Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

#116 – Red Scare Part 2

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 03:16:22 +0000

In April 1919, US authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment. One of those was Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. He decided it was the work of Russian Communists, so he ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch The Palmer Raids. And do you know who was in charge of the Palmer Raids? A 24-year-old American patriot – J. Edgar Hoover. Within three months after taking office, he controlled files on more than sixty thousand people. Hoover began to prepare for an American counterrevolution. Unfortunately, the Russian Communists had nothing to do with the 1919 bombings. It was the work of Italian anarchists. But that didn’t stop Hoover from turning the Communists into Public Enemy Number One. Even though he would himself say, years later, that the Communist Party’s influence on American life in the 1920s was “virtually nonexistent”. And even though the new Attorney General in 1924 instructed Hoover that the Bureau should not concern itself with the “political or other opinions of individuals”. JEH didn’t let that stop him.

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#115 – Red Scare Part 1

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 21:47:29 +0000

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties. HUAC is best remembered for the Alger Hiss case and the Hollywood blacklists. But the American fear of socialism and communism pre-dates HUAC by a century. In large part, it was rooted in RWG’s trying to prevent social progress. It also had some racist elements. After the Russian Revolution, Americans went to Russia to fight for the Monarchy. In 1919, there was the Overman Committee, a senate subcommittee to investigate Bolshevism in the United States.

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#114 Operation Lea

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 04:42:35 +0000

Finally, on Oct 7, 1947, the French made their offensive into the Viet Bac region: Operation Léa – aka Princess Leia. So-called because it was a smart, feisty, brave diplomat and warrior of a plan. But because he had less troops than he wanted, Valluy scaled down his plans. General Raoul Salan, the guy in charge of the operation, predicted it would all be over in three weeks.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED AGAIN. The Vietminh faded quietly into the jungle. Meanwhile Bao Dai talks to the French about forming an alternative government.

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#113 Toxic Nuts

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 22:53:06 +0000

Ho wonders aloud to a journalist why the Vietnamese were not being given the same opportunity as the Philippines, who had just been given their independence from the US, or India, which had just won its independence from the UK.

All the Americans seem to care about is whether or not he’s a Communist.

Meanwhile French Minister of War Paul Coste-Floret declared, “There is no more military problem in Indochina. The success of our arms is complete.”
And France has Madagascar problems involving toxic nuts.

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#112 Keyser HO-ze

Cameron Reilly — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 02:39:46 +0000

Ho and his team disappear into the jungle north of Hanoi. The French think they have won. George Marshall dithers.

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#111 – The War Begins

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 03:18:43 +0000

After the Haiphong incident, Ho started preparing Hanoi for an attack. First, he made a public speech appealing to the French to withdraw their troops.

They ignored him.

“If those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it,” declared French General Valluy.

Ho, Giap and Truong Chinh came up with a three stage plan, borrowed from Mao. And so the First Indochina War begins in earnest.

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#110 – Domino Theory

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 04:12:19 +0000

Vietnam. 1947.

The U.S. Consul in Saigon, Charles Reed, is the first American official to use the term “domino theory”. He’s talking about what will happen in Cambodia and Laos if Cochin China falls to the VietMinh, who he wrongly concludes are taking orders from Moscow.

Meanwhile Ho is playing Good Cop Bad Cop while making preparations for war. While the French are convinced the whole thing will be over in a matter of weeks, membership in local militia and guerrilla units from Giap’s “Combat Villages” reach almost one million people.

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#109 – The Haiphong Incident

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 23:14:36 +0000

Vietnam. Late 1946. The gears of war are turning. One President commits suicide. Another continues to fight for a peaceful settlement. A new government is formed. Then the French army in Indochina decides to take matters into its own hands. They seize a Chinese junk in Haiphong harbour – a deliberate provocation. The Vietminh fire on the French. The French respond by bombing the city. French Indochina High Commissioner d’Argenlieu made a bold prediction, especially for a Frenchman: “We will never retreat or surrender.”

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#108 – The First Indochina War (Part V)

Cameron Reilly — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 23:42:53 +0000

Ho Chi Minh goes to Paris for the big sit down with the new French government. But right from the start, things do not go as planned. Meanwhile, the United States are doing their best to ignore the situation. And Ho finally gives in and admits publicly that this is going to end up in a war and tells the story of the tiger and the elephant. Meanwhile, back in Vietnam, Giap is consolidating Viet Minh power. And a religious mystic is assassinated.

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#107 – The First Indochina War (Part IV)

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 22:18:03 +0000

Ho Chi Minh agrees to go to Paris for a second round of talks with the French about the independence of Vietnam. But just before he is due to leave, the French High Commissioner in Vietnam screws him over. And then, the next day, the French government collapses. Ho goes anyway, but has to spend a few weeks in the luxury seaside resort of Biarritz waiting for the new French government to get its shit together. While there, he visits Lourdes and hopes for a miracle.

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#106 – Andrew Roberts, Churchill

Cameron Reilly — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 05:23:20 +0000

Andrew Roberts has a huge new biography out on England’s favourite son, Winston Churchill, and he was nice enough to come on the show to answer a few of our questions about the man. You may remember Andrew talked to Cameron and David about his Napoleon biography a few years ago.

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#105 – The First Indochina War (Part III)

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 22:00:41 +0000

In Hanoi, a new provisional coalition government was established on January 1, 1946. Ho Chi Minh was to be named president and Nguyen Hai Than from the nationalist VNQDD party as vice president. The Vietminh and the Chinese controlled the north. The French controlled the South, with the full support of the Americans and British, and they prepared to send troops to the north as well. On March 6, the Vietminh and the French, under intense Chinese pressure, signed a “Preliminary Convention,” wherein the French recognized the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state” within the Indochinese Federation and French Union. Everyone who met Ho came away impressed with his sincerity, intelligence and commitment to his cause. Perhaps surprisingly, the one person who wasn’t supporting Ho was Stalin, even though Ho was leading the first Communist revolution outside of the USSR.

Here’s a picture of the seahorse for reference.

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#104 – The First Indochina War (Part II)

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 22:56:36 +0000

Peter Dewey was the first of nearly 60,000 Americans to be killed in Vietnam. Truman sells out the Vietnamese to keep De Gaulle happy. And the French arrive back in their old colony.

Here’s a picture of the seahorse for reference.

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#103 – The First Indochina War (Part I)

Cameron Reilly — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 00:37:18 +0000

After Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in September 1945, the British and Chinese troops arrived in Saigon and Hanoi to disarm the Japanese and prepare the return of the French – and the shooting begins. Some scholars thing that *this* was the beginning of the First Indochina War. Meanwhile, Ho continues to try to get Truman’s support. But who will Truman stand behind? A people wanting self-determination? Or the French colonialists?

Here’s a picture of the seahorse for reference.

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#102 – Ho Chi Minh VI

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 03:39:52 +0000

* As they grew stronger, Giáp’s forces took more territory and captured more towns
* And then on 15 August they heard that the Japanese Emperor had declared his country’s unconditional surrender to the allies.
* Unfortunately for Ho and Giap, the U.S. had a new President.
* Truman didn’t care, or maybe even know, about FDR’s plans for Indochina.
* And the French, of course, saw their opportunity to get in good with the new administration.
* And they wanted to make sure they would be able to reclaim colonial control after the war.
* The Truman administration wanted France to help them block Soviet expansion after the war.
* And so they decided to allow France to take back Indochina.
* When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not raise the issue of trusteeship for Indochina.
* On the contrary, U.S. secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured French foreign minister Georges Bidault that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the U.S. government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.”
* A report prepared for Harry Truman on June 2 acknowledged that “independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong” but declared that “the United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina.”
* When Truman met Chiang Kai-shek in Washington some weeks later, he dismissed any notion of trusteeship for Indochina.
* So much for The Atlantic Charter.
* Then came the Potsdam conference.
* DeGaulle wasn’t invited, because he annoyed the fuck out of everyone.
* And because he’d sent forces to the old French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, despite the Allies telling him not to.
* And at Potsdam the Vietnamese got well and truly shafted.
* In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divide the country in half at the 16th parallel.
* Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same in the south.
* And they agreed to return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina).
* Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia will once again become French colonies following the removal of the Japanese.
* But in the meantime, the Chinese occupation of the north meant the Vietnamese had time to consolidate their position before the French came back.
* And the fact that China and Britain needed to do the cleaning up of the Japanese reinforced the idea in the minds of the Vietnamese that France was now a second rate power.
* Then, when Japan surrendered in August, it created a power vacuum which the Viet Minh were able to exploit.
* As Ho had always said, they had to wait for the right moment to strike.
* And this was it.
* DeGaulle, in the meantime, made a typically clueless speech.
* On August 15, he sent a message from “the Mother Country to the Indochinese Union,” expressing France’s “joy, solicitude, and gratitude” for Indochina’s “loyalty to France” and her resistance to the Japanese.
* Even as he uttered those words, however, in the jungles of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh readied to make a triumphant entry into Hanoi.
* Their message to the crowds awaiting them: With Japan defeated and France prostrate, the moment of liberation was at hand.
* Hanoi is a city in the north of Vietnam.
* Near the coast.
* The name means “inside the river”
* Hanoi has been inhabited since at least 3000 BCE
* And was the administrative center of the colony of French Indochina.
* The French had built a new part of the city which was in Baron Haussmann, the man who designed modern Paris
* It had wide boulevards, shady trees, an opera house and formal gardens, French shops, sidewalk cafes.
* It was the Paris of Asia.
* Long Biên Bridge, built in 1899-1902 by the architects Daydé & Pillé of Paris, at that time, one of the longest bridges in Asia 1.68 kilometres (1.04 mi)
* And it was there in Hanoi on a hot September day in 1945, in front of hundreds of thousands, that Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence.
* Ho was 55.
* It was his first time in Hanoi.
* He had travelled four days from his base to get there.
* By foot, boat and, because he was still sick, being carried in a stretcher.
* Giap tells the story:
* The strain had an effect on his health. He fell ill. For several days, in spite of the fatigue and the fever, he pushed himself and continued his work. Every day in coming to make my report, I worried about his condition. Invariably he responded: “It will pass. Come on in and bring me up to date.” But I clearly saw that he was weakening and had lost considerable weight. One day, I found him in a state of crisis, delirious with fever. We were terribly short of medicine, just had some aspirin and quinine tablets. He took them, but they had no effect. Ordinarily, except for his moments of repose, he never lay down. Now he lay on his cot for hours in a coma. Of all those who worked habitually by his side I was the only one who had stayed at Tan Trao, He was so tired one night that when I suggested that I stay the night with him, insisting that I was free, he opened his eyes and nodded his head slightly in agreement.
* The black night and the jungle held our little hut on the mountainside in a vice. Each time that Uncle Ho recovered his lucidity, he returned to the current situation: “The circumstances are favorable to us. We must at all costs seize independence. We must be ready for any sacrifice, even if the entire chain of the Central Mountains must catch fire.” When he could put a little order in his thoughts, he insisted on the points that preoccupied him: “In guerrilla war, when the movement rises, it is necessary to take advantage of it to push further, to expand and create solid bases, in preparation for critical times.” At that moment I refused to believe that he had confided in me his last thoughts, but on later reflection, I told myself that he felt so weak that he was giving me his final recommendations. The moments of lucidity and agitation succeeded themselves all night. In the morning, I urgently informed the Party Central Committee of his condition. Then I asked the local villagers if they knew how to make some mixture of wild plants. They told me of a man who … was reputed for his medicinal preparations against fever. I sent a courier immediately to fetch him. The old man, who was of Tay origin, took his pulse, burned a root that he had just dug up in the forest, sprinkled the cinders in a bowl of rice soup and fed it to the patient. The miracle occurred. The medicine was efficacious. The President emerged from his coma. The next day the fever diminished, he took that mixture two or three times during the day. His condition continued to improve. After the fever subsided, he arose and resumed his daily work.
* Since the news of the bombing of Japan and their subsequent surrender, Ho and the ICP had been furiously meeting to discuss their plan of action.
* It was decided that they would call for a nationwide insurrection to bring about an independent republic under the leadership of the Viet Minh.
* Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho issued an “appeal to the people.”
* “Dear fellow countrymen!” he declared. “The decisive hour has struck for the destiny of our people. Let all of us stand up and rely on our own strength to free ourselves. Many oppressed peoples the world over are vying with each other in wresting back independence. We should not lag behind. Forward! Forward! Under the banner of the Viet Minh, let us valiantly march forward!”
* So here’s a question.
* Did Ho and the ICP create the revolution?
* Or did they just exploit the conditions?
* Famine, the weakness of the French, the defeat of Japan?
* I’d say it’s both.
* They waited for the right conditions to strike.
* One of the things Fidel and Che both stressed 15 years later in their writings and speeches was the need for the right conditions for a revolution.
* And then Che forgot that when he went to the Congo and Bolivia.
* He thought he could create the conditions.
* And Fidel criticised him for that, both at the time and later.
* Throughout the third week of August, Viet Minh forces took control in towns and villages in various parts of Annam and Tonkin.
* Resistance was usually minimal, as local authorities simply handed over power to the insurgents and as Japanese forces, now part of a defeated empire, stayed neutral.
* In Hanoi on August 19, Viet Minh forces seized control of all important public buildings except the Japanese-guarded Bank of Indochina, and announced their seizure of power from a balcony of what was then and remains today the Hanoi Opera House.
* For the first time since Francis Garnier seized it for France in 1873, the city was in Vietnamese hands.
* In Hue, Emperor Bao Dai announced he would support a government led by Ho Chi Minh, but a mass rally in Hanoi demanded that he abdicate his throne.
* He did so on August 25, declaring his support for the Viet Minh regime and handing over the imperial sword to the new national government, with all the legitimacy that that symbolic act conferred.
* He gave a short speech where he said: “Citizens, let me be understood. I prefer to be a free citizen than an enslaved king.”
* He wrote a letter to DeGaulle:
* “The Vietnamese people do not want, and cannot abide foreign domination or administration any longer. I implore you to understand that the only way to safeguard French interests and the spiritual influence of France in Indochina is to openly recognize Vietnam’s independence and to disavow any idea of reestablishing sovereignty or a French administration here in any form. We could understand each other so well and become friends if you would stop pretending that you are still our masters.”
* When Ho entered the city, streets were festooned with Viet Minh flags and banners
* FESTOONED, there’s a fun word.
* A Festoon is a garland, or a lei, a chain.
* Even though the ICP forces had taken the city, Ho knew it was still dangerous.
* He quoted Lenin’s famous warning: “Seizing power is difficult, but keeping it is even harder.”
* Starvation was still a real threat.
* Farmers had taken to eating next year’s seed stock in order to survive.
* And there were other Vietnamese nationalist parties that were reeling by how quickly the ICP had taken control and wanted a say in affairs.
* And of course there was still the French.
* And the position of the Allies regarding Vietnamese independence wasn’t known.
* On August 29, Ho Chi Minh quietly formed his first government.
* Then on September 2—the same day that Japan signed the instruments of surrender on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay—he presented the government to the country and, at a rally before hundreds of thousands, proclaimed Vietnamese independence.
* Thus came into being the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).
* The rally took place in Ba Dinh Square, a spacious grassy field not far from the Governor-General’s Palace in Hanoi.
* Banners had been hung displaying the new Viet Minh flag—a lone gold star on a field of red
* Peasants made the trek from nearby villages and now mingled with merchants and mandarins.
* Schools were closed for the occasion, and teachers armed with whistles walked at the head of bands of children singing revolutionary songs.
* Scouts who had been mobilized by the French and the Japanese now enthusiastically supported the new national government.
* Cuz you just know you can’t stage a revolution with the scouts.
* Girl Scout cookies.
* The universal cry of revolutionaries everywhere – Dib Dib Dib.
* Do you know where that comes from?
* It’s called the Grand Howl
* Robert Baden-Powell and is based on the Mowgli stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book
* Baden-Powell wrote about it in The Wolf Cub’s Handbook.
* he describes how in the Jungle Book, “The wolves all sat round the council rock in a circle, and when Akela, the old wolf, the head of the pack, took his place on the rock, they all threw up their heads and howled their greeting to him.”
* So in the Scouts…
* Scouter: “Pack – Pack – Pack!” This calls the Cubs into a Parade Circle.
* The Cubs reply as they run to their places in the circle.
* Cubs: “Pack!”
* As the Scouter enters the circle, the Cubs squat down on their heels with their “fore paws” on the ground between their feet and their knees out on either side.
* Cubs: “Ah-kay-la! We-e-e-e-ll do-o-o-o o-o-o-u-u-r BEST!” On the word “BEST”, the Cubs jump to their feet with two fingers of each hand at the sides of their heads, to resemble a wolf’s ears.
* A Sixer: “Dyb – dyb – dyb -dyb” The word “dyb” means “Do Your Best” which is the first part of the Cub Promise and was the original Wolf Cub motto.
* On the fourth “dyb”, the Cubs lower their left hands and the fingers of their right hands extend to form the Wolf Cub salute.
* Cubs: “We-e-e-e-ll dob-dob-dob-dob”, meaning “We’ll do our best”.
* Speaking of Baden-Powell, In 1939 noted in his diary: “Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc. – and ideals which Hitler does not practise himself.”
* But some modern biographers think he was a a repressed homosexual, so he wouldn’t have had much fun in Nazi Germany.
* Not to mention – Baden-Powell’s name was included in “The Black Book”, a 1940 list of people to be detained following the planned conquest of the United Kingdom
* Because the Scouting movement was seen to be a threat to the Hitler Youth.
* Here’s something from his final letter to the scouts before he died in 1941:
* Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.
* Ho Chi Minh arrived in a prewar American automobile with outriders on bicycles.
* He strode to a hastily built platform decked out with white and red cloth; with him were members of the new government’s cabinet.
* More than strode, he bounded, to the surprise of onlookers who expected rulers to walk in a careful, stately manner.
* While almost everyone on the stage wore Western suits and ties, Ho chose a high-collared faded khaki jacket and white rubber sandals—his standard uniform as head of state for the next twenty-four years—and an old hat.
* He shouted out “Compatriots, can you hear me!?”
* They shouted back “WHAT?”
* And he repeated himself louder.
* And they repeated “WHAT?” Even louder.
* And a good time was had by all.
* And then he gave his speech.
* I want to read it in full:
* All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
* This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
* The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution made in 1791 also states: All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.
* Those are undeniable truths.
* Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
* In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
* They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, Center, and South of Vietnam in order to destroy our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
* They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slaughtered our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in bloodbaths.
* They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people.
* To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
* In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people and devastated our land.
* They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank notes and the export trade.
* They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.
* They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers.
* In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indochina’s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that, from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quảng Trị Province to northern Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation.
* On March 9 [1945], the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of “protecting” us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.
* On several occasions before March 9, the Việt Minh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Việt Minh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yên Bái and Cao Bằng.
* Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese Putsch of March 1945, the Việt Minh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.
* From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
* The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French.
* The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bảo Đại has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.
* For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Viet-Nam, and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland.
* The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer the country.
* We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.
* A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent!
* For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that:
* Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already. And thus the entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.
* When he finished, Giap took the stage and gave a speech in which he called up the United States and China to support their independence.
* Neither Giap nor Ho mentioned the USSR.
* “Following in the steps of our forefathers,” Giap exclaimed, “the present generation will fight a final battle, so that generations to follow will forever be able to live in independence, freedom, and happiness.”

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#101 – Ho Chi Minh V

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 02:37:49 +0000

* Ho believed the army’s job was largely going to be propaganda until the conditions were right for war.
* But he also decided that for propaganda purposes, they had to win a military victory within a month of being established, so on 25 December 1944 Giáp led successful attacks against a couple of French outposts.
* Two French lieutenants were killed and the Vietnamese soldiers in the outposts surrendered.
* The Viet Minh suffered no casualties.
* A few weeks later, Giáp was wounded in the leg when his group attacked another outpost at Dong Mu.
* Through the first half of 1945, Giáp’s military position strengthened as the political position of the French and Japanese weakened.
* On 9 March the Japanese removed the titular French regime and placed the emperor Bảo Đại at the head of a puppet state, the Empire of Vietnam.
* Bao Dai was the 13th and final Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling family of Vietnam
* he renamed his country “Vietnam”
* He was 32
* Ho summed up the situation like this: “The Japanese became the real masters. The French became kind of respectable slaves. And upon the Indo-Chinese falls the double honor of being not only slaves to the Japanese, but also the slaves of the slaves—the French.”
* By April the Vietminh had nearly five thousand members, and was able to attack Japanese posts with confidence.
* In one of the ironies of history, between May and August 1945 the United States, keen to support anti-Japanese forces in mainland Asia, actively supplied and trained Giáp and the Viet Minh.
* The U.S. will work with anyone who is the enemy of their enemy.
* Just like they worked with Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
* Captain Charles Fenn of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sought out a meeting with Ho in early 1945.
* He had heard about Ho’s organization and about Ho’s role in helping locate downed American pilots and providing intelligence on Japanese troop movements.
* According to Fenn, Ho saved 17 US pilots before the war ended.
* He also heard that when Ho got out of prison in China, he used to drop by the Office of War Information in Kunming in Southern China to read Time Magazine.
* Ho was still hoping to get the support of the US.
* He believed they would be even more eager than the Soviets to help him get rid of the colonialists.
* After their first meeting in March 45, Fenn wrote the following description of the meeting in his diary:
* Ho came along with a younger man named Fam. Ho wasn’t what I expected. In the first place he isn’t really “old”: his silvery wisp of beard suggests age, but his face is vigorous and his eyes bright and gleaming. We spoke in French. It seems he has already met Hall, Blass, and de Sibour [OSS officers in Kunming], but got nowhere with any of them. I asked him what he had wanted of them. He said—only recognition of his group (called Vietminh League or League for Independence). I had vaguely heard of this as being communist, and asked him about it. Ho said that the French call all Annamites communists who want independence. I told him about our work and asked whether he’d like to help us. He said they might be able to but had no radio operators nor of course any equipment. We discussed taking in a radio and generator and an operator. Ho said a generator would make too much noise—the Japs were always around. Couldn’t we use the type of set with battery, such as the Chinese use? I explained they were too weak for distant operation, especially when the batteries run down. I asked him what he’d want in return for helping us. Arms and medicines, he said. I told him the arms would be difficult, because of the French. We discussed the problem of the French. Ho insisted that the Independence League are only anti-Jap. I was impressed by his clear-cut talk; Buddha-like composure, except movements with wrinkled brown fingers. Fam made notes. It was agreed we should have a further meeting. They wrote their names down in Chinese characters which were romanized into Fam Fuc Pao and Ho Tchih Ming.
* He later wrote:
* “Baudelaire felt the wings of insanity touch his mind; but that morning I felt the wings of genius touch mine.”
* Fenn, who had studied graphology, the study of handwriting analysis, also provided an analysis of Ho’s handwriting, from which he concluded:
* The essential features are simplicity, desire to make everything clear, remarkable self-control. Knows how to keep a secret. Neat, orderly, unassuming, no interest in dress or outward show. Self-confident and dignified. Gentle but firm. Loyal, sincere, and generous, would make a good friend. Outgoing, gets along with anyone. Keen analytical mind, difficult to deceive. Shows readiness to ask questions. Good judge of character. Full of enthusiasm, energy, initiative. Conscientious; painstaking attention to detail. Imaginative, interested in aesthetics, particularly literature. Good sense of humor.
* Faults: diplomatic to the point of contriving. Could be moody and obstinate.
* Graphology, BTW, is a load of crap.
* At their second meeting a few days later, Ho asked if Fenn could introduce him to Claire Chennault, adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, founder of the famed “Flying Tigers,” and commander of the Fourteenth Air Force
* The Flying Tigers were The First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942
* They used to paint shark faces on the front of their planes.
* There was a squadron of the Flying Tigers called the Hell’s Angels.
* The biker gang took their name from the squadron.
* Which in turn took its name from the Howard Hughes 1930 film Hell’s Angels about fighter pilots.
* Winston Churchill, upon seeing Chennault make his entrance at a conference earlier in the war and learning of his identity, whispered to an aide, “Well, thank God he’s on our side.”
* Fenn agreed to set up the meeting with Chennault on one condition:
* I agreed to arrange this if he would agree not to ask him for anything: neither supplies not promises about support.
* Ho agreed.
* A few days later, Ho had his meeting with Chennault.
* Chennault thanked Ho for his efforts to save U.S. pilots, and Ho responded by expressing his admiration for Chennault and the Flying Tigers.
* Before he left, Ho asked if he could get a photograph of Chennault.
* He wanted a selfie, but he hadn’t invented the iPhone yet.
* As Fenn recalled: There’s nothing Chennault likes more than giving his photograph.
* Chennault’s secretary pulled out a glossy and Chennault autographed it for him
* And Ho then waved it around like a flag everywhere he went, proof that he had the support of the USG.
* Which wasn’t far from the truth.
* Before he left Kunming to return to Vietnam, Ho provided his U.S. contacts with his interpretation of the Japanese coup in Indochina.
* In a note signed “Luc” that is now in the U.S. archives, he declared that it had brought an end to the French domination in Indochina, a domination that had begun eighty-seven years previously. \
* “Thus,” he said, “the French imperialist wolf was finally devoured by the Japanese fascist hyena.”
* He admitted that in the overall scheme of things in the world at war, this was only “a minute event,” but he claimed that it would have “a serious bearing on the World War in general, on Indo-China, France, Japan, and China in particular.”
* He was trying to persuade the Roosevelt administration to attack Japan in Indochina, which he called “Japan’s only road of retreat.”
* He wrote that “from Japan to New Guinea, the Japan force lays like a long snake whose neck is Indo-China. If the Allies knock hard on its neck, the snake will cease to move.”
* The OSS began to air-drop supplies, including medicine, a radio set, and a few weapons for training.
* In return, the Viet Minh provided the United States with intelligence reports and rescued several U.S. airmen.
* The OSS called its Vietnam operation the Deer Mission.
* On July 16, a Deer Team led by Colonel Allison Thomas parachuted into Ho’s new forward base, a tiny village in the jungle called Tan Trao, not far from the Thai Nguyen provincial capital.
* Claire and Allison.
* You didn’t need to have a woman’s name to be a senior U.S. military leader in WWII, but it helped.
* Many people don’t know that Douglas MacArthur’s first name was Shirley.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first name was actually Mary.
* After disentangling himself from the banyan tree into which his parachute had slammed him, Thomas spoke a “few flowery sentences” to two hundred Viet Minh soldiers assembled near a banner proclaiming “Welcome to Our American Friends.”
* Ho, speaking in good English, cordially greeted the OSS team and offered supper, but it was clear to the Americans that he was ill, “shaking like a leaf and obviously running a high fever.”
* The next day Ho denounced the French but remarked that “we welcome 10 million Americans.”
* Thomas was impressed by what he heard.
* “Forget the Communist Bogy,” he radioed OSS headquarters in Kunming.
* “Viet Minh League is not Communist. Stands for freedom and reforms against French harshness.”
* He wasn’t the only one who was confused.
* The Soviets and the Chinese also weren’t sure if Ho was really leading a communist revolution.
* He played his cards very close to his chest.
* As Fidel Castro would 15 years later.
* Other OSS personnel soon parachuted into the Vietnamese countryside, including a medic who diagnosed Ho Chi Minh’s ailments as malaria and dysentery.
* Another theory is that he had contracted tuberculosis during his long months in Chinese prisons.
* Quinine and sulfa drugs restored his health a bit, but Ho remained frail.
* To a remarkable degree, he made a winning impression on these Americans, who invariably described him as warm, intelligent, and keen to cooperate with the United States. As a sign of friendship, they named him “OSS Agent 19.”
* Everywhere the Americans went, impoverished villagers thanked them with gifts of food and clothing, no doubt especially welcome after the devastating famine of that spring.
* The villagers interpreted the foreigners’ presence as a sign of U.S. anticolonial and anti-Japanese sentiments.
* Major Archimedes Patti, – real first name Bridget – head of the OSS base in Kunming, China, taught the Viet Minh to use flamethrowers, grenade launchers and machine guns.
* In a single month they succeeded in training around 200 hand-picked future leaders of the army they were to oppose a few decades later.
* Ho told the OSS that he hoped young Vietnamese could study in the United States and that American technicians could help build an independent Vietnam.
* He said “your statesmen make eloquent speeches about … self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I any different from … your George Washington?”

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#100 – Ho Chi Minh IV

Cameron Reilly — Sat, 24 Nov 2018 09:16:59 +0000

* Welcome to #100!
* And we are still talking about 1944!
* When we finished last time, Ho Chi Minh was making his way to the Red River Delta.
* The Japanese have chased the French out of Vietnam and didn’t bother to protect the northern regions.
* So Ho and the ICP are getting ready to make their move.
* Surprisingly, they talk about a “post coup euphoria”.
* Apparently the Vietnamese were so happy to see the end of the French, they were happy to replace them with the Japanese.
* They realised the Japanese were probably going to lose the war, which is a good thing for the Vietnamese.
* In October 1944, Ho wrote a “Letter to All Our Compatriots,” in which he analyzed the current situation and said “the opportunity for our people’s liberation is only in a year or a year and a half. The time approaches. We must act quickly!”
* So the ICP decided to start with introducing the Viet Minh flag and doctrine to the people.
* And preparing themselves for a general uprising once the Japanese had been defeated by the Allies.
* Which even THEY knew was going to happen sooner or later.
* And the Viet Minh would be the force greeting the Allies when they came to Vietnam.
* They had already started to build connections with the Americans.
* On November 11, 1944, a U.S. reconnaissance plane piloted by Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw had engine trouble while flying over the mountains along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.
* Shaw was able to parachute to safety, but was spotted by French authorities stationed in the vicinity, and patrols were sent to locate him.
* But Members of a local Vietminh unit got to him first, and they decided to deliver him to Ho.
* For the next several days, the Vietminh troops led him over mountains and jungle trails toward Pac Bo, the jungle location of Ho’s HQ cave, walking at night and resting during the day in caves to avoid the enemy.
* In the end, it took almost a month to cover a distance of only forty miles.
* None of Shaw’s escorts had been able to communicate with him
* according to his own account, they communicated only when he said “Vietminh! Vietminh!” and the Vietnamese responded, “America! Roosevelt!”
* but when he arrived at Pac Bo, Ho greeted him in English: “How do you do, pilot! Where are you from?”
* Shaw was reportedly so excited that he hugged Ho and later said to him, “When I heard your voice, I felt as if I were hearing the voice of my father in the United States.”
* Despite the fact that Wilson ignored his attempts to get the League of Nations to address Vietnam back in 1919, Ho was still hopeful that they would come to his aid.
* He had probably read about FDR’s position on Indochina.
* For example, he had said “France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”
* Another thing that helped the VM was the famine of 1944-45.
* The northern regions of the country had relied on rice to be shipped from the south.
* But then in 1944, a combination of French and Japanese policies, typhoons, drought, insect plagues, and Allied bombings, meant the south couldn’t produce enough rice for the country.
* The Japanese had also mandated shipments of rice to Japan
* and they ordered farmers in the north to shift their crops from rice to oil seeds, peanuts, cotton, and jute.
* Do you know what jute is?
* I had to look it up.
* plant or fiber that is used to make burlap, hessian or gunny cloth.
* The French and the Japanese, like the British in India, stockpiled rice for themselves while the native population starved.
* In 1944 when US bombing cut off northern supplies of coal to Saigon, the French and Japanese used rice and maize as fuel for power stations.
* The French authorities refused to reduce taxes or to increase the price of obligatory quotas of rice assigned to each farmer for sale to the government.
* Farmers tried to grow other drops, like sweet potatoes but it didn’t help.
* Then as supply levels dropped, prices went up and people couldn’t afford to buy food.
* Millions of Vietnamese died.
* Streets were littered with dying peasants, and oxcarts were filled with corpses.
* Families roamed from village to village, hoping to find grain.
* Or they retreated to their homes, shared the few remaining morsels, and died quietly, one by one.
* Some people, having consumed everything that could be eaten—bark, roots, leaves, dogs, and rats—resorted to cannibalism, causing parents to fear that their children would be stolen and eaten.
* Some parents sold their children for a few cups of rice.
* Duong Thieu Chi, a provincial official in Nam Dinh, a city in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, said he made sure to avoid eating in restaurants or stalls when he traveled during these months, for fear that the meat served might be rat or human flesh.
* A French observer wrote: “From looking at these bodies, which are shriveled up on roadsides with only a handful of straw for clothes as well as for the burial garment, one feels ashamed of being human.”
* In May 1945, as the crisis eased, officials used statistics from various provinces in Tonkin to declare that to that point, precisely 380,969 people had died by starvation.
* A year later, using more complete figures, analysts estimated that one million people had died in Tonkin, and another 300,000 in Annam.
* In later years, the estimates would climb higher still, to two million deaths in a five-month period in 1945.
* Even if we accept the lower figure of one million for Tonkin, the implications are appalling: 10 percent of the population in the affected region died of starvation in less than half a year.
* Is it just me or do we hear more about the Holodomor famine under Stalin or the famines in China under the communists than we do about the famines under Churchill – 2-3 million died in the Bengal famine of 1943 – and the French or the famines in China under Chiang KaiShek?
* But as tragic as the famine was, it was a boon for the VM.
* Nobody could argue with them now that the French and the Japanese were only interested in looking out for themselves.
* The ICP helped the people in the Red River Delta to break into grain warehouses and developed a reputation as being for the people.
* This is when Võ Nguyên Giáp (Jeeap) first came to prominence.
* Known as the “Red Napoleon”.
* One of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century.
* He was 34 or 35 at the time.
* He had no previous military experience.
* By training he was a history teacher.
* his maternal grandfather had taken part in the resistance movement against the French in the 1880s
* Expelled from school in 1927, he joined the Tan Viet party but eventually shifted to the ICP and was arrested for taking part in student demonstrations in Hué during the Nghe Tinh revolt.
* Released from prison in 1933, he resumed his schooling and eventually received a law degree from the University of Hanoi.
* Became a history teacher at a private school in Hanoi.
* When the ICP was outlawed by the French in 1940, he went into exile in China.
* According to his own account, Giap had been instructed to leave Hanoi for China by Hoang Van Thu (pronounced to), a young Party member who had been named to the Central Committee in 1938.
* Thu and Giap often talked about military matters and the potential of guerrilla warfare in a future struggle against the French
* Both were familiar with Maoist tactics in China and the use of similar forms of warfare during the traditional era in Vietnam
* Thu told him that he should go to China and meet up with Ho.
* After his discussion with Thu, Giap had launched preparations for his trip to China.
* In early May, after dismissing his last class at school, he said good-bye to his young wife and infant daughter.
* They agreed that she would join him in China once she could make arrangements for the care of their child.
* In fact, they would never meet again.
* His wife stayed behind and was arrested and sentenced to 15 years.
* His young daughter was also put in prison.
* In China, he met Ho.
* And he was one of the small group that went back to Vietnam with Ho to build the liberation army.
* It was in the summer of 1943 that Giáp was told that his wife had been beaten to death by guards in the central prison in Hanoi.
* Her sister was guillotined and his daughter died in prison of unknown causes.
* When the Vietnamese Liberation Army (VLA) was created in September of 1944, Giáp was its commander.
* Ho directed him to establish Armed Propaganda Brigades and the first one, consisting of thirty one men and three women, was formed in December 1944.
* Named the Tran Hung Dao Platoon after the great Vietnamese hero who repelled three major Mongol invasions in the 13th century, it was armed with two revolvers, seventeen rifles, one light machine gun, and fourteen breech-loading flintlocks dating from the Russo-Japanese War.
* Ho’s advise to Giap: “Secrecy, always secrecy. Let the enemy think you’re to the west when you are in the east. Attack by surprise and retreat before the enemy can respond.”

