain tirelessly through her most desperate hours, was remorselessly sacked and sent home to the country by a swing to Socialism apparently boosted by the votes of the returning servicemen. Just when Britain needed that leadership again, it got instead Clement Attlee; a worthy Prime Minister, an excellent administrator, but lacking in inspirational quality.

In India, General Wavell was replaced as Viceroy almost as soon as Attlee came to power, and it was to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten that the task of guiding India to independence fell, a task completed in 1947.

In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur administered the Allied occupation wisely and well, guiding the Japanese nation to a new alliance of traditional values and Western attitudes. MacArthur proved himself a considerable politician, pushing through radical changes in the Japanese constitution that outlawed war entirely, guaranteed political freedom and created a democratic state. The Emperor was stripped of all but his symbolic status, and formally renounced his divinity. The major Japanese war leaders were tried for their crimes. Seven, including General Yamashita, General Tojo and General Homma, the perpetrator of the infamous "Death March" in the Philippines, were hanged. Two - Prince Funimaro Konoye and General Honjo - beat the hangman and committed suicide.

In Germany - the part of that country the world was now obliged to become accustomed to calling West Germany - a War Crimes Tribunal was convened on a much larger scale. Under four-power jurisdiction, the Tribunal was to try the former leaders of Nazi Germany for having committed crimes against humanity. On October 18th 1945, the prosecutors issued indictments against twenty-one Nazis. Thirty days later, on November 20th, the accused faced their accusers in one of the few intact buildings left in Nuremberg. As in Japan, some of the war criminals beat the hangman. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were all dead long before their crimes were heard.

Two observers of those hearings in Nuremberg have described their overwhelming impression to me in exactly the same words - `they looked so ordinary'. For the men of Nuremberg were by now crumpled, exhausted, beaten, and, in most cases, quite old. For ten months the hearings continued, bringing forth daily in evidence the indescribable sufferings of the six million Jews murdered in pursuit of Himmler's "Final Solution"; the atrocities against civilian populations in reprisal for incidents against the German Army; the callousness and brutality with which Hitler's Reich rightly became identified.

When it was all over, twelve of the accused were sentenced to death. Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann (in his absence) and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had succeeded "Hangman Heydrich" as Protector of Bohemia and Moravia after Heydrich's assassination; Rosenberg, the party "philosopher"; Hans Frank, the Nazi inquisitor in Poland; Julius Streicher, the Jew baiter of Nuremberg, probably the most unpleasant and sadistic of the Nazi hierarchy; The curiously colourless Frick, Plenipoteniary for Administration in Hitler's cabinet; Fritz Sauckel, the organiser of slave labour; Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Governor of Austria; Keitel and Jodl. All were hanged in the early morning of October 16th 1946 - except for Goering, who succeeded in taking poison an hour before he was due to die, and Bormann, who has never been located and was probably already dead.

Three of the accused were acquitted - Hjalmar Schacht, who had attempted as Hitler's Economics Minister and President of the Reichsbank to keep the Fuhrer in touch with reality; Franz von Papen, once Chancellor of Germany; and Hans Fritsche. The remainder, including Albert Speer, Hitler's Armaments Minister, Rudolf Hess, who had flown to Britain in May 1941 to seek peace, and Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, nominated by Hitler as his successor, were imprisoned for varying terms. Most were released in the Fifties. Only Hess remained in captivity, the lone prisoner in Berlin's Spandau Prison, until his controversial death by strangulation in 1987.

With the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, it was as though the past ended and the future began. The Soviet Union, constantly aware of the enormous strategic advantage gained by the USA as a result of having the nuclear bomb, had begun in 1945 a campaign of espionage to obtain the necessary secrets. On July 10th 1949, Russia proved the effectiveness of both her espionage and her scientists by conducting a successful nuclear test. The age of the rival deterrents had arrived, years before Washington believed it possible.

Little more than a year earlier the USSR had reacted sharply and quite indefensibly to US action to revitalise the West German economy by abolishing Hitler's Reichsmark and introducing a new Deutschmark. Recognising that Berlin, then as now, was isolated within Soviet dominated East Germany, Russia callously attempted to starve the population of West Berlin into submission to Russian domination by closing all land routes from West Germany to the former capital. The Allies could do nothing to reopen the roads and canals thus closed short of going to war with Russia, for there were 17 Red Army divisions between Berlin and the Western Zones of Occupation. But Russia had not and could not close the air lanes.

