Wars of The Cold War E-Book

David Stone

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 753

Beschreibung

Though the words, Cold War, refer to a period of specific international tension it is also true that the wars, conflicts and armed disputes of the period were most often influenced by, and even created because of, the existence of a 'cold war' environment - the Cold War was, in many ways, the Third World War. This extensive and authoritative volume presents all the major wars of the period - Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, etc., the uprisings and revolts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, etc, and even the skirmishes, such as the Cuba Missile Crisis, in a form that is suitable both for reading and for reference. Indeed, it is a book that meets a major need for historians, students and professionals working in the field of international current affairs and modern history.

Leseprobe

WARS OF THECOLD WAR

CONTENTS

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

1945: The Foundations of Conflict

CHAPTER TWO

Background to Conflict: The Age of the Superpower

Never the Twain: The United States and the Soviet Union

A Superpower in Embryo: The People’s Republic of China

The Rise of International Terrorism

CHAPTER THREE

The Nuclear Dimension

Enabling Apocalypse

Caribbean Crisis: Cuba, 1962

The Nuclear Balance and Arms Control

CHAPTER FOUR

The Cold War Combatants

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

The Warsaw Pact

CHAPTER FIVE

Europe: Focus of Conflict 52

Greece, 1945–9

Germany and Berlin, 1945–8

The Berlin Blockade and Airlift, 1948–9

Berlin, Post-1949

The Hungarian Uprising, 1956

The Berlin Wall, 1961

Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring

Poland, 1980–1

The End of the Cold War in Europe

CHAPTER SIX

The Korean War, 1950–3

A Land Divided: 1945–50

A Decisive Response: June–September 1950

Inchon and its Aftermath: September 1950

Enter the Dragon: October 1950 to March 1951

Battle on the Imjin: March to April 1951

Stalemate and Armistice: June 1951 to July 1953

CHAPTER SEVEN

Malaya, 1948–60

Origins of an Insurgency

A Plan of Campaign: 1948–51

Hearts, Minds and Independence: October 1951 to July 1960

CHAPTER EIGHT

Indochina and Vietnam, 1946–54

Colonialism, Communism and Empire

Disaster at Cao Bang: 16 September to 17 October 1950

An Expanding Conflict: January 1951 to November 1953

Dien Bien Phu: November 1953 to May 1954

End of an Empire

Geneva, 1954: The Seeds of Future Conflict

CHAPTER NINE

Indochina and Vietnam, 1954–75

America’s War: Origins, Nature and Perceptions

The Die is Cast: 1965

Airmobile and Air Assault: 1965–8

A Defining Moment: The Tet Offensive, 1968

The Beginning of the End: 1970–2

Hollow Victory: The Defeat of the Communist Invasion, 1972

The Great Betrayal: 1973–5

Decline and Fall: 1975

CHAPTER TEN

Towards Armageddon: The Middle East, 1947–90

A Matter of Conscience: Palestine, Israel and the Arabs, 1945–50

Sinai and the Anglo-French Suez Campaign, 1956

The Six-Day War, 1967

The Yom Kippur War, 1973

The Lebanon, 1982

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dark Deeds in the Dark Continent: Africa, 1952–90

Algeria, 1954–62

The Congo, 1960–5

Angola, Mozambique and Guinea

Nigeria, 1967–70

Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, 1974–91

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979–89

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Oil Weapon and the First Gulf War, 1980–8

Début of the Oil Weapon

The Iran–Iraq Conflict, 1980–8

The Catalyst of Conflict

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Triumph of Capitalism

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Legacy of Conflict

A Brave New World?

The Nuclear Perspective

The Social Dimension

Border Controls and Illegal Immigration

The Middle East Powder Keg

The War on Terrorism

Future Security Needs: Armed Forces and Military Service

The Superpower Monopoly

A Fragile Future

POSTSCRIPT

‘Shock and Awe’ in Iraq

Notes

Bibliography and Sources

Index

AUTHOR’S NOTEAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Very many books have already been written about the Cold War. Some were produced while it was still in progress; not surprisingly, some authors seized the opportunity to publish in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, albeit possibly a little prematurely, given the various turns of events that followed that historic event. These many accounts and analyses of the Cold War have included the full range of eyewitness accounts, biographies, autobiographies, and academic and strategic works at all levels of detail and from various perspectives. Several of these have been learned, informed and highly thought-provoking. Inevitably, the authors of a majority of these accounts are the international statesmen, politicians, academics and senior military commanders for whom the Cold War was ‘their war’, and whose knowledge of the ebb and flow of its actions and conflicts was based upon first-hand knowledge, personal involvement and vivid recollection. For the student or reader who seeks to know about the detail of the international relationships, strategy and politics of the Cold War era there are thus many such sources upon which he or she may draw. However, the use of these works does provoke a note of caution, as those involved in the development and implementation of such strategic and political decisions will inevitably – even if entirely unintentionally – colour their perspective of events in their own favour. To do so is human nature and the ‘top down’ recording of history has ever been such. Also, the majority of these works have not surprisingly approached the subject from the author’s particular area of interest or involvement; or (as is so with many of the Cold War analyses by academics) by a broad history of the Cold War in all its aspects. Inevitably, the latter approach, whilst usually informative and full of facts, does on occasion lose sight of the human element of a war that although ‘undeclared’ was nevertheless a conflict in which very many human beings, civilians and soldiers, sailors and airmen alike, died in combat across the world.

Wars of the Cold War does not seek to be a full military history of all aspects of the Cold War – the reader who seeks such a text will find it hard to better David Miller’s excellent functional approach to the subject in The Cold War: A Military History.1 Similarly, the detail of the strategic nuclear arms race and potentially cataclysmic ballistic missile conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is meticulously documented and analysed in works such as that by Miller and a host of other studies2 of this complex subject. Indeed, many people identify this aspect of post-Second World War history as the true Cold War, to the exclusion of the peripheral conflicts and limited wars that occurred between 1945 and 1990. However, these lesser conflicts cannot realistically be decoupled from the strategic conflict of the superpowers. Given the existence of such works, Wars of the Cold War seeks neither to duplicate nor to compete directly with them.