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#99 – Ho Chi Minh III

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 22:28:32 +0000

* On December 7 1941, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbour.
* And the world celebrated.
* As De Gaulle said “that’s it, the war’s over.”
* He was totally confident in U.S. superiority.
* He must have been part American.
* Unfortunately FDR’s confidence in de Gaulle was much lower.
* He hated him.
* And the more powerful de Gaulle became, the less sure FDR was that the French should get their colonies back after the war.
* But if Indochina and potentially other colonies should not be returned to the colonial powers after the war, what should happen to them?
* Roosevelt proposed a trusteeship formula by which the colonies would be raised to independence through several stages.
* Those not ready for independence—which in FDR’s view included all of France’s possessions—would be placed under a nonexploitive international trusteeship formed by the United Nations.
* In laying out this plan to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March 1943, the president singled out Indochina as an area that should be controlled by this new system.
* Eden, who would end up playing a huge role in Britain’s Indochina policy for the next dozen years, wondered outlaid whether FDR was being too harsh on the French.
* FDR just ignored him and said that France should be prepared to place part of her overseas territory under the authority of the United Nations.
* Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the man who wrote the original draft of the UN charter, Mr Ol’ Black Threesome himself, asked “But what about the American pledges to restore to France her possessions?”
* Roosevelt replied that those pledges applied only to North Africa.
* Sumner thought “hmmmm I bet there’s a lot of blacks in North Africa….”
* FDR’s trusteeship sounded a lot of like Wilson’s mandate system that divided up the Middle East after WWI.
* But this was going to be totally different.
* Because it had a different name.
* The way he saw it, the enforcement mechanism would be a greater degree of international accountability.
* As before, the core principle was that a colonial territory is not the exclusive preserve of the power that controls it but constitutes a “sacred trust” over which the international community has certain responsibilities.
* Eden knew that this was old wine in new bottles, and he didn’t like the taste.
* He and others in the Foreign Office suspected the Americans of seeking to use trusteeships to their own economic advantage—the “international supervision of colonies” would simply be a smoke screen by which America could facilitate access to the economic resources of the colonies and spread her influence globally.
* And the British didn’t like the sound of “international supervision”, especially of their own colonies.
* He suggested other countries would, at most, had an advisory capacity.
* FDR though insisted that it be an international trusteeship.
* So the Brits just changed the subject, talked about black threesomes, and that was that.
* So FDR went to Cairo for his only wartime meeting with Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China’s Kuomintang nationalist government.
* FDR wanted Chiang on board with his trusteeship program.
* But Chiang resisted, expressing a preference for outright independence for Indochina and other Asian colonies.
* Probably because it would make them easier for him to take over.
* FDR tried to sweeten the deal by saying he supported the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule.
* So Chiang said “go tell Winny The Poo that, then come back and talk to me about Indochina.”
* Meanwhile, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong, who had been waging an intermittent struggle against Chiang’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government since the late 1920s, were gaining strength in the north.
* From Cairo, FDR traveled to Tehran for meetings with Churchill and, for the first time, Stalin.
* During their initial get-together, FDR stressed to Stalin the importance of preparing the people of Indochina for self-government along the lines of what the United States had done in the Philippines.
* Stalin agreed that Indochina should not be returned to France and said he supported independence for all colonial subjects.
* Because if Stalin was anything, he was a nice guy.
* A note taker at Tehran noted that “The president remarked that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before.”
* When Roosevelt brought up his trusteeship scheme, implying that Chiang Kai-shek agreed, and Stalin expressed support.
* As the meeting drew to a close, they agreed there was no point in discussing the India matter with Churchill.
* For the British, FDR’s idea was a dangerous game of dominoes:
* If Indochina was allowed to fall from colonial control, what would keep Burma, Malaya, India, and other parts of the British Empire from being next?
* after learning of another Roosevelt attack on the “hopeless” French record in Indochina, Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, warned
* “We’d better look out. Were the French any more ‘hopeless’ than we in Malaya or the Dutch in the East Indies?”
* For the British, Indochina was the linchpin of all Southeast Asia, a barrier between China to the north and a string of prized British possessions to the south.
* Japan had used it as a forward base for her operations against Malaya and Burma, and this could not be allowed to happen again.
* As always, Strategic considerations – protecting British colonies – took precedence over morals about “freedom-seeking peoples of the world”.
* The Brits also knew they were going to need a friendly and powerful France after WWII to help them control Europe.
* And help maintain the balance of power with a powerful Soviet army, U.S. military and economic superiority, and possibly a revived Germany.
* How to secure such a cooperative France?
* Partly by supporting Charles de Gaulle’s determination to retain the French colonies, including Indochina, and partly by avoiding arguments with Washington on the issue.
* Churchill said to Eden in mid-1944 ““Roosevelt has been more outspoken to me on that subject than any other colonial matter, and I imagine it is one of his principal war aims to liberate Indochina from France.… Do you really want to go and stir all this up at such a time as this?”
* Quietly, London stonewalled American efforts in early and mid-1944 to negotiate on the colonial issue.
* Roosevelt continued to push his trusteeship plan and his opposition to a French return to Indochina, but with less urgency as 1944 progressed.
* Partly because he was having to re-think his “Four Policeman” plan for running the world after the war.
* China was getting deeper and deeper into an all out civil war and they probably weren’t going to be much help.
* And he knew he needed the co-operation of the British and the French.
* Who would be less inclined to give the U.S. what they wanted if they felt like their colonial possessions were being ripped out from underneath them.
* And then Eisenhower allowed de Gaulle’s Free French forces the honor of entering Paris first.
* Which really pissed FDR off.
* On August 25, 1944, de Gaulle announced the liberation of Paris.
* And everyone knew he was going to be the President of the new country.
* And you might be forgiven for thinking that a country who had recently been occupied and now had been given back its independence might have something of an awakening about their own position as a colonial power – but no.
* These is the French.
* But I’m kidding.
* Do you think many Israelis ever stop and think “gee after what happened to our people in WWII, maybe we shouldn’t be such cunts to Palestine?”
* Of course they don’t.
* They say “but they want to destroy us!”
* And I say “yeah that’s what the Nazis said about the Jews in the 1930s too.”
* Was it a justification back then? No? Okay then. Peace in the Middle East solved. What’s next?
* So there was no way under the Big Celery Stick that Indochina was going to be given its independence.
* At the Yalta conference in the Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt backed off his insistence on enforcing an international trusteeship over colonial areas; except in the case of Japanese-mandated territories, he now said, such internationalization would happen only with the consent of the colonial power.
* At Yalta, he informed Stalin that he would not allow U.S. ships to be used to carry French troops to Indochina, but he also recommended to the Soviet leader that they not raise the Indochina matter with Churchill.
* “It would only make the British mad,” FDR rationalized. “Better to keep quiet just now.”
* Then FDR died in April.
* One month earlier, in March 1945, the Japanese took full and complete control of Indochina.
* The French just caved in completely.
* This Was A Pivotal Moment For France In Indochina.
* The March coup dealt a blow to imperial authority from which it would never fully recover.
* Colonial rule had been based on the notion of European cultural and military supremacy, and though France had offered little more than token resistance to Japan in 1940, only now did most Vietnamese fully grasp how hollow was the French basis of power.
* The Japanese diplomatic victories in 1940–41, important though they were in many respects, had not appreciably altered everyday sociopolitical relations in Indochina—French officials thereafter still governed in the countryside and the villages, where Japanese officials seldom if ever set foot.
* Now, however, in the space of a few days, French colonial authority had disappeared, in plain view of Vietnamese in both urban and rural areas.
* De Gaulle gave a big speech.
* “Not for a single hour did France lose the hope and the will to recover Free Indochina.”
* FREE Indochina.
* Nice one.
* Meanwhile….
* Ho Chi Minh had been arrested in China in August 1942 by local authorities suspicious of his political activities;
* By his own estimate he then passed through eighteen prisons before winning his release in August 1943.
* During his incarceration, he kept in touch with his closest colleagues via letters written in disappearing ink,
* When he got out he stepped up his efforts to form a broad united front to drive the French and the Japanese from Indochina.
* By late 1944, Ho Chi Minh, now back in Tonkin, could see the endgame.
* He predicted that Japan would lose the Pacific War, France would seek to regain Indochina, and before that Tokyo would overthrow the local French regime in order to protect its army.
* The result would be a power vacuum the Viet Minh could fill.
* But he was careful.
* He told his more militant comrades to slow the fuck down and avoid launching a premature insurrection.
* You know all about that, don’t you Ray? You’ve had a few premature insurrections in your time, Ray.
* Japan’s defeat was inevitable, why not wait until the fruit was ripe to be picked?
* Like you waited five years to pick Heather’s fruit.
* You’re like the Ho Chi Minh of Heather’s pussy.
* Ho knew that even in Tonkin, the Viet Minh controlled only a small part of the territory,
* And in the rest of the country—especially in Cochin China in the south—its presence was spotty at best.
* Some provinces remained devoid of Viet Minh organizing until well into 1945.
* Ho said, “The hour of peaceful revolution has passed, but the hour of the more general insurrections has not yet sounded.”
* Then came March 9, the auspicious moment.
* The removal of the French secret police after the coup, together with Japan concentrating her presence in the urban areas of Vietnam in preparation for a possible Allied invasion, gave the Viet Minh considerable advantages in their underground work and propaganda efforts.
* The Japanese, having chased French troops out of Vietnam, did not think it vital to keep a troop presence in the northern provinces of Tonkin in light of more pressing concerns, and thus the Viet Minh had the region largely to themselves.
* Slowly, in the late spring and summer months, the Viet Minh began to spread southward toward the Red River Delta.

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#98 – Ho Chi Minh II

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 23:21:53 +0000

* Ho’s speech to the French socialist congress in 1920 was 12 minutes long and delivered without notes.
* It got some applause but that was about it.
* He realised that French socialists were more worried about affairs at home than they were about colonialism in a distant land.
* When a group of socialists broke off to form the French Communist Party, Ho went with them.
* He had read Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” a document that attracted him as a means of liberating Vietnam and other oppressed countries from colonial rule.
* Other Marxist writers whose work he knew seemed concerned only with how to achieve a classless utopia.
* Only Lenin spoke powerfully about the connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the potential for nationalist movements in Africa and Asia.
* Only Lenin offered a cogent explanation for colonialist rule and a viable blueprint for national liberation and for modernizing a poor agricultural society such as Vietnam’s.
* Lenin’s message was simple and direct.
* In their struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in advanced industrial countries, Communist parties in the West should actively cooperate with nationalist movements in colonial areas in Asia and Africa.
* He understood that Many of these movements were controlled by the native middle class, who, in the long run, were not sympathetic to social revolution.
* But the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
* Who said that first?
* The earliest known expression of this concept is found in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, which dates to around the 4th century BC, while the first recorded use of the current English version came in 1884
* The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy.
* The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).
* So any alliances with bourgeois nationalist groups should be implemented with care, and only on the condition that local Communist parties maintain their separate identities and freedom of action.
* But given such limitations, Lenin viewed the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa as natural, albeit temporary, allies of the Communists against the common enemy of world imperialism.
* It was the ability of the Western capitalist countries to locate markets and raw materials in underdeveloped countries that sustained the world capitalist system and prevented its ultimate collapse.
* Cut off the tentacles of colonialism in the far-flung colonies, and the system itself could be overthrown.
* Ho Chi Minh assured his Vietnamese allies in Paris that Communism could be applied to Asia,; more than that, it was in keeping with Asian traditions based on Confucian notions of social equality and community.
* On top of that, Lenin had pledged Soviet support, through the Comintern, for nationalist uprisings throughout the colonial world as a key first step in fomenting worldwide socialist revolution against the capitalist order.
* What could be more relevant to Indochina’s situation?
* Years later speaking of Lenin’s pamphlet, he said “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me. I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’ ”
* Ho stayed in Paris for a few years – writing plays, writing articles for many magazines, reading victor Hugo and Voltaire and Shakespeare.
* Then he finally came to the conclusion that the French Communists cared for the plight of the Vietnamese only slightly more than the other French socialists, so in 1923 he moved to Moscow, hoping to meet Lenin.
* Unfortunately when he got there, in July 1923, Lenin was already ill and dying.
* He died January 1924.
* Ho took the news hard: “Lenin was our father, our teacher, our comrade, our representative. Now, he is a shining star showing us the way to Socialism.”
* He stuck around in Moscow for a while, attending meetings of the Comintern, giving speeches about Asian self-determination, but again felt like a “voice crying in the wilderness.”
* The Moscovites, like the French, were mostly interested in Europe.
* But his time in Moscow was useful and a relief.
* He didn’t have to watch over his shoulder for French police to arrest him for treason.
* And he got to know various Soviet leaders, including Grigory Zinoviev, one of the original Politburo, and Kliment Voroshilov, one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union.
* And he became known as a specialist in asian affairs.
* In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina.
* To do that, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam.
* Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity – which were principles he learned from Confucianism.
* In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow.
* The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates.
* Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong.
* Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.
* There were already plenty of nationalist parties in Vietnam but as usual most of them suffered from the old Judean Peoples Front problem.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoIl7g8AAbM
* Which left the door wide open for Ho.
* French security services soon singled out the ICP as the most serious threat to colonial authority and devoted most of their resources to identifying the leadership.
* But Ho and his top lieutenants survived all French efforts to eliminate them.
* Ho kept constantly on the move in the 1930s, spending one year in Moscow, then in China, then in the USSR again, using different pseudonyms, his health often poor.
* In the mid-1930s, the party benefited from changes in the international scene.
* From 1936 to 1939, pressure from French authorities eased as a Popular Front government in Paris allowed Communist parties in the colonies an increased measure of freedom, the result of increased cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies against the common threat of global fascism.
* In late 1939, however, after Moscow signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, French authorities outlawed the ICP and forced its leaders into hiding.
* A few thousand French officials could maintain effective control over some twenty-five million Indochinese.
* as the 1930s drew to a close, only the most optimistic Vietnamese revolutionary—or pessimistic colonial administrator—could believe that France would soon be made to part with this Pearl of the Far East, this jewel of the imperial crown.
* But when WWII broke out in 1939 and France was on the brink of disaster, Ho saw his opportunity.
* At a meeting with his leadership colleagues in Southern China he said he saw “a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it.”
* When France fell to Germany in 1940, most Americans probably knew very little about Indochina.
* Not many lived there or had ever visited there or had much reason to pay attention to what was happening there.
* Which is one reason why the American government did nothing to assist the French authorities in Indochina when the Japanese threatened to invade and the Vichy government in France did a deal to let them in.
* Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin, the north eastern section of Indochina, and Cochin China, the very southern tip, against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed.
* Despite Ho’s objections.
* He thought the action as premature.
* YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT PREMATURE THINGS, RAY. WHY…
* In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process.
* Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed.
* It would take the southern branch of the party years to recover.
* But despite the losses, Ho still saw his chance to move.
* In 1941 he snuck back into his home country for the first time in 30 years.
* And he called for a plenary meeting of the ICP.
* He set up camp in a cave, just a mile from the Chinese border.
* The group slept on planks of wood in the cold and damp cave and had only one small oil lamp among them.
* The diet was meager, mostly soup of corn and bamboo shoots, fortified by fish caught in the stream.
* Each morning Ho woke up early to do calisthenics and then swim in the stream before sitting down to work at a flat rock he used as a desk.
* He spent long hours reading, writing—on his trusted Hermès typewriter—and conducting meetings, all for the purpose of setting up a new Communist-dominated united front and outlining a strategy for liberating Vietnam from foreign rule.
* The delegates sat on simple wood blocks around a bamboo table, and out of their discussions a new party came into being. Its official title was Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam—or, for history, the Viet Minh.
* This new party had a new platform.
* It moved the revolution away from the class struggle and toward national liberation.
* Women were to be an important part of the struggle and were to be given equal rights.
* Ho declared the vision of the party in a letter that was widely circulated in June 1941.
* “National Salvation is the common cause to the whole of our people. Every Vietnamese must take a part in it. He who has money will contribute his money, he who has strength will contribute his strength, he who has talent will contribute his talent. I pledge to use all my modest abilities to follow you, and am ready for the last sacrifice.”
* They were Communists, convinced that Marxism-Leninism represented the best path of development for their country.
* And their goal was to not only get mass support among the Vietnamese people but also to win the sympathy of the Allied powers.
* Which was going to be easy because that’s what The Atlantic Charter was all about – the freedom of people to determine their own future.
* But first they were going to have to deal with both the French and the Japanese.
* Who joined forces to crack down on the Viet Minh.
* Then in July of 1941, after they signed a neutrality pact with the Soviets, and then watched happily as the Nazi invaded the Soviet Union, Japan forced the Vichy government to let it send more troops to Indochina, build bases there, and to occupy strategic areas in the south, including the key port of Cam Ranh Bay and airfields at Da Nang and Bien Hoa.
* This gave the Japanese a forward vantage point from which to move quickly against Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and the Philippines.
* Which finally got the Americans to sit up and take notice.
* Because, remember, the Philippines was controlled by the United States at the time.
* Why?
* Why not?
* This lead to FDR freezing all Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoing all oil exports.
* For Japan, so poor in natural resources, the implications were dire.
* The country consumed roughly twelve thousand tons of oil each day, 90 percent of it imported, and also imported most of her zinc, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, cotton, and wheat.
* She could not survive a year of a thorough embargo—unless she seized British and Dutch possessions in Asia.
* Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, a moderate among hard-liners, proposed a summit meeting with FDR and indicated a willingness to withdraw from Indochina as soon as the war with China was settled.
* Roosevelt was tempted by this offer, but his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, persuaded him to insist on Japanese abandonment of China as a precondition for such a meeting.
* The proposal collapsed, and Konoe was ousted as prime minister in mid-October.
* Tojo replaced him.
* Diplomatic maneuverings continued, and in November Tojo offered to move troops out of Indochina immediately, and out of China once general peace was restored, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline.
* Hull rejected the offer and repeated the American insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and abandonment of the Southeast Asian adventure.
* Meanwhile in August 1941 FDR and Churchill met for the first time to sign The Atlantic Charter – we first talked about this back in Cold War 8 in April 2016.
* Two and a half years ago!
* This was when they talked about self-determination for all peoples.
* But remember.
* Two weeks before the Atlantic Charter meeting, the U.S. Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, assured the French government that they could keep their empire intact after the end of the war.
* He wrote: “The US Government, mindful of its traditional friendship for France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to maintain their territories and to preserve them intact.”
* The Department of Defense history of Vietnam (The Pentagon Papers) noted that “in the Atlantic Charter and other pronouncements, the U.S. proclaimed support for national self-determination and independence” but also “early in the war repeatedly expressed or implied to the French an intention to restore to France its overseas empire after the war.”
* In late 1942, Roosevelt assured French General Henri Giraud: “It is thoroughly understood that French sovereignty will be re-established as soon as possible throughout all the territory, metropolitan or colonial, over which flew the French flag in 1939.”
* In May 1945, Truman assured the French he did not question her “sovereignty over Indochina.”
* And then On December 7, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbor.

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#97 – Ho Chi Minh I

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 23:00:25 +0000

In 1919 a 29 year old Vietnamese man wrote a list of demands for political rights for his people to present to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Nobody paid him any attention. His name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He devoted the rest of his life to achieving those demands. History remembers him as HO CHI MINH.

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#96 – Marshall Plan III

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 04:07:23 +0000

* America’s approach to providing financial aid wasn’t popular with some of their allies either.
* Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, resented American dollar diplomacy, in particular the linking of desperately needed financial assistance to London’s submission on political matters central to British sovereignty.
* The American loan agreement, signed in December 1945 after nearly four months of difficult and often humiliating negotiations in Washington, required Britain to accept American air and naval bases on British and Commonwealth territory.
* Bevin’s decision to support the manufacture of British nuclear weapons was driven not by a German or Soviet threat, but by his belief that the country “could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of the new development.”
* So, in other words – he wanted the UK to have nuclear powers to defend themselves against America.
* Britain, as Bevin saw his country, was “the last bastion of social democracy,” standing against both “the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.”
* This is coming from a country that, until recently, had imperial control over 25% of the world.
* Mmmmm smell that social democracy.
* Another recent ally was also suspicious.
* Russia.
* The Kremlin was receiving a constant flow of intelligence from highly placed British sources—among whom Guy Burgess at the Foreign Office in London and Donald Maclean at the British embassy in Washington.
* Maclean, who had access to all of the embassy’s classified cable traffic, was reporting that “the goal of the Marshall Plan was to ensure American economic domination of Europe.”
* The spies also warned Stalin that the Brits and Americans were getting ready to announce that they were going to renege on the Yalta agreement regarding reparations.
* They were going to cut off German reparations to the USSR, which at the time was the Soviet’s only source of foreign income.
* Instead, they were going to re-build Germany.
* Well the parts under their control, anyway.
* And the Marshall Plan aid was to be implemented outside the United Nations framework, because they wanted some of it to go to Germany – and Germany was not a member of the U.N.
* And the Soviets needed the German money and goods to finance their efforts to control Eastern Europe.
* And – in the early stages, the ERP funds were going to be offered to Eastern European countries and even the U.S.S.R.
* The United States offered immense grants of cash and material aid to all of the European nations, not just those in the West, on the sole condition that the recipient nations agree upon a common economic plan to use these resources.
* Of course, this economic plan had to be based upon market capitalism, a stipulation not mentioned formally in the proposal but obvious nevertheless.
* Eastern European nations that accepted the American offer, as many were initially keen to do, would therefore have become incorporated into the American economic system, gravitating naturally into the U.S. orbit as their material fate became dependent upon American, not Russian, alliance.
* In addition, the terms of the Marshall Plan, when released, as we’ve discussed, gave the Americans a very high degree of say in how the money was spent.
* And it forced the recipients to buy products from American companies.
* And to give up their own funds for the Americans to spend however they saw fit.
* SPECIAL PROVISIONS: The Administrator is authorized to use funds made available to promote an increase in production in participating countries of materials required by the U. S. where there are actual or potential shortages in the U. S.
* This involved strategic goods needed for military purposes, and it prevented recipients from selling these things to Moscow or Eastern European countries, so they could use Marshall Plan funds to buy raw materials, eg uranium and plutonium, that they needed. (the_marshall_plan_-_the_extension_of_empire.pdf)
*
* More on that later.
* But This of course was intolerable to the Soviets – as the Americans, of course, knew it would be.
* As we discussed with Benn Steil when he was on the show, it was planned from the beginning the the Soviets would have to turn down the American money, and insist that the countries in Eastern Europe that were in their sphere of influence would also turn it down.
* As Bevin said to his private secretary, after Molotov stormed out of their last Foreign Ministers meeting in 1947: “This is the beginning of the Western bloc.”
* The Marshall Plan, Molotov said, was “nothing but a vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy its way” into European affairs.
* If the Soviets had just said “yes sure wonderful” and jumped both feet into the Marshall Plan, they probably could have killed it from the inside.
* Which is what Ambassador Novikov had recommended.
* But instead, Stalin refused to be part of it on principle.
* Which turned out to have dramatic consequences for the world.

* So the Marshall Plan, like the Truman Doctrine, has to be viewed, at least in part, as a political tactic for Truman.
* But in order for it to be useful in the upcoming election, he needed to sell it.
* To build support with the public, the “Committee for the Marshall Plan” was established.
* also known as Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery
* The committee contained eminent people like:
* Allen Dulles, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, later to become the director of the CIA
* Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Soviet spy
* Philip D. Reed, chairman of General Electric
* Dean Acheson, United States Under Secretary of State, who would later be Sec of State
* Robert Patterson, Secretary of War
* Hugh Moore president and founder of the Dixie Cup Company
* Winthrop W. Aldrich president and chairman of the board of Chase National Bank
* Union leader James B. Carey
* Another union leader David Dubinsky
*
* To sway public opinion, the committee advertised, issued various documents (press releases, editorials, policy papers), sponsored radio broadcasts, hired speakers bureaus. Targets included women’s clubs, church councils, and public affairs groups.
* Dean Acheson went on his own speaking tour around the country.
* His Message focused on American idealism, self-interest, and ideology – particularly, humanitarian and economic concerns.
* Allen W. Dulles: “The Marshall Plan … is not a philanthropic enterprise … It is based on our views of the requirements of American security … This is the only peaceful avenue now open to us which may answer the communist challenge to our way of life and our national security.”

* Government propaganda to convince the people to let them give THEIR money to American corporations in the name of European aid.
* A congressional committee headed by Representative Forrest A. Harness concluded its long study of the problem with this estimate in 1947: “Government propaganda distorts facts with such authority that the person becomes prejudiced or biased in the direction which the Government propagandists wish to lead national thinking.”
* Exactly ten years later, General Douglas MacArthur offered an even more biting commentary on the same pattern of distortion. “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of a grave national emergency. . . . Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
* (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy – William Appleman Williams)

* When the plan passed, as it easily did (with even Taft’s vote), the ink was hardly dry on the legislation when the ships full of goods hit the high seas.
* At any given moment over the next few months, 150 boats were carrying wheat, flour, cotton, tires, borax, drilling equipment, tractors, tobacco, aircraft parts, and anything else big domestic manufacturers could get their hands on.
* As with most goods shipped under the Marshall Plan, American producers had the advantage: 50 percent had to be sent on American vessels.
* Taking a leaf from the Roosevelt playbook, Truman bypassed the usual bureaucracy and established a new bureau—the Economic Cooperative Administration—to distribute the aid.
* It too was staffed by the heads of major industrial-corporate interests who stood to benefit at public expense.
* Paul Hoffman – the same guy who founded the CED – headed the group and passed out billions to well-heeled corporate powers.
* As historian Anthony Carew summarizes, the Marshall Plan “was in all major respects a business organization run by businessmen.”
* Most of all, the aid was used for purchases at distorted prices by American tax dollars in the hands of European governments.
* Like we see with Pentagon contract even today – when you’re taking taxpayer money, which they have no say over, and give it to corporations, particularly when there is an emergency, there’s no time or incentive to check how competitive the prices are that you’re being offered.
* The result was the largest peacetime transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to corporations until that point in U.S. history.

* The Marshall Plan aid was mostly used for the purchase of goods from the United States.
* The European nations had all but exhausted their foreign exchange reserves during the war, and the Marshall Plan aid represented almost their sole means of importing goods from abroad.
* Chomsky https://chomsky.info/200311__/:
* Of the $13 billion of Marshall Plan aid, about $2 billion went right to the U.S. oil companies.
* That was part of the effort to shift Europe from a coal-based to an oil-based economy, and parts of it would be more dependent on the United States.
* It had plenty of coal.
* It didn’t have oil.
* So there’s two billion of the 13.
* You look at the rest of it, very little of that money left the United States.
* It goes from one pocket to another.
* 90% of the funds were actually just a credit that had to be spent on American goods.
* And the recipient countries needed to match that amount in their own currency, known as counterpart funds.
* The remaining 10% was a loan that had to be paid back with interest.
* So the U.S. took $13 billion of taxpayers money and gave $11.7 billion of it to American companies.
* The counterpart thing is confusing.
* Here’s one explanation I read of how it worked.
* Each government that received grant funds had to put an equivalent amount into an account in their own currency.
* The governments reimburse themselves for the money they deposit in the counterpart funds by“selling” the ECA dollar credits to those of their citizens who require dollars with which to import goods from dollar countries.
* The importer, either a government agency or a private business firm, applies for use of ECA dollars to make a particular purchase that will contribute to the recovery of the country.
* If the importer’s application is approved (by the US), he buys the dollar credits with the currency of his country, e.G. Francs, lire Or pounds.
* Suppose a German construction company wished to purchase an American crane for reconstruction efforts in 1949. In a counterpart fund arrangement, company would buy the crane from the West German government in Deutschmarks, which would then be deposited into the central bank. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the body mediating counterpart funds, would pay the American crane exporter in dollars authorized under the European Recovery Program (ERP). Meanwhile, the Deutschmarks would be used to finance a ECA-approved recovery project.
* There are several benefits to this transaction. First, instead of a direct transfer of an asset or converting currency for import, this system incentivizes participation in the economy using the local currency. For the construction company, the entire transaction occurred in West Germany and was arranged by the fledgling government. Furthermore, because the payment was in local currency, there is not a negative effect on West German balance of payments, which was a major concern of the ERP. Lastly, instead of resorting to inflationary policies as had often been done in post-war recoveries, the central bank had an inflow of currency to loan out for projects.[2]
* As I said before, the U.S. also had to approve how the counterpart funds were spent, via the ECA.
* EG Britain wanted to spend counterpart funds on rebuilding social welfare projects but the U.S. rejected that idea.
* They would only approve projects that would drive the economy – meaning the country would be able to buy more American products in the future.
* Those bags of wheat that fed Germans and others had to come from the U.S.’ mid-Western grain belt, and many were paid for in so-called counterpart local funds which the United States could technically spend as it wished in Europe. (https://www.rferl.org/a/1084818.html)
* And 5% of the counterpart funds were earmarked for the U.S. to spend as it liked.
* Which, according to the actual explanation on the George Marshall Foundation site, was to “stockpile critical materials needed for America’s defense”.
* In fact, a quarter of this money ended up as a $200 million slush fund for the CIA which it used for covert activities in France and Italy.
* Another way the funds were used was for a European propaganda tour.
* The ERP Train.
* A seven-carriage train that went around Europe extolling the virtues of the Marshall Plan.
* (Cold-War Economics: The Use of Marshall Plan Counterpart Funds in Germany, 1948-1960
* Armin Grünbacher)
* How is this not imperialism, when Country A gets to dictate to Country B how and where it spends its own money?
* This is taking imperialism to a new level.
* You don’t need to invade.
* You don’t need to threaten.
* You just BUY control.
* Or as Zbigniew (zuh-big-nef) Bresinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, put it, “co-optation”.
* “It likewise relies heavily on the indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites.”
* And it’s “reinforced by the massive but intangible impact of the American domination of global communications, popular entertainment, and mass culture and by the potentially very tangible clout of America’s technological edge and global military reach.”
* (Brzezinski, Zbigniew – The Grand Chessboard; American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998).pdf)
* This is Keynesianism at its best.
* Even though Keynes died just before it got under way.
* He died in April 1946, a few weeks after participating in the negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as “absolute hell”.
* (source)

* And yes – it helped get Europe back on its feet.
* And probably stopped socialist parties from gaining political power.
* And reduced the chances for the U.S.S.R. to build economic and political ties with Western Europe.
*
* Yet many U.S. and European historians have recently concluded that the Marshall Plan’s impact in Western Europe was more important politically and psychologically than it was economically.
* U.S. historian Charles Maier concluded that Marshall aid served as what he called the “lubricant in an engine — not the fuel — which allowed a machine to run that would have otherwise buckle and bind.”
* In fact, the more recent historians say, the Marshall Plan provided Europeans as much psychological reassurance as it did recovery.

* The Marshall Plan had one other great effect on West Europe’s evolution over the past four decades: It encouraged the economic integration that led, first, to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community among six nations -Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands -in 1950.
* Eight years later, the same six took a qualitative jump into the more integrated European Economic Community.
* Which then became the European Union.
* Which Britain is now leaving.
*
* The Marshall Plan stimulated European unification because its architects celebrated the benefits of economic integration and did what they could to bring it about.
* They believed that an integrated economic order, particularly one headed by central institutions, would help to channel constructively Germany’s revitalized strength -and so far, they have been proved right.
* These assumptions grew fundamentally out of U.S. domestic experience, where a large integrated economy has made vast economic growth possible.
* They were not all accepted by the West Europeans, but they had a great influence over them.
*
* Witness the recent words of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: “The United States ought not to forget that the emerging European Union is one of its greatest achievements: it would never have happened without the Marshall Plan.”
* (source)

* But did the Marshall Plan work to stave of America’s economic woes?
*
* It created jobs, especially in the export industries.
* Just as millions of Americans were being discharged from the armed forces and were looking for jobs.
* For the first time in its history, the United States did not suffer from a severe recession due to a lack of spending immediately following the cessation of a major war and a reduction in military spending by the federal government. The United States and most of the rest of the world experienced an economic “free lunch” as both the potential debtor nations and the creditor nation experienced tremendous real economic gains resulting from the Marshall Plan and other foreign aid giveaways. Despite the growth in output from foreign factories, however, the United States maintained a surplus merchandise trade balance of exports over imports until the first oil price shock in 1973. (source)

* And the U.S. economy boomed in the 50s and 60s, in part because of the spending of public treasury money on boosting the economy.
* And partly because the Marshall Plan created a massive market in Europe for American products.

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#95 – Marshall Plan II

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 23:05:36 +0000

* Something that Marshall mentions only briefly in his speech is the effect that would have on the US economy. (around the 7’20″ mark)
* Europe’s economy might have been destroyed after the war, but America’s wasn’t looking too bulletproof, partly BECAUSE the European economy had been shattered.
* In 1947, there were serious concerns about the state of the US economy.
* Benn Steil:
* There was a report written in 1946, I think, by the SWNCC, the State, War and Navy department staff, which said “The conclusion is inescapable, that, under present programs and policies, the world will not be able to continue to buy United States exports at the 1946-47 rate beyond another 12-18 months.”
* They anticipated “substantial decline in the United States export surplus would have a depressing effect on business activity and empolyment in the United States.”
* And in 1946, the gross national product of the U.S. was already down 11.6% on the previous year, as the government stopped spending money on the war effort.
* Navy Secretary James Forrestal characterised American priorities in Europe as “economic stability, political stability and military stability… in about that order.”
* Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Clayton redefined the problem as one of disposing of America’s “great surplus.”
* He explained in May 1947 : “The capitalistic system, whether internally or internationally, can only work by the continual creation of disequilibrium in comparative costs of production.”
* “Let us admit right off that our objective has as its background the needs and interests of the people of the United States. We need markets — big markets — in which to buy and sell.”
* Clayton was saying implicitly what Dean Acheson had argued explicitly in 1944: the profitability of America’s corporate system depended upon overseas economic expansion.
* Marshall and other advocates of the program also spoke openly of the parallel between their policy and America’s earlier westward expansion across the continent.
* America needed to expand.
* But wait!? I thought it was the SOVIETS who were trying to take over the world?
* Marshall argued that the nation faced an either-or situation.
* He claimed that Unless the plan was adopted “the cumulative loss of foreign markets and sources of supply would unquestionably have a depressing influence on our domestic economy and would drive us to increased measures of government control.”
* So by defining America’s expansion as the key to prosperity, Marshall defined foreign policy as the key to domestic problems and to the survival of democracy at home.
* (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy – William Appleman Williams)
*
* If the European economy didn’t recover quickly, it would crash the US economy.
* It’s all connected.
* And if the European economy DID recover, but as part of a Soviet trading bloc, it would STILL crash the US economy.
* (Cox, Michael, and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan.”):
*
* And so they came up with a plan.
* A plan to give $13 billion to European countries over 4 years.
* So The Plan, Contrary to popular mythology, it was not just a simple program of aid.
* It had a TON of conditions.
* It wasn’t like the U.S. just dumped pallets of cash on Europe’s doorstep and said “have at it”.
* This was very carefully engineered and managed so that it would benefit the American economy.
* And Truman politically.
* As the influential British economist Sir Alec Cairncross pointed out, US Aid to Europe had been flowing across the Atlantic for the better part of two years even before Marshall’s speech.
* What made the June 1947 initiative different, he noted, was its attempt to link aid to the reform of European institutions and practices.
* Moreover, although the tone of the speech was mild and nonideological, its implications were anything but.
* it was the most dedicated effort so far to reduce Communist influence in Europe and was intended to affect not only the most obvious countries like France and Italy, but also the smaller states under Soviet control.
* This was certainly how George Kennan conceived of the Plan.
* Although Kennan continued to believe that the basic cause of the crisis in Western Europe was not Communism as such but the need to restore the continent’s economic health, he was in no doubt that the Plan had a deeply subversive purpose.
* Dean Acheson agreed, noting that what US “citizens and the representatives in congress alike always wanted to learn in the last analysis was how Marshall aid operated to block the extension of Soviet power and the acceptance of Commu nist economic and political organisation and alignment.
* At a meeting on 28 May 1947, when U.S. Officials decided that the East European countries would be allowed to participate in the program, they stipulated that any countries taking part would have to reorient their economies away from the USSR toward broader European integration – and capitalism.
* Because most of the resources and goods purchased with Marshall Plan funds came from the US itself, this benefited American exporters and domestic industries.
* It allowed the US to recover from a short-term economic slump in 1946-7 and enter a period of economic boom. (http://alphahistory.com/coldwar/marshall-plan/)
* But the real upshot of the Marshall Plan was a political maneuver to loot American taxpayers to keep influential American corporations on the government dole.
* The Plan’s legacy was the egregious and perpetual use of foreign aid for domestic political and economic purposes.
* It was the beginning of large scale Keynesian Economics during peacetime.
* Using government spending to bolster the economy.
* But of course “government spending” is the spending of the people’s money.
* The public treasury.
* And that money ends up going to private companies and their owners and shareholders.
* A little-known business group, founded in 1942 and called the Committee for Economic Development, was elevated into a think tank for a new international order—the economic counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Founded by a group of business leaders led by Paul G. Hoffman, President of Studebaker Corporation; William Benton, co-founder of Benton & Bowles advertising firm; and Marion B. Folsom, treasurer of Eastman Kodak Company.
* These groups understood that they owed their profit margins to government subsidies provided by the New Deal and wartime production subsidies.
* Faced with post-war peace, they feared a future in which they would be forced to compete on a free-market basis.
* Their personal and institutional security was at stake, so they got busy dreaming up strategies to sustain a profitable statism in a peacetime economy.
* CED successfully worked to garner support among the American business community for the Marshall Plan.
* As Julius Krug, secretary of the interior, said in his memoirs, the Marshall Plan, “essential to our own continued productivity and prosperity,” was a Tennessee Valley Authority on a world scale.
* “It is as if we were building a TVA every Tuesday.”
* But it was going to take some selling both to the American people and the politicians.
* Unlike today, they weren’t as familiar with the concept of Keynesian Economics and how it benefited their constituents.

* Benn Steil:
* Henry Wallace, FDR’s old VP, the man who SHOULD be President, led the attack from the left.
* Far from reviving the European economy, he said, the ERP would undermine the most positive elements of it, such as nationalization of industry, social welfare expansion, and government controls on trade.
* The State Department, which he believed to have been captured by monopoly private interests, was determined merely to perpetuate Europe’s “semicolonial dependence on the United States.”
* Its program would cleave the continent into rival blocs, slow recovery by severing traditional East-West trade links, and fan international tensions—possibly leading to “World War III.”
* In the United States, Wallace said, the ERP would boost the profits of agricultural, oil, steel, and shipping “trusts” at the expense of “American workers and farmers and independent businessmen,” who would have to contend with the resulting shortages, inflation, union busting, and social service cuts.
* In its place, Wallace advocated creation of a $50 billion fund, three times as large as the administration was calling for, run by the United Nations, which would finance a European “new deal.”
* The primary beneficiaries would be the victims of Nazi aggression, including the Soviet Union and the east European states.
* But of course if the UN is running it, how can they make sure it will benefit U.S. interests?
*
* Henry A. Wallace’s Criticism of America’s Atomic Monopoly, 1945-1948 By Mayako Shimamoto:
* Wallace claimed that although Western Europe was forced to buy non-essential items from America, they were banned from buying essential items from their neighbors.
* The economically weak Western industries were vulnerable to competition with American corporations.
* So they American companies would end up dominating the market for those products in Europe, shutting out European manufacturers from their own markets.
* And Wallace could see, even then, that this was a giant sham.
* American money spent on this gigantic scheme of the ERP returned to American pockets.
* To Wallace’s eyes, the huge rush of American taxpayers’ money worked well as a pump primer, returning huge profits only to American corporations as a justifiable reward in the name of humanitarian aid programs.

* Steil:
* But the Marshall Plan wasn’t only getting attacked from the left.
* Guys like Ohio Republican senator and presidential candidate Robert Taft attacked it from the Right as well.
* Also four-term Republican congressman from Nebraska, Howard Buffett.
* Father of Warren Buffet.
* He was a critic of the Truman Doctrine as well.
* He once said, on the floor of Congress: Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.
* He and Taft and others on the Right were critical of the MP, but not for the same reasons as Wallace.
* They didn’t have a problem with aid.
* They just believed the amount of funds Truman wanted Congress to approve — $17 billion ($184 billion in today’s money) over four years — was much too large.
* Taft argues that giving them too much money would create a dangerous dependency on the United States, sapping both private sector and governmental incentives to manage Europe’s own resources properly.
* It’s a big like people on the Right today saying that giving poor people welfare is just making them dependent on hand-outs.
* Like they will just put their feet up and say “that’s it for me for the rest of my life”.
* Which is horseshit, for the most part.
* Democrats tried to undermine Taft by arguing that he was only aiding the Soviets and their supporters.
* “Those who oppose the Marshall Plan, I think,” said Illinois senator Scott Lucas before an eight-hundred-delegate Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense, “should suffer some slight embarrassment in finding themselves in agreement with the Communist Party.”

