The Cold War Part I

THE DIVISION OF EUROPE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

It took time before the western zones of Germany were amalgamated and gained autonomy, and the communists were defeated in the Greek Civil War. The Sovietization of eastern Europe was a steady process, completed with the Czech coup of 1948, and only effectively resisted by Tito, another communist. Austria did not join the ranks of the neutrals until the country was reunited in a 1955 treaty and promised not to confederate with either West or East Germany.

1. from Germany to Poland 1945

2. from Germany to USSR 1945

3. returned to Czechoslovakia from Hungary 1945

4.  returned to Romania from Hungary 1945

5. from Hungary to USSR 1945

6. from Romania to USSR 1945

7. to USSR 1940, lost 1941, retaken 1944

8. to USSR 1940, lost 1941-44,

9. returned 1947 o to USSR 1947

10. Federal Republic of Germany  formed Sept. 1949

As victory over Germany grew closer, tensions among the Allies grew. The ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the West had been only temporarily eclipsed by the common effort against Hitler. Numerous contentious issues, including the slow development of a second front and the future political status of Poland and Germany signaled possible postwar conflicts. Stalin recognized that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the war against Germany and suspected that the British and the Americans would be happy to let that continue. After all, Harry Truman, then a Senator, had remarked in 1941, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.” After the opening of the second front in June 1944, disputes over the future shape of Europe threatened to wreck relations. President Franklin Roosevelt put a high priority on staying on good terms with Stalin, well aware Soviet troops were doing most of the fighting. At a three-way summit in Tehran in November–December 1943, Winston Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s keeping the Polish territory he had seized as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The fates of Germany and of Eastern Europe were still unsettled. Unable to reach a consensus on the German question, the three Allies, meeting at Yalta in February 1945, agreed as a stopgap measure to divide the country into occupation zones. At American insistence, France was included as an occupying power. The result was the division of Germany and of Berlin into four zones each, one for each power. This was not intended as a permanent solution, only a temporary expedient until a better solution was reached. Yalta also tried to reach some compromise on Eastern Europe. The war against Germany was clearly won, but Roosevelt’s priority had shifted to Soviet cooperation against Japan. Stalin’s actions made it clear that he intended to establish friendly governments in Eastern Europe. Needing Stalin’s assistance, and with the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe, Roosevelt had little choice but to acquiesce. Churchill and Roosevelt did obtain Stalin’s commitment to democratic governments in Eastern Europe. Both sides had, however, very different ideas about what democratic meant. So while there were very real conflicts about the future of Europe, Yalta had achieved at least a temporary solution.

In April 1945, though, Roosevelt died. He was replaced by Harry Truman, who had much less commitment to fostering Soviet-American relations. This coincided with growing evidence that Soviet policy in Eastern Europe was incompatible with Western interests. Given the history of Soviet-Polish relations, no democratic government in Poland could be pro-Soviet, defining democracy in Western terms of free expression and free elections. Stalin’s unshakable desire for a friendly and docile Poland thus required active Soviet intervention in Polish politics. Similar processes occurred in the Balkans, where pro-Soviet parties took power in Bulgaria and in Romania. The universal presence of the Red Army made Stalin’s task simpler. This Sovietization did not happen uniformly or immediately. Hungary, and especially Czechoslovakia, maintained open, multiparty systems for several years. By 1948, though, Eastern Europe had been thoroughly Sovietized. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were all run by one-party systems, taking direction from Moscow. Yugoslavia was communist as well, but its large wartime resistance movement under Jozef Broz Tito meant communist rule was imposed without active Soviet involvement, and in 1948 Yugoslavia broke from the Soviet bloc while remaining communist. Overall, though, the Soviet Union replicated its own political system in the territories under its control, and the West was terrified by what it saw.

The West also saw evidence of Stalin’s potential hostility outside of the Soviet bloc. Stalin was reluctant to withdraw his troops from northern Iran after World War II. Britain had attempted to maintain its prewar influence in the Mediterranean by supporting Greece and Turkey. The pro-Western Greek government was under threat from a domestic communist insurgency, backed by Yugoslavia. Turkey, by contrast, was facing Soviet pressure for concessions at the Turkish Straits. By 1947, Britain was near bankruptcy and could no longer underwrite Greek and Turkish security. The result was a new commitment by the United States to European politics. Truman agreed to take over Britain’s role in the Mediterranean and committed the United States to containing communism more generally. In early 1947 he proclaimed the Truman Doctrine, pledging American support to peoples attempting to maintain their freedom against outside pressures: communism. Massive economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey followed.