The intention in Wars of the Cold War is, therefore, to document, to bring to life and to analyse the proposition that, far from being a period of relative peace, the Cold War deserves a status in the military and political history of the world every bit as important as that accorded to the two World Wars that immediately preceded it, together with the great armed conflicts of previous centuries. This proposition is based primarily upon the perception that the several actual wars, together with the ‘war in waiting’ in Central Europe, which occurred between 1945 and 1990, were but military campaigns within a wider conflict that was a war in its own right: a war that lasted for almost half a century and was in many respects a modern version of the ideological struggle that raged across Europe from 1618 to 1648, to which history has accorded the title the ‘Thirty Years’ War’. In parallel with this, the author (himself a former ‘Cold War Warrior’)3 seeks to highlight the often extraordinary dedication, professionalism and self-sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of Cold War warriors of the armed forces on both sides of the political divide. Whether of the communist or non-communist bloc, their contribution to the needs of their countries and their unquestioning response to the direction, and sometimes the whims, of their political leaders has been consigned all too speedily to the past by many of today’s political leaders. Arguably this is especially so in Western Europe – within those countries that number themselves among the victors of the Cold War – where may be found those politicians who today appear all too eager to bask in the reflected glory of the actions of their nations’ armed forces, and so exploit the high profile, ‘quick fix’ conflicts of the ‘New World Order’ for their own political ends. While by no means universal, such actions have diminished the stature of many of today’s professional politicians and have tended to confirm that the era of the true statesmen of former times is truly at an end.

From all this it follows that Wars of the Cold War is necessarily selective, and that selectivity inevitably involves an element of personal judgement by an author who lived through the whole Cold War period and was a member of the British Army for the final twenty-five years of that conflict, and for a decade beyond. The work therefore treats the Cold War as a single conflict, whilst focusing upon the related campaigns and crises of the period. Inevitably, the clashes in Korea, Indochina and Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, and those members of the armed forces at the front line of the Cold War in Europe attract particular attention. Of the communist insurgencies, that which was defeated by the British in Malaya merits close attention. The failed national uprisings against Soviet rule in East Berlin, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also key events in the Cold War. Similarly, although they were not direct clashes of arms between West and East, capitalism and communism, the Arab–Israeli conflicts, together with other Middle East wars and the importance of that region’s oil supplies, are linked inextricably to the Cold War, and are therefore dealt with as such. This treatment allows a global view to be taken of the subject. Inevitably, however, this approach precludes detailed coverage of much of the high-level political manoeuvring that formed a backdrop to these campaigns. Similarly, where it is assessed that a conflict’s linkage to the Cold War is non-existent or tenuous, its non-inclusion or only passing treatment reflects this. It follows that certain lesser conflicts – while unquestionably of historical significance in their own right – are generally not considered in the detail accorded to the more major Cold War conflicts, except where their progress or outcome bore directly on the global confrontation between East and West. Similarly, the major war that India and Pakistan fought in 1971, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh, was only of Cold War significance inasmuch as it contributed to assessments of the effectiveness of each side’s Western or Soviet-supplied equipment in combat – albeit that both India and Pakistan were then in the process of developing their own nuclear capability (although this was at a very early stage in 1971).

Whilst this degree of selectivity may result in the omission of a conflict that another might deem important, the historical context and significance or otherwise of a given conflict or event can be no more than the personal view of the author. Accordingly, it is freely acknowledged that the responsibility for this work, and therefore for any consequent omissions, inaccuracies or misperceptions therein, rests finally and entirely with him. He therefore apologises in advance to any reader who might vainly seek an account of a favourite Cold War era campaign, crisis or conflict within its pages, but which has been omitted or afforded less than full treatment.

However, whilst obviating the need to document the course of each campaign or conflict in detail, and to omit some altogether, this selectivity also allows for an informed track back into those momentous years and a wider analysis on a case-by-case basis of the consequences and lessons of the Cold War campaigns and conflicts, and of the process of cause and effect. Then, on the premise that the most important function of history is to learn from it, Wars of the Cold War finally provides an assessment of some of the crises and conflicts that the post-Cold War world may be destined to experience in the twenty-first century.

Inevitably, an authoritative study of such a broad subject as the Cold War era involved extensive research, and the bibliography reflects this. In consequence of that, I am most grateful to all of the many authors, publishers, agents and other organisations and copyright holders who so readily agreed that I might reproduce extracts from their own works where appropriate. A number of specific acknowledgements are indicated at the bibliography. Although every reasonable effort was made to contact each one of the copyright holders involved, a very few proved to be entirely untraceable. Therefore, where such material has necessarily been included in Wars of the Cold War nonetheless, it has been fully referenced and credited on the basis of the information about the author and publisher as shown in the original source document or book, albeit that these publishing details must now be assumed realistically to be no longer current.

Finally, my particular thanks are due to Rod Dymott of Brassey’s for his continued support, advice and faith in my literary abilities. But, most importantly, I must conclude by thanking my former military colleague Ian Wilkinson for allowing me to inflict yet another draft manuscript upon him, just when the prospect of a somewhat more immediate military conflict was no doubt occupying much of his thoughts and time. The resultant text of Wars of the Cold Wars has benefited immeasurably from his informed, pragmatic and invariably constructive comments.