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#94 – Marshall Plan I

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 21:51:54 +0000

* One of the greatest pieces of mythology to ever be produced in America is the “Marshall Plan”.
* It’s right up there with the idea of glorifying the “Founding Fathers”, who were actually just tax dodgers who orchestrated a bloody coup.
* It’s also of course one of America’s greatest pieces of foreign policy.
* The Marshall Plan is sold to Americans as the greatest gift mankind has ever received since Jesus died on the cross.
* Even today, 70 years later, it’s almost impossible to find analysis of the MP that doesn’t position it as a ‘gift’ or ‘humanitarian aid’.
* But the truth is, it was really neither of those things.
* The Marshall Plan was completely self serving.
* You will often hear it it was about stopping the Soviets from spreading Communism and stopping another World War, and those things are partially true.
* But that’s also missing the point.
* Both for the U.S. as a whole and, particularly, for Truman.
* And it was a genius move.
* It was, at the time, the biggest transfer of wealth from the public treasury into the hands of the wealthy during peacetime probably in history.
* But nearly nobody understands it.
* I’ve been researching this topic for years and the lack of understanding of it blows my mind.
* But let’s go back a bit and provide some background.
* The European winter of 1946-47 was the worst in a hundred plus years.
* widely believed to be the snowiest winter since 1813-14
* Not the coldest, but it was the snowiest winter in a long time.
* Known as a “hunger winter”
* And of course everyone was still living in the aftermath of war.
* The Germans, Brits and Americans had been terror-bombing civilian populations for years.
* railways, bridges and roads were blown up, factories smashed, farms and fields ravaged by tank battles and firefights
* The war had also forced the old European colonial powers, most notably Britain and France, to begin the painful and, they soon learned, financially costly process of withdrawing from some of their overseas possessions, either as a result of military retreat or simply because they could no longer afford their imperial commitments.
* Or because the Americans insisted on it.
* Open door policy, free trade, and all that.
* Apart from complete destruction of their economies and infrastructure and the deaths of tens of millions of their people, Europe had to contend with something else.
* The realisation that they sucked.
* At the beginning of the 20th century, European countries prided themselves on their superiority.
* But In the space of thirty years the most powerful nations in the history of the world had set upon themselves in two ruinous wars.
* They had killed tens of millions of their citizens, injured tens of millions more, and had stripped from each of themselves of the rank of first-class power.
* Even Great Britain who was victorious in both wars.
* At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a belief in the superiority of European civilization.
* Now that seemed like a cruel joke.
* Superior civilizations don’t elevate warmongers to absolute political power in order to destroy themselves in unremitting industrial warfare.
* They don’t bombard defenceless civilians, or send conscripted soldiers to certain death in battle after battle, or massacre ethnic minorities, or attempt to commit genocide.
* So The conclusion seemed inescapable: the European way of politics had wrought disaster.
* So across Europe, people wanted dramatic changes.
* And political movements arose to drive those changes.
* And most of them were left leaning.
* Because these superior European countries had all been capitalist.
* Yes, even Nazi Germany.
* Nazi Fascism was extreme capitalism.
* They believed in private property and a market economy – they just wanted it to serve the State.
* And the monarchies were all capitalist.
* So after WWII, people are exploring new ideas, creating left parties, which were being supported by Moscow.
* Because who else is going to support left-leaning parties?
* These parties were in a good position to seize political power in places like Greece, Italy, and France, where they had huge political credibility as a result of their dominant role in resistance campaigns against fascism.
* And those parties talked about the economic state of affairs in Europe, which was obviously atrocious.
* In France, you could only buy meat on the black market, and bread was almost as hard to get.
* And hard when you got it
* In Britain, which suffered far less than most of Europe, the economy had hit rock bottom.
* Even in the once-mighty British realm, two years after a war they had technically won, people lived on bare rations and in unheated homes, often without electricity.
* The worst suffering by far, however, was taking place in Germany.
* So it’s all well and good to contain the Soviets.
* But what do you do if the people in Europe are starving and looking for new political leadership that only the Soviets can provide?
* The argument from American strategists was that America needed to get directly involved in re-building the economies of Europe.
* Truman thought it was only common sense to “spend twenty or thirty billion dollars to keep the peace” over the coming four years than to spend multiples of that annually fighting a war.
* WWII had cost the U.S. $350 billion.
* Here’s how one economist put it in 1948:
* Another war would cost considerably more: not only because the war would not be paid for out of additional output as was World War II, but also because warfare is going to be much more devastating in the future. We can be certain that after the next war, we shall not raise our income from $70 billion (as in 1939) to $160 billion (at War’s peak) and $205 billion in 1947. Even in stable prices, our income is up almost 75 per cent since 1939. Another war should cost us at least twice the last war, say $150 billion a year over 5 years; or if it is a knock- out war, an optimistic guess would be the loss of half to three- quarters of our income over a period of at least 10 years or, say, $1, 500 billion. It is well to ask whether we should take the prudent risk of spending $25 billion over 10 years in order to save $1, 000 billion (say), on the assumption that the stabilization of a democratic Europe will contribute substantially to saving us from a war.
* (* https://www-jstor-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/stable/pdf/2975441.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A51ed83cc6d9ab6a23c1c636ccb6403ee * Seymour E. Harris Source: The Journal of Finance, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb., 1948))
* And so the European Recovery Plan was born.
* It was conceived mostly by George Kennan.
* But it was announced by another George – Marshall, now the Secretary of State.
* And so it became known as the Marshall Plan.
* As Ray mentioned on the last episode, he’d replaced Jimmy Byrnes.
* And Marshall was a very serious guy.
* Remember the story about the time when FDR called Marshall by his first name?
* Marshall apparently responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”
* What happened to Byrnes?
* On Jan 6, 1947, Byrnes had been TIME’s Man of the Year.
* A day later he was gone from Truman’s cabinet.
* He’d only been in the position for a 18 months.
* Why?
* The official reasons were his health.
* He was 67.
* It can’t have been that bad though.
* Four years later he was Governor of South Carolina.
* We know today that there was a ton of tension between Truman and Byrnes, from day one.
* Byrnes died in 1972, at the age of 89 – so he had another 25 years in him after 1947.
* It seems quite obvious that he was pushed out by Truman, as was his predecessor, Big Stetty, Edward Stettinius.
* And Truman wasn’t holding up too well politically at this stage.
* His reputation was pretty damaged.
* Remember the leaks about the Soviet spies, how the Manhattan Project had been infiltrated, the Soviets weren’t playing nice, and the US economy is struggling.
* 14 percent inflation in 1947 and rising unemployment
* The huge growth the economy experienced during WWII, thanks to Military Keynesianism, was over.
* The military budget had been massively reduced.
* Here are Truman’s opening paragraphs when he presented his budget to Congress in January 1947:
* To the Congress of the United States: As the year 1947 opens America has never been so strong or so prosperous. Nor have our prospects ever been brighter. Yet in the minds of a great many of us there is a fear of another depression, the loss of our jobs, our farms, our businesses. But America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. The job at hand today is to see to it that America is not ravaged by recurring depressions and long periods of unemployment, but that instead we build an economy so fruitful, so dynamic, so progressive that each citizen can count upon opportunity and security for himself and his family. Nor is prosperity in the United States important to the American people alone. It is the foundation of world prosperity and world peace. And the world is looking to us.
* But people weren’t buying his optimism.
* According to Walter Lippmann, regarded as the most greatest political commentator of his day, Truman was an embarrassment.
* He said Truman’s bravado and quick decisions were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties.
* WOW – does that sound familiar?
* He’s had to fire his Secretary of State for undermining him.
* And there’s an election coming in 1948.
* Marshall, on the other hand, had huge respect.
* His appointment as SOS was unanimously accepted by Congress.
* Even though he’d just come from a massive failure as you mentioned on the last episode.
* He’s been sent to China by Truman to try and negotiate a peace between Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao.
* And there was a report that came out after WWII about the intelligence and operational failures that allowed the Pearl Harbour attack to take place and some of the blame was being laid on Marshall.
* Although modern scholars tend to give him a pass on that one.
* Do you know something Truman and Marshall had in common?
* Both Freemasons.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20131110000739/http://www.nymasons.org/about-freemasonry/famous-masons-ii.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Freemasons_(E%E2%80%93Z)#M
* According to Lolly Zamoysky, formerly a senior KGB analyst, the Freemasons were responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War.
* ‘Freemasons’, he claimed, ‘have always controlled the upper echelons of government in Western countries Masonry in fact runs “remotely controls’ bourgeois society… The true centre of the world Masonic movement is to be found in the most “Masonic” country of all, the United States… Ronald Reagan has been characterised as an “outstanding” Mason. ‘
* Zamoysky’s explanation of the Cold War was startling in its simplicity:
* The first ever atomic attack on people, the use of atomic weapons for blackmail and the escalation of the arms race were sanctioned by the 33-degree Mason Harry Truman.
* The first ever call for the Cold War was sounded by Mason Winston Churchill (with Truman’s blessing).
* The onslaught on the economic independence of Western Europe (disguised as the Marshall Plan) was directed by the 33 -degree Mason George Marshall.
* Truman and West European Freemasons orchestrated the formation of NATO.
* Don’t we ‘owe’ to that cohort the instigation of hostility between the West and the Soviet Union…?
* So there you have it.
* I’ve met some Freemasons and I can tell you, they were crazy.
* But anyhoodles.
* Here’s Marshall’s June 1947 Harvard Commencement speech https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/70-years-ago-a-harvard-commencement-speech-outlined-the-marshall-plan-and-calmed-a-continent/
* He was a pretty boring speaker.
* He hints at the idea of European aid, but it’s just a hint, and most of the media the next day ignored it.
* “Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help.”
* He said that Without such support Europe would “face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

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#93 – The X Article

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 01:22:16 +0000

* The X Article.
* George Kennan, the Soviet expert who wrote the Long Telegram, wrote another piece, but this time published publicly and anonymously, in July 1947, just after Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech.
* The actual title of the article was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”.
* It was published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
* He used the pseudonym “Mr X” and so it’s known as the X Article.
* It began as a private report prepared for Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in January 1947.
* It was never intended as a public document.
* But Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, urged Kennan to publish it, so he obtained permission from Forrestal to publish the article under the pseudonym “X”.
* Whereas The Long Telegram was a review of how the Soviet Union saw the world – and The Clifford-Elsey Report took those facts and interpreted how they affected the world and what the United States should do about it – The X Article took the information presented in the two prior reports and constructed a road map for the Cold War.
* The first sections of the article provide a potted history of Leninist and Stalinst ideology and the current political reality of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
* His conclusion is kind of interesting.
* As you might expect, he talks about containing the expansion of the Soviets.
* “confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
* He says Soviet power “moves inexorably along a prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.”
* Unfortunately he didn’t concentrate at all on how US power and expansion acted as contributing factors to Soviet behavior.
* As Thomas Paterson wrote in Meeting The Communist Threat:
* Too simply, he applied one interpretive model to Russia and another to the United States: Russia’s foreign policy derived from a response to internal needs not external threats; America’s foreign policy derived from a response to external challenges.
* Mostly he talks about America providing a good example to the world.
* He said that if America has internal fighting, if it struggles economically, if it doesn’t look after its own people, if it embarks on global wars, then it is playing right into the hands of the Communists.
* Because that what they predict the U.S. will do.
* However – if the U.S. keeps its nose clean, looks after its people, and doesn’t take an aggressive global stance, then the Leninist ideology will look stupid and will struggle to keep the faith of the people.
* And here we are, 71 years later, and I hate to tell you – the Russians were right!
* Anyway, back to Walter Lippman, The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda.
* He took issue with the X article – at the time, he didn’t know who the author was – and wrote a series of articles about it, which ended up as a book called “The Cold War”.
* Which popularised the term.
* It’s usually said that the term was first coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, another Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
* called the greatest reporter of his time by Lord Northcliffe
* He is known for saying, “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
* He did publicity work for Bernard Baruch in 1947.
* Swope wrote a speech for Baruch, which he delivered to Congress on 16 April 1947.
* The line was: “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.”
* HOWEVER
* On 19 October 1945, George Orwell published an essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” in which he wrote: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery… James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.
* So thanks George.
* Lippman wrote:
* My objection to the policy of containment is not that it seeks to confront the Soviet power with American power, but that the policy is misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power. It commits this country to a struggle which has for its objective nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years the Soviet power will, as the result of long frustration, “break up” or “mellow.”
* He was concerned that Military entanglements in remote places might bankrupt the treasury and would in any event do little to enhance American security at home.
* American society would become militarized in order to fight a “Cold War.”
* To compensate for America’s comparative weakness in these locations, Washington would be forced to recruit an “array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets;’ any number of whom could be expected to pull in the United States to defend them when trouble arose.
* And then – he nails the major flaw in Kennan’s assessment of the Russians:
* We may now ask why the official diagnosis of Soviet conduct, as disclosed by Mr. X’s article, has led to such an unworkable policy for dealing with Russia. It is, I believe because Mr. X has neglected even to mention the fact that the Soviet Union is the successor of the Russian Empire and that Stalin is not only the heir of Marx and of Lenin but of Peter the Great, and the Czars of all the Russias.
* For reasons which I do not understand, Mr. X decided not to consider the men in the Kremlin as the rulers of the Russian State and Empire, and has limited his analysis to the interaction of “two forces”: “the ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin” and the “circumstances of the power which they have now exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.”
* Thus he dwells on the indubitable fact that they believe in the Marxian ideology and that “they have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917.” But with these two observations alone he cannot, and does not, explain the conduct of the Soviet government in this postwar era–that is to say its aims and claims to territory and to the sphere of influence which it dominates.The Soviet government has been run by Marxian revolutionists for thirty years; what has to be explained by a planner of American foreign policy is why in 1945 the Soviet government expanded its frontiers and its orbit, and what was the plan and pattern of its expansion. That can be done only by remembering that the Soviet government is a Russian government and that this Russian government has emerged victorious over Germany and Japan.
* Having omitted from his analysis the fact that we are dealing with a victorious Russia–having become exclusively preoccupied with the Marxian ideology, and with the communist revolution–it is no wonder that the outcome of Mr. X’s analysis is nothing more definite, concrete and practical than that the Soviets will encroach and expand “at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
* Lippman then goes on to quote from Professor Robert Strausz-Hupe of the University of Pennsylvania, whose article on “The Western Frontiers of Russia” appeared in the July 1947 issue of The Review of Politics, quarterly published by the University of Notre Dame:
* The total area acquired by Russia between 1945 and 1947 is approximately as large as the total area lost between 1917 and 1921. Russia has redeemed the hostages she gave to defeat, revolution and national self-determination. The western frontiers of the Soviet Sphere of Influence coincide so closely with those Czarist Russia planned to draw after the defeat of the Central Powers that Czarist and Soviet policies appear to differ as regards methods only.
* Lippman then continues:
* The westward expansion of the Russian frontier and of the Russian sphere of influence, though always a Russian aim, was accomplished when, as, and because the Red Army defeated the German army and advanced to the center of Europe. It was the mighty power of the Red Army, not the ideology of Karl Marx, which enabled the Russian government to expand its frontiers.
* Lippman’s alternative strategy to containment is to sign a treaty with Russia where the US, UK and U.S.S.R. would all pull their forces out of Europe.
* In return for security guarantees for Russia.
* If that was indeed what they wanted, security, then they would get it.
* Then, if they move out of those borders without sufficient and acceptable justification – attack them.
* But until then – use diplomacy.
* If you go into a Cold War with them, there’s no hope of diplomacy.
* You’re at war.
* Even Churchill in his Iron Curtain speech had advocated seeking a settlement through “frequent and growing contact” with the Kremlin.
* It made sense to negotiate with Stalin particularly over the question of Central Europe, and above all Germany, if the containment of Soviet power within eastern Europe was the goal.
* You stay on that side, we stay on this side.
* Stalin, arch-realist that he had often shown himself to be and with his country still recovering from a brutal war, might agree to a treaty based on that.
* Or he might refuse.
* There was no way to know without trying.
* Ironically, Kennan agreed with much of this.
* He was unhappy with the black and white nature of Truman’s speech.
* And he thought he had neglected the role of diplomacy in both his Long Telegram and X Article.
* He believed in diplomacy and he knew the Russians did too.
* Kennan later claimed that he never meant the United States should undertake global interventionism or emphasize military means.
* But his article certainly hinted that they should and it was swallowed whole by the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.
* Whether he intended to or not, Kennan helped to establish undiscriminating globalism and interventionism as permanent features of American diplomacy.
* Kennan the intellectual would suffer as others used his ideas to support a multitude of interventions and a military establishment of enormous proportions.
* The father of containment would spend much of the rest of his life attempting to disown his offspring.
* He said he felt “like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of the cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster.”
* But in 1947 all of this containment talk was just theory.
* There was still no plan for just HOW the Americans would go about “containing” the Russians.
* It wasn’t until the following year, 1948, that they came up with the European Recovery Program, better known as – The Marshall Plan.

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#92 – The Truman Doctrine

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 23:00:18 +0000

* And so on March 12, 1947, before a joint session of Congress, President Truman articulated, for the first time, a comprehensive American foreign policy for the postwar world.
* He did not mention the Soviet Union by name, or refer to the need to contain its power in Europe, though he did place American freedom against “totalitarian regimes.”
* Appealing to American universalist ideals, he declared that U.S. foreign policy henceforth must side with any nation facing aggression, anywhere in the world.
* WATCH IT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=-LMXGFhfbCs
* READ IT: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumantrumandoctrine.html
* Why not the UN?
* Because the U.S.S.R. would intervene.
* But that’s the POINT of the UN.
* International co-operation.
* Here we are, a year and change after the creation of the UN, and the U.S. is already acting unilaterally in European affairs.
* His key phrases:
* I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
* I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
* I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
* What about the free peoples who are resisting armed MAJORITIES?
* What about the free peoples of Palestine?
* You’ll notice that in his speech, Truman never mentions the Soviets by name.
* But he hints at them.
* He mentions Yalta and “totalitarian regimes”.
* So the Soviets have officially gone from being Allied and friends to the boogieman.
* BTW.
* Please note that Truman in 1947 is referring to the U.S.S.R. as a “totalitarian regime”.
* When people point to the U.S.S.R. and say “look! Socialism doesn’t work!” I always point out that it wasn’t actually socialism or communism – it was totalitarianism.
* People seem to think that socialism has to be totalitarian.
* Which is, of course, nonsense.
* Australia has a form of socialism – “social democracy”.
* One of our two major political parties, the ALP, calls itself a democratic socialist party.
* So does Finland.
* So does Sweden.
* None of those countries have totalitarian governments.
* Socialism and democracy can go together.
* Just remember that.
* Back to Truman.
* His speech was really just a rehash of Churchill’s “We Will Fight Them On The Beaches” speech.
* Truman expanded on it.
* “We will fight them on the beaches… of other countries… even if they don’t want us to.”
* And how did the Soviets respond to his speech?
* Six days later, Nikolai Novikov, who had returned from Washington to Moscow to take part in a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, discussed Truman’s speech with Molotov.
* He said The speech showed that the United States would support “reactionary regimes” in those countries where they existed, and would try to undermine the progressive regimes of Eastern Europe.
* Novikov writes in his memoirs That Molotov replied with an ironical smile
* Molotov said, “The President is trying to intimidate us,” “to turn us at a stroke into obedient little boys. But we don’t give a damn. At the meeting of the Council [of Foreign Ministers] we will firmly pursue our principled line.”
* Origins of Cold War; an International History, 2e (2005).pdf – page 73
* Now the implications of the Truman Doctrine were enormous.
* Until 1947, the U.S. had openly criticised countries that played power politics.
* Now it has committed itself to playing it on a global scale.
* But as a political tactic, it worked: Truman received the support he wanted from Republicans who wanted the U.S. to get tough with the Soviets.
* The bill to commit American funds to Greece and Turkey passed the Senate easily, by 67 votes to 23.
* HOWEVER
* When countries give “aid” to other countries, there is ALWAYS – ALWAYS – a quid pro quo.
* One quid pro quo here was hypothetical.
* Don’t give the Soviets a chance to increase their influence in these two countries.
* But according to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal – he was the first guy to ever hold that title by the way, Truman invented it – there was a direct link between foreign aid and the shortage in critical materials.
* For Forrestal, aid to Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine was more than a simple effort to contain Communism; he labeled the doctrine “hard and selfish.”
* What did he mean?
* Well Seventy-three percent of America’s imports consisted of raw materials for the production of necessities for the United States, and 55 percent of these needed imports came from areas within the British Empire, mostly in Asia.
* Forrestal put it this way: “These raw materials have to come over the seas and a good many have to go through the Mediterranean. That is one reason why the Mediterranean must remain a free highway.”
* So the “aid” to Turkey and Greece was also an investment in keeping the shipping lanes open.
* Again, Forrestal told one skeptical friend that the materials problem “is the only thing that makes any impression on me at all,” and his listener observed that the “average fellow in this country” was not aware of the raw materials consideration. (Meeting the Communist Threat Truman to Reagan.pdf)
* Few Americans were aware either that the March 10 draft of the Truman Doctrine speech stated that Greece and Turkey were areas of “great natural resources which must be accessible to all nations and must not be under the exclusive control or domination of any single nation.”
* That section was later removed.
* But you get the idea.
* Truman officials in mid-1947 did not argue, however, that European aid was essential to head off an imminent recession.
* Rather, they stressed the long-range economic and political importance of such assistance in the familiar peace and prosperity idiom.
* In November 1947 the Council of Economic Advisers predicted an $8 billion decline in exports unless a new foreign aid program was initiated.
* Total exports in 1946 were only $14 billion. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EXPGSA)
* So pulling $8 billion out of that would hurt.
* The Economic Advisers said losing $8 billion would not “inflict serious short-run damage on our economy, substantial problems of readjustment would be generated. Moreover, the industrial paralysis which could be expected to result in some other countries would have repercussions of major proportion upon our own economy and upon world stability.”
* So it might start a chain reaction.
* Truman was coming to the realization that if he wanted to obtain political advantage by talking and acting tough on the Cold War, he didn’t have to wait for the Soviets to give him a reason.
* Later in 1947, Clark Clifford and one of FDR’s old aides James Rowe wrote a long memo to the President that mapped out how to turn a potential future war against the Soviets into political GOLD.
* They predicted that relations with the USSR would be the key foreign policy issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.
* And it was pretty simple to predict that those relations would get worse during the course of 1948;
* and that this would strengthen Truman’s domestic political position.
* They wrote: “There is considerable political advantage in the administration in its battle with the Kremlin;’
* “The worse matters get … the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president.”
* So it’s pretty obvious what they are saying.
* If Truman can ramp up a fear about the Cold War in the U.S. – irrespective of what the Soviets are actually doing – it would help his domestic political situation.
* And the Red Scare was already starting to ramp up.
* In the 1946 midterm elections the Republicans had taken control of both houses for the first time since 1928.
* Many of those elected were more conservative and more anti-communist than the candidates they replaced; many resorted to Red-baiting in their campaigns.
* They made “anti-Communist” attacks upon Truman and the Democrats
* Republican National Chairman Carroll Reece talked about the “pink puppets in control of the federal bureaucracy”
* And of course, the Democrats didn’t want to get caught out sounding soft, so they upped their anti-Soviet rhetoric to match the Republicans.
* But this is before the Soviets have even done anything!
* Anyone who suggested diplomacy was accused of appeasement.
* And then Truman went after his own people.
* Two weeks after his Truman Doctrine speech, he established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which gave government security officials authorization to screen three million employees of the federal government for any hint of political deviance.
* Executive Order 9835
* The order specified that one criterion to be used in determining that “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the attorney general to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
* Hundreds of federal employees were fired.
* Thousands quit in disgust.
* A few weeks later, Truman set up AGLOSO – the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.
* This is two years before McCarthy starts his whole thing.
* AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to “an official black list.”
* But they released little or no information about key aspects of the list, including how it was compiled, what criteria were used to list groups, why the decision was made to publish the list, and why listed organizations were not provided with any notice, charges, or hearings before they were designated.
* This first AGLOSO was compiled in secret, and the listed organizations were not informed or given any opportunity to challenge the listings.
* Imagine if Trump came out with something similar today.
* The Democrats would lose their fucking minds.
* But in 1947, it was a Democratic administration that put this together.
* Thousands of Americans with progressive or radical political beliefs signed petitions for, or became members of, these groups without being aware of the Communist ties of the group.
* Many were later persecuted and suffered personal consequences during the McCarthy era.
* And even if they HAD known about the communist ties – so what?
* The Soviets were their allies until yesterday.
* Supposedly American is the land of freedom.
* Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom of expression.
* Yet here is a Democratic administration saying that you’re not allowed to belong to this group or that group.
* Because they have different ideas.
* Have the Soviets attacked America?
* Have they said they were going to attack America?
* Okay – they had spied on America.
* And I can understand you don’t want spies in your ranks of Federal employees.
* And not all of the organisations had Communist ties.
* The KKK were on the list and they HATED the Communists.
* But for the moment, being in one of these groups didn’t automatically mean you were going to be in trouble.
* It just meant you were going to be investigated.
* However In his 1991 memoir, Clark Clifford said that his “greatest regret” from his decades-long government service was his failure to “make more of an effort to kill the loyalty program at its inception, in 1946–47.”
* He said that neither he nor Truman viewed Communist infiltration of the federal government as a serious problem.
* He said the 1946 elections “weakened” Truman but “emboldened [FBI Director] Hoover and his allies.”
* Rather than combating the irrationality of the charges of softness on communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs.
* So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party.
* It looks like, from an American perspective, the idea of using diplomacy with the Soviets had gone out the window.
* And not everyone was happy about that.
* Henry Wallace used it as the main platform for his 1948 run at the White House.
* The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda, Walter Lippmann, wrote that Moscow officials had genuine security fears, and were motivated primarily by a defensive concern to prevent the revival of German power-hence their determination to assert effective control over eastern Europe.
* It distressed him that the administration seemed blind to this reality, and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin over issues of mutual concern.
* And then around this time, George Kennan published his famous X Article.
* But that’s for next week.

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#91 – The Baruch Plan

Cameron Reilly — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 09:34:05 +0000

* So here we are in 1946.
* The Truman administration has decided on a “containment” policy.
* But who is going to contain the containers?
* According to the Novikov telegram, the Soviets felt like they had to contain the US.
* And the U.S. felt like they had to contain the Soviets.
* So the Americans were trying to figure out how they were going to to it, and how much they were willing to spend on it.
* In terms of atomic weapons control, the United States Atomic Energy Commission developed a classified plan to achieve international control, which came to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report, and submitted it to Secretary of State Byrnes in January 1946.
* It was named after Dean Acheson, at the time the Under Secretary of State – we’ve mentioned him briefly before, but he’s going to be a major character during the 1950s – and David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
* But it was written mostly by the committee’s chief scientific consultant, Robert Oppenheimer,
* They recommended that all global fissile material be owned by an international agency to be called the Atomic Development Authority, which would release small amounts to individual nations for the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy.
* But there was a twist.
* The stockpiles and atomic production plants would be strategically distributed geographically.
* Lots of different countries would have some inside their borders.
* So everyone would know what each country had.
* And the UN would have inspections and access.
* If a nation bent on atomic war seized the international plants within its borders, and refused access and inspections, everyone would know immediately what was happening.
* Other nations would have atomic plants within their own borders so that they would not be at a disadvantage.
* If a nation did seize the Authority’s installations that were located within its territory, it would still take at least a year or more to produce bombs.
* So the plan would provide a huge measure of security against surprise attacks.
* Not a bad plan.
* The report also said that the United States would have to abandon its monopoly on atomic weapons, revealing what it knew to the Soviet Union, in exchange for a mutual agreement against the development of additional atomic bombs.
* It made no mention of when the United States should destroy its nuclear arsenal, but it did acknowledge that doing so was a necessity.
* The background to this report is the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow between December 16 and 26, 1945.
* The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to create a United Nations commission to advise on the destruction of all existing atomic weapons and to work toward using atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
* The resulting body, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission – UNAEC – was created on January 24, 1946, with six permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and Canada) and six rotating members.
* That same month, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes created a special advisory committee headed by Acheson and Lilienthal, to compose a report that the U.S. Government would present to the UNAEC.
* And of course, in that great American White House tradition, a great committee of serious and intelligent men was commission to spend many months of their time researching and writing a serious report about a very serious subject, so that, when it was delivered seriously to the President who commission the report, he could just go “nah fuck that” and throw it in the bin.
* But By the time they delivered their report, Truman had decided “nope, fuck that, we’re keeping the bomb to ourselves”
* But he couldn’t just come out and SAY that, because it would mean reneging on an important piece of FDR’s plan
* And something he had already agreed to in principle with the UK and USSR
* I mean, the very first sentence of the Acheson – Lilienthal report says:
* We were given as our starting point a political commitment already made by the United States to seek by all reasonable means to bring about international arrangements to prevent the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes and to promote the use of it for the benefit of society.
* A political commitment made by the United States!
* Which obviously didn’t mean much to Truman.
* So instead he came up with something called the Baruch Plan.
* Which was a sneaky way of painting the Soviets into a corner.
* The day before the United States submitted the Acheson-Lilienthal report to the United Nations, Truman appointed Bernard Baruch as the American delegate to the UNAEC.
* Baruch was a seriously rich stockbroker, known as the “Lone Wolf Of Wall Street” because he refused to join any financial house.
* He was a Democrat who had been involved with Woodrow Wilson and FDR and had helped finance Truman’s own 1940 Senate race.
* So Baruch delivered a speech to the commission in June of 46, stating that the United States would agree to transfer its bomb science and plans etc to the United Nations, but only under certain conditions.
* First, the UN Security Council would have to begin a process of thorough worldwide inspections to ensure that no state was attempting to build a bomb surreptitiously.
* Any state caught doing so would be subject to immediate and harsh penalties, which meant, as far as the Security Council was concerned, military attack.
* Second, no nation on the Security Council would be allowed to use its veto on matters of international atomic control.
* Truman and Byrnes quickly approved these new stipulations.
* Acheson and Lilienthal did not approve.
* It was a brilliant move.
* The administration knew from the espionage revelations that Moscow was working on a bomb.
* If the Kremlin accepted the new provisions, it would open itself up to a military attack by the United Nations that it could not veto.
* This the USSR would never do.
* And if it rejected them, the Soviets – not the Americans – would be held responsible for crushing the dream of international atomic weapons control.
* Sure enough, late in 1946 the Soviet Union rejected the plan.
* For the first time, but not the last, the United States had developed a strategy that forced Moscow to shoulder the blame for initiating a conflict to which the United States had already committed itself.
* Truman wrote to Baruch: ‘We should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can’t arm against us.’
* The big question everyone was wondering about in late 1946 and early 1947 was to what extent the U.S. would leverage its military and economic superiority in Europe.
* U.S. diplomatic tradition stipulated that the United States should avoid direct intervention in European affairs during peacetime.
* There were several high profile politicians saying the U.S. should stay out of Europe’s problems.
* Including Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the 27th President Taft, who also goes on to be a prominent critic of the Nuremberg Trials, and Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin.
* Traditionally isolationist publications, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, also pushed for the U.S. to stay out of it.
* Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace – the guy who was FDR’s Veep before Truman – saw right through the Baruch Plan.
* He knew it was about threatening the Soviets with the bomb, instead of diplomacy.
* In a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden audience in September 1946, he said that getting tough “never brought anything real and lasting-whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”
* He also said: the US *should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, western Europe and the United States. ”
* In the same speech, Wallace said the Russians needed to stop “conniving” against the U.S. and must stop teaching that communism must triumph, by force if necessary.
* “And we must be certain that Russia is not carrying on territorial expansion or world domination through native Communists faithfully following every twist and turn of the Moscow party line. ”
* Which sounds reasonable?
* But Truman fired Wallace from the cabinet, privately calling him “a real Commie and a dangerous man.”
* Two weeks after Wallace’s firing, White House aides Clark Clifford and George Elsey – Clifford ended up being a senior adviser to every President from Truman through to Carter as well as being Secretary of Defense for a few years in the late 60s – Elsey was a naval commander who had been an advisor to FDR and Truman and ended up becoming President of the American Red Cross – submitted an 82-page report on Soviet-American relations solicited by Truman.
* They took a hard line, saying the Soviets wanted to take over Europe and the U.S. needed to do everything in its power to stop them.
* Stalin only understood tough talk and military power.
* Truman at this stage seemed to agree with the Clifford-Elsey position.
* Great story about Elsey BTW.
* He once gave this advice to Truman:
* “The President’s job is to lead public opinion, not to be a blind follower. You can’t sit around and wait for public opinion to tell you what to do. In the first place, there isn’t any public opinion. The public doesn’t know anything about it; they haven’t heard about it. You must decide what you’re going to do and do it, and attempt to educate the public to the reasons for your action.”
* People don’t know shit.
* The historian Thomas A. Bailey, author of a popular 1948 book entitled The Man in the Street, agreed: “Because the masses are notoriously short-sighted, and generally cannot see danger until it as at their throats, our statesman are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-term interests. . . . ” He went on: “Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand. . . . The yielding of some of our democratic control over foreign affairs is the price that we may have to pay for greater physical security.”
* This is how political strategists think about the public.
* So Truman agreed with Clifford and Elsey but he needed a justification before he could act.
* And then he got one.
* On February 21, the British government under Clement Attlee informed Washington that it would no longer subsidize pro-Western forces in Turkey and Greece.
* There were two nations in which Britain had wielded informal colonial power since the nineteenth century.
* They were both part of the “naughty agreement”.
* This was a clear sign that the old empire was not going to take responsibility for European security, not even in cases where strategically important nations faced the risk of political collapse.
* So the U.S. strategists were trying to figure out what to do.
* If they didn’t jump in, they were convinced there would be revolutions in each country and they would fall into the Soviet bloc.
* Remember that the UK had already had to crush a Communist revolution in Greece to keep the King in power.
* In the 19th century the Ottoman Empire grew weaker and Britain increasingly became its protector, even fighting the Crimean War in the 1850s to help it out.
* They considered the Ottoman Empire an essential component in the balance of power in the region.
* When the war ended for some countries in 1918-19, it didn’t end for Turkey: the First World War led straight into the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923).
* Then the secret wartime agreements between the British and the French to divide up the Ottoman territory amongst themselves kicked in.
* All that was left behind to become the Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was primarily to the former empire’s Anatolian heartland.
* And of course the Turkish remembered that after WWII.
* They had lost their status amongst the great empires.
* And it felt betrayed by the British who had, during the war, formed secret alliances with Ottoman Arabs to stir up revolts against their Turkish imperial rulers and entered into the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 with the French, to take control of much of the empire’s former territory.
* So if the Brits pulled out, there was a good chance there would be a Turkish revolution.
* During a meeting on February 27 1947, Dean Acheson referred to the potential collapse of Greece as “Armageddon.”
* He said it was like “apples in a barrel infected by a rotten one;’
* its loss could “infect Iran and all of the East” and even Africa and western Europe.
* the “domino theory”
* Truman agreed.
* But how would they get the American public on board?
* It’s not like Turkey and Greece were in any immediate threat of being invaded by Stalin.
* He’d already promised Churchill he’d stay out of it.
* So together with George Marshall, they came up with the idea of generalising the problem.
* An abstract, universal case would have to be made emphasizing the importance of overseas American commitment generally, rather than the specific merits of supporting Greece and Turkey.
* As the Republican senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg, – not to be confused with Art Vandalay from Vandalay Industries – and who
* Vandenberg also opposed U.S. involvement in World War II and urged Roosevelt to reach an accommodation with Japan – famously put it, Truman would have to “scare hell out of the American people” to get Congress on board.
* And so scare them he did.

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#90 – The Novikov Telegram.