Thus began the Berlin Airlift, by which two and a quarter million Berliners were supplied with their every essential for almost a year before the Russians gave in, admitted defeat and reopened the land routes. By the time the airlift finished, the pilots and controllers had become so efficient that every day saw lifted into Berlin three times more supplies than the city needed for a day. The Russians learned from this a great lesson - the value of strategic military transport aircraft. One has only to reflect on the efficiency of their invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas 1979 to recognise how well the lesson was learned.

Even in the years immediately after the war, Russian influence extended far beyond Berlin, Germany or indeed Europe. As soon as the Japanese were defeated by the advancing Red Army in Manchuria, the captured arms began to be ferried to Mao-Tse-Tung's communist revolutionaries in China. Although the USA tried repeatedly to find diplomatic means to reconcile Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao, and did achieve, through a mission by General George C. Marshall, a truce between the two in 1946, by the end of 1949 Mao had smashed the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek had retreated to his Formosan Nationalist stronghold (now Taiwan), and Mao was in control of what became known as Red China.

There next emerged what is now a familiar Soviet tactic designed to extend Russian domination - the supply of arms to a guerilla force. Many of those same captured Japanese arms, and many more of the genuine Russian article, found their way into North Korea, where the communists were seeking to overrun the (genuinely) democratic South. The Americans intervened forcefully and successfully to contain the Communist attack, and prevented the loss of South Korea to the free world - but, when the stalemate armistice was signed at Panmunjom, it was the United Nations that enforced it.

Born of an idea hatched between Roosevelt and Churchill, christened by Roosevelt, and brought to maturity by a series of conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, during 1944, and at a meeting in San Francisco in April 1945, the United Nations had been already in existence by the end of the war. Because it was genuinely an organisation seeking to avoid unnecessary conflict, it was and, to a lesser extent is, a more successful policing body than the League of Nations, which had failed in so many crises during the Thirties. In the early years after the war, before its original political polarisation and intent was clouded and put out of balance by the procession of newly independent emergent countries of the Sixties and Seventies, the United Nations was an effective balance in the Cold War, and several times prevented the Cold War becoming hot. But, as the Fifties succeeded the Forties, it was the balance of power rather than idealistic concepts that once more determined whether the peace was preserved. That balance, by 1949, was polarised as being between, on the one hand, the Soviet Union itself with the Soviet dominated countries that the USSR had overrun in the closing stages of the war, which now became known collectively as the Warsaw Pact nations, and, on the other, the North Atlantic Treaty Orgnisation, known as NATO. The Treaty was ratified on 4th April 1949, and brought together with the USA and Canada under a common umbrella of defence spending and planning eleven nations of Western Europe, to which were later added Greece and Turkey, which joined in 1952, and West Germany, which joined in 1955.

The emergence of NATO was perhaps the most significant single example of the mighty change in the position of the USA that the war had wrought. Before the Second World War, Britain had been a great imperial power, still wielding the influence and through it much of the wealth of the Victorian era. The USA was a determinedly neutral, isolationist nation. When America threw its means of production heart and soul into the war, it actually did the nation good. The standard of living in the United States rose sharply during the war; in other combatant countries it fell. British and British Commonwealth shipping losses reduced the size of their fleet from 40,000,000 tons to only 19,500,000 tons. The US merchant fleet quadrupled to 50,000,000 tons. Britain lost as a result of the war 35 times as much foreign invested capital as did the USA. The USA ended the war rich. Britain ended it poor.

Recognising this situation, the USA put its new-found wealth to the defence of the free world; and in particular to the defence of Western Europe. From being an isolationist power observing the doings of the British Empire with intererst, America had become the most significant financial and international diplomatic force on earth. From that again sprang the space programme. For, as General Patton's 3rd Army had rushed through Southern Germany in the closing stages of the war, they had discovered a stockpile of complete and near complete V2 rockets. The US Army had also secured the services of Wernher von Braun, the brilliant chief scientist of Hitler's rocket programme. After a discreet interval, von Braun and his rockets were reunited in the USA, and from his continued work were developed the "Gemini", "Mercury" and "Apollo" programmes which put Neil Armstrong and his successors on the moon.

When he set out to conquer Europe and subjugate Russia, Hitler sought to change the face of the world. He and his allies drew a large part of the world into war. He conquered; he over-reached himself; he was totally defeated. The evils of his regime were so great that almost any result was to be preferred to his success. But although his plans for the world were not to be, the pattern of political and military power was altered for the remainder of the twentieth century, and probably for the twenty-first, by the perverted genius of the Austrian corporal. His impact upon history, and upon our lives, has been greater than that of any other man since the ancients.