David Stone

INTRODUCTION

The true starting point of the Cold War might have been marked by any one of a number of historic events. Foremost among these was the famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, which illustrated so dramatically the rift that had occurred between East and West. Then again, perhaps it really all began with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, when the Soviet Union had finally to come to terms with the fact that the non-communist West had won the race to harness atomic power for military purposes. However, some would argue that the seeds of the Cold War had actually been planted some three decades earlier, with the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in the obscure Balkan town of Sarajevo, which triggered the First World War, precipitated the Russian Revolution, and subsequently spawned a communist superpower in the form of the Soviet Union.

Yet whatever the start point of the Cold War may truly be, it is undeniable that its principal focus throughout was always the struggle between the Soviets and their erstwhile Western Allies in the war against Nazi Germany: the United States, Great Britain and the British Empire, and France. And, although it later diverged from the Soviet form of communism, the People’s Republic of China also became an important player in the global struggle between communism and capitalism. Thus, when these great powers, together with the forces they controlled and the ideology they espoused, finally came physically and militarily into close proximity with one another, all that followed was more or less inevitable.

Accordingly, the start point of the Cold War may actually have been during the final days of a bright but still chilly spring of 1945, in the final days of the Second World War in Europe. The very first East and West ‘confrontation’ almost certainly took place on 25 April, when a patrol from the 69th US Infantry Division, led by a Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue, encountered a lone Soviet cavalryman near Stehla, a nondescript German village situated on the west bank of the Elbe, some twenty miles to the south-east of the town of Torgau. Significantly, Kotzebue’s subsequent radio report of the incident to his command post indicated that there had been ‘no casualties’! Next, on 27 April, the first officially recorded meeting of the Americans and the Russians took place. This happened when other soldiers of 69th US Infantry Division linked up with their Soviet allies of the 1st Ukrainian Army on the River Elbe at Torgau. The first such meeting of British and Russian troops did not occur until four days later. On that day, a group of weary soldiers of the British 6th Airborne Division, then under the command of General Ridgway’s 18th US Airborne Corps, were advancing rapidly along the north coast of Germany and had just seized the Baltic port of Wismar. They were continuing to push forward out of the town when they encountered ‘two motorcycle combinations, followed by two lease-lend American scout cars containing seven ragged soldiers and one buxom female soldier armed with a tommy-gun’.4 These turned out to be the leading troops of Marshal Rokossovsky’s 2nd Byelorussian Front of the Red Army. The time was about 9 p.m. on 1 May 1945.

After almost six years of war, the ground forces of the East had finally met those of the West, communism had met capitalism, and two mighty war machines had no option but to acknowledge and come to terms with each other’s existence. That acknowledgement was speedily followed by a growing awareness at all levels of the sheer military power and fundamental differences of ideology between the two great power blocs that had emerged from the Second World War.

Following that first meeting on the Baltic coast, the natural bonhomie and genuine comradeship of the ordinary soldiers of both sides – one serving the red star, the other the white star – was modified and transformed all too rapidly by their respective armies’ political masters. The change was first manifested by an uneasy reserve, then by a mutual suspicion, and finally by an open hostility that was destined to perpetuate for almost fifty years.

Ironically, however, throughout that time the only reliably recorded and direct combat between soldiers of the Red Army and the Western Allies occurred just two days later, on the evening of 3 May 1945. This was an entirely avoidable and rather sordid little Anglo-Soviet affair, which was precipitated by the arrival of a score of very drunk Russian soldiers at Wismar’s main hospital, by then occupied by soldiers of the British 7th Parachute Battalion. The Russians’ principal interest in the hospital that night was the large number of German Red Cross sisters and female auxiliaries who had earlier taken refuge inside. The immovable determination of the paratroopers to protect the women met the irresistible force of the Russian insistence on access to the hospital, and this soon degenerated into a short firefight that left six Russian soldiers lying dead on the cobbled street of the little German seaport.5

For the next forty-five years the Soviet Union and the West were locked into an undeclared state of war; but it was a war in which the main protagonists never again engaged in open combat, face-to-face, on land.6 It was in reality a war of many wars, fought out through a host of proxy conflicts that together comprised the wider Cold War – a period of conflict that for almost half a century affected the lives and fortunes of the majority of the world’s population. And wherever the subsequent conflict moved beyond the political and diplomatic arenas, there were to be found the soldiers, sailors and airmen of both sides: ready as always to answer their country’s call to arms, and to reinforce time and again the truth of the oft-quoted statement by Major General Karl Philip Gottlieb von Clausewitz that war is indeed ‘a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means’.7 To that axiom might be added the observation that in the modern age wars are also so often the evidence of moral weakness and professional failures on the part of politicians and diplomats inexperienced in the real implications and art of war; whose errors of judgement and responsibilities are then passed on to the military men for what may be – in some if not all cases – their less than ideal resolution by force of arms.

Now that the Cold War has finally drawn to an end, the events of those momentous years are rapidly being consigned to the past, to the texts of academics and to the political and military memoirs of those involved. Indeed, with the so-called hot wars in the Gulf in 1990–1, in the Balkans from 1995 and the plethora of low intensity military operations conducted under the auspices of the UN or NATO since 1990, the focus has increasingly relegated the Cold War to virtual irrelevance in light of the ‘new world order’ so beloved of many of today’s politicians. Even in military circles, the imperative to prepare for ‘today’s conflicts’ and the ‘sort of conflicts that we can expect in the future’ (those that primarily involve peacekeeping, peace support and peace enforcement operations, or the achievement of a satisfactory outcome primarily by the use of air power) are increasingly degrading the ability of many nations to wage war on a significant scale. And, for those politicians who postulate that this need will never arise again, it would perhaps be appropriate to remind them that if they learn no more than one lesson from history it should be that the only absolute certainty is that the future is entirely uncertain.