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 04:09:07 +0000

* The last, and certainly most conspicuous, of the four events that transformed the political culture of Washington in 1946 was a speech given in early March by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri.
* Like Stalin’s speech of four weeks earlier, it was prepared for public consumption.
* Truman had read a draft in advance and approved it, though he would later equivocate on this point.
* He sat behind Churchill as the legendary leader, speaking in the great rolling cadences now so familiar to Americans, declared that an “iron curtain” had fallen on Europe, dividing the free people of the West from a tyrannical, totalitarian regime in the East.
* Sometimes called the opening shot of the Cold War, this passage is one of the most often-quoted in post 1945 world affairs:
* Churchill said near the end: “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines … What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will be.”
* This is coming from the guy who bitterly opposed to collapse of the British Empire which controlled 25% of the world only a few years earlier.
* Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
* These four developments of February and early March 1946 – Stalin’s speech, Pearson’s revelations, the Long Telegram, and Churchill’s speech – went a long way toward solidifying American attitudes with respect to the Soviet Union.
* The Pearson revelations and the Stalin speech demonstrated to lawmakers of both parties that continued efforts at cooperation with the USSR would be risky to sustain in the hardening atmosphere of American politics.
* General suspicion of the Soviet Union moved to the mainstream-it was now the easier, politically safer stance for a congressional representative or senator to take.
* Add the four together and the picture was clear: Stalin’s Soviet Union presented no immediate danger, but neither could it be trusted.
* Because the Soviets could not be trusted, the United States needed to act, rather than stand idly by as it had in the 1930s.
* The questions now was – what to do about it?
* They didn’t want another war.
* And at this stage, the U.S. didn’t have a tradition of carrying a highly military budget during peacetime.
* Many in congress, and perhaps even Truman, believed that the expensive game of military readiness was something the old, defunct European nations did – the U.S. was an exception.
* Plus, Truman wanted to keep the government budget low and balanced and to avoid the inflation that a lot of people were predicting would come after the war ended and the economy returned to a consumer footing, with millions of soldiers returning home.
* As the Soviet threat seemed a long way off, Truman could afford to take his time and do it on the cheap.
* One of the first things he did was to screw Stalin on Iran.
* As we’ve mentioned in the past, Stalin had troops in Iran during WWII to stop the Nazis taking the oil reserves.
* As did the British, who of course had a long history with oil concessions – I think we talked about that on the Bullshit Filter series on Syria.
* Stalin demanded an oil concession from Iran that was equivalent to the one they gave the British.
* American and British diplomats worked with the Iranian leader Ahmad Qavam (and, secretly behind the scenes, with the heir to the Persian throne, Reza Pahlevi) to demand the removal of Soviet troops sent by Stalin to the northern part of the country and to suppress the Iranian communist party, Tudeh.
* Stalin agreed to withdraw his forces in exchange for an oil concession; but once the troops were out, the Iranians-backed by Washington-reneged on the oil agreement, and Iran settled back into the Western camp.
* At about the same time, the administration pushed through Congress a low-interest $3.75 billion loan to Britain.
* A tough sell initially, it won approval in July, justified not only by new geopolitical imperatives but also by the claim that the United Kingdom would become a lucrative market for American goods and by Britain’s willingness to make its pound sterling convertible to American dollars .
* In Germany, the U.S. tried to solidify their control over the political process in the regions they, and the other Western powers, controlled.
* The extreme economic deprivation that the people there were suffering under made them targets for communism.
* So the Americans, lead by General Lucius Clay, Cassius to his friends, supported anti-communist parties and tried to kick start the economy.
* But France and the U.S.S.R. blocked those efforts, because they didn’t want a revival of German power.
* So the U.S. needed to take it slowly.
* They were also backing Chiang Kai-Sheks’ Kuomintang in China against the communist forces lead by Mao.
* In Indochina, the Truman administration covertly backed French efforts to beat down nationalist foes dominated by the communist-led Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh
* But the real story I want to talk about is the Novikov Telegram.
* Nikolai Novikov, The Soviet ambassador in Washington, wrote his own telegram in September 1946.
* He was stressing the dangers of possible U.S. economic and military domination worldwide.
* Novikov attempted to interpret U.S. foreign policy for his superiors, much the same way George Kennan had done in his “Long Telegram” to the U.S. State Department earlier that year.
* It was a direct response to the Keenan telegram.
* And he accuses the Americans of the same thing they are accusing the Soviets of – expansion.
* I’m going to read some of it but as I do, keep in mind that this was a report written for Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
* It’s not a speech.
* It’s not propaganda.
* Like the Kennan telegram, this is intended for internal eyes only.
* In fact, the West only learned about the existence of it in 1990, during glasnost.
* He starts off:
* Reflecting the imperialistic tendency of American monopoly capital, US foreign policy has been characterized in the postwar period by a desire for world domination*. This is the real meaning of repeated statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles that the US has a right to world leadership [rukovodstvo]. All the forces of American diplomacy, the Army, Navy, and Air Force, industry, and science have been placed at the service of this policy. With this objective in mind broad plans for expansion have been developed, to be realized both diplomatically and through the creation of a system of naval and air bases far from the US, an arms race, and the creation of newer and newer weapons.
* Then he talks about how the European economy was destroyed by the second world war and America came out of it stronger than ever.
* However, he says:
* On the other hand, the expectations of those American circles have not been justified which were based on the Soviet Union being destroyed during the war or coming out of it so weakened that it was forced to bow to the US for economic aid. In this event it could have dictated such conditions which would provide the US with an opportunity to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR.
* In reality, in spite of all the economic difficulties of the postwar period associated with the enormous damage caused by the war and the German fascist occupation the Soviet Union continues to remain economically independent from the outside world and is restoring its economy by its own means.
* In addition, at the present time the USSR has a considerably stronger international position than in the prewar period. Thanks to the historic victories of Soviet arms the Soviet armed forces are on the territory of Germany and other former enemy countries, a guarantee that these countries will not be used again to attack the USSR. As a result of their reorganization on democratic principles, in such former enemy countries as Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania regimes have been created which have set themselves the task of strengthening and maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union. In the Slavic countries – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia – liberated by the Red Army or with its help, democratic regimes have also been created and are consolidating which maintain relations with the Soviet Union on the basis of friendship and mutual aid agreements.
* Right now US foreign policy is not being determined by those circles of the Democratic Party which (as when Roosevelt was alive) try to strengthen cooperation between the three great powers which composed the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition during the war. When President Truman, a politically unstable person with certain conservative tendencies, came to power followed by the appointment of Byrnes as Secretary of State it meant the strengthening of the influence of the most reactionary circles of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. The constantly increasing reactionary nature of US foreign policy, which as a consequence of this approached the policy advocated by the Republican Party, has created a foundation for close cooperation in this area between the extreme right wing of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. This cooperation of the two parties, formalized in both houses of Congress in the form of an unofficial bloc of reactionary Southern Democrats and the old guard of the Republicans headed by Vandenberg and Taft, is especially clearly demonstrated in the fact that in their statements about foreign policy issues the leaders of both parties are essentially advocating the same policy.
* At the same time the influence on foreign policy of the followers of the Roosevelt policy of cooperation with peaceloving powers has been sharply reduced.
* The increase in peacetime military potential and the organization of a large number of naval and air bases both in the US and beyond its borders are clear indicators of the US desire to establish world domination.
* For the first time in the country’s history in the summer of 1946 Congress adopted a law to form a peacetime army not of volunteers but on the basis of universal military conscription. The size of the Army, which is to reach 1 million men as of 1 July 1947, has been considerably increased. At the end of the war the size of the US Navy was reduced quite insignificantly compared to wartime. At the present time the US Navy occupies first place in the world, leaving the British Royal Navy far behind, not to mention other powers.The colossal growth of expenditures for the Army and Navy, comprising $13 billion in the 1946-1947 budget (about 40% of the entire budget of $36 billion) and is more than 10 times the corresponding expenditures in the 1938 budget, when it did not even reach $1 billion.
* These enormous budget sums are being spent along with the maintenance of a large Army, Navy, and Air Force and also the creation of a vast system of naval and air bases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. According to available official plans, in the coming years 228 bases, support bases, and radio stations are to be built in the Atlantic Ocean and 258 in the Pacific Ocean. The majority of these bases and support bases are located outside the United States.
* The situating of American bases on islands often 10-12,000 kilometers from US territory and located on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans clearly shows the aggressive nature of the strategic designs of the US Army and Navy. The fact that the US Navy is studying the naval approaches to European shores in a concentrated manner is also confirmation of this.
* All these facts clearly show that their armed forces are designed to play a decisive role in the realization of plans to establish American world domination.
* In recent years American capital has been being introduced into the economies of Middle Eastern countries quite intensively, particularly in the oil industry. At the present time there are American oil concessions in all the Middle East countries which have sources of oil (Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia). American capital, which first appeared in the Middle East oil industry only in 1927, now controls about 42% of the total proven reserves of the Middle East (less Iran). Of the total proven reserves of 26.8 billion barrels of oil 11 billion belong to US concessions.
* Palestine, where the US has recently displayed great interest, creating many difficulties for Britain, can be cited as an example of the quite sharp differences in US and British policy in the Middle East as is occurring in the case of the demand of the US government to allow 100,000 European Jews into Palestine. American interest in Palestine, outwardly expressed in sympathy for the Zionist cause, actually only means that American capital is expecting to become rootedin the economy of Palestine by interfering in Palestinian affairs. The choice of a Palestinian port as one of the terminal points of the American oil pipeline explains a lot about American foreign policy on the issue of Palestine.
* And he concludes with this:
* All these steps to preserve the great military potential are not an end in itself, of course. They are intended only to prepare conditions to win world domination in a new war being planned by the most warlike circles of American imperialism, the timeframe for which, needless to say, no one can determine right now.It ought to be fully realized that American preparations for a future war are being conducted with the idea of war against the Soviet Union, which in the eyes of American imperialists is the chief obstacle in the American path to world domination. Such facts as the tactical training of the US Army for war with the USSR as a future enemy, the situating of American strategic bases in regions from which strikes can be launched on Soviet territory, the intensified training and reinforcement of Arctic regions as tactical approaches to the USSR, and attempts to pave the way in Germany and Japan to use them in a war against the USSR testify to this.
* So this is the internal view of the U.S. in 1946 from the Soviet ambassador.

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#89 – The “Long Telegram”

Cameron Reilly — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 22:55:39 +0000

* Stalin’s speech in February 1946 wasn’t a declaration of war.
* It wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been said in the past.
* He issued no direct threats toward the United States, and emphasized above all else the security of the Soviet state and the communist experiment.
* Rather, Stalin showed, if his previous words and actions had been insufficient, that he regarded the postwar world as a continuing realm of competition in which the Soviet system would fight for its survival in the face of capitalist encroachment.
* Close ties with the West were not in the cards.
* The situation, as far as he was concerned, was the same as it had been before the Great Patriotic War: rivalry was inevitable, broad-ranging cooperation all but impossible.
* And that’s when George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow, when asked to explain Stalin’s position, wrote his famous 5,500-word answer (not 8000 words, as it’s often referred to) in the form of a telegram he sent to the State Department.
* It’s known as the “Long Telegram”
* We’ve mentioned Kennan a few times in the past, but I think we should stop for a minute and do a small bio.
* After all, the man did more to shape United States policy during the cold war than any other person.
* George FROST Kennan was born in 1904
* His mother died two months later from a ruptured appendix.
* But for a long time Kennan thought she died giving birth to him.
* Which has to be some kind of burden as a kid.
* Growing up he wasn’t close to his father or stepmother.
* But at the age of 8 he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German.
* It was the first of numerous languages he would eventually master: Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese and Norwegian.
* So this would have been around 1912.
* Just before WWI.
* He eventually got a bachelor’s degree in History from Princeton in 1925 and went to work for the United Stated Foreign Service which had only been created the previous year.
* his first job was as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland
* Then he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany where he was selected for a linguist training program that lasted three years.
* In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute.
* He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger cousin, also called George Kennan,who was a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia.
* And by 1931 he was in Latvia, where he worked on Soviet economic affairs.
* When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933, Kennan went to Moscow with the U.S.Ambassador, William C. Bullitt.
* Who of course Steve McQueen portrayed in the 1968 film BULLITT.
* Joking.
* Bullitt was actually fired from that job in 1936 when a journalist blew the whistle on him for being involved in the illegal money exchanges in Russia.
* He was briefly engaged to Roosevelt’s personal secretary and lifelong companion, Missy LeHand (Job), but she broke off the engagement after a trip to Moscow during which she reportedly discovered him to be having an affair with Olga Lepeshinskaya, who was Stalin’s favourite ballet dancer, and maybe mistress.
* Bullitt’s second wife, BTW, was Louise Bryant, author of Six Red Months in Russia, played by Diane Keaton in the 1981 film REDS.
* He divorced her when he found out she was having a lesbian affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne.
* ANYWAY.
* Back to Kennan.
* Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946.
* Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
* Kennan wrote his long telegram to Secretary of State James Byrnes, outlining a new strategy for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
* In his “Long Telegram”, Kennan explained that at the “bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”.
* After the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy”.
* So The Soviet Union’s relations with the West were merely the latest rendition of the long Russian tradition of diplomatic cynicism and duplicity.
* Russian statesmen regarded international cooperation as a ruse to lower the guard of the gullible.
* Only fools kept their word on the international stage.
* This had always been the attitude of Russian leaders, and such cynicism was only magnified and given ideological depth by the struggle between Soviet socialism and the imperialist West.
* Nothing the United States might do would earn Moscow’s trust, so irreducibly hardened were these views.
* according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule.
* Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand … Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability”.
* Now – you’re going to like this.
* Here’s the opening paragraph to the long telegram.
* Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.
* Sound familiar?
* I want to read Part 1 of the telegram, because it does a pretty good job of setting out the worldview of Stalin.
* Part 1: Basic Features of Post War Soviet Outlook, as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine Are as Follows:
* (a) USSR still lives in antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers:
* “In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”
* (b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.
* (c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states, and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter.
* (d) Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs.
* (e) Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause, particularly if USSR remains militarily powerful, ideologically monolithic and faithful to its present brilliant leadership.
* (f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be “objectively” favorable to interests of USSR These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.
* (g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to seine interests of reactionary capital.
* So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:
* (a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity most be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.
* (b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia’s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an “imperialist” war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.
* (c) “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.
* (d) Relentless battle must be waged against socialist and social-democratic leaders abroad.
* The rest of the telegram makes for fascinating reading and his description of Stalin-era U.S.S.R. really sounds a LOT like the present United States.
* Take this, for example: The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world.
* And let me finish by reading his conclusions:
* As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:
* (1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.
* (2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.
* (3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meets Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit–Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.
* (4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.
* (5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After Al, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

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#88 – Mine All Mine

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 23:06:48 +0000

* In October 1945, Navy Day 1945 in New York City, at the Commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman gave a speech.
* Here’s a clip.
* https://youtu.be/BjUz4BPWwbc?t=2m21s
* FAKE TRUMAN ACCENT: “We don’t seek any more land – because we already took as much as we could from the Native Americans, and the Mexicans, and the Hawaiians, and the Spanish.”
* He went on to say The world “cannot afford any letdown in the united determination of the allies in this war to accomplish a lasting peace.”‘
* So he’s all about working with the Soviets and finding a lasting peace.
* Or is he?
* Privately it seems like he didn’t believe peace with the U.S.S.R. was possible.
* Like FDR before him, Truman envisioned a world with open international trade – something the U.S. economy desperately needed – which meant global capitalism.
* But the U.S.S.R. had just turned back the Nazis, fighting them for years without much support, and had played a huge role in their final defeat.
* and they had the world’s largest land army.
* They weren’t about to kowtow to the American new world order.
* The only way the USA could force the Soviets to go along with it was war.
* And the Soviets had just proven – again – how difficult their country was to invade.
* And the American people wouldn’t support another war.
* Especially not to overthrow a recent ally, just because they wanted to enforce their own new world order.
* Not yet, anyway.
* Some in Washington believed the U.S. had no real choice but to find a way to work with the USSR
* Other believed the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, and pointed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
* They conveniently ignored the places where the Soviets had kept to their agreements – Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.
* As of October 1945, Truman and his inner circle seem to have no grand strategy regarding working with the Soviets at this stage.
* But over the next few months, they started concluding that they weren’t going to be able to work with Stalin.
* And by late 1947, the term “Cold War” had already entered the political lexicon.
* and America’s containment strategy had been implemented.
* At the end of World War II the United States possessed far and away the world’s largest economy.
* Its GDP was five times that of Great Britain, four times that of the Soviet Union.
* As we’ve pointed out many times – this was mostly due to the fact that the U.S. was the only major economy not flattened by the war.
* And now it also had the bomb.
* Initially Truman and Byrnes, his new Sec of State, thought they could dangle the bomb in front of Stalin as a way to induce him to accept their view of the world.
* Not in a “do it or we’ll drop it on you” approach, although that was always an unspoken threat, but in a “do it and we might share our atomic secrets with you” approach.
* Of course, what they didn’t know at the time, was they didn’t HAVE any secrets.
* Stalin knew it all.
* In the first Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) conference, which took place in London from September 11 to October 2, Byrnes tried to use a combination of threats and sweets to get Molotov to budge on a range of issues – the control of Germany and eastern Europe – but Molotov just laughed in his face.
* By December, Byrnes had been told by Truman to stop trying to woo the Russians.
* In fact, Truman got all up in his face for trying to conclude a deal without the White House’s approval.
* He felt Byrnes had over-stepped his authority.
* It’s like Truman has become Stalin and Byrnes is Molotov.
* Truman is beginning to mistrust and sideline Byrnes already and he’s only six months into the job of SoS.
* Now Truman is going to start playing tough again with the Russians.
* In September the departing secretary of war, Henry Stimson, suddenly made an impassioned plea for international atomic control, spelling out to the president and the rest of the cabinet very clearly exactly what was required.
* “I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb;” the veteran statesman said in a secret White House meeting.’
* His logic was simple.
* The United States and Great Britain had kept the building of the bomb a secret from their Soviet ally and had used it ruthlessly to end the war in Japan.
* This collusion and secrecy with respect to a manifestly powerful weapon was so threatening to the Kremlin that it would take all steps necessary to build a comparable weapon for itself.
* Once it did so, Stimson maintained, an arms race would ensue and the prospect of international cooperation would disappear. Hence the necessity of moving quickly to reach a deal with the Soviet Union that could lead to the establishment of a truly international agency in control of all atomic technologies.
* Without such an agency, the two new powers would sooner or later commence an atomic arms race.
* But his plea fell on deaf ears.
* Speaking to reporters “on the record;’ Truman vowed that the United States would never transfer its atomic material and scientific facilities to an international agency, and added that if other nations wanted the bomb they should acquire it “on their own hook.”
* In a speech to Congress in December he called for a foreign policy built on military power.
* He was quite clear – The United States would not cooperate seriously with the Kremlin on the question of atomic control and would not use its bomb monopoly as a negotiating tool to secure Soviet concessions either.
* This was partly about domestic politics.
* Truman wanted to look tough on the Soviet issue to disarm any criticism of him or the Democrats so they could maintain their majority in Congress after the 1946 midterm elections.
* But there was another reason.
* In September, just as Stimson was pleading for cooperation and as Byrnes and Molotov were meeting in London, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Truman that a massive spy ring operating out of Ottawa had infiltrated the Manhattan Project with Canadian and American spies working for Moscow.
* Washington officials had known of this network since 1942, but new revelations from the Canadian government indicated that the scale of the espionage was much greater than had been previously suspected.
* Truman was incensed!
* How DARE Stalin put spies inside the Manhattan Project?!
* It’s almost like he didn’t trust the Americans to share the knowledge with him, their ally!
* Oh wait, that’s right, they didn’t.
* But STILL.
* He didn’t know that at the time!
* So all of a sudden, Truman better understood why Stalin was giving them the middle finger in negotiations.
* Maybe he knew he could build his own bomb.
* But a third reason Truman went tough on Stalin was that if the news got out that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project on the Democrats watch, it was going to look VERY bad.
* Especially as many of its spies were American citizens, and – as Hoover would later make abundantly clear to Truman – that many of these individuals had connections to leading Democratic Party figures in the State Department and elsewhere, the damage to his party and to his own political stature could be devastating.
* if such revelations were made public at the same time that Truman was proposing to give away America’s atomic bombs to an international agency, the ensuing political assault on the White House would have been incalculable.
* The espionage revelations made serious international control a political impossibility for the president, and further inclined him to regard the Soviet Union with suspicion and hostility.
* None of this was yet public knowledge.
* As far as the American people were aware, the Soviet Union was still an ally, and the administration’s plans for the postwar world were still wholly undetermined.
* Truman faced an array of foreign policy criticism on this question in the first weeks of 1946.
* There was still a lingering suspicion of American internationalism throughout parts of both the Democratic and Republican parties, especially among politicians wary of Great Britain and those keen to reduce the power of the federal government now that the war had ended.
* Many liberals in the Democratic Party – led by Henry Wallace, vice president under Roosevelt during much of the war and now Truman’s secretary of commerce – Roosevelt appointed Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce in January 1945, shortly before Roosevelt’s death, as a sort of consolation prize for losing the vice presidency – were unhappy with the increasingly frosty nature of the Soviet-American relationship and demanded that Truman honor Roosevelt’s call for a perpetuation of the Grand Alliance to keep the postwar peace.
* Conversely, many influential Republicans, sensing a political opening, argued that the administration was dangerously slow to respond to the Soviet threat and pressed for a more resolute policy.
* Fortunately, the American public didn’t know about the Soviet spy ring.
* That all changed in February 1946, when the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson gave a radio address where he said a source inside the government leaked him secret details on an extensive Soviet atomic espionage network operating out of Canada.
* That source?
* Probably J Edgar Hoover.
* When the Canadians confirmed the story a couple of weeks later, there was “near-hysteria” in many newspapers and throughout Washington during the second half of February.
* Not only had America’s wartime ally run a major-and apparently quite effective-espionage operation during the war; the operation evidently had been conducted largely by American citizens, secretly working for Moscow while they went about their treacherous business in Los Alamos or Washington.
* The public effect of the Pearson revelations did not come to full fruition until the heyday of McCarthyism in 1950-1953, but the political impact on Truman’s foreign policy was immediate.
* Of course, after this revelation, an international atomic deal, especially with the Russians, was totally off the cards.
* In fact, Truman was so shaken by the Pearson scandal that he canceled an atomic cooperation deal with Great Britain, reneging on a promise Roosevelt had made to Churchill in 1944.
* Then, on cue, In a public speech on February 9, Stalin announced that his government would maintain its wartime (and prewar) policies of state control over the economy and would continue to divert maximum resources toward heavy industry and military production.
* Stalin did not attribute the policies he was announcing to American behavior as such but rather to the need for the USSR to maintain its military strength in a world of continuing imperialism.
* He endorsed Lenin’s line that the nations of the West were impelled by the logic of late capitalism toward unending conflict and war.
* The Soviet Union would not be caught up in this logic, but it could find itself-as it did in 1941-in a capitalist war not of its own making.
* Until the global triumph of communism, Stalin maintained, the world would be dangerous and the threat to the Soviet Union imminent.
* The aspirations of the long-suffering Soviet citizenry for prosperity and domestic reform would have to wait.

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#87 – The Aftermath Part 2

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 01:01:23 +0000

* The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers.
* A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”
* In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of U.S. bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects.
* The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.
* A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.”
* Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it — even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.
* Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend.
* It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
* From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.
* So he got his hands on it and made a short 16 film, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945”.
* He arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press.
* He approached the three TV networks that existed back then and offered them the film, but none expressed interest in airing it.
* Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release.
* When that footage finally emerged, journalist Greg Mitchell spoke with the man at the center of the drama: Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
* McGovern told him: “I always had the sense, that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child….They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war.
* He later said: “The main reason it was classified was…because of the horror, the devastation.”
* Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
* Four days after Wilfred Burchett’s story – remember him from the last episode? Aussie journalist, first into Hiroshima? – splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico.
* Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.
* Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test.
* His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site.
* Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.
* Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors.
* “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.
* Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”
* Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”
* Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”
* Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program.
* Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing.
* Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
* He was wrong about the Trinity site.
* Today the radiation levels at the site are 10 times greater than the region’s natural background radiation.
* Of course that’s probably one of the main reasons the U.S. wanted to discredit the connection between atomic bombs and dangerous radiation.
* THEY HAD BLOWN ONE UP IN NEW MEXICO.
* Imagine what the locals would do if they thought they were eating irradiated food and breathing in irradiated air?
* Which, of course, they were.
* For years, many of the residents of Tularosa, a small town roughly 35 miles from the Trinity site, have experienced unusually high rates of cancer.
* They are known as “downwinders”.
* For the past several years, a bill to list residents near the Trinity site under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has been rejected repeatedly by Congress.
* Of course, the U.S. didn’t stop testing nuclear weapons after Trinity.
* United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear weapons tests to date, involving at least 1,151 nuclear devices, most of which occurred at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
* Lots of downwinders in Arizona, Nevada and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
* Chrissy’s hometown in Utah as well.
* Several severe adverse health effects, such as an increased incidence of cancers, thyroid diseases, CNS neoplasms, and possibly female reproductive cancers that could lead to congenital malformations have been observed in “downwind” communities exposed to nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination.
* From 1951 to 1962 the AEC detonated more than 100 bombs, sending huge pinkish plumes of radioactive dust across the stony valleys and canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona.
* It gave each “shot” names like Annie, Eddie, Humboldt and Badger.
* The official advice: enjoy the show.
* “Your best action is not to be worried about fallout,” said an AEC booklet.
* Families and lovers would drive to vantage points for the spectacle, then drive home as ash wafted down on their communities.
* It was a cheap date.
* At first the local press cheered the chance to beat the Russians and be part of history.
* “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense, No Cause For Panic,” said an editorial in the The Deseret News.
* Eleven bombs were detonated in 1953, including several between March and June that coated St George, Utah, a small town about half an hour away from Chrissy’s hometown, and other towns in grey dust.
* A year later St George hosted the filming of The Conqueror, a big budget blockbuster about Genghis Khan, starring John Wayne.
* Of course.
* Who else?
* A People magazine article in 1980 reported that of 220 cast and crew, 91 had contracted cancer, with 46 of them dying.
* Including The Duke, plus leading lady Susan Hayward, director Dick Powell and dozens of other cast and crew members.
* Wayne’s two sons, Patrick and Michael, who were on location, also got cancer.
* Back to journalist William L. Laurence, the guy who wrote there was no radiation from Trinity.
* Apparenlty he was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times.
* He was also on the payroll of the War Department.
* In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons.
* The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.”
* Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
* A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence).
* He has long been confused with William L. Laurence.
* Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett.
* W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945.
* He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.”
* He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”
* Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN.
* For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.”
* W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”
* Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
* I even found an article from 09 August1945 where Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as saying he didn’t think there would be any residual radiation in Hiroshima.
* And in case you’re thinking they didn’t know any better – from the same article, Dr Harold Jacobsen from Columbia University, who specialised in atomic research, said he thought the radiation at Hiroshima could linger for 70 years.
* As it turns out, the radiation levels at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki today are neglible.
* Why?
* A bomb which detonates near or on the ground has a greater chance of producing radioactive fallout than one which is detonated high in the air.
* If a bomb was detonated in the air, the hot, radioactive ball of fire travels up high into the stratosphere.
* It does this quickly, usually within minutes.
* The cloud then cools down and begins to look like a regular (albeit irregular shaped) cloud.
* But don’t let this fool you, it is still hot and radioactive.
* Prevailing winds will blow this cloud over a huge area.
* The residual heat and lightness of the particles will keep it in the atmosphere for a few weeks, after which, the particles begin to “fall out” and come back down to earth.
* By this time, the radioactive particles have been dispersed and diluted over a thousands of square miles with the most dangerous radioactive elements already rendered inert by decay.
* The bombs dropped on Japan were detonated high up in the air so the radioactive fireball did not touch the ground.
* This dramatically reduced the radioactive fallout.
* However, the U.S. didn’t do this out of consideration, rather, it just happened to be the ideal height to maximize the destruction of the structures within the city.
* Also – during the re-building of the cities, radioactive materials, like rubble, would be cleared away.
* Rain and snow would wash more of it away, below ground and into rivers where it would be dispersed.
* Since then, approximately 1,900 people in Hiroshima, or about 0.5% of the post-bombing population, are believed to have died from cancers attributable to Little Boy’s radiation release.
* No data on subsequent cancer deaths attributable to radiation exposure from Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, is readily available.

* In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima – 71 years after the bomb was dropped.
* He said: We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.
* Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade.
* It was a good speech.
* But he didn’t apologise on behalf of his country.
* Should he have?
* Whenever I read Americans discussing the question of an apology to Japan, I normally read a few common arguments for it.
* The first is “They started it.”
* Well no, they didn’t start it.
* As I’ve pointed out before, America was already engaged in an economic war with Japan, they had put economic sanctions on them before Pearl Harbour.
* And the U.S. had moved their fleet to Hawaii which was obviously signalling their intention to attack Japanese troops in China.
* When you’re acting aggressive towards another country, and they decide to retaliate, are they striking first?
* The other argument I hear is DRESDEN.
* People say “more civilians died in Dresdan than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and we didn’t apologise to them”.
* Both of which are true.
* But that’s not a great argument either.
* I didn’t apologise to THIS guy so why should I apologse to THAT guy?
* Do the Japanese want an apology?
* It seems that some don’t.
* A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.
* In 2007, during Shinzo Abe’s first term as prime minister, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma referred to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “something that couldn’t be helped.”
* While opposition leaders took issue with that position, the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”
* One of their concerns might be that if the U.S. apologises to Japan, then the Japanese will face pressure to apologise to China and Australia and the Phillipines for their own war crimes during WWII and other conflicts.
* But is that a bad thing?
* Why is it such a bad thing to apologise for things we, as nations, have done?
* “It’s in the past” some people say.
* Well duh doy.
* Everything we ever apologise for is in the past, you dumbass.
* Is that how you handle your personal relationships?
* Do you say to your spouse, “I’m not going to apologise, it’s in the past”??
* Good luck with that if you do.
* Why do we ever apologise for things we’ve done?
* Because it’s a sign of humility.
* It’s a sign of maturity.
* It’s a sign of sincerity.
* It’s a sign that we care about others and want to mend their hurt in order that we might have a healthy relationship with the moving forward.
* I think the real reason people, especially politicians don’t want to apologise, is that they are afraid it’s an admission of guilt, which could lead to lawsuits.
* But that’s a legal matter.
* From a moral perspective, I say, let’s apologise, often and sincerely.
* Even if we don’t think we are totally in the wrong.
* If I say something that hurts Chrissy’s feelings, even if I think it was innocent, or if I think she was mean first, I can either dig my heels in, in which case we’re going to have a bad couple of days, or I can just say “I’m sorry” and we can move on.
* Why is it different between nations?
* And let’s be clear.
* Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime.
* ARTICLE 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states:
* No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
* Now, you will say, “but that wasn’t written until 1949”.
* True.
* But the fact that it *was* written a mere four years after WWII, implies that people living in that day KNEW that collective punishment was immoral.
* Is there any sensible argument that the nuclear attacks on Japan, and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and other cities, weren’t a form of collective punishment as defined by the Geneva Convention?
* I can’t think of one.
* And if they are wrong, wrong now, wrong then, shouldn’t the countries who committed them, apologise for them?
* I asked the question on Facebook and my old mate Rod Adams gave the best reply:
* As I understand “collective punishment” it’s about holding innocent people accountable for offenses committed by others. Large scale strategic bombing wasn’t, in the minds of most decision makers, aimed at punishing anyone. It was ostensibly a tactic design to contribute to achieving victory. By the time those actions were taken, the generally accepted definition for victory in WWII was “unconditional surrender.”
* But I don’t think the justification for attacking civilians makes much of a difference as to whether or not it’s classified as collective punishment.
* Today a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law is that parties to a conflict must distinguish between combatants and civilians, and may not deliberately target civilians or civilian objects.
* Article 33 of the 4th GC states “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.”
* I think the bombing of a civilian population to try to force politicians to surrender would today be considered ‘Measures of intimidation or of terrorism’.

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#86 – The Aftermath Part 1

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 05:58:57 +0000

* TRUMAN ANNOUNCES THE BOMB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN_UJJ9ObDs
* On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow.
* Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others.
* Mr. Akihiro Takahashi was 14 years old, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
* He was standing in line with other students of his junior high school, waiting for the morning meeting 1.4 km away from the center.
* “The heat was tremendous . And I felt like my body was burning all over. For my burning body the cold water of the river was as precious as the treasure. Then I left the river, and I walked along the railroad tracks in the direction of my home. On the way, I ran into an another friend of mine, Tokujiro Hatta. I wondered why the soles of his feet were badly burnt. It was unthinkable to get burned there. But it was undeniable fact the soles were peeling and red muscle was exposed. Even I myself was terribly burnt, I could not go home ignoring him. I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Next, I made him stand on his heels and I supported him. We walked heading toward my home repeating the two methods.”
* He was under medical treatment for about year and half.
* Eiko Taoka, then 21, was one of nearly 100 passengers said to have been on board a streetcar that had left Hiroshima Station at a little after 8:00 a.m. and was in a Hatchobori area, 750 m from ground zero, when the bomb fell. Taoka was heading for Funairi with her one year old son to secure wagon in preparation for her move out of the building which was to be evacuated. At 8:15, as the streetcar approached Hatchobori Station, an intense flash and blast engulfed the car, instantly setting it on fire. Taoka’s son died of radiation sickness on August 28.
* When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, ‘I will be getting off here. Please take this seat.’ We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside…. I held [my son] firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.
* Ms. Akiko Takakura was 20 years old when the bomb fell. She was in the Bank of Hiroshima, 300 meters away from the hypocenter. Ms. Takakura miraculously escaped death despite over 100 lacerated wounds on her back. She is one of the few survivors who was within 300 meters of the hypocenter.
* Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away. For a few years after the A-bomb was dropped, I was terribly afraid of fire. I wasn’t even able to get close to fire because all my senses remembered how fearful and horrible the fire was, how hot the blaze was, and how hard it was to breathe the hot air. It was really hard to breathe. Maybe because the fire burned all the oxygen, I don’t know. I could not open my eyes enough because of the smoke, which was everywhere. Not only me but everyone felt the same. And my parts were covered with holes.
* On August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige was 32 years old, living at home in Midori-cho, Hiroshima.
* His home was 1.7 miles away from ground zero, just outside of the 1.5 mile radius of the total destruction created by atomic blast effects.
* Miraculously, Matsushige was not seriously injured by the explosion.
* With one camera and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures, he tried to photograph the immediate after effects of the bombing of Hiroshima.
* During the next ten hours, Matsushige was only able to click the shutter seven times.
* He said, “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”
* In addition, he was afraid the burned and battered people would be enraged if someone took their pictures.
* Matsushige could not develop the film right away but eventually did so after twenty days, in the open, at night, using a radioactive stream to rinse the photographs.
* Only five of the seven photographs were developable.
* His photos would be the only immediate record of the destruction at Hiroshima.
* A few weeks after the atomic bombing, the American military confiscated all of the post-bombing newspaper photographs and/or newsreel footage, but failed to confiscate many of the negatives.
* As a result, photographs from the Hiroshima atomic bombing were not published until the United States occupation of Japan ended in April 1952.
* The magazine Asahi Gurafu initially published Matsushige’s photographs in a special edition on August 6, 1952.
* “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence,” described Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett in his September 5, 1945 article “Atomic Plague” in the London Daily Express
* Burchett was the first Western journalist to enter Hiroshima after the bombing – Armed with a pistol, a typewriter and a Japanese phrasebook
* which is my plan for our trip to europe
* He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone and unarmed carrying rations for seven meals
* He was shocked by the devastation.
* Under the banner “I write this as a warning to the world”, Burchett described a city reduced to “reddish rubble” and people dying from an unknown “atomic plague”.
* At the time it was ignored by most Western newspapers.
* General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan, and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital.
* U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda.
* They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness.
* The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
* I want to close out this episode by reading the entire article by Burchett.
* In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured by the cataclysm — from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague.
* Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
* When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, square miles you can hardly see a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.
* I picked my way to a shack used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.
* There is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys — chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing.
* The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city. With the local manager of Domei, a leading Japanese news agency, he drove me through, or perhaps I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals where the victims of the bomb are still being treated.
* In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.
* For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.
* At first the doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle.
* And in every case the victim died.
* That is one of the after-effects of the first atomic bomb man ever dropped and I do not want to see any more examples of it. But in walking through the month-old rubble I found others.
* My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.
* They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.
* And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses. It probably does not help them physically. But it helps them mentally.
* From the moment that this devastation was loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself.
* The counted dead number 53,000. Another 30,000 are missing, which means “certainly dead”. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima – and this is nearly a month after the bombing – 100 people have died from its effects.
* They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured by the explosion. They have been dying at the rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured.
* These casualties might not have been as high except for a tragic mistake. The authorities thought this was just another routine Super-Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and dropped the parachute which carried the bomb to its explosion point.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000 foot altitude at which it was timed to explode – at the moment when nearly everyone in Hiroshima was in the streets.
* Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.
* Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.
* If you could see what is left of Hiroshima you would think that London had not been touched by bombs.
* The Imperial Palace, once an imposing building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust.
* Hiroshima has one intact building – the Bank of Japan. This in a city which at the start of the war had a population of 310,000.
* Almost every Japanese scientist has visited Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find a way of relieving the people’s suffering. Now they themselves have become sufferers.
* For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped they found they could not stay long in the fallen city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then minor insect bites developed into great swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated.
* Then they found another extraordinary effect of the new terror from the skies.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* All these phenomena, they told me, were due to the radio-activity released by the atomic bomb’s explosion of the uranium atom.
* They found that the water had been poisoned by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still afraid.
* The scientists told me they have noted a great difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki.
* Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rainstorm developed soon afterwards.
* And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so many are still falling sick and dying, it is still the cause of this man-made plague.
* At Nagasaki, on the other hand, the weather was perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed the radio-activity to dissipate into the atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force of the bomb’s explosion was, to a large extent, expended into the sea, where only fish were killed.
* To support this theory, the scientists point out to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly, suddenly, and that there have been no after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is still suffering.