Despite the growing tensions, the Cold War was not yet military. It involved a competition for political influence, but the threat of force remained muted. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had demobilized their armies rapidly after the war. Soviet manpower dropped to under 3 million by 1948 and was moreover counterbalanced by the American atomic monopoly.

In mid-1948, though, the Cold War’s military side began to become more important. The trigger was Germany. The occupying powers had all imposed their own social and political systems in their respective zones. The difference was that Germans found the Western systems much more pleasant. The Soviet zone saw the steady imposition of one-party dictatorship, while the Western zones enjoyed the slow return of normal social, economic, and political life. As time passed, it became more and more difficult to envisage a way in which the steadily diverging British, French, and American zones, on the one hand, and the Soviet zone, on the other, could be brought back together.

In response to the creation of a unified currency for the three Western zones, Stalin acted to halt the creation of a pro-Western Germany by exerting pressure on the West’s most vulnerable spot: the Western-occupied enclaves in Berlin, buried deep inside the Soviet zone. On 24 June 1948, he shut off road and railroad access to West Berlin. Stalin did not see this as a prelude to war, for the Soviet occupying force in Germany made no preparations for war. Indeed, the entire operation seems quite shortsighted; Stalin made no provisions for military complications and cut off Berlin while the United States still enjoyed an atomic monopoly. It was instead an effort either to liquidate the Western presence in Berlin or to force a better deal for Stalin in Germany as a whole. After considering and rejecting the option of testing the Berlin blockade with military force, the United States and Britain organized the Berlin airlift, supplying the city with food and fuel by air. The Soviet military harassed flights into Berlin, but did not halt them. When the blockade had clearly failed, Stalin canceled it on 12 May 1949.

Simultaneously with the Berlin blockade, Stalin remilitarized the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself. Eastern Europe had generally been demilitarized after the war. Hungary’s army, for example, bottomed out at a mere 5,000 soldiers (plus 8,000 border guards). In 1948, however, a major military buildup began throughout Eastern Europe. Soviet military advisors flooded Eastern Europe, and Soviet satellite governments were instructed to build mass armies. Domestic military traditions were obliterated and replaced by the wholesale Russianization and Sovietization of uniforms, doctrine, traditions, and training. Top military officials had Soviet minders. In the case of Poland, Stalin appointed Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovskii, a Soviet marshal of Polish ancestry, as Poland’s Minister of Defense. Levels of interference varied, depending on the particular country’s strategic importance and the level of anti-Soviet attitudes. Bulgaria was relatively free; Poland was tightly controlled. There was at this point no overarching structure; the Soviet Union managed its military ties to Eastern Europe through individual, bilateral arrangements.

The Cold War Part II

Tu-4 plus MiG-9

Stalin’s 1949 cancellation of the Berlin blockade did not repair the damage it had done. Stalin’s move had been astoundingly counterproductive. In March 1948, before the Berlin blockade, Britain and France had signed a mutual defense pact with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The Berlin blockade then led to its expansion into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), signed 4 April 1949, uniting the United States, Canada, and Iceland with nine western European countries. NATO pledged its members to treat an attack on any one as an attack on all. In addition, Stalin had succeeded, only three years after the end of World War II, in making Germans into victims. This removed remaining obstacles to the formal unification of the three western zones into the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in May 1949. Stalin responded by turning his occupation zone into the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, in October 1949.

The Cold War’s front lines in Europe were becoming increasingly rigid, even more so once Stalin possessed his own atomic weapons. Stalin and the Soviets had downplayed the significance of the atomic bomb, briefly in reality and longer in rhetoric, when the Americans first revealed its existence. When the United States possessed the atom bomb and Stalin did not, it was in Stalin’s interests to dismiss the bomb as not changing warfare in any essential way. His actions suggest a somewhat different view. Stalin took some convincing as to the importance of atomic research, and serious efforts to build a bomb began only after the two atom bombs were dropped on Japan. Aided by espionage, the Soviet atom bomb project successfully detonated its first weapon on 29 August 1949.