Typical of that uncertainty was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. Although its immediate categorisation by the United States and NATO as an ‘act of war’ would probably not now bear close and objective scrutiny, it effectively brought about an albeit fairly one-sided war between the in-place Taliban government of Afghanistan and the United States, the latter nation being supported in relatively small measure by Great Britain, and by a few of its other allies. But the future course of the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ is still very uncertain, as is the precise form of the forces needed to conduct it. There is a danger, however, that the long-term committal of forces to an open-ended campaign to suit these current needs will eventually further dissipate, degrade and diminish the skills of war-fighting that were developed and honed during the Cold War years. Then, when some as yet entirely unexpected and previously unimaginable threat manifests itself, the necessary military response may not be forth-coming.

There is, therefore, a very real risk of forgetting too quickly the experience of strategic and operational deterrence and warfare gained between 1945 and 1990. The risk also exists of losing sight of the fact that the Cold War was, in many theatres of operations, far from ‘cold’ in nature. Even at the epicentre of the conflict – in Central Europe – although no combat took place (notwithstanding that the populations of East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia might, with some justification, disagree with that statement!) the forces of East and West faced each other on a permanent war footing throughout the conflict: a fact that, ironically, provided the deterrent balance to ensure that a full scale ‘hot war’ never broke out. However, nobody should be under any illusion that these forces, on both sides of the Inner German Border (IGB), were other than entirely ready for immediate committal to combat. They lived with that individual and corporate commitment, and with the necessary levels of operational readiness and training to sustain it, through every day of their service. No official commemorative medal was struck by NATO or by its individual member states to mark the end of the Cold War, or to recognise military service during it. This unfortunate omission tends to diminish the contribution of hundreds of thousands of regular and conscripted servicemen and servicewomen for whom the Cold War was ‘their war’, just as the First and Second World Wars were, respectively, the wars of their grandparents and parents. The lack of any such tangible symbol of Cold War involvement inevitably gives credence to the view that this was a war that never was.

But of course such a perception would be entirely misplaced and factually very far from the truth. Those soldiers, sailors and airmen of all sides and many nations who fought in the steaming jungles of South-east Asia, in the sub-zero temperatures of Korea, in the rocky djebel of the Arabian Peninsula, at Suez and in the Sinai, in the mountains of Afghanistan, and in a score of other war zones across the world are testimony to the very real nature of this diverse war. And, while these easily recognisable and limited conflicts were being fought out to their often bloody end, the strategic bombers of the US, British and Soviet air forces played cat and mouse with each other in the skies above, while the submarines of the nuclear powers conducted their own game of hide and seek in the cold darkness deep in the world’s oceans. Then there were the missiles: thousands of nuclear-tipped rockets, poised ready to be launched from their underground silos, or from their mobile launchers. And throughout, there were the mighty armies and air forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact which faced each other across the IGB – the Iron Curtain that Churchill had so vividly identified in March 1946.

Thus the Cold War was played out simultaneously at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. The ultimate aim of what became by default the new ‘Great Game’8 was clear to all, but the rules of the conflict were regularly modified as the war progressed and as the international situation and political agendas of the major players changed, and then changed again and again.

CHAPTER ONE

1945: THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONFLICT

The world that found itself finally at peace following the defeat of Japan in August 1945 was very different from the one that had taken the road to war in the late summer of 1939. Although the defeat of the German Axis powers and subsequently of Japan meant that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had won the war, the new task of winning the peace would prove in different ways to be just as difficult and infinitely more complex than had been that of confronting the territorial aspirations and excesses of fascism and Japanese imperialism. Consequently, the goal of peace in the post-1945 era proved every bit as elusive as it had been throughout all of history, as the long and difficult process that began while the radioactive dust was still settling on to the debris of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was punctuated all too frequently by the many conflicts, campaigns and wars of the Cold War period.

In 1945, with the notable exception of the United States, many of the world’s countries were metaphorically, economically and physically in bits, and the task of picking up the pieces, rebuilding and rehabilitating, was indeed formidable. In much of the world – but particularly in many of the overseas territories of the European powers – new political movements and a surge of nationalism provided an early indication that this process would produce end-state situations that were very far removed from those that had existed prior to 1939. But, amid the post-war euphoria and general sense of relief of late 1945, relatively few leaders of the once-great European powers had the vision or inclination to comprehend this; or to understand the embryo new world order and the serious implications of resisting the developing international trends and political movements within it. Many in Europe also failed to understand or accept the pre-eminent position that the United States now occupied in the world. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a number of influential politicians and decision-makers in Washington, supported by a significant groundswell of post-war public opinion, were determined that American lives should never again be sacrificed in the defence of Europe, or to preserve what they perceived to be an outdated, undemocratic and un-American system of colonialism and imperialism.

In May 1945 the ‘Victory in Europe’ (VE) celebrations were conducted against a backdrop of destruction, economic collapse, mass migration, political unrest and a future that was anything but certain. Upon this chaotic situation were laid the foundations of the Cold War. Almost all of mainland Europe had suffered the horrors of ground warfare and foreign occupation. Of the principal nations, only Britain had escaped the ultimate trauma of invasion and occupation, although the German bombing campaign had torn the heart out of many British towns and cities. Some areas of London that escaped the massed air raids of the blitz finally succumbed to German V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks in the closing months of the war. Overseas, a British empire still existed, although a wind of change was wafting across Britain’s overseas territories and gaining strength – spurred on by a growing tide of nationalism. Meanwhile, Britain was still a nation in arms, with its economy and industry entirely geared to the war effort. Consequently, Britain emerged from the war as militarily the most powerful West European nation. But after six years at war the country was virtually bankrupt, and the post-war Labour government faced a Herculean task for which it was in many ways ill-prepared; a situation exacerbated by the sweeping programme of social and welfare reforms that the new government was determined to introduce. In order to meet its funding commitments, Britain borrowed 4.3 billion US dollars in autumn 1945, and this loan placed Britain in debt to the United States for at least the next sixty years.9

France also suffered very extensive war damage, although Paris had escaped relatively unscathed. The destruction was especially apparent in northern France, consequent upon the Allied landings in Normandy and the breakout campaign after D-Day. But whereas the physical destruction was repairable, the human damage was less easily rectified, and with the coming of peace the population of France began to come to terms with its recent past. Collaborators, informers, anti-Semitism, Vichy, and the fact of the French military defeat in 1940 all made for a divided and unhappy nation – one in which the communists (who had played an important role in the resistance movement) prospered better than anywhere else in Western Europe. France also had a pre-war overseas empire, and in 1945 the Paris government fervently desired both to retain it and to regain its former position as the major continental European power. In both these aspirations it was destined to fail, as its military defeat, followed by Vichy’s policies and performance in the war, created external perceptions of France’s post-war impotence that at first ignited and then fanned the flames of nationalism in its overseas territories. Nowhere was this more evident than in its territories in French Indochina and North Africa.