* We went to great lengths to explain the road to the decision to use the bomb on Japan.
* But listen to how it was presented to American children
* TRUMAN CLIP showing the propaganda fed to Americans https://youtu.be/Hxk3qS2TQ8?t=2m3s
* But the decision to drop the bombs is just one aspect of the start of the nuclear arms race that was hidden from Americans.
* The other aspect was the destruction the bombs caused.
* Within weeks of the bombings, Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha sent Japanese camera crews to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shoot footage of the devastation and its victims.
* Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman.
* His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ).
* That film, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is aptly known in Japan as the maboroshi, or “phantom,” film.
* From the very beginning, the way the atomic bombing of Japan was presented to the American public was a carefully handled PR issue.
* At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda).
* George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, who won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize as a Daily News war correspondent, slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there.
* Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors.
* His newspaper never even received his story.
* As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
* His notes from his trip were finally published posthumously by his son in a book called First Into Nagasaki – in 2006.
* BTW – can you guess what he won his Pulitzer for?
* He wrote an article where he interviewed crew members who were eyewitnesses to an emergency appendectomy performed in a submarine, partly with a tea strainer and spoons.
* Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored.
* Life magazine would later observe that for years “the world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”
* Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities.
* Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.
* in early 1946 a special U.S. military unit shot twenty hours of film footage, in blazing color, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
* Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro Sugata, the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.
* the footage was hidden for decades and almost no one could see it
* no one outside military, official or archival circles saw any of it.
* The 90,000 feet of color film – enough for 30 full-length movies – was classified as top secret for 30 years.
* For decades all that most Americans saw of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the same black-and-white images: a mushroom cloud, a panorama of emptiness, a battered building topped with the skeleton of a dome – all devoid of people.
* On the morning of 9 August 1945, 16-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi was 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) from the hypocenter of the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki, delivering mail on his bicycle without a shirt on due to the warm summer weather, when “Fat Man” exploded in the sky.
* The bomb’s heat flash heavily injured Taniguchi with near instant burns resulting, but the blast that arrived afterward did not cause any severe injuries to him, as he clung to the ground while buildings were blown down around him.
* Heavy burns melted skin from his back and left arm, but Taniguchi states that he did not bleed or feel any pain due to the nerve endings being burned away.
* Tired and disoriented, he walked over to a nearby munitions plant, where a female survivor assisted in cutting off loose portions of skin and rubbed machine oil on his damaged arm.
* Come nightfall Taniguchi was carried to a hill to rest, where he was surrounded by confused and thirsty survivors.
* The next morning everyone but Taniguchi was dead.
* During the next two days rescue teams passed by without noticing him, as he was too weak to muster a call for help.
* He was found 2 days later.
* He was eventually taken to Omura Navy Hospital, where he spent the next 21 months lying on his stomach due to the severe burns on his back.
* And you can see photos and film of that – from the American crew that were there in 1946.
* It’s not a pretty sight.
* Imagine a guy whose entire back has had the skin removed.
* The film was finally released to the public in 1982, in a documentary called Prophecy, made by the Japanese, during the height of anti-nuclear demonstrations.
* 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy footage from the USG to make the film.
* The guy who made it, Iwakura, traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for the original U.S. film crew in 1946.
* One of the Americans who shot this footage in 1946 was Herbet Sussan.
* He ended up becoming director of special programs for NBC, supervising 250 special telecasts.
* And he spent a lot of his life trying to get his footage released.
* He took his request to Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow.
* None of them could – or would – help him get it released.
* Meanwhile – when US servicemen returned from Japan, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores.
* Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer (such as multiple myeloma or the form of lymphoma that Sussan himself had) associated with radiation exposure.

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#85 – The Decision Part 3

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 04:37:00 +0000

* Truman met often with Byrnes in the first few months of his Presidency.
* But there are almost no records or notes of what they discussed.
* And that was apparently Byrnes’ preference.
* He was known as being paranoid about leaks.
* a very devious politician
* Truman referred to him as his “conniving” secretary of state
* Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who liked Byrnes and found him personally charming, nevertheless had no illusions about him: “He was an operator. He was a kind of prior Lyndon Johnson.”
* Throughout this period Byrnes spoke with the authority of—and personally represented—the president of the United States on all atomic bomb-related matters in the Interim Committee’s deliberations.
* It is also quite clear that by early July 1945 when he was sworn in as secretary of state, Byrnes was firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy.
* And as we’ve seen before – while Truman seems to have looked up to Byrnes as a mentor, Byrnes privately didn’t like Truman.
* One of Truman’s close friends and advisers, his appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, later said that Byrnes thought Truman was “a nonentity, with no abilities to speak of, no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy, or much else for that matter.”
* Matthew Connelly later described Byrnes without reservation as “a very Machiavellian character,” adding that “I never trusted him.”
* Similarly, Robert G. Nixon—who served as White House correspondent for the International News Service at the time—would later remark that “Byrnes looked down on Truman. He had a superior attitude.… He, in a sense, despised Truman … he looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.”
* According to Clark Clifford, Admiral Leahy, who initially was favorably disposed towards Byrnes, came to regard him as a “horse’s ass.”
* Bernard Baruch, the financier who presented Truman’s first nuclear arms control proposal at the United Nations in 1946, regarded his friend Byrnes as “power-crazy—that he wants to decide everything himself.…”
* Averell Harriman recalled that after Potsdam, “I was through with Jimmy Byrnes … I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.”
* Almost immediately after taking office, Truman demonstrated his great trust in Byrnes by informing him of his intention to appoint him secretary of state sometime that summer—as, of course, he did. It should be kept in mind that the position of secretary of state carried far more weight in 1945 than it does today.
* At the time, before the post of national security adviser was established, it was the premier Cabinet office.
* Under then-existing law—with no vice president in office once Truman succeeded Roosevelt—the secretary of state was next in line of succession.
* If anything happened to Truman, Byrnes would become president.
* And of course, everyone knew that Byrnes *should* have been President.
* He was going to be FDR’s Veep in the 1944 election – up until the very last moment, when Truman was picked instead.
* Byrnes also appears to be a logical candidate for the adviser who convinced Truman to postpone meeting Stalin until the atomic bomb had been tested—one of the truly fundamental strategic decisions of the spring and summer.
* Although our information is even more sketchy in this area, we have seen that his mandate—and his alone—included both atomic and diplomatic issues.
* Moreover, all the other top advisers directly involved in diplomacy were pressing for an early meeting with Stalin, Thus, either Truman made the decision against their advice on his own or some other highly placed adviser concerned with the atomic bomb convinced him the new weapon would be critical in his approach to Stalin.
* So everything points to Byrnes as the man who made the decision to bomb Japan.
* Not to win the war – but as a message to Stalin.
* Byrnes, we should remember, was at Yalta.
* He helped draft the “Declaration on Liberated Europe” which vaguely promised consultation on how to achieve future free elections in Eastern Europe.
* And FDR sent him back to the U.S. early to be his representative, selling America on their new relationship with Stalin and the Yalta agreements.
* After attending an off-the-record briefing given by Byrnes, a reporter in the New York Sun’s Washington bureau had this to say about Byrnes’ view of Stalin: “Like everyone who has returned from Russia, [Byrnes] has been tremendously impressed by Joseph Stalin.”
* Indeed, on the Polish issue [Byrnes] said that time after time Stalin proved his readiness to compromise; that throughout he proved to be tractable and to possess a malleable mind. He made concession after concession. He points out that Russia will come out of this war as the most powerful nation in the world. Stalin has definite plans in the Pacific, he reported, but apart from that wants only to rebuild Russia and to bring it to the standard of living that it ought to enjoy with its vast resources. He believes that once Stalin has settled with the Japs, we can trust him to keep the peace.
* And as we know, in the intervening months, Stalin had annoyed the Anglo-American allies with his behaviour in Poland and Eastern Europe.
* Sounds to me like Byrnes felt personally embarrassed and wanted to use the bomb to pull Stalin back in line.
* He was personally identified with the Yalta accords and was about to become Sec of State.
* In his mind, I think, he was actually becoming the President.
* On April 30 he wrote Walter Lippmann:
* Peace in the future will not depend on what is written in any document at the conference. It will depend upon what is in the hearts of the people of Russia, Britain and the United States. We cannot promote it by promoting distrust of the Soviets. We must have confidence in each other.…
* If only he was still around today.
* We get a small hint of Truman’s thinking just before Potsdam with this comment from Jonathan Daniels—a man who had worked on Truman’s 1948 campaign staff and was close to the president.
* According to notes Daniels made after a 1949 discussion of the atomic bomb, Truman explained that as the Potsdam meetings were about to begin he felt: “If it explodes as I think it will I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.”

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#84 – The Decision Part 2

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 21:49:27 +0000

* By June 18 events had progressed to the point where Admiral Leahy was able to note privately in his personal diary:
* It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against any future trans-Pacific aggression.
* This is two months before Hiroshima.
* But also on June 18, when Grew spoke to Truman about brokering peace with the Japanese, The President shut him down.
* He said he wanted to hold off until the Potsdam meeting.
* Which, as we know, he was putting off to coincide with the Trinity test.
* About 5000 American troops died between May and August. (page 22)
* A total of 24,000 casualties during that period.
* The Battle of Okinawa 1 April until 22 June, 1945.
* If saving American lives was the objective, why not talk peace with the Japanese during this period?
* Unfortunately we don’t know much about what Truman was thinking during these months.
* Contemporaneous documents concerning Truman’s attitude at this time are scarce.
* We have far fewer hard facts illuminating his calculations than we have concerning the thinking of Marshall, Stimson, and Grew.
* Truman did give a public speech in June where he said his main priority was minimizing the loss of American lives.
* And yet the invasion was set for November 1, 1945.
* Which everyone knew was going to be a bloodbath.
* Admiral Leahy said that he could not agree with those who said to him that unless we obtain the unconditional surrender of the Japanese that we will have lost the war.
* Which suggests at least some people were worried about the optics.
* McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, claims that at the June 18 meeting, he strongly advocated to Truman that they should spell out terms of surrender to the Japanese, assuring them that they could keep the Emperor,
* The President said that is just what I have been thinking about. “Why don’t you draft something and take it to Jimmy Byrnes.”
* Byrnes, as we know, was acting as a special advisor to Truman and was soon to become the Sec of State.
* He also thought HE should be the President.
* And he disliked Truman.
* When McCloy took his proposal to Byrnes, it was shot down because Byrnes thought it would be considered a weakness on America’s part to conclude the war without a total surrender.
* So twice on June 18, Truman told people that he agreed with the idea of offering the Japs a deal.
* But then Byrnes said no.
* And it never happened.
* Like the official Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the internal War Department report concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.
* Its assessment of the impact of the Soviet declaration of war paralleled that of American historian Ernest May: It was a “disastrous event which the Japanese leaders regarded as utter catastrophe and which they had energetically sought to prevent at any cost.…”
* Had the atomic bomb not been available or not been used, the study concluded, it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.…”
* The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.
* The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.
* And, as we know, American leaders had been trying to get the Soviets to engage with the Japanese since a few days after Pearl Harbour.
* General George C. Marshall, June 18, 1945: “An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we land in Japan.”
* There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Japs also knew Russia’s entry into the war meant the end.
* On April 29, Colonel Tanemura — Chief of the Planning Bureau of the General Staff — stated: “Needless to say, moves of Soviets could be fatal in continuing the Great Asian War, and this has been the matter of greatest concern in planning of the war since before the beginning of the war.…”
* Even though Japan may have to give up Manchuria, South Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, [w]hich means reverting to the borders before the Sino-Japanese War, Japan has to avoid the Soviet entry into the war no matter what, and has to accomplish fighting with the U.S. and U.K.
* The Supreme Council for the Direction of the War held on May 11, 12, and 14, Umezu, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, urged the central importance of preventing a Russian attack.
* A formal Council decision taken at this time stated:
* While Japan is fighting with the U.S. and U.K., once the Soviets enter the war Japan will face inevitable defeat; therefore, whatever happens in the war with the U.S. and U.K., Japan has to try as much as possible to prevent the Soviet Union from entering the war.
* And Umezu was one of the guys who opposed the surrender in August.
* He was personally ordered by Hirohito to sign the instrument of surrender on behalf of the armed forces on September 2, 1945 and thus, was the Army’s senior representative during the surrender ceremonies on the battleship USS Missouri.
* In prison he converted to Christianity… and died of rectal cancer a few years later.
* So… thanks a lot, Jesus.
* In 1946, Albert Einstein’s wrote that in his opinion, the bombing flowed from “a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia’s participation.”
* And that “if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible. He would have forbidden such an act.”
* Also in 1946, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Norman Cousins—writing together with former assistant secretary of state and, subsequently, secretary of the air force Thomas K. Finletter—suggested that:
* The first error was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Not the making of the atomic bomb; that we were forced to do out of sheer national preservation, for the enemy was working on atomic weapons as well. It was what we did with the atomic bomb after we made it that was a mountainous blunder.…
* Can it be that we were more anxious to prevent Russia from establishing a claim for full participation in the occupation against Japan than we were to think through the implications of unleashing atomic warfare?
* On April 24, 1945, at the height of the tense stand-off with Moscow over Poland—indeed, the day after Truman’s White House session with his top advisers and his “showdown” with Molotov—Stimson sent the following letter to Truman:
* Dear Mr. President: I think it is very important that I talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.
* The next day Truman met with both Stimson and Leslie Groves to get brief in detail about the Manhattan Project.
* It’s important to realise the timing – it happened the day after the showdown with Molotov – and Stimson’s wording about “our present foreign relations” and it having “such an important effect upon all my thinking”.
* Groves’ notes from that meeting say “A great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and particularly on the Russian situation.”
* Truman and Byrnes both later said that Byrnes had brought Truman up to speed about the bomb during the first days of his Presidency.
* Including Byrnes’ belief the bomb “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
* And, as we know, Truman deliberately kept pushing back the date of the Potsdam meeting to coincide with the planned Trinity test.
* There’s a very interesting paragraph in Stimson’s diary from May 14.
* After having lunch with British FM Anthony Eden, Stimson met alone with Marshall and McCloy.
* He wrote:
* I told them that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. They have rather taken it away from us because we have talked too much and have been too lavish with our beneficences to them. I told him this was a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it. They can’t get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves.
* “Let our actions speak for themselves”.
* Sounds to me like Stimson is saying “let’s show the Russians what we’ve got… by bombing Japan.”
* On May 28, three scientists—Leo Szilard, the brainchild behind the bomb, Walter Bartky, and Harold C. Urey—met with Byrnes to discuss atomic bomb-related issues at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
* They were worried about an atomic arms race between America and Russia
* Szilard subsequently reported that at their meeting, “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war . . . ”
* He said Byrnes “was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior.”
* “Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania; Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw . . . and that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.”
* “I shared Byrnes’s concern . . . but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable . . . .”
* So according to one source, Byrnes didn’t think they needed to use the bomb to defeat Japan.
* And we have a sense of what Stimson and Byrnes thought.
* But what about Truman?
* It’s a strange thing – we know nearly nothing about Truman’s thoughts about using the bomb from when he became President through to the dropping of them in August.
* It’s not like he wasn’t talking about it with his inner circle.
* But for some reason none of them have recorded his thoughts at the time.
* We only have his post-hoc explanations in his own memoirs.
* The man responsible for dropping the world’s only nuclear weapons used against human targets – and we have no record of what he was thinking at the time.
* We do have the record of the Interim Committee.
* So called because it was anticipated that a permanent committee to manage America’s nuclear weapons would be set up after the war.
* We’ve talked about them before.
* Stimson himself was chairman. The other members were: James F. Byrnes, former US Senator and soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman’s personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of the New York Life Insurance Company who later went on to be the lead guitarist of The Beatles.
* WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
* Byrnes, as the President’s personal representative, was probably its most influential member.
* Most knowledgeable experts no longer credit the Interim Committee per se with significant influence on the decision to use the atomic bomb.
* In fact, so far as we know the question of whether the atomic bomb should or should not be used was never seriously discussed by the Interim Committee. Historians pondering this point have suggested that the committee simply assumed the bomb would be employed; the only thing it apparently discussed during its May 1945 deliberations was “how” to use it, not “whether.”
* The committee decided to use the bomb against Japan, on a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses, without any warning – and the only dissent was from Bard, the Under Sec of the Navy.
* Bard later said he had the impression that instead of having a meaningful debate about how and where to use the bomb, the Committee just ratified a decision that had already been made.
* Groves was later to comment privately: “… the story as to the Interim Committee having any influence on [the decision to use the atomic bomb] … is just plain bunk.”
* One questions about the Interim Committee is whether or not they were made aware that the Japanese had been trying to surrender.
* We do know that Truman knew.
* On July 18, a handwritten entry in Truman’s journal shows him referring to the intercept of a cable from the Japs after a conversation with Churchill as the “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.”
* But the public and historians didn’t get to see this until it was declassified in 1979.
* One reason Byrnes’ powerful role in the early Truman administration is often forgotten is that Truman and Byrnes subsequently had a major falling-out: Byrnes was replaced as secretary of state by George Marshall in January 1947, and after he and Truman parted ways Byrnes seemed to fade in significance.
* Byrnes was, in fact, secretary for under nineteen months (and only a brief six weeks before Japan surrendered).

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#83 – The Decision Part 1

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 22:16:19 +0000

* On 15 August 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic.
* Did they have an effect on the Japanese surrender?
* The Survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians and enlisted men, based in Japan.
* They interviewed 700 Jap military, government and industrial officials.
* And had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.
* Less than a year later they published their conclusion – that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without it, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.
* “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.”
* It goes on to say that there wasn’t a unanimous agreement amongst the military, especially the War Minister, and the Army and Naval Chiefs of Staff.
* They wanted to fight on.
* But that’s why the Emperor was brought into the discussions to accept the Potsdam terms.
* According to the report:
* “So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel.”
* The report says the only thing the atomic bombings achieved was that they sped up the process.
* The War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff were looking for a way to surrender without losing face.
* And the nuclear attacks gave them that.
* Because the military were able to conclude that there was no way of defending the home islands against further atomic attacks.
* So they could surrender without losing face.
* But the report strongly suggests the Japanese would have surrendered anyway and probably pretty quickly after the Emperor got involved.
* They had been trying to get the Soviets to intercede with the United States.
* The Soviets, as we know, kept stalling until the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July.
* Then they declared war on 9 August.
* The made the decision to surrender on August 10 and they publicly accepted the Potsdam terms on August 15.
* But in the 73 years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.
* 56% of Americans according to a poll in 2015.
* Which is down from 85% in 1945.
* But it’s a lot considering that the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded as early as 1946 that it wasn’t necessary to get Japan to surrender.
* And considering senior American military leaders from Admiral Leahy to MacArthur, Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson all said they didn’t think the bombing was necessary.
* So if it wasn’t necessary, why did it happen?
* WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
* In 1990, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:
* The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
* But does this mean dropping the bombs was wrong?
* Not necessarily.
* We obviously can’t put ourselves in the shoes of American leaders in 1945.
* But I think there are two questions we CAN ask.
* 1. Did American military and government leaders in 1945 think they had to use, or should use, the bomb to bring about Japan’s surrender?
* 2. why do the majority of Americans still think all these years later that it was necessary, if the historians say it wasn’t?
* I think the answer to the last question is partly to do with the media.
* Over the past fifty years most journalists have reported what government officials said about the decision as if it were fact—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
* And partly I think it has to do with Americans wanting to believe in the Great American Myth – that America can do no wrong.
* And when it *does* do wrong, well it was either an accident, the result of bad intel – or it was necessary.
* So how was the decision made?
* And why?
* As we have discussed in the past, the Potsdam Declaration was demanding “unconditional surrender”.
* Truman inherited this from Roosevelt.
* But what this meant was unclear.
* Did it mean, for example, that Japan, like Hawaii before it, would become an American colony?
* Did it mean the execution of the Emperor?
* We know, of course, that in the end, Truman did not hesitate to modify the “unconditional surrender” policy after the atomic bomb was used.
* The Emperor stayed.
* BTW, did you know – Currently, the Emperor of Japan is the only head of state in the world with the English title of “Emperor”.
* Although that’ll change as soon as Trump stages his false flag attacks.
* And speaking of the Emperor.
* Did you know that Hirohito’s name changed when he died?
* His posthumous name is Emperor Shōwa.
* The word Shōwa is the name of the era (Shōwa period) potentially “period of enlightened peace/harmony” or “period of radiant Japan” that corresponded with the Emperor’s reign, and was made the Emperor’s own name upon his death.
* The name Hirohito means “abundant benevolence”.
* So…. nice to know that’s how they Japanese think about his reign.
* Some Americans today seem to think that demanding an unconditional surrender was obvious back then.
* But it wasn’t so obvious to Americans at the time.
* If the goal was to end the war as quickly as possible, to prevent further American deaths, why not negotiate the quickest possible surrender on agreeable terms?
* On May 9, 1945, the Washington Post published an article that called for a CONDITIONAL surrender.
* It took the position that demanding an unconditional surrender would just drive some elements of the Japanese military to choose to die fighting rather than be enslaved or see their Emperor executed.
* The British Foreign Office had long since concluded the same thing.
* In his May 13 weekly report to London, British Ambassador Lord Halifax cited the Post editorial as an early indication of support.
* And it wasn’t only in England.
* On April 18, a Joint Intelligence Committee report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded:
* [W]e believe that the Japanese Government will endeavor to find some formula for ending the war, without having the stigma of absolute “unconditional” surrender attached to it. If such a formula can be found which would be acceptable to the Allies, we believe that Japan might surrender without the invasion of Japan proper.
* That was nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* In an April 25 review of Pacific strategy, the Joint Staff Planners had gone even further in their critique of the existing language:
* The concept of “unconditional surrender” is foreign to the Japanese nature. Therefore, “unconditional surrender” should be defined in terms understandable to the Japanese, who must be convinced that destruction or national suicide is not implied. This could be done by the announcement on a government level of a “declaration of intentions” which would tell the Japanese what the future holds.… Unless a definition of unconditional surrender can be given which is acceptable to the Japanese, there is no alternative to annihilation and no prospect that the threat of absolute defeat will bring about capitulation.
* So it seems pretty clear that the highest levels of advice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, months before Hiroshima, were making it very clear that demanding an unconditional surrender was not going to work and the language needed to change.
* But the language didn’t change.
* Now – also keep in mind that FDR died on April 12 and Hitler died on April 30.
* So things are a little crazy around this time.
* But it’s 3 months before Potsdam and nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* I know Truman had a lot of catching up to do, but ending the war with Japan was PRETTY HIGH on that list.
* And yet the language still did not change.
* Although on May 9, Truman did give a speech where he declared the unconditional surrender of Japan did NOT mean their enslavement or extermination.
* But there was no mention of what it meant for Hirohito.
* However, the Joint Chiefs took the report seriously and started discussing there was general agreement that “unconditional surrender” should refer explicitly to the armed forces of Japan and that explicit reference should now also be made to the authority of the existing Imperial Institutions.
* On May 28, 1945, Acting Secretary of State, and former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew visited President Truman with a proposal to conclude the war quickly.
* He argued that the Allies should modify their terms of unconditional surrender to permit Japan to retain the Imperial Institution if the people desired it.
* Grew supported America’s primary goals of destroying Japan’s military machine and blotting out the cult of militarism, but warned, “The Japanese are a fanatical people and are capable … of fighting to the last ditch and last man.”
* He went on to say, “the greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne.”
* Grew insisted that if the United States compelled the Japanese people to defend their Emperor, untold number of Americans would die.
* He recommended that America permit Japan to determine its own political structure in order to allow the country a means of saving face—a position Chang Kai-Shek also held.
* Truman agreed asked Grew to pull together a meeting with Stimson, Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, to discuss the issue, which he did and they met on May 29.
* Meanwhile former president Herbert Hoover, a Republican, met with Truman on May 28 and recommend that the Allies make sure to state clearly that they had no desire to destroy either the Japanese people or their government, or to interfere in the Japanese way of life.
* Truman passed Hoover’s memorandum to Grew and Stimson for comment.
* Stimson in turn referred it to staff for review.
* A week later, on June 14, a staff assessment of Hoover’s paper came back. It observed:
* The proposal of a public declaration of war aims, in effect giving definition to “unconditional surrender,” has definite merit if it is carefully handled.
* So the Washington Post, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former President, and the acting Secretary of State all agreed that the terms of surrender should be clarified.
* On May 29, Grew met with Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, who all apparently agreed that the surrender terms needed to be clarified – but claimed it was not yet time for the President to make any statements for “certain military reasons.”
* What those reasons were, they didn’t say.
* Stimson’s diaries, which were published decades later, explained the reasons – the bomb.
* Some of the people in the room weren’t aware of its existence.
* One guy who was in the room and who did know about it was Assistant Secretary of War McCloy.
* He said the guys who knew about the bomb had a meeting afterwards.
* In that meeting he said General Marshall said he thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers.… Every effort should be made to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.
* Which seems to suggest that one of Marshall’s reasons for wishing to delay a statement was related to the idea that the bomb would first be used against a military target.
* Thereafter a clear “warning” would be issued—including, specifically, a warning to Japanese citizens to leave any targeted cities or population centers.
* Only then would the bomb be used against an urban center.
* It is often suggested that a so-called “demonstration” of the atomic bomb was not seriously discussed at the highest levels (except once, informally over lunch, by the Interim Committee on May 31)—and, further, that a “demonstration” was impractical. In subsequent discussions the idea of a desert island explosion has often emerged (and been discounted).
* It may therefore be important to note that Marshall—one of the most respected military figures in modern history—apparently did not see insuperable obstacles to a carefully designed “demonstration”—against a military target.
* Also on May 29, the U.S. intercepted a discussion between Molotov and Japanese Ambassador Sato.
* Molotov asked Sato’s view of how long the Pacific War would last, and Sato replied:
* Japan follows Russia’s example in her desire to end hostilities as quickly as possible. The Pacific War, however, is a matter of life and death for Japan and, as a result of America’s attitude, we have no choice but to continue the fight.
* Note it was “America’s attitude” that was driving their choice to fight to the end.
* Roosevelt’s former aide Harry Hopkins, on a presidential mission to Moscow at this time, reported Stalin as saying, along similar lines, that “according to his information the Japanese would not accept unconditional surrender,” and that “if we stick to unconditional surrender the Japs will not give up and we will have to destroy them as we did Germany.”
* on June 2, 1945 An OSS report – the OSS was the predecessor to the CIA – to Truman of a late May meeting with a Japanese representative in Portugal.
* It stated that peace terms were unimportant as long as the term “unconditional surrender” was avoided.
* On June 22 the Joint Chiefs of Staff received an message that Fujimura, one of the principal Japanese Naval representatives in Europe, insisted that the Japanese would require assurances that the Emperor would be retained before surrendering.
* Look – I could go on citing evidence that the upper echelons of the American government and military all understood that clarifying the terms of the surrender involving the Emperor could have brought about an early peace.
* If ending the war as quickly as possible was the ultimate goal, why didn’t they do just that?
* I can only think of a few possible reasons.
* 1. They wanted to grind Japan in the ground as revenge for Pearl Harbour. And yet all of the indications are that the top military and political leaders of the U.S. stated they did NOT want to do that.
* 2. They didn’t want to leave Japan with any military or political capabilities. Like Stalin wanted to destroy Germany’s. But surely there was a way of doing that AND also assuring the Japanese about the future of the Emperor?
* 3. They wanted to use the bomb. If it worked. But they were pretty sure Little Boy worked. And they would know about Fat Man by mid-July.
* 4. Optics. They didn’t want it to appear as though America gave up.

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#82 – Alex Wellerstein

Cameron Reilly — Tue, 29 May 2018 01:50:43 +0000

Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, a self-described “historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons”. He’s a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He blogs here and is on Twitter here. He is also the creator of the NUKEMAP. Alex joined us to talk about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Did Truman know Hiroshima contained civilians? Did he know the military were going to bomb Nagasaki a few days later? How much deliberation went into the question of whether or not the bomb should be used? And was it necessary to end the war with Japan? These questions and more on this episode.

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#81 – GROUND ZERO

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 18 May 2018 03:53:16 +0000

Kistiakowsky and his team armed the device shortly after 5am and retreated to the control bunker.
Their final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground that would serve as an ‘aiming point’.
The air force wanted to know what the effect of the blast would be on a B-29 30,000 feet up and some miles away.
In case of an accident, Groves left Oppenheimer in the control bunkers and joined Bush and Conant at base camp another 5 miles to the south.
There they picked up the countdown by FM radio.
Those in shelters heard it over the PA system.
Some of the scientists were with a party of onlookers 20 miles away on Compania Hill.
Teller said, ‘We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.’
However, though it was not yet dawn, they smothered their faces with suntan lotion.
Teller himself wore a pair of dark glasses and heavy gloves and pressed a welder’s glass to his face.
At precisely 5:30am on Monday, 16 July 1945, the atomic age began.
As the firing circuit closed, 32 detonators fired around the outside of the high-explosive shell.
The shockwave produced hit the tamper, squeezing and liquefying it.
The plutonium sphere inside shrank to the size of an eyeball.
In the centre, polonium alphas kicked neutrons from the beryllium – one, two, maybe as many as nine of them.
This was enough to start a chain reaction in the plutonium.
It went through 80 generations in millionths of a second, generating millions of degrees of heat and millions of pounds of pressure.
The X-rays given off super-heated the air, generating another shock wave.
The explosion vaporized the tower and turned the asphalt around the base into green sand.
The bomb released approximately 18.6 kilotons of power, and the New Mexico sky was suddenly brighter than many suns.
Some observers suffered temporary blindness even though they looked at the brilliant light through smoked glass.
Here’s an eyewitness account:
Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 Eyewitness Report by Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist, one of the giants of 20th century physics.
He died in 2002, aged 93.
You have asked me to submit to you an eye witness account of the explosion. I was located at base camp and watched the phenomenon from a little ridge about 100 yds. east of the water tower. Groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds. from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion. They were arranged so that their distance corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point. I looked at the explosion through the dark glass, but I have provided for an indirect view of the landscape in order to see the deflected light.
When the explosion went off, I was first dazzled by this indirect light which was much stronger than I anticipated, and I was not able to concentrate upon the view through the dark glass and missed, therefore, the first stages of the explosion. When I was able to look through the dark glass I saw flames and smoke of an estimated diameter of 1000 yds. which was slowly decreasing in brightness seemingly due to more smoke development. At the same time it rose slightly above the surface. After about three seconds its intensity was so low I could remove the dark glass and look at it directly. Then I saw a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow.
The first two or three seconds, I felt very strongly the heat radiation all over the exposed parts of my body. The part of my retina which was exposed to the indirect light from the surrounding mountains was completely blinded and I could feel traces of the after image 30 minutes after the shock.
The reddish cloud darkened after about 10 or 20 seconds and rose rather rapidly leaving behind a thick stem of dark brown smoke. After this, I remember having seen a white hemisphere rising above the clouds in continuation of the breakthrough of the explosion cloud through the ordinary cloud level. The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky where it was covered by clouds. After about 45 seconds the sound wave arrived and it struck me as being much weaker than anticipated.
V. Weisskopf
I watched a great interview from 1988 with Weisskopf where he said something I agree with.
He said a sunset is made ever more beautiful if you understand something about the science that causes it.
Science doesn’t deprive us of beauty – it enhances it.
A steel container weighing more than 200 tons, standing half a mile from Ground Zero, was knocked over.
As the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column, narrower than the first, rose and flattened into a mushroom shape, giving the atomic age a visual image that has become the very symbol of power and awesome destruction.
Oppenheimer then uttered his famous quote
Later he recalled that the experience brought to his mind the legend of Prometheus, punished by Zeus for giving man fire.
He also thought fleetingly of Alfred Nobel’s vain hope that his discovery of dynamite would end wars.
Did you know the guy who created the Nobel Prize invented dynamite?
He also invented gelignite and ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.
He also owned Bofors, a company that manufactured cannon.
It was after he read a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, that he bequeathed his fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes.
Without telling his family!
At base camp, Bush, Conant and Groves shook hands.
Hubbard heard Groves say: ‘My faith in the human mind has been somewhat restored.’
Bainbridge said to Oppenheimer immediately after the test, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
“My personal nightmare,” he later wrote, “was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hangfired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong.”
In the sweepstake, Isidor I. Rabi of the MIT’s Radiation Laboratory had put his money on 18 kilotons and swept the pot.
He broke out a bottle of whiskey and everyone had a swig.
The terrifying destructive power of atomic weapons and the uses to which they might be put were to haunt many of the scientists from the Manhattan Project for the rest of their lives.
But for the moment, the success of the Trinity test meant that a second type of atomic bomb could be readied for use against Japan.
Oppenheimer and Groves wrote a report for Stimson who was now in Potsdam with Truman.
Along with Little Boy, the untested uranium gun model Fat Man, a plutonium implosion device similar to that detonated at Trinity, now figured in American Far Eastern strategy.
Newspaper coverage that day did not enlighten the public.
Pre-written press releases claimed that an ammunition magazine accidentally exploded on the Alamogordo Air Base.

Meanwhile – it was clear to the Japanese that the war was lost.
In an attempt to achieve surrender with honour, Emperor Hirohito had instructed his ministers to open negotiations with Russia.
On June 30, Tōgō told Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to try to establish “firm and lasting relations of friendship.”
Satō was to discuss the status of Manchuria and “any matter the Russians would like to bring up.”
The Soviets responded with delaying tactics to encourage the Japanese without promising anything.
Mostly because the Russians wanted payback for the war of 1905.
Satō finally met with Molotov on July 11, but without result.
On July 12, four days before the Trinity test, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō directed Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to tell the Soviets that:
His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. But so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.
The Emperor proposed sending Prince Konoe as a special envoy, although he would be unable to reach Moscow before the Potsdam Conference.
Satō advised Tōgō that in reality, “unconditional surrender or terms closely equivalent thereto” was all that Japan could expect.
Moreover, in response to Molotov’s requests for specific proposals, Satō suggested that Tōgō’s messages were not “clear about the views of the Government and the Military with regard to the termination of the war,” thus questioning whether Tōgō’s initiative was supported by the key elements of Japan’s power structure.
On July 17, Tōgō responded:
Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind …
Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians’ mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender.
In reply, Satō clarified:
It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family].
On July 21, speaking in the name of the cabinet, Tōgō repeated:
With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. …
It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, …
through the good offices of Russia. …
it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms.
American cryptographers had broken most of Japan’s codes, including the Purple code used by the Japanese Foreign Office to encode high-level diplomatic correspondence on their 97-shiki injiki Type B Cipher Machine.
As a result, messages between Tokyo and Japan’s embassies were provided to Allied policy-makers nearly as quickly as to the intended recipients.
However, the Russians refused to help when the Japanese put out peace feelers.
Forty years before, Japan had soundly beaten Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, sinking two Russian fleets and putting an end to Russian expansion in the east.
They had clashed again at the Battle of Nomonhan in Mongolia in the summer of 1939, when Japan’s attempt to invade Siberia was thwarted, weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland started World War II.
Now, with the imminent defeat of the Japanese, Stalin hoped to make territorial gains.

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#80 – The Plug & The Hole

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 11 May 2018 22:14:53 +0000

Back to Alamogordo.
The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory.
They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape.
Just like Ray’s infamous kill room.
Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero.
Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero.
From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured.
Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released.
They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball.
The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release.
It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere.
As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas.
Two towers were built.
One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero.
Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor.
One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared.
Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives.
Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing.
The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor.
The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground.
Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides.
The open side faced the camera bunker to the west.
Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch.
On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan.
The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th.
The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day.
‘reverse English’ – Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction.
As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren.
At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives.
Final assembly of “the gadget” – which was its nickname – took place in the ranch house.
Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army.
As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn’t want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize.
Imagine that conversation – so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko.
Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium.
These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off.
HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar)
The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper.
The core was then driven out to Ground Zero, where it arrived at 3.18pm.
The five-foot sphere of high explosives had arrived that morning.
Remember the way a plutonium implosion bomb works is that want to compress is using convention explosives wrapped around the outside of the shell – the beer can experiment.
This was wrapped around a hollow globe of U-238.
At 1pm, the winch was used to hoist the 2 ton ball of high explosives from the back of the truck and lower it onto a skid.
Norris Bradbury, the navy physicist in charge of the assembly, said ‘We were scared to death that we would drop it,’ ‘because we did not trust the hoist and it was the only bomb immediately available. It wasn’t that we were afraid of setting it off, but we might damage it in some way.’
A white tent was erected over the assembly, ready for the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium spheres and the initiator to be slid into place in the centre of the ball of tamper inside the explosives.
Boyce McDaniel, one of the assembly team, said ‘Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the centre of the high-explosive shell, it would not enter,’ ‘Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to think about it. Could we have made a mistake?’
To maximize the density of uranium in the assembly, the clearance between the plug and the spherical shell had been reduced to a few thousandths of an inch.
Three sets of the plugs and tamper spheres had been made back in Los Alamos.
In the haste of their construction, not all the plugs fitted into all the holes.
Surely they could not have brought the wrong ones.
Then Bacher realized what had happened.
In the heat of the ranch house, the plug had expanded, while the tamper sphere, insulated by the explosives wrapped around it, was still cool from Los Alamos.
The world’s smartest guys forgot that heat makes shit expand.
So feel better the next time you forget something obvious.
Reminds me of that time I tried to insert a plug into your ass and your shit had expanded.
The team left the metal of the plug and the sphere in contact and took a break.
Later, when they checked the assembly again, the temperature had equalized and the plug slid smoothly into place.
That evening, the last block of explosive was Scotch-taped into place.
The detonators were installed the following day.
At 8am on 15 July, the device was hoisted up the firing tower, stopping at 15 feet for a team of GIs to stack army-issue mattresses under it in case it should fall.
While this was being done, news came that measurements from the test-firing indicated that Trinity would fail.
Everybody blamed George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky, the Ukrainian born physicist who ran X-Division – the team that developed the shaped charges for the imploding the ball, and also developed Wolverine’s skeleton.
but he was adamant.
Get it? Adamant? Wolverine’s skeleton was made of adamantium?
he said. ‘Oppenheimer became so emotional that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charges would work,’
While this was going on, Little Boy, the uranium bomb with its gun mechanism, was leaving Los Alamos for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
From there it would be flown to San Francisco, where it would be loaded on to the USS Indianapolis and padlocked to the deck in an anonymous 15 foot crate for shipment to Tinian.
They apparently didn’t need to test it.
Although all of its components had been tested, no full test of a gun-type nuclear weapon occurred before the Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima.
Then came good news.
After a night analysing the data from the test-firing, Hans Bethe called to say that something was wrong with the instruments and even a perfect implosion would have registered as a dud.
‘So I became acceptable to local high society,’ said Kistiakowsky.
Groves, Bush, Conant, Lawrence, Farrell, Bethe, Teller and Chadwick, head of the British contingent at Los Alamos and discoverer of the neutron, arrived in the test area.
It was pouring with rain.
In the control bunker 5.7 miles to the south, Groves and Oppenheimer discussed what to do if the weather did not break in time for the test scheduled at 4am.
At 3.30 they pushed the time back to 5.30, when the meteorologist Jack M. Hubbard forecast there would be a break in the weather.
‘You’d better be right on this, or I will hang you,’ Groves told Hubbard.
Then he Called the governor of New Mexico, getting him out of bed to warn him that he might have to declare martial law.
Many precautions were taken to prepare for all sorts of doomsday scenarios.
Soldiers were posted in several nearby towns in the event that they needed to be evacuated.
Groves, who was already concerned for the safety of Amarillo, Texas, a city of 70,000 only 300 miles away, placed a call to New Mexico Governor John J. Dempsey explaining that martial law might need to be implemented in the event of an emergency at the site.
The Army Public Relations Department prepared somber explanations in the event that disaster occurred and lives were lost.
I’d love to see a draft of that to see how they were prepared to spin it.
These days Trump would just call it fake news.
Fermi spent the wait annoying Groves.
‘He suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world,’ Groves recalled.
‘He also said that after all it wouldn’t make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it would still have been a well worthwhile scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.’
A betting pool was also started by scientists at Los Alamos on the possible yield of the Trinity test.
Yields from 45,000 tons of TNT to zero were selected by the various bettors.
Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth, with special odds on the mere destruction of the entire State of New Mexico!
At 4am the rain stopped.