The Soviet military first had to figure out how to fight a nuclear-armed opponent without arms of its own. Even after it possessed the atomic bomb, the Soviets lacked bombers or missiles capable of reaching American territory. Partly as a psychological defense mechanism, partly in recognition of the limited power of early atomic weapons, Soviet doctrine and planning downplayed their importance. The Soviets did step up their attention to strategic bombing and air defense. Soviet aviation during World War II had focused on control of the battlefield, not strategic missions, and the Soviets lacked a strategic bomber. American B-29s that had been interned on Soviet territory during the war were dismantled and reverse engineered to produce the Tu-4, the Soviets’ first real strategic bomber in decades. British jet engine designs were purchased to upgrade the Soviet Air Force. In July 1948, Air Defense Forces were reorganized as a separate branch of the Soviet military, on a par with the navy, the air force, and ground forces. At the same time, Soviet military doctrine held that atomic weapons had only limited utility against hard targets like armored vehicles and that speedy operations could overrun air bases and capture foreign territory, greatly reducing the utility of atomic weapons.

Even with the American atomic monopoly broken, the Cold War was still not fully a military confrontation. While NATO represented a joint Western commitment to defense, the creation of NATO did not produce rearmament on any appreciable scale. Some within the U.S. government advocated a major conventional military buildup to counter Soviet strength, but the money and political will for such a step were missing.

A shooting war between the West and the communist bloc changed that. On 25 June 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Like Germany, Korea had been divided at the end of World War II and had two systems imposed: a communist one-party state in the Soviet-occupied north, a pro-Western and capitalist (though not at all democratic) state in the U.S.–occupied south. After the withdrawal of occupation forces in 1948, both North and South Korea wished to unify the peninsula under their own control. The difference was that Stalin gave the North Korean regime his permission to go ahead, along with the equipment and raw materials to fight a war. Stalin’s possession of the atom bomb gave him more freedom to risk military confrontation with the West. After the northern invasion, American troops intervened to defend the South, backed by a United Nations mandate and troop contingents from over a dozen other countries. Though the North almost succeeded in conquering the entire peninsula, in September 1950 a United Nations amphibious landing at Inchon quickly turned the tide, and the North Koreans were driven back in disarray. As the American-led force crossed the 38th parallel and continued north, the recently formed People’s Republic of China, with Stalin’s backing, intervened on behalf of the North. Early in 1951, the front lines stabilized back at the 38th parallel, where they would remain through a 1953 cease-fire. Stalin saw the Korean War as the beginning of confrontation between the capitalist and communist worlds. Indeed, at the beginning of 1951 he warned the leaders of the communist bloc that war with the West was coming soon, and rearmament had to begin immediately.

In addition to giving Kim Il-Sung, ruler of North Korea, permission for the invasion, Stalin assisted in the construction of the North Korean army and the war effort itself. Even after Soviet troops evacuated North Korea, 4,000 military advisors remained to train the North Korean army. During the war, the Soviet 64th Fighter Corps, based in northern China and from August 1951 in North Korea as well, fought secretly against UN forces. Over 20,000 Soviet servicemen and 300 planes were involved at any one time, though the Soviets were careful not to allow Soviet pilots to fly over enemy territory where they might be shot down and identified. The precise performance of Soviet fighters and antiaircraft guns is disputed; almost 300 Soviet servicemen died fighting in Korea.

In these early years of the Cold War, Soviet armed forces had domestic responsibilities as well. The reimposition of Soviet rule, especially on territories that had not been part of the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, was a violent process. In the Baltics, especially Lithuania, scattered assassinations and partisan resistance lasted well into the 1950s. In western Ukraine, this looked more like a civil war. There, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) engaged in a vicious fight that involved ethnic and religious warfare, not simply opposition to Soviet rule. Only massive use of military and police power brought order. Over the decade after World War II, OUN averaged over 1,000 killings per year of Soviet officials and collaborators. The Soviet regime deported at least 300,000 people from the Baltics and western Ukraine in efforts to pacify the region. Most of this fighting was conducted not by the Soviet army, but by special troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs organized and trained for that purpose. The military itself supported and occasionally participated in these operations.