Throughout continental Western Europe the story was much the same: ruined countries, shattered lives, wrecked industries, and destroyed roads, railways and infrastructure. And everywhere new governments with new political agendas set about the monumental task of reconstruction, with varying degrees of success.

Germany had been the final focus of the war in Europe, and very many of its towns and cities had been reduced to rubble. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, the Ruhr and a hundred other once-proud centres of German culture, learning and industry were almost unrecognisable under the towering piles of smashed bricks and broken concrete that had virtually obliterated their former glory and buried the bodies of thousands of their soldiers and citizens. Much of Germany’s population was traumatised, homeless and starving. The country’s industrial base had been comprehensively destroyed, and a great deal of the machinery which had survived in the zones now occupied by US, British and French forces was in any case destined to be removed to the Soviet Union as war reparations, in accordance with the agreements made by the Allies at Potsdam – although a reciprocal undertaking given by Stalin to send food from the mainly agricultural Soviet zone of occupation in eastern Germany to help feed the Germans living in the western zones was not honoured.

Everywhere in Europe people were on the move – possibly in excess of thirty million of them in 1945. The Jews who had survived the concentration camps and now sought new homes and new lives in Palestine, America and other countries were an identifiable group that attracted much attention (and would provide the focus of much more during the next five decades). But there were also thousands of demobilised German soldiers, liberated prisoners of war and slave labourers, former impressed foreign workers, homeless refugees and a multiplicity of other categories of displaced persons (DP) of every nationality on the roads and few surviving railways of Europe. Although their plight was often desperate, these were people who had retained a measure of control over their own destiny. However, there were also many thousands more in enforced transit, due to the Soviet policy of relocating to Siberia and elsewhere many people from the Baltic, East Prussia, the Crimea and the Caucasus, and from Karelia. The Potsdam agreements and other accommodations between the ‘Big Three’ allies – many of which were undoubtedly naïve on the part of the Western Allies and patently pandered to Stalin’s agenda – produced numerous inequities which further exacerbated the problem. Forces that had fought for the Germans, together with some of those who had fought for the Western Allies, now found their homelands under Soviet domination, and their forcible repatriation by the West to face death or imprisonment at the hands of the communists was one of the less honourable stories of the time. The Soviets’ mass eviction of the ethnic German populations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland added to the turmoil and led to the death of more than three million ethnic Germans in the immediate post-war period.

Much of the blame for the continued turbulence in Europe was due to Stalin’s fear of attack by the West, and to his need to preserve the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) internally, while simultaneously expanding communism (and Soviet control and influence) internationally. In Soviet-occupied eastern Germany communist control was both obsessive and absolute, and during the few years following the German defeat communists seized control in Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania, which enabled the Soviet Union to create an almost unbroken defensive shield on its western borders, a shield that was later transformed into a formal defensive alliance. But elsewhere in Europe – in Greece, in France and in Italy – the communists were less successful. Despite its initial occupation by the Soviets in 1945 and its willing participation in the German cause in 1939, Austria finally emerged from the post-war turmoil as a neutral state.

Meanwhile, far from the devastated countryside of central Europe, much of Asia and the Far East had also suffered enormously from the war with Japan. Many of the towns and cities of the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Indochina, Korea, the Pacific islands and the southern region of China had sustained significant damage, as had the great cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Japan itself had ultimately paid a particularly high price for its wartime policies, becoming the first country in the world to suffer an atomic attack, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In Asia and the Far East, just as in Europe, people set about the task of rebuilding their lives following the Japanese surrender in August 1945. And in many of the countries of South-east Asia, much of which had endured a Japanese occupation unparalleled in modern times for its inhumanity and savagery, the inability of the European powers to counter the Japanese aggression had been well noted by those who now sought a new future for their nations. Foremost among these were communist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung; the latter already engaged in an epic struggle with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists for control of China. Indeed, much of the conflict to come would centre upon South-east Asia, where the Cold War contest between East and West, communism and capitalism, was be fought out in a succession of proxy wars.

In 1945 the different circumstances of the two superpowers – one already established, the other rapidly emerging – could not have been more distinct. By and large, the United States had had a relatively ‘good war’ following its late entry to the conflict after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. By then Europe had already endured two years of warfare, during which US industry had benefited enormously from supporting the war against Germany through the lend-lease arrangement with Britain. It had also begun the process of reinvigorating a military machine that successive budget cuts in the 1930s had left with a capability that was in many respects no greater than that of Germany under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Versailles. After some uncertain starts (in the Philippines and in North Africa), the US armed forces had generally acquitted themselves well, and their casualties during the war had not been excessive. But, most importantly, at no time had the continental United States been subjected to direct enemy action. Therefore, no part of that huge country (apart from Pearl Harbor) had been bombed, shelled or occupied by enemy forces throughout the entire war. Small wonder perhaps that a serious terrorist attack on a sunny 11 September 2001 in New York, fifty-six years after the end of the Second World War, should have so traumatised the government and people of the most powerful nation in the world.