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#79 – Jeffrey Hogue

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 04:16:45 +0000

Today we have a special guest – Jeff Hogue from the “History of the Cold War” podcast. We invited Jeff on to chat about his thoughts on the bombing of Japan.

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#78 – Alamogordo

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 04:50:01 +0000

On 6 June, Stimson again briefed Truman on S-1.

* The briefing summarized the consensus of the Interim Committee, set up as an advisory group on atomic research.
* It’s job was the advise on the proper use of atomic weapons in wartime and to develop a position for the United States on post-war atomic policy.
* The committee comprised of Bush, Conant, Compton, the Under Secretary of the Navy, The Assistant Secretary of State and the director of the Office of War Mobilization, soon to be Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes.
* Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton and Lawrence served as a scientific panel, while General Marshall represented the military.
* They had met on 31 May and concluded that the United States should not share its nuclear secrets and should try to retain superiority in nuclear weapons in case international relations deteriorated.
* Most present thought that the US should protect its monopoly for the present, though they realized that the secrets could not be held for long.
* It was only a matter of time before other potentially hostile countries, particularly Russia, would be capable of producing atomic weapons.
* Some thought the Soviets would catch up in 3 or 4 years.
* Groves countered with a twenty-year estimate.
* He was convinced the U.S. Had a stranglehold on the world’ supply of uranium.
* There was also some discussion of free exchange of nuclear research for peaceful purposes and the international inspection system that such an exchange would require.
* Lawrence’s suggestion that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender was discussed over lunch and rejected.
* No one knew whether the bomb would go off.
* If it did not, it would do much to improve Japanese morale.
* If they were warned, the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in populated areas or make an all-out effort to shoot down the plane.
* Besides, the shock value of the new weapon would be lost.
* These reasons and others convinced the group that the bomb should be dropped without warning on a dual target – a munitions factory surrounded by workers’ homes.
* Still no one realized quite how devastating the bomb would be.
* The weirdest thing about the committee meeting?
* There seems to have been no discussion about whether or not they SHOULD use the bomb – only where and when they should use it.
* On 1 June, the committee met with representatives from DuPont, Tennessee Eastman, Westinghouse and Union Carbide to get input from the contractors.
* This further convinced the Interim Committee that the US had a lead of three to ten years on the Soviet Union in making the bomb.
* As a result, in his meeting with the president on 6 June, Stimson told Truman that the Interim Committee recommended keeping S-1 a secret until Japan had been bombed.
* The attack should take place as soon as possible and without warning.
* The president was of course due to meet Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam on 17 July.
* While the British were already on board with the Manhattan Project, Truman and Stimson agreed that the president would stall if asked about atomic weapons by Stalin as it might be possible to gain concessions from Russia later in return for technical information.
* Stimson told Truman that members of the Interim Committee generally held the position that international agreements should be made in which all nuclear research would be made public and a system of inspections would be devised.
* They were even considering domestic legislation to that effect.
* However, if international agreements didn’t get worked out, the US should continue to produce as much fissionable material as possible to maintain its current position of superiority.
* Although the bomb had not yet been tested, a target selection group was set up in late April.
* It was headed by Groves and General Thomas Farrell, who had been appointed his military aide in February 1945.
* In late May, the committee, which comprised scientists as well as air force officers, listed Kokura Arsenal, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto as the four best targets.
* These cities were as yet undamaged, though General Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force planned to eliminate all major Japanese cities by 1 January 1946.
* Using a single bomb to wipe out a pristine city, it was thought, would have a profound psychological impression on the Japanese and weaken military resistance.
* It was also thought that by dropping the bomb on a city that had not already been damaged, it would be easier to judge just how much destruction this new weapon wrought.
* However, Stimson vetoed Kyoto.
* Japan’s most cherished cultural centre was full of priceless art treasures.
* The Allied governments had already noted the revulsion among their populations at the bombing of Dresden, so Nagasaki replaced the ancient capital in the directive issued to the Army Air Force on 25 July.
* While decisions about the use of the atomic bomb were being made by politicians and the military, the scientists who had made it thought they should have their say.
* The scientific panel of the Interim Committee was the only way that they could communicate with the policy-makers and Compton was convinced it must have a high level of participation in the decision-making process.
* His briefing of the Met Lab staff on the findings of the Interim Committee on 2 June led to a flurry of activity.
* The Met Lab’s Committee on the Social and Political Implications of the Atomic Bomb, chaired by James Franck, issued a report advocating international control of atomic power as the only way to stop the arms race that would be inevitable if the United States bombed Japan without first demonstrating the weapon in an uninhabited area.
* The scientific panel disagreed with the Franck Report, as the Met Lab report was known.
* It concluded that no technical test would convince Japan to surrender and a military demonstration of the bomb might best further the cause of peace, but held that such a demonstration should take place only after the US informed its allies – which, of course, included the Soviet Union.
* On 21 June, the Interim Committee agreed with the position advanced by the scientific panel.
* The bomb should be used as soon as possible, without warning and against a war plant surrounded by additional buildings.
* As to informing allies, the Committee concluded that when Truman went to Berlin in mid July he should mention to Stalin that the United States was preparing to use a new kind of weapon against Japan.
* On 2 July 1945, President Truman listened as Stimson detailed the peace terms he had drawn up for Japan.
* These included demilitarization and prosecution of war criminals in exchange for governmental and economic freedom.
* Stimson returned to the Oval Office on 3 July and suggested that Truman broach the issue of the bomb with Stalin.
* It would put the Russians on notice and serve, in Stimson’s words, as a ‘badly needed equalizer’.
* Meanwhile, the test of the plutonium weapon was rescheduled for 16 July at a barren site on the Alamogordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of Death, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, NM.
* Do you know what Alamogordo means?
* “large/fat cottonwood” in Spanish
* It’s also what I call my penis.
* The test and the test site were named ‘Trinity’ by Oppenheimer.
* Groves wrote to him in 1962, asking why he had picked that name and speculating that he had chosen it because it was a name commonly given to rivers and peaks in the American West, so it would be inconspicuous.
* Oppenheimer replied that he had not suggested the name on those grounds.
* ‘Why I chose the name is not clear,’ he said, ‘but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:
* As West and East
* In all flat Maps (and I am one) are one,
* So death doth touch the Resurrection.’
* The poem was ‘Hymn to God My God, in My Sicknesse’.
* Groves was like… Ooookkkkk ….But it doesn’t explain why you picked the name Trinity.
* He was like “hey I’m just a big Matrix fan.”
* TRINITY CLIP
* So wait… You’re at a club. Some smoking hot babe walks up to you and introduces herself, and you’re first reaction is to assume she’s a hacker with the same name?
* And then tell her you thought she was a guy?
* What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
* Groves concluded that there was another, better known devotional poem by Donne that began: ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’
* This is the fourteenth of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and explores the theme of a destruction that might also redeem.
* Oppenheimer, like many of those who worked with him, still thought this most deadly weapon might, once and for all, put an end to war.

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#77 – Bombing Japan

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 23:29:01 +0000

* Which brings us to April 1945.
* Only weeks before Germany surrendered on May 7, FDR dies.
* And Truman takes over as POTUS.
* He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb.
* He was briefed on it immediately by Sec of War Stimson.
* By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat.
* Keep in mind that the bomb was developed primarily to fight the Nazis.
* But now that they are out of the picture, nobody wants a $2 billion white elephant.
* At this stage, American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will.
* As we mentioned recently, the B-29 was the world’s first pressurized bomber.
* So it could fly at high altitudes that the few remaining Japanese fighters couldn’t reach.
* Although kamikaze pilots did take down quite a few.
* BTW, do you know what the B stands for in B-29?
* Lots of people think it stands for “bomber”.
* But it really secretly stands for the name of the guy who came up with the name of the planes – Barry.
* It’s the Barry-29.
* A single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million.
* On 13 April, the Imperial Army Air Force’s laboratory where early Japanese research on the atomic bomb had been done was hit.
* And that’s something we haven’t talked about – the Japanese attempts to build a bomb.
* In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi released his “atomic physics theory”.
* Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.
* Keep in mind that the West didn’t understand that concept until 1938 when the Germans worked it out.
* Leading Japanese physicist Nishina Yoshio was keen on utilizing nuclear fission as a military weapon, but was also justifiably concerned that other countries like the U.S., were also trying to create a nuclear weapon.
* Before the war, he was apparently friendly with Einstein and Neils Bohr
* Nishina had previously established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at RIKEN Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research.
* BTW, Ricoh, the Japanese camera company, also came out of Riken.
* In 1936 Nishina constructed a 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron, and a 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937.
* In 1938 he also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
* After meeting Japanese director of Japan’s Army Aeronautical Department’s Technical Research Institute, lieutenant-general Yasuda Takeo (surname first), Nishina told him about the possibility of Japan building its own nuclear weapon’s arsenal.
* In April of 1941, Army Minister and later Prime Mininster Tojo Hideki (yeah, that Tojo) ordered Yasuda to look further into the possibility of Japan being able to create nuclear weapons.
* Yasuda then passed the order down to viscount Ōkōchi Masatoshi director of the RIKEN Institute, who then passed the order down to Nishina.
* By this time, Nishina had over 100 nuclear researchers.
* Japan’s Army and Navy were always in competition with one another, so perhaps it would come as no surprise that the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Technology Research Institute had been looking in to the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, too.
* They had been in talks with scientists from the Imperial University in Tokyo, for advice on constructing and possible use of nuclear weapons.
* This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met 10 times between July 1942 and March 1943.
* It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, “it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war.”
* Well… if the U.S. couldn’t do it, why should the Japanese Navy bother?
* Rather than worry about nuclear weapons, the Navy focused its attention on radar.
* But the Army still thought the awesome might of a split atom would be just dandy to use, that same Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics worked with the Army and set up the Ni-Go Project at the RIKEN complex.
* Via the Ni-Go Project, scientists were TRYING to separate uranium-235 by thermal diffusion.
* It took until February 1945, but at the RIKEN complex, scientists separated a small amount of some radioactive material… but it was not uranium-235.
* The attempt to separate the U-235 ended two months later after U.S. bombing fire-damaged the facility.
* Japan’s biggest problem in attempting to create nuclear fission was its inability to procure enough uranium for experiments.
* The Japanese Navy and Army did conduct searches for uranium ore, looking in Fukushima, of all places, as well as in conquered territories in Burma, Korea and China.
* They also tried to get some from Germany, with some 1,230 pounds (560 kilograms) of unprocessed uranium oxide sent via German submarine U-234 (interesting name).
* Do you know what the U stands for?
* Unterseeboot, literally “undersea boat”
* It was the U-234’s first and only mission into enemy territory, but on May 14, 1945 it was told to surface and surrender by German Admiral Dönitz, as Germany was offering its unconditional surrender.
* The 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of uranium disappeared.
* It was most likely transferred to the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge diffusion plant.
* The uranium oxide would have yielded approximately 7.7 pounds (3.5 kg) of 235U after processing, around 20% of what would have been required to arm a contemporary fission weapon.
* But, there was another Japanese plan for nuclear weapons going on at the same time as Ni-Go Project… this one called F-Go Project
* F-Go was a Navy program – another one, taking place at Kyoto’s Imperial University under the auspices of Arakatsu Bunsaku (surname first), who as the then-current No. 1 Japanese physicist had studied at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford and at the Berlin University under Albert Einstein.
* By the time WWII concluded for Japan, he had designed and was constructing an ultracentrifuge that could spin at 60,000 rpm (rotations per minute) – current ultracentrifuge’s can spin at a speed of 1,000,000 g’s, which is approximately 9,800 kilometers per second squared, which is effing fast.
* But he didn’t manage to produce any U-235 before the end of the war.
* However – in 1946, a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution, David Snell, who had also served in the army during the war, wrote an article where he claimed Japan built and tested an A Bomb three days before the end of the war.
* They called it “genzai bakudan” (or greatest warrior).
* He claimed the project was moved to Konan, aka Hungnam, in Korea before the end of the war, because of the B-29 bombings, and that the Soviets had taken control of that area after the war and captured the Japanese atomic scientists.
* He said he learned all this from a Japanese officer, who said he was in charge of counter intelligence at the Konan project before the fall of Japan.
* He also said this was the reason the Soviets shot down the B-29 “Hog Wild” over the Hungnam region on August 29, 1945.
* David Snell went on to become Senior Editor of LIFE Magazine.
* Meanwhile… another air attack on Tokyo in May killed 83,000.
* Similar attacks followed on 67 cities, including Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Toyama and Nagoya.
* As more islands fell into American hands, the bombing campaign was ramped up.
* According to the Japanese government’s official statistics, air attacks killed 260,000 people and destroyed 2,210,000 houses, leaving 9,200,000 homeless.
* The Japanese just gave up.
* Much later, Mr Abe, the minister in charge of home affairs, said: ‘I believe that After the 23–24 May 1945 raid on Tokyo, civilian defence measures in that city, as well as other parts of Japan, were considered a futile effort.’
* By the end of the war, Japan was surrounded by the US and British navies, shelling the ports at will.
* Their blockade severed the islands’ supply lines.
* But the accepted view was that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end and an invasion of the home islands would be costly.
* Of course, this ignores what they would do when the U.S.S.R. Joined the Pacific War, as the Americans had urged them to do, and Stalin had agreed.
* He was scheduled to end his neutrality pact with Japan and declare war within three months of the end of the war with Germany
* Which means earliy – mid August.
* On August 3, Marshal Vasilevsky reported to Stalin that, if necessary, he could attack on the morning of August 5.
* More on that later.
* So American policy-makers clung to the idea that the successful combat delivery of one or more atomic bombs might convince the Japanese that further resistance was futile.
* There was little doubt of the determination of the Japanese to fight on.
* After the bombing of Tokyo on 9 – 10 March, Tokyo radio said: ‘If by any chance the enemy believed that he could demoralize the Japanese people, he has made a big mistake. The Emperor of Japan, on the morning of 18 March, deigned to pay an unexpected personal visit to the stricken districts of the Capital. He went on foot, exposing himself to the cold March wind. All the people, touched by his sympathy, renewed their determination to prosecute the war, saying: “This is a sacred war against the diabolical Americans.’’’
* But of course that’s typical wartime propaganda.
* American troops had suffered terribly in the face of the fanatical Japanese defence of the Pacific islands they had held.
* When American invaded the island of Iwo Jima, just south of Tokyo, 19 February – 26 March 1945, they ended up with 6,821 killed and 19,217 wounded out of a force of 70,000.
* Some 20,000 Japanese were also killed.
* “Well, this will be easy. The Japanese will surrender Iwo Jima without a fight.” – Chester W. Nimit, fleet admiral of the United States Navy said just before the landing.
* Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: “The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.”
* The fighting became even more intense when the Americans landed on Okinawa, the first of the Japanese home islands, in April 1945.
* The battle was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific, with approximately 160,000+ casualties on both sides: at least 75,682 Allied and 84,166–117,000 Japanese, including drafted Okinawans wearing Japanese uniforms.
* 149,425 Okinawan civilians were killed, committed suicide or went missing, a significant proportion of the estimated pre-war 300,000 local population.

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#76 – Operation Alsos

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 21:57:02 +0000

Of course, while the bomb was being designed, they had to figure out how they were going to deliver it.
And WHO was going to deliver it.
Way back in March 1944, the US Army Air Force, with William Sterling “Deak” Parsons and his team at Los Alamos, developed two bomb models and began testing them with B-29 bombers.
Thin Man, named for President Roosevelt, was the design carrying the plutonium gun, while Fat Man, named for Winston Churchill, was an implosion prototype.
Emilio Segrè, Italian-American physicist, had designed a lighter, smaller uranium bomb was later dubbed Little Boy, Thin Man’s brother.
Thin Man, the one named for FDR, was eliminated four months later because of the predetonation problem.
Which is ironic, because FDR himself also was eliminated a few months after that.
The problems with figuring out how to create a reliable chain reaction meant the estimates of when a bomb could be delivered that Bush had given the President in 1943 would have to be revised.
The new timetable was presented to Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff General Marshall by Groves on 7 August 1944, two months after the Allied landings on Normandy on 6 June.
It said that small implosion weapons using uranium or plutonium would be ready in the second quarter of 1945, if experiments proved satisfactory.
Groves was more confident that a uranium gun bomb could be delivered by 1 August 1945, and another one or two more by the end of that year.
Marshall and Groves acknowledged that German surrender might take place by summer 1945, making it likely that Japan would be the atomic bomb’s first target.
Expenditures on the Manhattan Project had reached $100 million a month by mid-1944.
No one was sure that Groves’ deadline of 1 August 1945 could really be reached.
The Germans were by then in retreat on all fronts and the Japanese were being pushed back in the Pacific
it wasn’t certain that a weapon would be ready for use in the war at all.
Meanwhile, just in case a bomb was ready in time, they needed to start working out how they would deliver it.
The US Army Air Force started training in September 1944 at Wendover Field Air Force Base in western Utah
Where Chrissy won at craps when she was 21.
On the border of Nevada and Utah.
Near the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway, about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City.
BTW, Wendover Air Base is still there today.
It’s a civil air base.
But it’s one of the most intact World War II training airfields.
Numerous films and television shows have been filmed using Wendover Field, including The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Con Air (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), Independence Day (1996), Hulk (2003) and The Core (2003).
Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets began drilling the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of the 509th Composite Wing in test drops with 5500-pound orange dummy bombs, nicknamed pumpkin bombs, on the Great Salt Lake.
Not to be confused with the pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin.
These had the same ballistic characteristics as Fat Man.
Tibbets was recognized as the best bomber pilot in the Air Force.
He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England over occupied Europe.
Then he had flown Eisenhower to his command post in Gibraltar before the Allied landings in northwest Africa and conducted the first bombing raids there afterwards.
More recently, he had been a test pilot for Boeing’s new B-29 Superfortress and worked with the physics department of the University of New Mexico to determine how well the B-29 could defend itself against fighter attack.
BTW – the Superfortress was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion.
It was the first plane to include a pressurized cabin, and dual-wheeled, tricycle landing gear.
Those of course ended up in commerical aircraft.
It also had an analog computer-controlled fire-control system that directed four remote machine gun turrets that could be operated by a single gunner and a fire-control officer.
That of course ended up in James Bond’s cars.
In September 1944, Deke Parsons and Norman Ramsey, a Columbia physicist in charge of the delivery group, briefed Tibbets.
He was then told by his commanding officer, Major General Uzal Girard Ent, ‘You have to put together an outfit and deliver this weapon. We don’t know anything about it yet. We don’t know what it can do. You’ve got to mate it to the airplane and determine the tactics, the training and the ballistics – everything. These are all parts of your problem. This thing is going to be very big. I believe it has the potential and possibility of ending the war.’
Given Tibbets and two other names as choices for the mission, General Ent replied without hesitation, “Paul Tibbets is the man to do it.”
A month later, Ent was seriously injured in the crash of a B-25 on takeoff at the Fort Worth Army Airfield, Texas.
Paralyzed from the waist down he learned to walk again using braces.
But he died a few years later.
Tibbets’s delivery programme was to be codenamed ‘Silverplate’.
If Tibbets needed anything, he was to use that magic word, which had been accorded the highest priority in the service.
Silverplate was the code reference for the United States Army Air Forces’ participation in the Manhattan Project during World War II.
it was Originally the name for the aircraft modification project which enabled a B-29 Superfortress bomber to drop an atomic weapon.
The original directive for the project had as its subject line “Silver Plated Project” but continued usage of the term shortened it to “Silverplate”.
In June 1945, Tibbets and his command moved to Tinian Island in the Marianas, where the Navy SeaBees had built the world’s largest airport to accommodate the new Superfortresses, which had been manufactured specially to bomb Japan.
From there, Tibbets and his crew began flying bombing missions over Japan to familiarize themselves with the target area.
By then, the home islands had been bombed for more than six months.
By early 1945, the team at Los Alamos were confident that their design for the uranium bomb was going to work.
So they focused all of their attention on getting the implosion model for the plutonium right.
Meanwhile Groves wanted to know whether or not the Germans had the bomb.
In late 1943, Groves had set up a unit to find out.
It was called Alsos, Greek for ‘grove’, and was headed by an FBI-trained army G-2 security officer, Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash – his birth name was Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky.
Born in the U.S. but moved back to Russia with his family when he was 12.
And they moved back to the U.S. when the Bolsheviks took over.
He’s fluent in English, German and Russian.
G-2 BTW refers to the military intelligence staff of a unit in the United States Army.
It is contrasted with G–1 (personnel), G–3 (operations), G–4 (logistics) and G-5 (civil-military operations).
Now this fucking Pash guy is a legend.
What a fucking name – “Pash is my name and pashing is my game”.
He needs a movie.
Starring… Charles Muthafuckin Bronson.
Pash is the guy who investigated Oppenheimer for his communist connections.
Now his job is to go into Europe, even behind enemy lines, to try to find the German nuclear project, as well as arrest the scientists, get them to America before the Soviets or the French get their hands on them, and also find all of the uranium stocks the Germans had acquired.
It was decided to bomb German nuclear facilities wherever they lay in order to deprive the Soviet Union of their technology and personnel, unless American troops could get to them first.
Keep in mind – the French and the Soviets are American allies at this stage.
Pash went into Normandy and then Paris in August 1944 just after D-Day and tracked down some French physicists who knew something about the German bomb project.
He was shot at by German defenders in Paris and had to retreat.
He then moved on to Brussel and then Strasbourg near the border of Germany by November, where he found a German physics laboratory installed in a building in the grounds of the city hospital.
There they arrested a couple of physicists, and found papers on the German atomic project which sounded like the Germans weren’t even close to developing something.
But it wasn’t conclusive.
And Groves didn’t want to take any chances.
He wanted to know the whereabouts of the 1200 tons of uranium the Germans had captured in Belgium in 1940.
Pash had already found 31 tons of it in a French arsenal at Toulouse, where it had been secretly diverted and stored.
Crossing the Rhine into Germany, Pash acquired a large force of men, four jeeps with machine guns mounted on them and two armoured cars, then went hunting for German atomic scientists.
He also wanted to make sure no Nazi physicists with knowledge about how to build a bomb fell into Soviet hands.
By the end of March 1945 he was in Heidelberg, where he captured Walther Bothe, head of the Institute of Physics, along with Germany’s only working cyclotron.
At Stadtilm, near Weimar, he found the central office of German atomic research, though Werner Heisenberg and the rest of his group from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had fled south, leaving behind a small stash of uranium oxide.
Captured documents indicated that the rest of the Belgium ore might be in a factory at Stassfurt, near Magdeburg.
The British were there, but the Red Army was advancing fast and the area was in the occupation zone allocated to the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference.
Groves organized a joint British and American strike force who went into Stassfurt.
They found the plant a mess, from both Allied bombing and looting by French workmen.
The ore was in barrels in an open-sided shed and had obviously been there a long time; many of the barrels were broken open.
Around 1100 tons of ore was stored there in various forms, most of it the concentrates from Belgium, along with around 8 tons of uranium oxide.
Over the following ten days, 260 truckloads of uranium ore, sodium uranate and ferrouranium weighing about 1,000 tons, were taken away by an African-American truck company – before the Soviets arrived – IN THEIR ZONE!
Meanwhile, Pash had discovered that Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and other German scientists were in the resort town of Haigerloch in the Black Forest region of southwest Germany.
This was still in enemy hands, though the French were breaking through there.
But that was also a problem.
Because Haigerloch lay in the occupation zone allocated to France.
And Groves didn’t want the French to get their hands on nuclear secrets either!
He tried to get the border of the occupation zones changed!
But the State Dept wanted to know why and he refused to tell them.
Groves, Marshall, and Stimson then decided that the area would have to be secured by American troops that would carry off what they could and destroy everything else.
The plan, codenamed Operation Effective, called for the 13th Airborne Division to occupy the area to prevent its capture by the French, and seize an airfield that could be used to fly in an Alsos Mission team, and later to fly it out, along with captured German scientists.
Operation Effective was scheduled for 22 April.
Meanwhile, they took steps to delay the French advance.
But on 20 April, the French First Army captured an intact bridge over the Neckar River at Horb and established a bridgehead.
It was decided to send in a force on the ground instead of Operation Effective, which was cancelled.
This time, instead of following or accompanying the front-line troops, the Alsos Mission would operate behind enemy lines.
The Alsos Mission had taken delivery of two armored cars, four jeeps with machine gun mounts, and two .50 caliber machine guns.
The other two jeeps would carry captured German machine guns.
They would be accompanied by three unarmed jeeps.
For the operation, codenamed Operation Big, Pash would command a special force called Task Force A, built around his Alsos Mission team and the U.S. 1269th Engineer Combat Battalion
Pash hastily raced around Stuttgart in a convoy of jeeps and trucks to beat the French to Haigerloch.
This was to be Alsos’s first seizure of an enemy town.
When they arrived at the town, they found white pillowcases, sheets and towels bedecking flagpoles, window shutters and broomstick handles.
The people of Haigerloch obviously wished to surrender.
The team quickly located the Nazi research facility – ‘an ingenious set-up that gave almost complete protection from aerial observation and bombardment’.
Pash said that as he hurried to the scene, ‘I saw a box-like concrete entrance to a cave in the side of an 80-foot cliff towering above the lower level of the town. The heavy steel door was padlocked. A paper stuck on the door indicated the manager’s identity. When the manager was brought to me, he tried to convince me that he was only an accountant. When he hesitated at my command to unlock the door, I said: “Beaston, shoot the lock off the door. If he gets in the way, shoot him. The manager opened the door.’
Inside the main chamber was a concrete pit some 10 feet in diameter.
In the lid was a heavy metal shield covering the top of a thick metal cylinder.
This contained a pot-shaped vessel, also made of a heavy metal.
It was about 4 feet below the level of the floor.
On top of the vessel was a metal frame.
A German prisoner confirmed that the Americans had captured the Nazi uranium ‘machine’, as the German called it.
It was an atomic pile.
Leaving Goudsmit and his colleagues at Haigerloch, Pash moved on to nearby Hechingen, where he picked up most of the German atomic scientists.
Otto Hahn was captured in Tailfingen two days later and they heard Werner Heisenberg was with his family in a cottage beside a lake in Bavaria.
On 1 May, Pash set out in pursuit of Heisenberg with ten men in the two armored cars and two jeeps.
They teamed up with the 36th Reconnaissance Troop of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division and entered Urfeld on 2 May, where Pash found Heisenberg at his home.
The Americans became involved in firefights with German troops attempting to enter the town, and the 36th Reconnaissance Troop had to head off on another mission, leaving Pash with just seven men.
Fortunately, the German force, which numbered about 700, offered to surrender.
Pash returned on 3 May with the 3rd Battalion, 142nd Infantry, which took them prisoner, while Pash and his Alsos Mission team took Heisenberg into custody.
German scientists that had been captured by the Alsos Mission were held in several camps, separate from other prisoners of war.
After VE Day, it was decided to concentrate them in an internment camp at Kransberg Castle, codenamed “Dustbin”, as part of Operation Epsilon.
The Castle was the personal retreat for Hermann Göring.
It’s where the Americans stashed high-ranking non-military prisoners of war, including Albert Speer, who originally re-designed the castle as a HQ for Hitler, Wernher von Braun, Ferdinand Porsche, and the leaders of the IG Farben chemical conglomerate.
Ten of the nuclear physicists, including Heisenberg, were then taken to England.
They were kept at a house near Cambridge.
The place was thoroughly bugged to determine how close the German nuclear project had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening in to their conversations, and transcripts of their conversations were sent to Groves.
On July 6, the microphones picked up the following conversation between Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, another German nuclear physicist, both of whom had worked on the German nuclear project and had been seized as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, Diebner in Berlin and Heisenberg in Urfeld:
Diebner: “I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?”
Heisenberg: “Microphones installed? (laughing) Oh no, they’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods; they’re a bit old fashioned in that respect.”
The most interesting conversations occurred after they received the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they struggled to comprehend how the Allies had done what they could not.
Some of the scientists indicated that they were happy that they had not been able to build a nuclear bomb for Adolf Hitler, while some of the others, more sympathetic to the Nazi party, were dismayed at having failed.
Otto Hahn, one of those who were grateful that Germany had not built a bomb, chided those who had worked on the German project, saying “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second-raters.”
Some of the scientists had almost nothing to do with the nuclear project.
Hahn, for example, had (with his assistant Fritz Strassmann) discovered nuclear fission in December 1938, – he’s known as the father of nuclear chemistry – but otherwise had no participation.
Max von Laue was, like Hahn, an ardent anti-Nazi and had not done any work relating to wartime physics.
Albert Einstein (who was born six days after him) wrote that Hahn was “one of the very few who stood upright and did the best he could in these years of evil”.
In the transcripts, Hahn contemplates suicide after learning of the bombing of Hiroshima, believing himself personally responsible for the many Japanese victims.
After seeing the German project at Haigerloch, Goudsmit, the scientist who accompaied Pash, wrote that:
It was so obvious the whole German uranium set up was on a ludicrously small scale. Here was the central group of laboratories, and all it amounted to was a little underground cave, a wing of a small textile factory, a few rooms in an old brewery. To be sure, the laboratories were well equipped, but compared to what we were doing in the United States it was still small-time stuff. Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent more money on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their whole project.
The Soviets BTW had their own version of Alsos but it didn’t get off the ground until Beria suggested in early in 1945.
By the time they got to Berlin it was too late – the atomic scientists had all escaped and been picked up by the Americans.
All except a few.
One of those few was Nikolaus Riehl.
A few years later, he helped the Soviets build their first uranium bomb.
But that’s another story.

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#75 – The Beer Can Experiment

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 03:48:12 +0000

* President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to go full steam 26 days after Fermi’s success, on 28 December 1942
* The U.S. would end up spending $2 billion on it. (about $22 billion in 2018 dollars)
* Do you know why it cost so much?
* 130,000 people
* When I thought of the Manhattan Project, I used to imagine it was a handful of guys sitting around a blackboard scribbling equations in chalk.
* Over 90% of the cost was for building factories to produce fissile material, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.
* Remember that you couldn’t just go to Amazon and buy pure uranium-235 or plutonium.
* It had to be made. A LOT of it had to be made.
* And they still didn’t even know how to make it.
* So they ran up parallel factories trying various methods.
* Out of that 130,000 people, do you know how many knew they were working on developing an atomic bomb?
* Probably not many.
* It was one of the best kept secrets in military history.
* Imagine – 130,000 people working on a project that didn’t know what it was for!
* And I’m not just talking about the worker bees – the management didn’t know either.
* And of course in December 1942, nobody knew how long the war would last or how long it would take to build a bomb.
* So it was highly likely they the war would be over before they figure it out.
* But they did it anyway.
* While Bush was seeking approval from the president, Oppenheimer had suggested that a bomb laboratory be set up in an isolated area.
* It would operate secretly but allow a free exchange of ideas between theoreticians and experimentalists who would work side by side.
* The site chosen was the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School in New Mexico.
* Which, BTW, used to be called just Mexico.
* The owners of the boys’ school occupying the site was eager to sell, and Groves was equally eager to buy.
* it was easy enough to get to Santa Fe by train, Los Alamos itself was virtually inaccessible, located on a mesa, or flat-topped hill, about 30 miles northwest.
* a private ranch school for boys, modeled after the Boy Scouts
* Famous graduates of the school include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal
* The official name for the site during the war was Project Y.
* It was only after the war, when it’s existence became public, that it was referred to as Los Alamos.
* Oppenheimer was put in charge, despite him being a leftie and the fact he didn’t have a Noble Prize when many of the people working in the team did.
* But he was apparently a great leader.
* According to some of the other scientists who worked there, nobody else in that laboratory even came close to him in his knowledge.
* There was human warmth as well.
* Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing.
* In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.
* He seems to have the ability to walk into a room where a major scientific debate was going on, listen, sum up everyone’s points, and then when he left, everyone knew what the right answer was.
* He insisted that everyone at Los Alamos could know everything about the project – they weren’t relegated to their particular piece of the puzzle.
* He created a spirit where everyone felt important and involved.
* Meanwhile, on the production side of things, they still had challenges.
* Huge amounts of material had to be obtained.
* But that’s just the start of their problems.
* More than three million board cubic feet of timber were required, for instance, and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to substitute silver, borrowing almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the US Treasury.
* They couldn’t get enough vacuum tubes, generators, regulators and other equipment
* Keep in mind that nobody had ever done this before, so they didn’t know what they needed.
* A lot of it was in flux.
* Last-minute design changes continued to frustrate equipment manufacturers – who of course were still kept in the dark about what was going on.
* And there were major performance issues with other parts of the project.
* Oppenheimer discovered that he needed three times more fissionable material would be required for a bomb than earlier estimates had indicated.
* Even if things had been going well with the teams trying to create U235, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it was possible that they might not produce enough purified U-235 in time.
* But things weren’t going well.
* The two teams trying to create Uranium 235, one using electromagnetic separation and the other using gaseous diffusion, at Oak Ridge, had equipment malfunctions and breakdowns or just couldn’t get it working.
* Things on that front were behind schedule.
* Even going into 1944, neither method was producing results.
* So Oppenheimer turned to the Navy.
* Even though the bomb project was in the hands of the Army, the Navy were pursuing their own atomic project – to provide a source of fuel for submarines.
* And they were working on a completely different way to create U235 – thermal diffusion.
* This was under a guy called Abelson.
* Oppenheimer suggested Groves go to meet with Abelson and offer to help funds his project if they could share the U235.
* Abelson agreed.
* Abelson had been working with 100 convection columns in his plant.
* In 90 days, Groves had a 2142-column plant built in Oak Ridge.
* There was also a third major facility in Hanford, Washington, run by Du Pont, trying to produce plutonium.
* Interesting story about Hanford.
* It was the location of a booming agricultural town.
* About halfway between Seattle and Spokane.
* But the government came in and gave all 1500 residents eviction notices.
* They were told the government would purchase their properties – mostly farms – at a price to be determined by the government and they had between 2 and 30 days to move.
* People asked why?
* They were told “we can’t tell you. It’s top secret.”
* They were purchased at low prices.
* And they weren’t allowed to harvest their last crops, despite a bumper year with high prices.
* Some farms were leveled while the families were still in the homes.
* One guy remembered his father received $500 for a 10-acre irrigated farm.
* Out of that was deducted back taxes and electricity bills, leaving about $300.
* “The well alone and the irrigation system cost $1,100,” he said.
* Many of the displaced residents believe they are entitled to the same kind of payments that interned Americans of Japanese descent received from the government.
* “The government stole our property,”
* Groves wrote in his memoirs that he regretted paying too much for the farms, a comment that still rankles many survivors.
* Then the government leveled the town except for the high school, which was used for the management offices of the plutonium project.
* DuPont and the army co-ordinated efforts to recruit labourers from all over the country And 50,000 workers were shipped in over the next year.
* a sea of tents and wooden barracks where there was little to do and nowhere to go.
* Ground-breaking for the water-cooling plant for the 100-B pile, took place on 27 August, less than two weeks before Italy’s surrender to the Allies on 8 September.
* On 10 October, work gangs began laying the first of 390 tons of structural steel, 17,400 cubic yards of concrete, 50,000 concrete blocks and 71,000 concrete bricks.
* That was just to make the 40 foot windowless building the pile sat in.
* Groves had a hard time getting Du Pont on board.
* Apparently they had copped some PR flack after WWI for war profiteering.
* founded in July 1802 as a gunpowder mill by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont.
* using capital raised in France and gunpowder machinery imported from France.
* The company was started at the Eleutherian Mills, on the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, two years after he and his family left France to escape the French Revolution and religious persecutions against Huguenot Protestants.
* The company began as a manufacturer of gunpowder, as du Pont noticed that the industry in North America was lagging behind Europe.
* The company grew quickly, and by the mid-19th century had become the largest supplier of gunpowder to the United States military, supplying half the powder used by the Union Army during the American Civil War.
* They went on to develop nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, and Lycra among other things.
* Eventually they agreed to help Groves build and operate his plutonium pile for costs plus one dolllar.
* The scientists at Hanford were from The Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab) – a scientific laboratory at the University of Chicago that was established in February 1942 to study plutonium.
* But getting plutonium to go fissile was a different process than uranium.
* The problem was with the firing mechanism.
* Essentially, to detonate an atomic bomb, all you need to do is put together a critical mass which will then explode spontaneously.
* Putting it together must be done rapidly, otherwise predetonation would only produce a small explosion, which would blow the bomb apart before the optimal mass was achieved.
* One way to do this was to use a gun to fire a fissionable projectile into a fissionable target.
* This might work with uranium, but would work with plutonium only if absolute purification of plutonium could be achieved.
* Unable to purify the plutonium sufficiently, bomb designers came up with the idea of using high explosives to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, releasing neutrons and causing a chain reaction.
* However, no one yet knew exactly how much plutonium would be needed.
* Would Hanford be able to produce enough?
* As they tested the plutonium approach later in 1944, they couldn’t get it to create a chain reaction.
* It would start off okay but then the reaction would taper off.
* They eventually figured out it was something they called ‘xenon poisoning’.
* The chain reaction would produce the element xenon, which would then start absorbing neutrons faster than the pile could create them, slowing down the chain reaction.
* On Christmas Day in 1944, the figured out the solution was just increasing the number of tubes containing irradiated uranium slugs.
* By the end of January 1945, they had produced enough plutonium nitrate to send it to Los Alamos.
* Colonel Franklin T. Matthias from Groves’s staff then carried the first small batch of plutonium nitrate by train from Portland to Los Angeles, where he turned it over to a security courier from Los Alamos.
* It arrived there on 2 February.
* After that, small subcritical batches in metal containers within wooden crates were despatched by Army ambulance, in convoy, via Boise, Salt Lake City, Grand Junction and Pueblo to Los Alamos, New Mexico.
* It was also known, theoretically, that it would be possible to create a fusion, or hydrogen, bomb.
* Just as when heavy nuclei break up, or fission, energy is given off, so when light nuclei are forced together by immense temperatures and pressures, they fuse, giving off energy.
* The fusion of hydrogen atoms, producing helium, is the energy that powers the sun.
* If it could be made, a thermonuclear, or fusion, device would be considerably more powerful than either a uranium or plutonium device, though it would need a fission bomb as a detonator.
* Research on the hydrogen bomb – or the Super, as it was called at Los Alamos – was always a distant second in priority, but Oppenheimer thought that it was too important to ignore.
* After considerable deliberation, he gave Edward Teller permission to devote himself to the Super.
* At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had put together a stellar team of the country’s leading physcists.
* As well as a few British physicists.
* One member of the British contingent was the Soviet agent Klaus Fuchs, who had been passing nuclear information to the Russians since 1942 and continued doing so until 1949 when he was caught and convicted of espionage.
* The problem with the plutonium implosion method was to achieve symmetrical implosions.
* The high-explosive shell would melt the metal core, so it was difficult to compress the material uniformly without some of it squirting out of the side.
* One of they physicists The problem he found was to achieve symmetrical implosions. The high-explosive shell would melt the metal core, so it was difficult to compress the material uniformly without some of it squirting out of the side. Parsons mocked: ‘To my mind he is gradually working up to what I shall refer to as the Beer-Can Experiment. As soon as he gets his explosives properly organized, we will see this done. The point to watch for is whether he can blow in a beer can without splattering the beer.’ called it the Beer-Can Experiment.
* “As soon as he gets his explosives properly organized, we will see this done. The point to watch for is whether he can blow in a beer can without splattering the beer.”
* John Von Neumann and Teller worked out that if you could squeeze a hollow shell of plutonium into a solid ball, you could put together a critical mass much quicker than you could firing it from a gun.
* it would be possible to squeeze a solid subcritical sphere of plutonium to such unearthly densities that it would detonate.
* This would avoid the problems of compressing hollow shells.
* The high speed of the compression would prevent predetonation; the plutonium would not have to be so pure and you would need less of it.
* In other words, you could make a more reliable bomb more quickly.
* It would also be smaller, and therefore much easier to fit in a plane.