After the end of the war, Stalin wanted to guarantee a politically reliable military. Unfortunately for Stalin, victory brought great prestige to the Red Army’s high command, particularly Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov. Stalin had tried in the last months of the war to spread credit to other generals—Ivan Stepanovich Konev and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vasilevskii in particular—but to no avail. Zhukov’s own conduct, in which he clearly drew attention to his own accomplishments, exacerbated the situation. In the summer of 1946, Zhukov was brought back from Germany and demoted to running the insignificant Odessa Military District as a lesson to other generals. Stalin also maintained political officers and secret police minders as additional systems of control over his military. Within the armed forces, he used a system inherited from World War II to divide power. Authority over the Soviet military was split between the Minister of Defense, responsible for organizing and supplying the military, and the Chief of the General Staff, responsible for training and operational control. Though the Minister of Defense was nominally superior to the Chief of the General Staff, the real distinction was slightly different. The Minister was typically a more political and administrative figure, while the Chief of the General Staff was a fighting general, intended to manage combat.

THE DIVISION OF EUROPE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

It took time before the western zones of Germany were amalgamated and gained autonomy, and the communists were defeated in the Greek Civil War. The Sovietization of eastern Europe was a steady process, completed with the Czech coup of 1948, and only effectively resisted by Tito, another communist. Austria did not join the ranks of the neutrals until the country was reunited in a 1955 treaty and promised not to confederate with either West or East Germany.

1. from Germany to Poland 1945

2. from Germany to USSR 1945

3. returned to Czechoslovakia from Hungary 1945

4.  returned to Romania from Hungary 1945

5. from Hungary to USSR 1945

6. from Romania to USSR 1945

7. to USSR 1940, lost 1941, retaken 1944

8. to USSR 1940, lost 1941-44,

9. returned 1947 o to USSR 1947

10. Federal Republic of Germany  formed Sept. 1949

Federal Republic of Germany, Armed Forces

Discussions regarding German rearmament took place as early as 1946, but the British government opposed anything more than an armed and mobile police force, while the French government did not wish to see Germans rearmed in any way. Serious negotiations over the creation of a German military began in 1950, however, when the Korean War stretched Western military resources thin. Once again, French resistance was the major obstacle.

The Paris Accords of May 1955 overcame these obstacles by creating a Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) army, the Bundeswehr, that was firmly under civilian and Allied control. In stark contrast to previous periods in German history, the Bundeswehr was under intense oversight by parliamentary committees and a public wary of military institutions. Soldiers would be subject to civil law in all matters that were not strictly military. All Bundeswehr units were designated to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for action, with the German government retaining peacetime control. Weapons and military matériel were imported from the United States, Britain, and France on a large scale until the late 1960s, when domestic military production developed.

Under the 1955 agreement, the United States and Great Britain committed themselves to maintaining a troop presence in Germany. NATO’s current European partners would provide naval and air forces to complement British and American commitments. In return, West Germany would provide twelve mixed divisions (approximately 340,000 men) for the common defense of Europe by 1959, with a final strength of 500,000. Each infantry division would have three combat commands with three motorized infantry battalions and an armor battalion each; antiaircraft, engineer, communications, and reconnaissance battalions; a company of aircraft; a military police company; and combat support from three light artillery battalions and one medium artillery battalion. Tank divisions contained two armored and three mechanized infantry battalions in each combat command. Two of the divisions would be further specialized for airborne and mountain operations.

A civilian screening process was created to recruit officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) from World War II veterans. NATO would be responsible for all war planning and for the direction of all operations. No German general staff was permitted, on grounds that it might revive German militarism. The Bundeswehr was allowed an operations staff but on the condition that officers rotated through such duty periodically. Planners believed that half of the necessary manpower for the divisions would be volunteers, while a draft would provide the remaining numbers.

The first West German military volunteers reported for duty in November 1955, and the Law for Compulsory Service passed the West German parliament on 7 July 1956. It required all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to serve for twelve months, with provisions allowing conscientious objectors to fulfill their obligation through alternative means, usually administered at the state and local levels. Further exemptions, thought to include some 10 percent of eligible males, covered the sons of deceased and wounded veterans, economic hardship cases, clergy, and those deemed unfit for service. Men who became officers or NCOs would remain in the reserves, known as the Territorial Army, until age sixty. The term of service was increased to eighteen months in 1962 at the height of the Berlin Crisis (1958–1963). It was then reduced to fifteen months in 1972, as population growth began to provide more than adequate numbers of draftees.

The West German government experienced some difficulty in providing the promised troops. Part of the reason was monetary. Between 1956 and 1989, the share of defense-related expenditures in the West German federal budget never sank below 12 percent. It reached its zenith in the early 1960s when it was one-third of the overall budget, yet most of the money was going to purchase matériel. On average, throughout the Cold War the West German government annually spent about 20 percent of its total budget on defense.