America’s Second World War experience contrasted starkly with that of the Soviet Union. Some twenty-seven million Soviet servicemen and civilians had died since 1941. The western Soviet Union had suffered an oppressive enemy occupation founded upon German ideological and racial philosophies that espoused the evils of Bolshevism and the ethnic inferiority of the Russian and Slav peoples. The levels of destruction and the almost total disregard of the invaders for human life on the Eastern Front reflected the very different nature of the German army’s campaign in Russia from that it had fought in the West. In the Soviet Union, the Second World War was and still is termed ‘The Great Patriotic War’, with the additional words ‘against fascism’ often added. The significant differences between the situation and perceptions of the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945 played a defining role in establishing their future priorities, policies, roles and destinies during the Cold War. A post-war American commentator noted:

There were only two first-class powers in the world at the end of the war. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had harnessed their vast resources in people and industrial capacity to win the war for the [Allied cause]. While the United States became the ‘arsenal of democracy’ to equip and sustain much of the Allied war effort, the Soviet Union made a Herculean effort to focus its industry on war production and gained the wherewithal for its mass armies to grind down and overwhelm the enemy. In some respects, World War II represents a culmination of some of the main trends in American history in that it was pre-eminently a war of mass and concentration militarily, industrial capacity (the first of the so-called ‘gross national product wars’), and organizational and managerial necessity, all the things at which Americans had historically come to excel. So great were the resources and managerial capacity of the United States that it could fight two major but separate wars [in Northwest Europe and in the Pacific region] and still raise its standard of living appreciably. Built with the sweat and blood of its people, the Soviet war effort was cruder but still resulted in the emergence of a true nation-state possessing military power second only to that of the United States, coupled with the confidence born of having beaten in open battle the world’s most modern and impressive [German] war machine.10

In 1945 the world was still populated by the great military forces that had waged the war. Whilst the United States, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union all had millions of personnel under arms, America was the only nation that possessed the atomic bomb. Now, with Germany and Japan defeated, the Western Allies at last set about the complex process of demobilising and repatriating their forces scattered across the world. However, the bulk of the Soviet ground forces were deployed as occupation troops in the eastern part of Europe and the western Soviet Union, and Stalin decided to maintain in existence and (in many instances) in place the Soviet war machine that had been developed so assiduously since 1941. The Soviet leader had looked pragmatically at the nature of the new world order, and had concluded that there would be further work for the armed forces of the Soviet Union in the years ahead. As 1945 drew to a close the opening moves of the Cold War were already under way.

CHAPTER TWO

BACKGROUND TO CONFLICT: THE AGE OF THE SUPERPOWER

Never the Twain: The United States and the Soviet Union

The many conflicts and campaigns of the Cold War period were all conducted against the background of the global power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. This strategic contest was affected by virtually every one of the more visible armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 1990. Indeed, the 1991 Gulf War – although it took place after what was generally acknowledged to be the end of the Cold War – was directly influenced by it; for had the Cold War not concluded by 1990 it is unlikely that the coalition’s campaign in Kuwait and Iraq could ever have taken place. The fact that it did is perhaps one of the best pieces of evidence that the Cold War had indeed ended by 1990, although it is also a moot point whether or not Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would have been possible had the Cold War still been in progress; with the Soviet Union as strong in 1990 as it had been in former times.

As well as the international politics, power-plays, brinkmanship and diplomacy that characterised Soviet–US relations throughout the Cold War, their parallel and complementary technological contest was at its most visible in the struggle for nuclear dominance. Although the nuclear balance was maintained and nuclear deterrence worked (inasmuch as the oft-predicted nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union never took place) the considerable holdings of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, both strategically and (later) as tactical or battlefield weapons, was an ever-present backdrop for everything else that happened between 1945 and 1990. It follows that the specific campaigns and conflicts that occurred during the Cold War can only be understood in the context of the superpower contest and later that between the two great Cold War alliances: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Without the titanic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union many of the localised or limited wars that flared up between 1945 and 1990 would simply not have happened, and the world of the early twenty-first century would undoubtedly have been a very different place from that which it is today.

Blame for the East–West confrontation that emerged at the end of the Second World War cannot be attributed to either side exclusively. The Soviet Union under Stalin was to a great extent a prisoner both of recent events of 1941–5 and of its old pre-1917 imperial history. These on the one hand underlined the threat posed by the West and need to maintain an effective buffer against a future invasion, while on the other they indicated the need to acquire territory and worldwide influence. Meanwhile, the United States was not reticent in trumpeting its military, technological and economic pre-eminence. It had provided the military forces that ensured the final victory against the Germans in the West. It had won its own war against the Japanese in the Pacific. To a significant extent it had underwritten and resourced the Allied campaigns in both the East and the West. Its scientists had won the race to produce the first viable atomic weapon; and American industry had benefited enormously from the government contracts to manufacture vast quantities of war matériel for the US forces and their allies. The post-war Marshall Aid Plan, whilst vital to the regeneration of Europe, also served to emphasise the economic strength of the United States and the almost total dependence of Western Europe on America for decades to come. And unlike the Soviet Union, Europe and the Far East, the continental United States had been physically untouched by hostile action. Only Hawaii had experienced the horrors of war at first-hand.

In victorious post-war America a fierce belief in the power of capitalism was matched by a growing ideological hostility to communism and all that it represented. For the American people, communism threatened their way of life, their future prosperity, and the continued global supremacy of the nation. Small wonder then that President Harry S. Truman, more a politician and less a statesmen than his predecessor, set the United States firmly on a course to contain the communist threat wherever it manifested itself: a course that was maintained by his successors into the 1980s. Small wonder also that Stalin and all of his successors until Gorbachev in the late 1980s identified the United States as the principal post-war threat to a Soviet state that had, since 1917, been firmly founded on the principles and practices of Marxist-Leninism. The collapse of the Nationalist Chinese in 1949 only served to increase American fears of a red tide of communism expanding from the Soviet Union and the newly established People’s Republic of China to engulf a United States that had been largely untouched by foreign powers and influences ever since it gained its independence from Great Britain in 1783.11 That fear fuelled the obsessive anti-communist purges by Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy from 1950, which in turn reinforced the Kremlin’s perception of the antipathy of the United States to the ideology on which the Soviet system was based.