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#74 – Benn Steil & The Marshall Plan

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 01:54:19 +0000

Benn Steil is an American economist, author of a great new book on “The Marshall Plan”, and senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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#73 – k

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 02:27:02 +0000

* Fission involved breaking apart the nuclei of heavy elements like uranium or plutonium.
* Fusion involves forcing the nuclei of lighter elements, like hydrogen or deuterium, together.
* And deuterium, which is basically heavy hydrogen, is far easier to get your hands on than uranium.
* But there’s still not a ton of it.
* There is one D atom in 6420 of H.
* D accounts for approximately 0.0156% of all the naturally occurring hydrogen in the oceans, while protium, the other isotope of hydrogen, accounts for more than 99.98%.
* But a fusion bomb is also a lot more powerful than a fission bomb.
* That’s why all of the nuclear weapons today operate by fusion instead of fission.
* BTW, a fusion bomb is also known as a hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear bomb, becaue a fusion bomb actually contains a fission bomb which creates the heat, thermo, required to initiate the fusion reaction, the nuclear part.
* In late November, there was a scare.
* Neither Groves nor the S-1 Executive had been told that Compton was building the experimental pile at Stagg Field.
* They were faced with the vision of a chain reaction possibly running wild in heavily populated Chicago.
* However, Fermi’s calculations provided reasonable assurance that this was not going to happen.
* But for a few days there, everyone was panicking.
* So let’s talk about k.
* And I’m not talking about Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black.
* Here’s the situation.
* Remember that to get a fission reaction to happen, you had to get just the right number of neutrons to hit the right number of uranium nuclei, causing them to fission, which would give off more neutrons, which would hit more nuclei, etc.
* Some of the neutrons would be lost, they might bounce in a direction where there wasn’t a uranium nuclei.
* So you have to put up a kind of shielding that would make the neutrons bounce back into the chamber.
* To quantify this, the physicists came up with a number – k.
* If the number of neutrons in the chamber was less than k, there was no chain reaction, the process would just fizzle out.
* If it was exactly k, when k = 1, you had a sustainable reaction.
* But if it was larger than k, it could go supercritical, and you might have a bomb go off in the middle of Chicago.
* But of course at this stage nobody knew if achieving k was even possible.
* To try and achieve k, they put the uranium in the middle of the pile and surrounded it with cubes of graphite, which would act as a moderator, slowing down the neutrons.
* The first pile that Fermi built on the campus at Columbia in September 1941 comprised cans of uranium oxide surrounded by graphite bricks.
* Its k was 0.87.
* Which he said sucked but at least it was a starting point.
* By July 1942, at Stagg Field, they had edged k up to 0.918, then 0.94.
* To get closer to k they realised they were going to need purer graphite and uranium metal, instead of uranium oxide, which had too many impurities.
* The problem was – uranium metal of that purity didn’t exist.
* It wasn’t until November that they could get enough manufactured, from a range of companies who were all working without knowing exactly why, to their specifications.
* So in November, Fermi started to build the main pile in Chicago.
* interestingly, some of the physicists working on the project were pacifists.
* They believed that the existence of atom bombs would prevent future wars.
* But Fermi still didn’t know if the pile would go critical.
* So they had the idea to cover the entire thing in a huge rubber balloon so they could pump all of the air out of it.
* Gases absorb neutrons and they wanted to negate that factor.
* The balloon was made by Goodyear, who of course weren’t allow to know WHY they were building this huge rubber balloon.
* Maybe they thought it was a huge condom. For a giant.
* The pile had graphite bricks in the center.
* Surrounded by a wooden frame.
* Then uranium was placed on the next layer.
* More wooden frames.
* Then alternating graphite and uranium for each layer.
* Into a roughly spherical shape.
* And these guys needed to carve the graphite into the shapes they needed.
* One of them said: ‘We found out how coal miners feel. After eight hours of machining graphite, we looked as if we were made up for a minstrel. One shower would remove only the surface graphite dust. About a half-hour after the first shower the dust in the pores of your skin would start oozing. Walking around the room where we cut the graphite was like walking on a dance floor. Graphite is a dry lubricant, you know, and the cement floor covered with graphite dust was slippery.’
* Imagine you’re one of the world’s leading physicists, and you’re spending your days carving graphite, covered in dust, trying to build the world’s biggest bomb.
* That’s a hard day’s work.
* Fermi was described by his associates as ‘completely self-confident but wholly without conceit’.
* He’d made his calculations and he was certain of them.
* In Chicago in the early afternoon of 1 December, tests indicated that the pile was reaching critical size.
* At that point Fermi’s massive lattice pile contained some 400 tons of graphite, 6 tons of uranium metal and 50 tons of uranium oxide.
* The average African elephant weighs between 2.5 and 7 tons, to 400 tons of graphite is about 80 elephants worth.
* Imagine spending your days carving 80 elephants into nice little cubes.
* About 8.30am on the morning of Wednesday, 2 December, the scientists began to assemble at the squash court where the pile had been built.
* The pile was built in the doubles squash court in the west stands of Stagg Field.
* Fermi and other scientists watch from the balcony of the squash court.
* The giant balloon was fitted, and the air was pumped out.
* What if it went supercritical?
* They had a an emergency cadmium rod, which would absorb neutrons, suspended above the pile, attached to a rope, which could be cut with an axe if needed.
* But that wasn’t enough security.
* Remember – this had never been done before.
* So there was a suicide squad on stand-by.
* If things went pear shaped, these three guys would rush in and cover the entire pile with cadmium-sulphate solution.
* What a job description.
* The experiment started at 10am.
* First the emergency rod was slowly pulled out a bit.
* The neutron counter in the pile started ticking, showing Fermi the number of neutrons being released.
* 37 minutes later, they removed the rod a bit further.
* The ticking went higher.
* Fermi is doing manual calculations on a slide rule to make sure the counter matches his calculations.
* They pull the rod out a little more.
* Another half an hour goes by. They pull it out another foot.
* Fermi does his calculations.
* Then suddenly – there is a loud crash.
* Everyone freezes.
* It turns out that the rod had just slipped back down.
* “Let’s go to lunch, I’m starving” said Fermi.
* They spent a couple of hours at lunch, talking about anything BUT the experiment.
* Then at 2pm they go back to try again.
* They repeat the process.
* Slowly removing the rod up a bit.
* Then Fermi watches the needle on the counter.
* Does his math.
* Gives the order to pull it up a little more.
* And a little more.
* Finally Fermi says “This is it. The reaction will now be self-sustaining.”
* He watches the needle.
* They all watch him watching the needle, doing his math, calm as a cucumber on a cold day in the Antarctic.
* Then Fermi broke into a huge smile and closed his slide rule.
* ‘The reaction is self-sustaining,’ he announced quietly, happily. ‘The curve is exponential.’
* The world’s first nuclear chain reactor operated for 28 minutes.
* At 3.53pm, the control rods were replaced.
* The counters slowed and the pen headed downwards across the paper.
* The test was over.
* The team had succeeded in initiating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction – and then stopping it.
* They had released the energy of the atom’s nucleus and controlled it.
* One of the team presented Fermi with a bottle of Chianti.
* He’d kept it hidden behind his desk the entire time.
* The U.S. was at war with Italy and it was illegal to import Italian wine.
* Fermi pulled out some paper cups and they all drank in silence.
* No toast.
* They were all aware of what they had accomplished.
* They just weren’t sure if they were the first.
* No way of telling if the Nazis hadn’t beaten them to it.
* Fermi got all of the guys to sign the straw wrapping around the bottle.
* Compton then phoned Conant at Harvard and delivered a message in the pre-arranged code.
* ‘Jim,’ said Compton. ‘The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.’
* ‘Is that so,’ said Conant. ‘How were the natives?’
* ‘Everyone landed safe and happy,’ Compton replied.
* As the crew filed out of the West Stands, one of the guards asked one of the scientists: ‘What’s going on, Doctor, something happen in there?’
* On this momentous day in scientific history, they had generated half a watt of energy.
* That would be increased 10 days later to 200 watts – enough to power two light bulbs.

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#72 – The Manhattan Project

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 21:56:56 +0000

* President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards.
* Side note: his daughter Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother.
* Which is complete bullshit BTW.
* The committee met for the first time on 21 October 1939.
* It’s function was to look into the current state of research on uranium to recommend an appropriate role for the federal government.
* On 1 November 1939, the Uranium Committee recommended that the government should immediately obtain 4 tons of graphite, which was used to slow down the neutrons coming from the fission reaction, and 50 tons of uranium oxide.
* But there was still no proof that the whole thing would work.
* Even if you could create a chain reaction, how would you fit everything you needed into something of a size that could be used as a bomb?
* Fermi himself thought that there was ‘little likelihood of an atomic bomb, little proof that we were not pursuing a chimera’.
* Keep in mind that this was before Pearl Harbour, before the U.S. was officially even at war.
* One guy who believed that America was going to end up at war was Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Foundation.
* Bush was a legendary engineer and inventor.
* Among other things, he founded the company now known as Raytheon, which developed better vacuum tubes, he developed the work that lead to the digital circuits, came up with the idea of hypertext, and was vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering.
* in June 1940 Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee with Bush at its head.
* Its priorities were the development of radar, proximity fuses and anti-submarine devices.
* The Uranium Committee fell under its remit.
* It was reconstituted as a scientific body and purged of its military membership.
* In the interest of security, foreign-born scientists were barred from the committee and further publication of articles on uranium research was banned.
*
* In 1941, Plutonium was discovered.
* They found that plutonium-239 was 1.7 times as likely as U-235 to fission.
* And they could produce large amounts of fissionable plutonium from the plentiful U-238.
* So now there were two options – U-235 and plutonium.
* Meanwhile, Bush had been appointed director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
* This had been established by an executive order on 28 June 1941 – six days after German troops invaded the Soviet Union – giving Bush direct access to the White House.
* The National Defense Research Committee, now headed by James Conant, president of Harvard University, was downgraded to an advisory body while the Uranium Committee became a section of the OSRD, codenamed S-1 – Section One of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
* It was S-1 that Truman discovered was sucking up a ton of money in 1943 and they told him he wasn’t allowed to know anything about it.
* Meanwhile, over in England, the Military Application of Uranium Detonation Committee, or MAUD, which was set up in 1940 to research atomic weapons, issued a report that said fission of U-235 could happen even with fast neutrons.
* They estimated that a critical mass of 22 pounds would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion.
* A bomb that size could be loaded on existing aircraft and be ready in around two years.
* The Americans read the report.
* It reminded them that fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany nearly three years earlier, and since spring 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had been set aside for uranium research.
* Meanwhile
* In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, who had become head of the German nuclear energy project, visited Neils Bohr in Copenhagen.
* During this meeting the two men took a private moment outside, the content of which has caused much speculation, as both gave differing accounts.
* According to Heisenberg, he began to address nuclear energy, morality and the war.
* Bohr seems to have reacted by terminating the conversation abruptly.
* Denmark was currently under Nazi occupation and his situation was kind of dicey.
* As it turned out, a couple of years later Bohr got word that he was seen as a Jew and they were coming to get him.
* He defected to the UK.
* He ended up meeting Churchill and tried to convince him that they should share the work that was being done on the bomb with the Soviets.
* Churchill wanted him arrested.
* Oppenheimer agreed with Bohr and they tried to convince FDR.
* FDR sent Bohr back to have another discussion with Churchill and get his agreement.
* Of course, as we know, that never happened.
* Anyway….
* Bush went to see Roosevelt on 9 October.
* He summarized the British findings and discussed the cost of building a bomb and how long it might take, though he was still by no means convinced it could be done.
* Roosevelt gave his permission for Bush to discuss the construction of a bomb with the Army.
* He was to move ahead as quickly as possible, but not to go beyond research and development without presidential authorization.
* Roosevelt indicated that he would find a way to finance the project if it proved feasible and he asked Bush to draft a letter to the British government, enlisting their co-operation.
* Arthur Compton of the University of Chicago, who headed the committee looking into uranium research, reported back on 6 November, just one month and a day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought the United States into World War II, with Germany and Italy declaring war on the US on 10 December.
* Compton’s committee concluded that a critical mass of between 4 1/2 and 220 pounds of U-235 would produce a powerful fission bomb.
* The cost of isotope separation alone would be $50–100 million.
* $100 million in 1941 is roughly $1.7 billion today.
* Bush forwarded their findings to Roosevelt under a cover letter on 27 November.
* Roosevelt did not reply until 19 January 1942.
* When he did, it was as commander in chief of a nation at war.
* He gave the project the green light.
* Under instructions from Roosevelt, the responsibility for all work concerning uranium was taken from the National Defense Research Committee and given to the newly constituted Top Policy Group, which comprised Bush, Conant, Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.
* The U.S. was now at war and money wasn’t a problem.
* The race was on to beat the Nazis to build the world’s first nuclear weapon.
* Clearly the question of security was a high priority, so it was suggested that the S-1 project should be put under the control of one of the armed forces.
* It was decided that the army, with its Corps of Engineers, was most suitable.
* Roosevelt had approved army involvement on 9 October 1941, and army officers joined S-1 meetings in March 1942.
* Previously the research had been happening all over the country at different universities.
* In April 1942, Compton began to centralize everything in Chicago.
* He took space wherever he could find it.
* In a racket court under the west grandstand at an old football stadium Stagg Field, which was by then no longer, they started to build Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor.
* Colonel James C. Marshall, a West Point graduate with experience of building air bases, was put in charge of the new Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Metals, or DSM.
* In New York City, Marshall set up the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED.
* But Marshall didn’t understand the urgency or the objective.
* First, he dragged his feet with purchasing a test site in Tennessee that the scientists needed.
* Then In June 1942, he had a discussion with Norman Hilberry, Compton’s top assistant.
* He had heard that they were planning on only building one or two bombs.
* Hilberry confirmed it.
* He said that’s all that would be needed to win the war.
* And the materials to even build one or two were scarce.
* ‘That’s all wrong,’ said Marshall.
* ‘There is a fundamental principle in military matters which – and I don’t care how fantastic this atomic device may prove to be – is not going to be violated. This is one’s ability to continue delivering the weapon, and it’s this that determines whether the weapon is useful. If you folks succeeded in making only one bomb, I can assure you it would never be used. The only basic principle on which the military can operate is the ability to continue to deliver. You’ve got to sit down and get re-orientated. The thing we’re talking about is not a number of bombs; what we are talking about is production capacity to continue delivering bombs at given rate. That, you will discover, is a very different problem.’
* When the news got back to the scientists, Szilard was beside himself.
* ‘In 1939,’ he wrote in a memo to Bush, ‘the government of the United States was given a unique opportunity by providence; this opportunity was lost. Nobody can tell now whether we shall be ready before German bombs wipe out American cities. Such scanty information as we have about work in Germany is not reassuring and all one can say with certainty is that we could move at least twice as fast if our difficulties were eliminated.’
* He wanted to get rid of the Army’s involvement, which was slowing things down.

* So Marshall was given the boot.
* On 17 September 1942, the army appointed Colonel Leslie R. Groves.
* He was promoted to brigadier general six days later.
* Groves was an engineer with impressive credentials, including the building of the Pentagon, and, most importantly, had strong administrative abilities.
* Within two days of his appointment Groves acted to obtain the Tennessee site and secured a higher priority rating for project materials.
* In addition, he moved the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters from New York to Washington to gain better access to other federal agencies.
* He quickly recognized the talents of Marshall’s deputy, Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, and arranged for Nichols to work as his chief aide and trouble-shooter throughout the war.
* Nichols said that Groves was ‘the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision. He abounds with energy and expects everyone to work as hard, or even harder, than he does . . . if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss, I would pick General Groves.’
* But later, after the war, The Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, met with Groves on 30 January 1948 to evaluate his performance.
* Eisenhower recounted a long list of complaints about Groves pertaining to his rudeness, arrogance, insensitivity, contempt for the rules and maneuvering for promotion out of turn.
* Eisenhower made it clear that Groves would never become Chief of Engineers.
* So Groves retired from the army and joined Sperry Rand, a major military contractor, not to be confused with the RAND Corporation.
* Sperry Rand is best known for inventing the UNIVAC computer.
* On 5 October 1942, Groves paid his first visit to the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago to meet Compton, Fermi, Szilard, Hilberry and other top scientists working there.
* At the end of the meeting, he asked them, with respect to their estimates about how much fissionable material they were going to need for each bomb, how confident were they in their estimates?
* He said he expected them to say “oh 50%” or “75%”.
* Instead they said “a factor of 10”.
* Which meant that if they said they needed 100 pounds of plutonium to make a bomb, it could really be anywhere from 10 pounds to 1000 pounds.
* ‘Groves said it was like being a caterer who is told he must be prepared to serve anywhere between 10 and 1000 guests.’
* How can you plan around something like that?
* In early December they finally got experimental proof that plutonium could be created from U-238.
* So they pushed ahead with the research.
* Meanwhile, Robert Oppenheimer headed the work of a group of theoretical physicists he called ‘the luminaries’.
* Oppenheimer is an interesting character.
* He was born to a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had a massive collection of paintings, including some Picassos and Van Goghs.
* Robert did a lot of early work on astrophysics and quantum field theory and nuclear physics.
* He also claimed to be a communist.
* When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he [Oppenheimer] had been “a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast”.
* He was also on the board of the ACLU.
* In 1941, the FBI opened a file on him and had him listed as a CDI – the Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency.
* Something our mate Victor Santochi knows all about.
* He told me in LA that his father was also on the list.
* During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was being closely watched by both the FBI and the project’s internal security arm.
* They considered getting rid of him, but Groves insisted he was too important.
* Anyway, the consensus of his luminaries was some bad news.
* They now thought it was going to take TWICE as much fissionable material as they had previously thought to make a bomb.
* Which again confirmed that mass production of atomic bombs was, at least in the early stages, out of the question.
* But there was also some good news.
* Oppenheimer and his team were confident that it might be theoretically possible to use FUSION instead of fission to make nuclear bombs.

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#71 – The World Set Free

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:36:13 +0000

* In 1913, H. G. Wells wrote a book called The World Set Free
* The novel begins: “The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. . . . Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.”
* In the book, the human race develops an atomic bomb.
* This was written in 1913.
* A few years earlier, Frederick Soddy had published a book about the properties of radium which Wells had read.
* Soddy and others, including Rutherford, had the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge.
* Wells wondered what would happen if you could get all of that energy to release at once?
* He got a lot of the details wrong – but plutonium, the fissile material used in the first atomic explosions, wasn’t actually discovered until 1941.
* Wells’s “atomic bombs” have no more force than ordinary high explosive and are rather primitive devices detonated by a “bomb-thrower” biting off “a little celluloid stud.”
* He also said that ‘A man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city’.
* I don’t know about a handbag, but suitcase bombs certainly are a thing.
* In the 1960s the U.S. built a mini nuclear device– the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM).
* It weighed 80-100 pounds, was small enough to fit in a duffel bag or large case and was designed for sabotage missions– airfields, bridges, dams.
* It had an explosive charge of roughly one thousand tons of TNT (one kiloton).
* The Russians also developed a suitcase bomb.
* The highest ranking GRU defector, Stanislav Lunev, has said that suitcase nukes might be already deployed by the GRU operatives on US soil to assassinate US leaders in the event of war.
* He claimed that arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries.
* They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices or Molniya as its known in Russian.
* Just like Mad Max’s Interceptor, a sequence of specific actions had to be taken in the correct order to render the device safe prior to moving or opening the container, or the device would automatically detonate.
* This detonation was designed to be lethal to anyone in its immediate proximity, as well as being sufficient to destroy all materials in the cache.
* In 1992, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK, and brought with him 30 years of handwritten archives.
* He indentified the location of one hidden suitcase radio transmitter, not a bomb, which exploded when Swiss authorities sprayed it with a high pressure water cannon in a wooded area near Bern.
* Several others caches were removed successfully.
* The lightest nuclear warhead ever acknowledged to have been manufactured by the U.S. is the W54, which fit into 11 in by 16 in (28 cm by 41 cm, small enough to fit in a footlocker-sized container) cylinder that weighed 51 lbs (23 kg).
* Anyway, back to Wells’ book.
* His bombs ‘made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer’.
* They produced ‘tremendous pillars of fire . . . Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds.’
* They destroyed buildings like a scythe cutting down grass, while mountainous clouds billowed up into the air.
* The book was published in 1914, just as World War I was starting.
* In 1932, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, a Wells fan, read the book.
* The following year, he realized that you could indeed make an atomic bomb.
*
* In the first memorandum passed to President Roosevelt, outlining the possibility of making a bomb, Szilard’s first citation is to The World Set Free.
*
* For the next few episodes, we want to tell the story about how that happened.
* In the book, Wells’s atomic bombs were used in a war that pits an alliance of Britain, France and America against Germany and Austria.
* The war takes place in 1956.
* As a result, all the major cities of the world are destroyed.
* A conference is then called in Switzerland where the Britain’s ‘King Egbert’ abdicates in favour of a world state.
* Limitless atomic energy then solves the world’s problems, leaving the majority of the world’s population to pursue a career as artists.
* Wells died in August 1946, a year after the atomic bomb had been used for the first time and ten months after the United Nations had been established, so he may have felt justified in his optimism.
* Of course, it didn’t play out exactly as he prophesized.
* Out story begins early 20th century.
* With New Zealand chemist Ernest Rutherford.
* Who said nothing good ever came out of that bunch of sheep fuckers?
* Rutho was Interested in radiation being given off by certain materials.
* It came in three types: alpha, beta and gamma.
* It was alpha radiation that particularly interested him because it comprised particles of the tangible mass.
* These had a positive charge and, in 1907, he proved they were helium ions – that is, atoms of helium stripped of their electrons.
* At the time, atoms were thought to be solid objects with lightweight electrons embedded in a mass of positively charged material, like raisins in a pudding.
* This was known as the ‘plum pudding’ model.
* He began firing alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold.
* These energetic particles should have passed straight through.
* However, some bounced back.
* Rutho said ‘It was almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.’
* This meant that the atom could not be a uniform solid.
* He concluded It must be largely empty space with most of its mass concentrated in a tiny central nucleus.
* It was a mini-solar system.
* This was in 1911.
* Rutherford is therefore known as the father of nuclear physics.
* A couple of years later, Neils Bohr, a Danish physicist, realised that the chemical properties of an atom are caused by the electron that orbit the nucleus.
* But the radiation came from the nucleus itself.
* In 1919, Rutherford discovered that if you shot alpha particles at nitrogen atoms, you could turn them into oxygen atoms.
* This was the first time one element had been deliberately changed into another.
* He was therefore also the world’s first successful alchemist.
* The process also gave off another particle.
* He realised these were the nuclei of hydrogen atoms.
* Which were later called protons.
* By 1932, the British physicist James Chadwick discovered other particles that had no charge.
* He called them Neutrons.
* For which he received the 1935 Nobel Prize for Physics
* And the atomic model was complete.
* Also in 1932, two of Rutherford’s students, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, were the first to split the atom.
* And in the same year, the first cyclotron was built at Berkley in California, to produce high energy beams needed for further nuclear research.
* It was discovered that when you bombarded a nucleus with a proton, a small amount of matter was converted in energy.
* This was explained by Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2.
* where E is the energy, m is the mass and c is the speed of light, around 300,000 kilometres a second, or some 670 million an hour. So c2 is a very large number indeed.
* But in 1932 Rutherford, Bohr and Einstein didn’t think there was any potential in the near future to capture this energy reaction for any practical purpose.
* In a speech in 1933 – the year Hitler came to power in Germany – Rutherford called such expectations ‘moonshine’.
* Einstein compared particle bombardment with shooting in the dark at scarce birds.
* Because the chances of hitting a nucleus during the bombardment process was about one in a million.
* Bohr agreed that the chances of taming atomic energy were remote.
* All three Noble Laureates were about to be proven wrong.
* The next year, 1934, Enrico Fermi was working at Mussolini’s Accademia d’Italia in Rome.
* He tried using neutrons instead of protons to bombard the nucleus, figuring that it’s neutral charge meant it had a better chance of not being rejected by the positive charge of the nucleus.
* He also figured out a way to slow the neutrons down during the bombardment, which meant they spent more time near the nucleus and had a better chance of intercepting it.
* One element Fermi tried bombarding was uranium, the heaviest of the elements.
* He was successful, but didn’t realise exactly what he’d done.
* The answer came out of Nazi Germany in late 1938.
*
* By then Fermi had left Italy which was becoming anti-Semitic.
* He had won the 1938 Noble Prize for his work on fission and used the prize money to establish himself in New York.
* At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, run by Werner Heisenberg, radio-chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were bombarding elements with neutrons when they made an unexpected discovery.
* They found that the new elements produced when they bombarded uranium with neutrons were barium and lathanum, but there was a significant mass gap between the original uranium and the resulting elements.
* Which meant a LOT of energy must have been released.
* Two Germans physicists, Lise Meitner, a Jewish colleague who had fled to Sweden that summer, the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany, and her nephew, Otto Frisch, realised that some new kind of process was happening.
* They called it “fission”.
* BTW, Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission
* Lise was ignored because she was a woman.
*
* It was also realised that during the uranium breakdown, two neutrons were released.
* If these neutrons could be used to break apart other uranium nuclei, then a chain reaction could be created, releasing a LOT MORE energy.
* But as we saw earlier, Leo Szilard had already come up with the idea of an atomic bomb.
* It turns out he was a huge fan of H G Wells.
* In 1929 he’d travelled to London to meet Wells to buy the rights to one of his books.
* In 1932 he read The World Set Free and in 1933, by now a Jewish fugee from Nazi Germany living in London, he heard Rutherford’s “moonshine” speech, and had the idea that a chain reaction could be created and therefore create an atomic bomb.
* Szilard patented the idea of an atomic bomb.
* Now there’s a way to make some cold hard cash.
* But he feared it would end up in the hands of the Nazis, so he transferred the rights over to the British Admiralty.
* Doh! There goes that cash.
* Then he moved to New York to work with Fermi.
* Meitner and Frisch communicated their findings to Neils Bohr in January 1939, just as he and Fermi were to give a speech at a conference on Theoretical Physics in New York.
* They then presented the idea to the American physicists.
* In March 1940, scientists working at Columbia University discovered that uranium-235 was the best material for fissioning with slow neutrons, not uranium-238 that everyone else was working with.
* The problem was, uranium-235 made up on 1/140th of uranium found in nature.
* You had to first separate the 235 from a pile of 238.
* And you needed a LOT of 238 to get enough 235 to create a critical mass.
* But it was stll doubtful that the chain reaction would work.
* And there wasn’t enough 235 available to put it to the test.
* So they needed to get more 235.
* And to get more 235, they needed a shit ton of 238.
* And that was going to cost money.
* LOTS of money.
* Government money.
* But how were they going to get the attention of the government which was trying to pull the country out of the Great Depression and was also worrying about the big war that was happening in Europe?
* How about getting the most famous scientist in the world to get their attention?
* On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter to FDR.
* It said:
*
* Sir:
* Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations.
* In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America that it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
* This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove too heavy for transportation by air.
* The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is in the Belgian Congo.
* In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust the task with a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:
* a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.
* b) to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of university laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining co-operation of industrial laboratories which have necessary equipment.
* I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsacker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
* Yours very truly,
* Albert Einstein
* The letter was to be delivered by Alexander Sachs, a Wall Street economist, who sat on the board of Lehman Brothers, and was an unofficial advisor to the president, along with a memorandum prepared by Leo Szilard.
* Although he was a longtime friend, even Sachs had trouble getting in to see Roosevelt, who was busy dealing with the situation in Europe.
* On 23 August, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact.
* European armies began to mobilize and on 1 September Hitler invaded Poland, precipitating World War II.
* It was not until 11 October that Sachs got in to see the president.
* Sachs had read Einstein’s letter and Szilard’s memorandum, and explained that recent research on chain reactions utilizing uranium made it probable that large amounts of power could be produced – enough to make extremely powerful bombs.
* The German government was actively supporting research in this area and it would sensible if the US government did the same.
* But FDR didn’t give a shit.
* He said it wasn’t something he thought the government should get involved in.
* Sachs went back to his hotel in shock.
* He spent the rest of the day meditating on a park bench.
* Then he had an idea.
* The next morning he went back to the White House and interrupted FDR at breakfast.
* FDR said “What bright idea have you got now? How much time would you like to explain it?”
* Sachs says he replied that he would not take long.
* “All I want to do is to tell you a story. During the Napoleonic wars a young American inventor came to the French Emperor and offered to build a fleet of steamships with the help of which Napoleon could, in spite of the uncertain weather, land in England. Ships without sails? This seemed to the great Corsican so impossible that he sent [Robert] Fulton away. In the opinion of the English historian Lord Acton, this is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary. Had Napoleon shown more imagination and humility at that time, the history of the nineteenth century would have taken a very different course.”
* After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several minutes.
* Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the servant who had been waiting at table.
* The latter soon returned with a parcel which, at Roosevelt’s order, he began slowly to unwrap.
* It contained a bottle of old French brandy of Napoleon’s time, which the Roosevelt family had possessed for many years.
* The President, still maintaining a significant silence, told the man to fill two glasses.
* Then he raised his own, nodded to Sachs and drank to him.
* Next he remarked: “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up?”
* “Precisely.”
* It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attaché, [Brigadier] General [Edwin] “Pa” Watson, and addressed him—pointing to the documents Sachs had brought—in words which have since become famous:
* “Pa, this requires action!”
* Roosevelt wrote back to Einstein on 19 October 1939, telling him that he had set up a committee consisting of Sachs and representatives from the Army and Navy to study the use of uranium.
* He believed that the US could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to achieve unilateral possession of an atomic bomb.

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#70 – No Military Justification