Beyond that, rearmament was never popular in West Germany. In October 1956, West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss announced that manpower targets had been reduced from 96,000 to 80,000 for 1956 and from 240,000 to between 175,000 and 200,000 for 1957 largely because volunteers were not coming forward in the numbers anticipated. Only eleven of the twelve German divisions originally planned for 1959 were filled out and under NATO control by 1963. It took until the mid-1970s before West Germany’s armed forces reached the final benchmark of 500,000 troops envisaged in 1955. In 1975, the Bundeswehr contained 345,000 soldiers, 110,000 air force personnel, and 39,000 seamen. At any given time, only 48 percent of the German armed forces were volunteers, far short of the 55 percent target that the West German governments maintained. Recruitment of long-term (twenty-one-month) volunteers and of NCOs in particular continuously fell far short of expectations, although the federal government offered numerous incentives such as vocational education programs and career guarantees.

Popular opposition to the Bundeswehr, although always strong, increased notably in early 1957 when the United States indicated that it would arm its European allies with nuclear weapons as part of a shift in NATO strategy. Before 1957, NATO planned a forward defense along the German frontier. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had pushed for and won the integration of German units all along the line rather than having the Bundeswehr assigned a particular sector. He had also readily accepted a ban on atomic, biological, and chemical weapons for German units in order to make rearmament more palatable to the public and to the Social Democratic opposition. NATO’s new strategy of nuclear deterrence, officially adopted on 21 March 1957, thus set off a maelstrom in German politics that continued into the 1960s.

Adenauer renounced German construction of nuclear weapons and declared that Germany would not accept national control over such weapons. NATO responded by introducing the two-key system, whereby German units possessed nuclear capabilities but the nuclear warheads and launchers remained under Allied control. After winning by-elections in Nordrhein- Westfalen in July 1958, Adenauer’s government announced that it was prepared to equip the Bundeswehr with atomic weapons. German units received Matador rockets and nuclear-capable artillery pieces so that they could fight either a conventional or a tactical nuclear war. Bundeswehr units were also divided into either the six armored infantry or four purely armored divisions to facilitate mobility and, supposedly, increase defense against nuclear attack.

Even before this restructuring was complete, however, NATO, with some prompting from West Germany and led by U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s administration, moved to a strategy of flexible response. This deemphasized the role of nuclear weapons where German forces were concerned by creating a multilateral force that deployed nuclear-armed Polaris submarines. Two of the German armored infantry divisions created in 1957 were reorganized as straight infantry divisions, and the Bundeswehr’s deployed division strength was increased by about 10,000 men to compensate for its reduced nuclear role. The question of arming West Germany with nuclear weapons was shelved for good when the coalition government led by Willy Brandt and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in November 1969.

In the late 1970s, however, NATO plans to station intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Germany renewed the debate over atomic weapons. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had earlier been one of the principal advocates of flexible response in Germany, declared in early 1978 that West Germany would accept nuclear weapons only if other NATO countries did as well. U.S. President Jimmy Carter eventually led a NATO climb-down on the issue, agreeing to a two-track policy that tied deployment in Germany to Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe. In the 1980s his successor, President Ronald Reagan, worked closely with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to manage the deployment of Pershing missiles in Germany. Nuclear weapons always remained under NATO and U.S. control, and the German and American governments continued to cooperate in reducing the number of nuclear weapons stationed in West Germany.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Bundeswehr has changed immensely. Despite the integration of the former East German Army since 1990, overall troop strength has been roughly cut in half. Although during the Cold War West German troops were never deployed on foreign soil except for training exercises and joint NATO maneuvers, the Bundeswehr has undertaken several foreign peacekeeping missions since 1991, most notably in the Balkans. German armed forces now serve as part of different international missions on several continents, most notably in the Balkans and in Afghanistan.

References Bald, Detlef. Die atombewaffnung der Bundeswehr: Militaer, oeffentlichkeit und politik in der Aera Adenauer [Nuclear Armaments for West Germany’s Army: Military, Public, and Politics during the Adenauer Era]. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994. Schmidt, Gustave, ed. A History of NATO: The First Fifty Years. 3 vols. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Thoss, Bruno, ed. Vom Kalten Krieg zur deutschen einheit [From Cold War to German Unification]. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995.