The creation of NATO in 1949 provided the West with an effective defensive barrier against communist expansion westward and, seen through Western eyes, it was a benign and logical extension of the military co-operation that the Allies had exercised through the Second World War. In Moscow, however, it was viewed as an offensive alliance – one underwritten by the American nuclear capability – designed to restart and complete the crusade against Bolshevism begun by Nazi Germany in 1941. This Soviet assessment gained additional substance with the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to full NATO membership in 1955. The creation of the Warsaw Pact in May 1955 was, therefore, a not unreasonable Soviet response to a NATO Alliance that had by then existed for almost six years, and which had just extended membership to the state that had invaded Russia and the Soviet Union twice within the previous four decades.12 It also followed the January 1954 announcement by American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles of the US doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation, which took full account of the Soviet Union’s first successful thermonuclear explosion on 12 August 1953.13 Meanwhile, albeit under UN auspices, the United States and others had just fought a major war against communist North Korea and its Chinese allies, while in Malaya the British were engaged in a successful campaign against communist insurgents. Both conflicts could reasonably be regarded by Moscow as evidence of the West’s readiness to use armed force to confront communism far from the United States and Europe. And, even though the Korean War had cost the Democrats the 1952 presidential election, the new Republican administration, headed by Dwight D. Eisenhower and his unequivocally anti-communist Secretary of State, gave the Soviets no reason to believe that American attitudes and policies were about to change.

During the late 1950s NATO and the Warsaw Pact sought to strengthen their forces both quantitatively and qualitatively, with the Soviet Union striving ever more vigorously to close the considerable East–West nuclear capability gap. The Warsaw Pact also provided a means by which Moscow could exert closer ideological and military control over the Soviet satellite states. In East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 it demonstrated that it would maintain that control by force of arms if necessary. In both cases, but especially so in Hungary, the failure of the Western powers to intervene indicated that a de facto acceptance of East–West spheres of influence and interest was beginning to emerge from the game of international relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The development of the Warsaw Pact also provided some reassurance within the Kremlin at a time when Moscow was still experiencing the unsatisfactory and potentially destabilising period of so-called ‘collective leadership’ that followed the death of Stalin in 1953. From then until February 1955 the Soviet Union was ruled jointly by Georgii Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov. Malenkov resigned as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1955 and by 1957 Khrushchev’s position as overall leader of the Soviet Union was assured.

While the Soviets consolidated the strength of the Warsaw Pact, the United States continued to pursue its anti-communism policies, and to expand its own power and influence beyond Europe through treaties and organisations – such as the 1954 treaty signed with the beleaguered Nationalist Chinese government in Formosa, the South-east Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) also in 1954, and the Baghdad Pact in 1955. Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the late-1950s also saw growing US involvement in the former French Indochina, which led it into one of the greatest of the Cold War conflicts: the Vietnam War.

However, US support for its NATO allies Britain and France, and for Israel, did not extend to the Anglo-French attack on Egypt in 1956 to recapture and safeguard the strategically vital Suez Canal. On that occasion Washington’s objections to an invasion by two former European imperial and colonial powers even overrode the fact of Soviet military support for Egypt and Moscow’s hostility to the invasion – the failure of which was finally attributable to the pressure exerted upon the British and French governments by Secretary of State Dulles. Nevertheless, only two years later, in July 1958, America and Britain acted in concert to deal with another crisis in the Middle East centred on the Baghdad Pact region. On this occasion, the Iraqi royal family was overthrown by a coup, and the leftist takeover of Iraq was countered by US marines landing on the beaches of the Lebanon to deal with communist forces in Beirut and at Tripoli. Concurrently, elements of the same British 16th Independent Parachute Brigade that had landed in the Suez Canal Zone in 1956 parachuted into the Jordanian capital Amman to support the authority of King Hussein. During 1959, Iraq formally left the Baghdad Pact organisation, which subsequently adopted the better-known name of the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO).

But throughout the Cold War the main focus of East–West tension was always the Central Region of Europe, and within that region the epicentre of the undeclared war was invariably Berlin. The tensions and power struggle between East and West, and the imminent crisis within East Germany in mid-1961, culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August that year. Thus was created a physical Iron Curtain across a divided Europe that more than matched the metaphorical image provided so eloquently by Winston Churchill during his historic speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946.

The existence of the Berlin Wall emphasised the clear line that had been drawn between the communist world and the West – the ‘Free World’. Shortly thereafter the undeclared but de facto existence of Soviet and US spheres of influence was graphically illustrated by the only direct Soviet–US armed confrontation of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The world was possibly closer to a full-scale nuclear war on that occasion than at any other time during the Cold War. However, the lessons of that crisis undoubtedly assisted the development of better arrangements for the management of these ultimate weapons of destruction – even though it did not check the accelerating nuclear arms race of the 1960s. But above all else Cuba did demonstrate a grudging acceptance by Khrushchev that Cuba was placed both geographically and strategically well within the US sphere of vital interest. Thus was the nuclear balance – the balance of power or of terror – refined, as the two superpowers continued to learn the art of co-existing in the nuclear age.

Two years later, on 16 October 1964, the sleeping dragon of China awoke to the flash of light, blast and heat produced by the first successful test detonation of its own atomic device, which was followed on 17 June 1967 by its first thermonuclear explosion. Although it had a great deal of catching up to do, communist China – with its huge population and commensurately large conventional armed forces – had effectively laid its claim to being the third world superpower in waiting. The emergence of China as a superpower made the international scene infinitely more complex, not least due to the ideological differences and worsening relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union – and their various proxy and client states – during the 1960s. The involvement of both countries in the so-called wars of liberation, insurgencies and limited wars in the Middle East, South-east Asia and Africa also created numerous situations in which the United States, the Soviet Union and communist China became engaged in proxy wars during the 1960s and 1970s.

In a number of those conflicts described as ‘insurgencies’ the descriptive line between ‘nationalist’ and ‘communist’ was often so blurred that it became virtually indistinguishable. Whilst all of these lesser conflicts influenced to varying extents the global and ideological struggle between the superpowers, their true significance for the Cold War often lay in the entirely practical strategic advantages (such as deep-sea ports, airbases, access to oil and minerals and so on) that either the United States or the Soviet Union derived from the successful campaign of its client state or insurgent organisation. These wars also provided useful opportunities for the superpowers to test in combat – but by proxy – much of the new military technology and equipment that both of them developed as the Cold War progressed.

The Soviet policy of supporting wars of liberation wherever they were waged was a direct contributor to its second priority of reducing the power and influence of the United States and NATO. The achievement of this second priority in turn enabled achievement of the Soviets’ first priority – the security of the Soviet Union and communist bloc against any and all forms of ideological and military attack; and central to this overriding need was Soviet awareness of the constantly growing nuclear capability of the United States.

At the conclusion of the US military involvement in Vietnam in 1973, the way was open for new relationships to be formed between the communist and capitalist worlds. Significant political changes had taken place in Washington through the 1960s, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the escalating media (and consequently domestic) opposition to the Vietnam War – especially after Tet 1968 – which finally destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson politically and personally, and facilitated Richard M. Nixon’s presidential victory in 1968. Then, in August 1974, the very institution of US president was severely damaged by Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate affair, when Gerald Ford succeeded him. Rightly or wrongly, the office of president had been seriously diminished in world eyes. Throughout the Ford administration, and that of Jimmy Carter which followed it, America was perceived by the Soviet Union to be a weaker state – politically, militarily, economically and morally – than the superpower that had confronted it prior to 1968. Although but one incident, the seizing of the US Embassy staff in Tehran as hostages by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries on 4 November 1979, followed by the ill-fated rescue attempt by Delta Force in late-April the following year, exemplified the decline in America’s power since the 1960s, that of its military in particular.14 As if to emphasise this fact, just after Christmas 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Only when President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 did the Soviet Union recognise in America a resurgence of the superpower qualities with which it had been familiar in previous decades. The election of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom in 1979 also restored that country’s economic and military fortunes. Together, the United States and Great Britain at the start of the 1980s presented a new, united and forward-looking challenge to communism that had lain dormant for almost a decade. Although not by definition a ‘Cold War conflict’, the British victory against the Argentines in the Falklands War of 1982 provided a major boost for Britain’s armed forces and for the country as a whole. However, the Falklands campaign also highlighted numerous war-fighting deficiencies in all three services and provided justification for remedying these matters. This in turn led to a real terms increase in UK defence expenditure and so raised the overall operational capability of the British armed forces to meet their wider Cold War challenges and NATO obligations effectively.

The renewed strength of the Anglo-American alliance during this period was a vital contributor to the eventual end of the Cold War. But although the Western Alliance’s final Cold War victory came at the end of the 1980s, the less confrontational approach of the United States during the previous decade had also enabled it to engage in substantive negotiations with the Soviet leadership with a view to containing and managing the vast numbers of nuclear weapons that both sides had by then accumulated.

A Superpower in Embryo: The People’s Republic of China

Early in the 1970s, in a major transformation of US foreign policy that had only been made possible by the steadily reducing American military involvement in South Vietnam, a bilateral rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) took place. In 1972, in an historic move, the then President Richard Nixon visited Beijing and conducted face-to-face talks with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. This momentous change of American foreign policy subsequently reduced US direct military involvement in Taiwan and also signalled Washington’s acceptance of the PRC as representative of the whole of the Chinese people. And this in turn facilitated communist China’s recognition and acceptance as a full member of the UN.

Understandably, these improved relations between Washington and Beijing did not sit well with Moscow; where the growing threat posed by the emerging superpower on its southern border was viewed with increasing concern. Nixon’s visit to Beijing came just three years after a major Sino–Soviet border clash concerning Damansky Island in the late summer of 1969, in which more than 200 had died; and other sporadic incidents had continued to occur in the border region. China’s readiness to resort to force and attack another communist state was again evident five years later, when it invaded Soviet-supported Vietnam in February 1979. On this occasion some 20,000 communist Chinese and 27,000 Vietnamese died. Previously, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had engaged UN forces in Korea from 1950 to 1953, had suppressed the Tibetan uprising in 1954 to 1959, and had clashed with India in a border dispute from April to September 1965. The Soviets, therefore, had some cause for concern over the developing Sino-American relationship from 1972.

Moscow’s concern was magnified considerably by the fact that China had carried out its first atomic explosion in October 1964. Beijing had followed this success with its first thermonuclear explosion in the summer of 1967 and China’s first hydrogen bomb came into service about a year later. But even more significantly, the PRC had its first ICBM operational in 1971. If the new Sino–US rapprochement were ever translated into any form of military alliance it would mean that the Soviet Union was effectively surrounded. To the west were NATO’s European states – notably the nuclear-capable United Kingdom and France, and the US and West German forces in the FRG. To the south lay China, by 1972 also a nuclear power. Meanwhile, over the North Pole and to the east was the United States with its huge nuclear arsenal. During the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s perceptions of nuclear encirclement were further exacerbated by the development of nuclear capabilities by India, Pakistan and – it was generally assessed – Israel; although it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would be a primary target for an ICBM from any of these three countries.