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:26:32 +0000

* The Potsdam declaration on Japan was tricky.
* It was drafted while Churchill was still PM.
* In fact it was probably one of the last things he did as PM.
* But it was signed by Attlee.
* Stalin had to be involved, but he couldn’t sign it because the U.S.S.R. was still technically under a non-agression treaty with Japan.
* Truman also wanted Chiang KaiShek to sign it.
* Which meant it needed they needed to get it translated and sent to him at his remote headquarters nears ChongKing in central China.
* The final text gave Japan “an opportunity to end this war” before the “prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan . . . until she ceases to resist.”
* It also advised the Japanese of what befell the Germans when they fought to the end.
* It warned that “the might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.”
* But of course it’s worth keeping in mind that many in the Japanese military prided themselves on their particular militaristic interpretation of the Bushido code.
* The classic book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, written in 1899, portrays Bushido – which he says translates as Military-Knight-Ways – as being very similar to the code of chivalry supposedly adopted by the European knights in the Middle Ages.
* He portrays it as relatively pacifistic.
* It’s about courage and honour, sincerity, frugality, loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and honour to the death, but stresses morality as well.
* It was the code of the samurai.
* Here’s some crazy numbers.
* By the end of the 19th century, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the Japanese population were samurai.
* The census at the end of the 19th century counted 1,282,000 members of the “high samurai”, allowed to ride a horse, and 492,000 members of the “low samurai”, allowed to wear two swords but not to ride a horse, in a country of about 25 million.
* Under the bushidō ideal, if a samurai failed to uphold his honor he could only regain it by performing seppuku (ritual suicide).
* In an excerpt from his book Samurai: The World of the Warrior, historian Stephen Turnbull describes the role of seppuku in feudal Japan:
* In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded.
* It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced.
* The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.
* Unfortunately bushido was hijacked and adapted by militarists and the government from the early 1900s onward as nationalism increased around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.
* And by WWII, it had reached epic proportions.
* I don’t know how much western strategists understood bushido in 1945, but they were certainly aware of kamikaze pilots.
* Kamikaze translates as “divine wind” or “spirit wind”
* The Kamikaze were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who initiated suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional air attacks.
* About 3,862 kamikaze pilots died during the war, and somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 naval personnel were killed by kamikaze attacks.
* The idea for kamikaze came very late in the war.
* It’s not something you do when things are going well.
* Has a tendency to deplete your airforce pretty fucking quickly.
* But by late 1944, the Japanese airforce was already running out of experienced pilots and their planes were outclassed by the new American planes.
* Captain Motoharu Okamura, in charge of the Tateyama Base in Tokyo, as well as the 341st Air Group Home, was, according to some sources, the first officer to officially propose kamikaze attack tactics.
* The first successful attacks happened on 14 October or 15 Oct 1944.
* Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima, the commander of the 26th Air Flotilla (part of the 11th Air Fleet), is sometimes credited with inventing the kamikaze tactic.
* Arima personally led an attack by about 100 Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Judy”) dive bombers against a large Essex-class aircraft carrier, USS Franklin, near Leyte Gulf, on (or about, accounts vary) 15 October 1944.
* Arima was killed and part of a plane hit Franklin.
* The Japanese high command and propagandists seized on Arima’s example: He was promoted posthumously to Vice Admiral and was given official credit for making the first kamikaze attack.
* It is not clear that this was a planned suicide attack, and official Japanese accounts of Arima’s attack bore little resemblance to the actual events.
* Maybe they just jumped on an accidental collision and said “oh yeah he meant that”.
* Although other sources say it was an Aussie ship that was the first attack.
* Early on 21 October, a Japanese aircraft, deliberately crashed into the foremast of the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia.
* The attack killed 30 personnel, including the cruiser’s captain, Emile Dechaineux, and wounded 64, including the Australian force commander, Commodore John Collins.
* The Australian official history of the war claimed that this was the first kamikaze attack on an Allied ship, although other sources disagree because it was not a planned attack by a member of the Special Attack Force, but was most likely to have been undertaken on the pilot’s own initiative.
* over the next few months over 2,000 planes made such attacks.
* It was claimed by the Japanese forces at the time that there were many volunteers for the suicidal forces.
* Captain Motoharu Okamura commented that “there were so many volunteers for suicide missions that he referred to them as a swarm of bees,” explaining: “Bees die after they have stung.”
* A kamikaze pilots’ manual said: When you eliminate all thoughts about life and death, you will be able to totally disregard your earthly life. This will also enable you to concentrate your attention on eradicating the enemy with unwavering determination, meanwhile reinforcing your excellence in flight skills.
* Anyway – so that was one consideration when thinking about ending the war with Japan.
* Would the military be happy to die with honour rather than surrender?
* But for all its harshness, the Potsdam declaration followed the advice of the moderates.
* It did not mention the emperor, either by name or by reference to the institution he represented.
* The words “unconditional surrender” appeared only once, in the final paragraph, and then specified only the unconditional surrender of the armed forces, not the Japanese nation.
* The alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”
* The fate of Emperor Hirohito was left ambiguous.
* He was not mentioned.
* This was, of course, a problem for the Japanese.
* They considered the Emperor to be divine. called the “Son of Heaven”
* In State Shinto, the Emperor was believed to be a Arahitogami (a living god).
* In Japanese mythology, according to Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the Emperor and his family are said to be direct descendants of the sun-goddess Amaterasu.
* The significance of the Emperor in Japanese society was no secret to American leaders: The Japanese regarded the Emperor as a deity, a god—more like Jesus or the incarnate Buddha than an ordinary human being.
* Until the surrender occurred, the Japanese people at large had never been allowed to hear the Emperor’s voice; many were moved to tears when, on the radio, they first listened to their deity speaking directly to them.
* In 1937, fearful that traditional values of loyalty and devotion might be displaced by Western immorality, the Thought Bureau of the Ministry of Education issued a document titled “Cardinal Principles of the National Polity” which defined and celebrated a “national character that is cloudless, pure, and honest.”
* The “Cardinal Principles” emphasized that “our country is a divine country governed by an Emperor who is a deity incarnate.”
* They needed confirmation that he wouldn’t he arrested or harmed in any way.
* The idea of their divine emperor being put up on war crimes charges was inconceivable.
* Fun fact: Currently, the Emperor of Japan is the only head of state in the world with the English title of “Emperor”.
* The standing U.S. demand for “unconditional surrender” directly threatened not only the person of the Emperor but such central tenets of Japanese culture as well.
* Because of the Emperor’s unique political and religious status, U.S. leaders were repeatedly advised that a surrender would likely be accepted only if the Japanese people were assured the Emperor-God would neither be removed from his throne nor harmed (or tried and possibly hanged as a war criminal, as German leaders were about to be tried).
* A report by the Joint Intelligence Committee observed in March 1944—sixteen months before Hiroshima—that the
* course of conduct of Japanese armed forces deployed in the areas under consideration, to a large extent, will depend upon the Japanese political situation as of the time that our peace terms are enforced. The crux of the political situation will lie in the all-important status of the Japanese Emperor.
* Another report put together for MacArthur in 1944 said:
* Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us.
* So the fact that the declaration was vague on this point was always going to be a major sticking point for the Japanese.
* Nor was there any explanation of what form the “prompt and utter destruction” might take.
* It pledged that Japan would retain sovereignty over the home islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku.
* It further promised the Japanese people “the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives” and explicitly stated, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation,” although Japanese militarists and war criminals would surely face prosecution.
* Thus the Potsdam Declaration, while threatening the “prompt and utter destruction” of Japan if it did not surrender, offered something to the Japanese if they did surrender.
* It even indirectly left open the possibility of the emperor staying on the throne.
* The Japanese, not knowing about the atomic bombs and seeing the declaration as a political ultimatum, rejected it.
* The prime minister said, “There is no recourse but to ignore [the declaration] entirely.”
* He famously used the word Mokusatsu (黙殺) is a Japanese noun literally meaning “kill” with “silence”, and is used with a verb marker idiomatically to mean “ignore”, “take no notice of” or “treat with silent contempt”.
* But – Stewart Chase in his ”Power of Words” said the Japanese responded with the word ”mokusatsu,” which was intended to mean in context that they were reserving comment.
* The Allied Powers were mistakenly informed by inaccurate translators that ”mokusatsu” meant that the Japanese were ignoring it.
* Truman then authorized the bomb’s use, but not until he had departed Potsdam and his ship had sailed for the United States.
* Truman wanted to be literally at sea, and unavailable to the Russians, when the bomb did its work and a new era in human history opened.
* But as we’ve seen – there were other considerations involved in using the bomb, other than the war with Japan.
* There’s a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.”
* According to historian J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, writing in 1990:
* Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why the Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
* This wasn’t his personal opinion.
* He was offering a summary of the most recent expert research on the Hiroshima decision in the respected scholarly journal Diplomatic History.
* And yet – Throughout the 70 years that has passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.
* It’s just not historically accurate.
* It’s PR spin that Americans have been subjected to.
* And the fact is that the majority of U.S. military and political leaders in August 1945 also believed that bombing Japan wasn’t necesary to end the war.
* Let me read you some quotes from some of them.
* DWIGHT EISENHOWER
* “…in [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
* “During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”
* – Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
*
* ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
* (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)
* “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
* “The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
* – William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
*
* HERBERT HOOVER
* On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly: “I am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan – tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists – you’ll get a peace in Japan – you’ll have both wars over.”
* Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 347.
* On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O’Laughlin, “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
* quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
* “…the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945…up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; …if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs.”
* – quoted by Barton Bernstein in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian, pg. 142
* Hoover biographer Richard Norton Smith has written: “Use of the bomb had besmirched America’s reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out into the sky over Japan.”
* Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 349-350.
* In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover recorded in his diary, “I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.”
* Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351.
*
* GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
* MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur’s reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: “…the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.”
* William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.
* Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.” He continues, “When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
* Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
*
* JOSEPH GREW
* (Under Sec. of State)
* In a February 12, 1947 letter to Henry Stimson (Sec. of War during WWII), Grew responded to the defense of the atomic bombings Stimson had made in a February 1947 Harpers magazine article:
* “…in the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the [retention of the] dynasty had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the [Japanese] Government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clearcut decision.
* “If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.”
* Grew quoted in Barton Bernstein, ed.,The Atomic Bomb, pg. 29-32.
*
* JOHN McCLOY
* (Assistant Sec. of War)
* “I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs.”
* McCloy quoted in James Reston, Deadline, pg. 500.
*
* RALPH BARD
* (Under Sec. of the Navy)
* On June 28, 1945, a memorandum written by Bard the previous day was given to Sec. of War Henry Stimson. It stated, in part:
* “Following the three-power [July 1945 Potsdam] conference emissaries from this country could contact representatives from Japan somewhere on the China Coast and make representations with regard to Russia’s position [they were about to declare war on Japan] and at the same time give them some information regarding the proposed use of atomic power, together with whatever assurances the President might care to make with regard to the [retention of the] Emperor of Japan and the treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which the Japanese are looking for.
* “I don’t see that we have anything in particular to lose in following such a program.” He concluded the memorandum by noting, “The only way to find out is to try it out.”
* Memorandum on the Use of S-1 Bomb, Manhattan Engineer District Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 77, National Archives (also contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 307-308).
* Later Bard related, “…it definitely seemed to me that the Japanese were becoming weaker and weaker. They were surrounded by the Navy. They couldn’t get any imports and they couldn’t export anything. Naturally, as time went on and the war developed in our favor it was quite logical to hope and expect that with the proper kind of a warning the Japanese would then be in a position to make peace, which would have made it unnecessary for us to drop the bomb and have had to bring Russia in…”.
* quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the Bomb, pg. 144-145, 324.
* Bard also asserted, “I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted.” He continued, “In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn’t have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb.”
* War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb, U.S. News and World Report, 8/15/60, pg. 73-75.
*
* LEWIS STRAUSS
* (Special Assistant to the Sec. of the Navy)
* Strauss recalled a recommendation he gave to Sec. of the Navy James Forrestal before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima:
* “I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation…”
* Strauss added, “It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world…”.
* quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the Bomb, pg. 145, 325.
*
* PAUL NITZE
* (Vice Chairman, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)
* In 1950 Nitze would recommend a massive military buildup, and in the 1980s he was an arms control negotiator in the Reagan administration.
* In July of 1945 he was assigned the task of writing a strategy for the air attack on Japan.
* Nitze later wrote:
* “While I was working on the new plan of air attack… [I] concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945.”
* Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 36-37 (my emphasis)
* The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that was primarily written by Nitze and reflected his reasoning:
* “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
* quoted in Barton Bernstein, The Atomic Bomb, pg. 52-56.
* In his memoir, written in 1989, Nitze repeated,
* “Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands [scheduled for November 1, 1945] would have been necessary.”
* Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 44-45.

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#69 – The Atomic Bomb

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 08:23:00 +0000

* Episode 69.
* Ray’s favourite number.
* Have you actually had one yet, Ray?
* Sister in law?
* Truman had given his final approval to the plan to invade Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan, just two weeks before leaving for Potsdam.
* A Russian invasion of Manchuria and Korea figured prominently in the grand strategy that underlay that plan.
* Second, even an invasion of the home islands did little to solve the problem of the estimated 1.8 million Japanese soldiers in mainland China.
* But the Soviets could handle that problem as well.
* In return, of course, for the new territories they wanted as a result.
* Which were mostly old Russian territories lost during the Russo-Japanese war as we discussed in earlier episodes.
* Getting Stalin into the Pacific War was Truman’s number one goal in Potsdam.
* The Japanese knew of course that this was coming and had been trying to negotiate a way to keep their Neutrality pact in place with the Soviets.
* They had offered the Soviets pretty much everything they wanted – southern Sakhalin Island, Port Arthur, and half of Manchuria in exchange for help in keeping the rest of Japan’s conquests in Asia.
* The Russians had informed the Allies about these offers and their rebuttals of them.
* But still the Americans didn’t trust the Soviets and thought they might cut a deal.
* Of course, Truman need not have worried about Russian desires to join the war against Japan.
* Stalin wanted Russia involved in the war as much as Truman did.
* On June 28, 1945, even before he set out for Potsdam, Stalin told his commanders to begin preparations for a war with Japan “in the greatest secrecy.”
* As later reported, “army commanders [were] to be given their orders in person and orally and without any written directives.”
* Almost without debate, Stalin told Truman early on at Potsdam that Russian forces would invade Manchuria no later than mid-August.
* Truman was as happy as a capitalist pig in shit.
* How to end the war with Japan remained a question of intense debate.
* The Allies had insisted on unconditional surrender for Germany, but several strategists argued that the same insistence for Japan might well prove counterproductive.
* The geography of Japan complicated any attempts at invasion and military dominance.
* Culturally, the Japanese people had an attachment to the emperor that argued against an insistence on his removal.
* If the Americans, whose forces would have to bear the brunt of an invasion of the home islands, insisted on dethroning the quasi-divine emperor, it might force the Japanese to fight on for an abstract goal that had little real strategic or political importance.
* The Americans should, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and others argued, allow Japan to keep its emperor in exchange for ending the war.
* Most senior US military officials agreed, noting that only the emperor could sign or endorse a capitulation that the Japanese people would respect.
* Removing him by force might create anarchy and an untenable situation for occupying forces.
* British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin drew a direct lesson from World War I, arguing that “it might have been better for all of us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaiser after the last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn’t done so.”
* Thus, he argued, the Allies should remain flexible about the emperor’s future.
* Other officials recalled with bitterness Pearl Harbor and insisted that Japan must surrender unconditionally.
* The still-influential former secretary of state Cordell Hull publicly blasted any concessions to the Japanese as “appeasement.”
* His word choice mattered deeply, as it carried the historical implication of both American weakness and the beginning of another round of conflict.
* He, Byrnes, and most State Department officials opposed allowing the emperor to remain under any circumstances.
* They were willing to risk further casualties in order to destroy the Japanese political system and open the way for a full American occupation of Japan after the war.
* By the time of Potsdam, Truman’s senior advisers had begun to back off the idea of unconditional surrender.
* A New York Times editorial on May 11 called unconditional surrender “a senseless policy” that would cause the Japanese people to fight harder and cost lives unnecessarily.
* Truman’s own briefing book argued for stripping the emperor of his powers, but not for abolishing the institution, removing the emperor from Japan, or placing him on trial for war crimes.
* The Japanese people, the briefers argued, would never accept abolition of the institution of the emperor by a foreign power.
* Better, it argued, to try to use the emperor in helping Japan make the transition from war to peace.
* Stalin, too, favored unconditional surrender with some room for flexibility, as he told Hopkins in Moscow in May.
* An unconditional surrender offered the way to “destroy Japanese military might and [the] forces of Japan once and for all.”
* Stalin recognized, however, that Japan would likely fight harder, as the Germans had, if the Allies remained inflexible on peace terms.
* Hopkins told Truman that in Stalin’s view, “if we stick to unconditional surrender, the Japs will not give up and we will have to destroy them as we destroyed Germany.”
* THE DEBATE ON SURRENDER changed in an instant as a result of an explosion thousands of miles away from both Japan and Germany.
* Roosevelt’s $2 billion gamble had paid off.
* On July 18 at 7:30 a.m., Truman received a message at Potsdam marked “TOP SECRET URGENT.”
* It read: “Operated this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations. Dr. Groves pleased.”
* The next day another message arrived that read, “Doctor Groves has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernable from here to Highhold and I could hear his screams from here to my farm.”
* The “doctor,” Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, headed the Manhattan Project.
* The rather transparently worded memos that Secretary of War Henry Stimson handed to the president confirmed that the expensive gamble Truman had uncovered as a senator had now paid off.
* The prearranged code indicated that the blast could be seen 250 miles away from Alamogordo.
* This was when Churchill was still PM.
* Churchill reacted to the atomic bomb almost as if it were a wonder weapon descended from the gods to solve all of Britain’s strategic problems.
* He walked around Potsdam that day, according to one diplomat, like a little boy who had hidden something precious under his coat.
* Churchill hoped that the bomb might compensate Britain for its debts and its massive global obligations.
* It might also rescue Britain from its decline from great-power status.
* Truman and Churchill met on July 24 at Potsdam with their military advisers, and Truman probably decided at that meeting to use the bomb as soon as practicable.
* It offered a way to get an unconditional surrender from the Japanese without an invasion of the home islands that might cost hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives.
* It also offered a way to end the air raids over Japanese cities that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, most of them in firestorms caused by the incendiary bombs of the US Air Force.
* A sense of vengeance clearly played a role as well.
* American Journalist Walter Brown overheard Churchill tell Truman that the United States should use the weapon without prior warning because the Japanese “did not give any warning when they bombed Pearl Harbor and killed and mangled your boys.”
* A week after getting the first of the Groves messages, the magnitude of it all seemed to have hit Truman.
* On July 25, he confided to his diary, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark. . . . It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”
* But defeating Japan wasn’t the only thing the Allies thought the bomb would do for them.
* Some of them also thought it would give them new leverage against the Soviet Union – their allies.
* After a meeting with Churchill on July 23, Field Marshal Alan Brooke wrote that he felt “completely shattered by the P.M.’s outlook” that the atomic bomb gave the West new leverage over Russia.
* Churchill had announced at the meeting that “we now had something in our hands that could redress the balance with the Russians” and “completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium to Britain’s favor.”
* Churchill raved: ‘Now we can say if you insist on doing this or that we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Sebastopol, etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!!’ I tried to curb his over optimism. . . . I was trying to dispel his dreams and, as usual, he did not like it. But I shudder to feel that he is allowing the half-baked results of one experiment to warp the whole of his diplomatic perspective.”
* Others weren’t so sure that the bomb was going to be a good thing.
* Brooke knew from the moment he heard of the Manhattan Project that it would change the nature of military strategy forever.
* A state simply could not use atomic weapons in the manner it used conventional weapons.
* Once the Russians inevitably built their own nuclear weapons, moreover, they could respond in kind.
* He saw more quickly than most that after the war with Japan, atomic weapons could only serve as weapons of deterrence.
* They would not solve any of Britain’s long-term strategic problems.
* Henry Stimson saw the same problem that Brooke saw.
* If the Allies used the bomb as Churchill briefly envisioned, they would be committing mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
* Stimson told Truman that he did not want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” although he did support using the weapon to end the war with Japan.
* Clement Attlee largely agreed.
* Although not enthusiastic about the bomb, Attlee understood that with Japanese forces deployed all across Asia, the Allies had to find a military approach that would compel the government in Tokyo to order them all to surrender.
* Only the atomic bomb held out that possibility.
* Admiral Leahy, who had doubted the bomb’s utility all along, agreed, and worried that once the United States used atomic weapons, it would adopt “an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
* General Ismay, too, expressed his apprehension, writing that he “had always had a sneaking hope that the scientists would be unable to find a key to this particular chamber of horrors.”
* Still, Truman did not see the bomb as an anti-Soviet measure at this point.
* As Averill Harriman later recalled, “that wasn’t the president’s mood at all. The mood was to treat Stalin as an ally—a difficult ally admittedly—in the hope that he would behave like one.”
* Of course, there was now also the question about how to tell Stalin about the existence of the bomb.
* Both Truman and Churchill worried that if Stalin grasped the meaning of the bomb, he might order his forces to push faster and further into Manchuria in order to control as much Chinese territory as he could before Japan surrendered.
* They also worried about how they would respond if the Japanese chose to surrender to the Soviet Union rather than to the United States and Great Britain.
* Once again, Truman need not have bothered worrying.
* Stalin had known about the Manhattan Project since March 1942, thanks to the reports of his secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria.
* Russian spies working on the project had kept Beria well informed; Beria may well have known more about the bomb than Truman and Byrnes did.
* By the time of Potsdam, Beria and Stalin had already discussed how best to respond if Truman mentioned the bomb.
* They decided to feign ignorance on the matter in order to guard the secret of Soviet espionage.
* Both Beria and Stalin knew enough to wonder why Truman had not mentioned the atomic bomb in their first meeting together over lunch at Truman’s house in Babelsberg on July 17.
* Truman finally decided to tell Stalin about this momentous and historic news in as casual a manner as possible.
* At the end of the evening session on July 24, he approached Stalin as the latter prepared to leave the conference room.
* Churchill watched from a distance while Stalin’s interpreter rushed to his boss’s side to translate.
* “The USA,” Truman said, “has tested a new bomb of extraordinary destructive power.”
* By a prior agreement with Churchill, Truman had avoided using the word “atomic.”
* Stalin’s interpreter looked carefully at the Russian leader: the moment had come at last.
* “No muscle moved in his face,” the interpreter recalled.
* Stalin then calmly responded, “A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the Japanese! What a bit of luck.”
* The interpreter watched Stalin glance at Churchill long enough to see that Churchill was smiling, then turn and walk away.
* Stalin’s ruse worked.
* Truman later said, “I am sure that he did not understand its significance.”
* Churchill had the same response, remarking with almost identical language, “I was sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told.”
* Leahy, who also watched carefully for Stalin’s reaction, thought the Russian dictator “did not seem to have any conception of what Truman was talking about. It was simply another weapon.”
* They could not have been more wrong.
* That night Stalin ordered the Soviet atomic energy department to increase the speed of its work.
* The Red Army also increased its efforts to move forces to the Manchurian border.
* They would continue to conduct operations there for two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6.
* Part of Stalin’s reaction may have had to do with the timing of Truman’s announcement.
* Although there is no evidence that he intended to do so or had directly connected the two events in his own mind, Truman told Stalin about the bomb shortly after a particularly intense session about Poland.
* Two Soviet advisers thought that Stalin saw no coincidence in the timing.
* Instead, Stalin told one of them, the timing showed “a rather unfriendly attitude towards us and towards our security interests.”
* One of the advisers went as far as to call the announcement, which Truman intended to be as low-key as possible, “atomic blackmail” to get the Russians to change their position on Poland.
* “They’re raising their price,” Molotov remarked.
* Joseph Davies had predicted such a reaction from the Russians, warning that they would “naturally see it as deliberately throwing them out on the junk heap after they had been ‘used’ to defeat Hitler.”

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#68 – Two And A Half Men

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 09:43:52 +0000

Well the election result shocked everyone.
And the rest of the contingent at Potsdam weren’t very happy about it either.
We might think that the Soviets would be please to be dealing with a British government made up of socialists.
But that wasn’t the case.
Stalin didn’t like Attlee or the British Labour Party.
Despite Churchill’s attempts during the election to paint Labour as pro-Soviet, neither Attlee nor Stalin saw themselves as fellow travellers.
To the Labour Party, Soviet-style economic models were horrible.
To the Soviets, the Labour Party seemed no less capitalist or imperialist than the Tories.
Far better, in Stalin’s mind, to deal with the Churchill devil he knew rather than the Attlee devil he most certainly did not.
Attlee wrote: “I knew from experience,” he wrote, “that the communists had always fought us more vigorously than the Tories because they thought we offered a viable alternative to communism. They regarded the Tories as advocates of a dying cause while they thought we were a rival”
The British of course were horrified.
Cadogan called Churchill’s defeat “a display of base ingratitude” on the part of the British people and “rather humiliating for our country.”
Field Marshal Alan Brooke saw the timing of the election itself as another in a long line of Churchill’s mistakes in domestic politics, and one with potentially catastrophic repercussions.
“What a ghastly mistake to start elections at this point of the world’s history!” he wrote in his diary that night, “May God forgive England for it.”
Brooke blamed Churchill personally, saying, “If only Winston had followed any advice, he would have been in at any rate till the end of the year!”
Instead, Brooke noted, Churchill had counted on his personality to carry the election, just as he had counted on his personality to win over Truman and Stalin.
Tragically, he had failed at both.
Some tried to tell Churchill that the British people had not rejected him personally, but the Conservative Party in general.
The data, however, tell a different story.
The Tories actually performed worse in districts where Churchill himself had campaigned.
Clearly, he had lost the faith of the British people even if he could not quite figure out why.
“It may well be a blessing in disguise,” Clementine told him.
“At the moment,” he replied, “it seems quite effectively disguised.”
Attlee himself thought the result had more to do with the economic policies of the Tories in the 30s and the appeasement of Hitler – nothing Churchill could personally be blamed for.
Churchill returned to No. 10 Downing Street for one last meeting as prime minister.
He told Eden that he expected his own political career to be at an end, but that Eden would himself one day return to Downing Street as prime minister.
Churchill appeared to Eden as “pretty wretched, poor old boy.”
Losing the election, Churchill told Eden, was “like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock.”
The British government had even taken away his bodyguards,
The American delegate Walter Brown observed that “the Empire he had saved did not think enough of him to keep a guard for a single night after he had been defeated.”
Churchill drove down to Chequers for a final weekend at the country home of the prime minister, writing his name and “FINIS” in the guest book as his tenure as Britain’s wartime leader came to an end.
The end was pretty harsh: no one even asked Churchill to deliver an address to the nation when the Japanese surrendered in August.
Churchill told Lord Moran that “it would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.”
When the king announced he was awarding the Order of the Garter to Eden, Eden replied that he could not accept it, given that the British people had just given him the Order of the Boot.
Churchill and Eden may also have worried about the strategic situation they had bequeathed to their successors.
When Ernest Bevin told Eden that he would seek to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new government, Eden shot back, “Whatever for? There will be nothing to do there except account for the money we have not got.”
He then advised Bevin to seek the Foreign Office as, in Eden’s judgment, Bevin was the only Labour politician qualified for the job.
Which he did.
Now Labour had only 48 hours to govern before the new PM and FM had to return to Potsdam.
Attlee had time to make just six political appointments.
Several members of the outgoing government shared Churchill’s derisive view of the new prime minister.
Cadogan remarked that with Attlee representing Britain, the Big Three would become the Big Two and a Half.
He had also described Attlee’s villa in Babelsberg as a “drab and dreary little building. . . . very suitable—it’s just like Attlee himself.”

But To help him along and help him deal with the transition, every member of the British delegation except Churchill and Eden returned to Potsdam with Attlee, underscoring the continuity in policy despite the changes at the top.
Truman, on the other hand, seems to have been happy to deal with a couple of guys who, like him, were new in the job.
And they weren’t upper class pompous snobs like their predecessors.
They were working class men like himself.
And like Stalin.
Truman and Attlee seemed to get along on a personal level, on one occasion sitting together at a piano to sing bawdy soldier songs that they remembered from their time as junior officers in World War I.
And unlike Churchill, Attlee wasn’t one for giving long winded speeches that lead nowhere.
Maybe now they can get down to business.
His feelings about Churchill were mixed.
It was too bad about Churchill, he wrote to his mother and sister, but then he added that “it may turn out to be all right for the world,” suggesting that this way, without Churchill around, he might make better progress with Stalin.
The fundamental worldview and positions of Attlee and Bevin didn’t change much on matters of foreign policy from those of Churchill and Eden.
The British position was still where Churchill had left it – they were broke, a spent force, and desperately trying to figure out a path forwards.
A Life magazine portrait of the new British prime minister described him as resembling a “harassed shopkeeper or an absent-minded professor.”
It reported that even many in his own party had little faith in him or in Bevin, the new foreign minister, whom Life called “bulldogish, blustering, often boastful and egotistical.”
Upon Attlee’s return to Potsdam, Stalin told Truman that “judging from the expression on Mr. Attlee’s face,” he didn’t seem too happy to be taking over the British government.
So what happened in the second session at Potsdam?
Let’s start with their decisions about the fate of Germany.
GERMANY
One thing they did agree on was that the war crimes trials for the Nazis would be held in Nuremberg, home to the notorious Nazi rallies from 1923 to 1938.
The location was all about symbolism.
One of the issues was how many people should be put on trial.
Too many made it look like a brutal occupation by the victors who were out for revenge.
And the Allies needed people – some of whom were Nazis – to run Germany’s industry after the war.
Too few and people with blood on their hands would walk free.
The British, under Churchill and Eden, only had ten names on their list.
Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering; Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; former deputy führer Rudolf Hess, who had been in British custody since his flight to the United Kingdom in May 1941; Robert Ley, who headed the Nazi labor organization Deutsche Arbeitsfront; Wilhelm Frick, the chief author of the Nuremberg Laws; Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s senior military adviser; Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg; SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner; propagandist Julius Streicher; and Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland.
Hitler, Himmler, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hans Krebs and Goebbels of course were already dead from suicide.
At least they hoped Hitler was.
Stalin thought this list was WAY too small.
And he wanted the British to send Hess to Russia for trial.
He even offered to pay for it.
Remember that back in 1941, Hess had flown to Scotland and ended up in prison.
In the end, the British won the argument about keeping the numbers low – the total was 24 men.
All but three received either the death sentence or a long prison sentence.
Give a shout out to Ulrich Hoxer who works at Nuremberg.
We’ll cover the nuremberg trials in more detail later in the series.
Suffice to say that it was a milestone in the treatment of war crimes on the international stage.
But then there was the issue of reparations.
You might recall that the decision they came to at Yalta was a final figure of $20 billion, with half of that going to the Soviets.
At Potsdam, the Americans reneged on the deal.
Byrnes argued that, since Yalta, more than 4 million Germans had fled to the West (almost 800,000 of them to the Western-controlled zones of Berlin), increasing the immediate costs of the occupation to the Americans alone by $1.5 billion.
He said he could not support any reparations plan harsh enough to force onto American taxpayers the burden of feeding so many Germans.
Instead it was decided that each country would take whatever reparations it could from its own zone of occupation.
The Americans and the British could reduce or even waive reparations payments, thereby relieving the United States of some of the burden of paying to feed Germany by keeping German resources in Germany.
By allowing the Soviet plunder of eastern Germany, they could protect against Soviet claims for shares of the valuable western factories and mines upon which Germany would base its economic recovery, given that 81 percent of German coal and 86 percent of German steel production sat in the western zones.
Of course, as we’ve explained before, the Americans had no real need for reparations.
Their economy was booming as a result of military Keynesianism.
The British economy was screwed, but they intended to recover, in part, by exporting products to Germany.
The Soviets had taken the brunt of the war, and their economy had been screwed to start with, so they needed to extract as much as they could.
The Americans also knew that the Russians had already seized scientific data relating to the V-1 and V-2 rocket programs, all scientific material from German military laboratories, and what remained of the scientific research plants of the Berlin area’s universities and institutes.
The Allies issued a statement of aims of their occupation of Germany: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization, dismantling and decartelization.
The Six D’s
POLAND
BETWEEN THE TIME of the Yalta Conference in February and the Potsdam Conference in July, the Soviets tightened their control over Poland.
But Byrnes and others saw little that the United States could do to correct these problems without risking a major confrontation with the Soviets.
And as we’ve seen before, the Western allies had already agreed in principle to the Soviet position on the new Polish government, made up mostly of the pro-Soviet Lublin Poles, with a few hand-picked London Poles for good optics.
What Admiral Leahy called “an external appearance of [Polish] independence.”
The Soviets, from Stalin on down, saw Poland as nonnegotiable and would not reopen questions at Potsdam that they believed the Big Three had already settled at Yalta.
As Stalin told Hopkins when they met in May – if not for the Red Army’s “great loss of life” in liberating Poland, “nobody would be talking about a new Poland,” in 1945 or ever.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that the Americans should not make an issue of Poland, because “the Russians, with their possession, have 99 and 44/100 percent of the law.”
Accordingly, both Truman and Churchill displayed an unwillingness to make Poland a major issue at Potsdam.
Truman gave the London-based Poles just twenty-five minutes of his time at Potsdam, most of it dedicated to introductions and protocol.
Churchill refused to meet with them at all.
“I am sick of the bloody Poles,” the prime minister thundered. “I don’t want to see them.”
By the time of Potsdam, the Russians had transferred control of all the territory between the Curzon Line and the Oder-Neisse River Line to the new Polish government.
With blazing speed, German-language newspapers disappeared, Polish flags flew over public buildings, signs changed from German to Polish place names (Stettin to Szczecin, and Breslau to Wrocław, for example), and Poles took possession of formerly German homes.
The Russians then announced that because this territory now fell under Polish control, it was exempt from any reparations the Allies might demand of Germany.
The wealth of Silesia’s coalfields would therefore go into the coffers of the new Polish government, or through them to the Soviet Union, instead of indirectly to the British or the Americans via reparations.
So that just left Japan.

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#67 Clement Atlee

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 04:49:46 +0000

Attlee was Churchill’s lame duck deputy PM.
In fact he was the first Deputy PM the UK ever had.
I didn’t realise this, but in the UK the role of the Deputy PM isn’t like you’d expect, like it is in Australia or like the Vice-President in the USA.
The Deputy PM doesn’t take over if the PM is incapacitated or resigns.
If the PM is sick or dies, the Deputy does NOT take over.
In the UK, only the sovereign can appoint a PM.
So having a Deputy who is PM-in-waiting is seen as a no no.
One argument made to justify the non-existence of a permanent deputy premiership is that such an office-holder would be seen as possessing a presumption of succession to the premiership, thereby effectively limiting the sovereign’s right to choose a prime minister.
But of course you might think “well surely the Monarch can just say “okay I make you PM and I make you Deputy PM and therefore you’ll take over if something happens”, but apparently that would be too much work.
Attlee was the Deputy PM because the Churchill war ministry was a coalition government of men from both major political parties, handpicked by Churchill.
The idea went back to the first World War, when both Asquith and David Lloyd George had a coalition government in which Churchill was a minister, and back then he was with the Liberal Party, because he’d quit the Tories for a while.
And Attlee was the leader of the Labor Party.
In fact he was the leader for 20 years, from 1935 – 1955.
Not a bad run.
Now remember that Churchill himself HATED socialists more than he hated wasting a cigar, so it was a pretty remarkable thing that he found a way to work with these guys, and it’s something I can respect him for.
Anyway, the UK election had happened before Potsdam, despite Attlee suggesting they should wait until after the defeat of Japan, but the results were still being tallied.
On July 25, the conference took a two-day break so that the most senior British officials could return to London for the tabulation of the votes.
There was a three week delay between the vote on July 5 and the results to give the 3 million troops still overseas time to cast their votes.
Everyone, including Attlee and the British communists, expected Churchill to win, all that seemed in doubt was the size of the majority..
But Churchill later claimed that before he left Potsdam he had had a nightmare. “I dreamed that my life was over,” he later recalled. “I saw it—it was very vivid—my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very life like. . . . Perhaps this is the end.”
I wonder if his corpse was smoking a cigar?
The elections produced a historic surprise, of course – it was a landslide victory for Labour and Clement Attlee.
The Conservative majority in the House of Commons disappeared as the number of Tory seats plummeted from 585 to 213.
Labour emerged as the dominant party, meaning that Clement Attlee would return to Potsdam as Britain’s prime minister, and that Churchill would at least temporarily leave government.
Churchill briefly thought about returning to Potsdam and forcing the new Parliament to vote him out, but he soon bowed to the inevitable and resigned.
Attlee offered Churchill and Eden the chance to return to Potsdam with him as advisers, to show the world the continuity of the British system, but both declined.
Attlee himself could hardly believe that he and his party had won, and by such an enormous margin.
When he went to Buckingham Palace to meet the king, George VI told Attlee that he looked quite surprised to have won. “Indeed I certainly was,” Attlee replied.
Needless to say – everyone back at Potsdam was in shock.
No one quite knew what to make of the change; Winston Churchill now had no role in British policy.
In his diary, Admiral Leahy recorded his concern that, Churchill’s flaws notwithstanding, Britain simply could not go on without him.
The change in government, Leahy wrote, “is in my opinion a world tragedy. I do not know how the Allies can succeed without the spark of genius in his qualities of leadership.”
Now, instead of Roosevelt and Churchill at Potsdam, the Allies had Truman and Attlee, both of whom seemed to Leahy to be grossly inadequate substitutes for their illustrious predecessors.
ATTLEE BIO
Clement Attlee’s background was about as far removed from Chuchill’s as you could imagine.
Attlee was born into a middle class family, the seventh of eight children.
His father was Henry Attlee (1841–1908), a solicitor, and his mother was Ellen Bravery Watson (1847–1920), daughter of the secretary for the Art Union of London.
But young Clement went to Oxford, where in 1904 he graduated BA with second-class honours in Modern History.
He trained as barrister and went to work for his father’s firm, but didn’t like it.
In 1906, he became a volunteer at Haileybury House, a charitable club for working-class boys in the East End of London run by his old school, and from 1907 to 1909 he served as the club’s manager.
Until then, his political views had been more conservative.
But now he was face to face with the poverty and deprivation of the slum children, and he came to the conclusion that charities would never be able to make a dint in the problem, and that what was needed was government intervention and income redistribution.
And so he became a socialist.
He joined the Labor Party and was employed for a time by the UK gov, where he rode around the country on a bike explaining the new National Insurance Act that was introduced in 1911 by David Lloyd George.
That’s right Americans – The UK has had a form of universal health care for over a century.
Do you know the first country to introduce it?
Germany in 1884 under Bismarck.
We should do a BS series on health care.
Anyway, back to Clem.
He was a lecturer at the London School of Economics until WWI broke out.
He tried to join the army, was rejected because he was too old at 31, but tried again and was accepted
He ended up at Gallipoli with my great-grandfather.
the Gallipoli invasion of course was architected by – Winston Churchill.
But Attlee was actually a fan of the idea and had a lot of respect for Churchill as a result.
But he got sick at Gallipoli and was sent home on a ship.
But he said he wanted to stay and fight, and was let off at Malta, where he recovered in a hospital before going back to the front lines.
He ended being injured in Iraq and was sent back to the UK where he recovered, was promoted to Major, and trained soldiers.
Then he ended up the war on the Western Front in France.
After the war he went back to lecturing at the London School of Economics.
He entered politics and became the mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, one of London’s most deprived inner-city boroughs, in 1919.
During his time as mayor, the council undertook action to tackle slum landlords who charged high rents but refused to spend money on keeping their property in habitable condition.
Then he wrote his first book, The Social Worker, which laid out his political philosophy.
The book attacked the idea that looking after the poor could be left to voluntary action.
He wrote on page 30:
In a civilised community, although it may be composed of self-reliant individuals, there will be some persons who will be unable at some period of their lives to look after themselves, and the question of what is to happen to them may be solved in three ways – they may be neglected, they may be cared for by the organised community as of right, or they may be left to the goodwill of individuals in the community.[21]
and went on to say at page 75:
Charity is only possible without loss of dignity between equals. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one, dependent on his view of the recipient’s character, and terminable at his caprice.
In 1922 he became a Minister in the Parliament.
And in 1924 became the Under-Secretary of State for War in the short-lived first Labour government.
In 1927 he joined the Royal Commission set up to look at granting India independence.
Which he finally made happen in 1947 during his government.
He became the leader of the Labor Party in 1935.
Although in the next few years he fought against the build up of Britain’s army, believing the money was better spent building up the welfare system, by 1937 he disagreed with Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement of Hitler and came to agree that they needed to rearm and get ready for war.
Then in 1940, Chamberlain was out, and Churchill created his coalition war ministry.
Attlee played a fairly low key role during the war, mostly behind the scenes.
Although in the times when Churchill was overseas, Attlee stepped in and took over as the face of the government.
In many ways, during the war, Churchill was focused mostly on the war, and Attlee had been running the country.
Unlike Churchill, he didn’t have much charisma;
Beatrice Webb, the sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer, who coined the term “collective bargaining”, and was a friend of Ivan Maisky, wrote in her diary in early 1940:
He looked and spoke like an insignificant elderly clerk, without distinction in the voice, manner or substance of his discourse. To realise that this little nonentity is the Parliamentary Leader of the Labour Party… and presumably the future P.M. [Prime Minister] is pitiable.
Not to mention that he had a Hitler mustache and Himmler’s glasses.
Imagine a balding Hitler wearing Himmler’s glasses.
When the war with Germany was over, both Attlee and Churchill wanted to postpone the election until Japan had been defeated, but there was pressure at home for an election.
The Labor party voted to pull out of the coalition, despite Attlee’s personal views, and Churchill was forced to call an election for July 5.
Britain was bankrupt.
There was a lot of rebuilding to do, and people wanted social reform.
- Not one of Churchill’s strengths.
Keep in mind that Britain had been in a depression for the last 25 years, pretty much ever since the end of WWI.
Britain incurred 715,000 military deaths (with more than twice that number wounded), the destruction of 3.6% of its human capital, 10% of its domestic and 24% of its overseas assets, and spent well over 25% of its GDP on the war effort between 1915 and 1918.
Germany owed billions in reparations, but Britain in turn owed the U.S. billions in loan repayments.
And Britain also lost a huge percentage of its export trade after the war, to Japan and the USA.
The 30s had been a period of mass unemployment, no welfare state, a lack of housing, people were living in slums.
So people were ready for a change.
Labour campaigned on the theme of “Let Us Face the Future,” positioning themselves as the party best placed to rebuild Britain after the war, and were widely viewed as having run a strong and positive campaign talking about policies.
In particular, they built on the report produced by the Liberal economist Lord Beveridge in 1942 that proposed a welfare state, where people would be taken care of by the state, from cradle to grave.
His report proposed widespread reforms to the system of social welfare to address what he identified as five “Giant Evils” in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease.
The argument was pretty simple: if you could have full employment during the war, funded by the state, why couldn’t you have it in peace time to build houses?
Churchill called Beveridge “an awful windbag and a dreamer”.
We can imagine what he thought about such a socialist idea.
Here’s Attlee’s campaign speech – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlcn6JtQX_s
The Conservative campaign centred entirely around Churchill being a strong war leader, personality over policy.
Most of the media backed Churchill and claimed he would win.
Especially Lord Beaverbrook, the original Rupert Murdoch, who owned the Daily Express, the world’s largest selling newspaper.
He personally took over the editing of the paper during the election and made it into a propaganda arm of the Tory party.
The bookies had the Tories 5 to 1.
Churchill however made some costly errors during the campaign.
In particular, his suggestion during one radio broadcast that a future Labour Government would require “some form of a gestapo” to implement their policies was widely regarded as being in very bad taste, and massively backfired.
Here’s a clip.
The woman at the end was Attlee’s daughter.
Churchill’s daughter said she thought her father had lost his touch when it came to domestic politics.
After five years of being THE MAN, and sitting around tables with Stalin, he had become more blunt.
But come on – the guy had never been popular in the first place.
He was an emergency wartime PM.
Labour won power by a huge landslide, winning 47.7% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 36%
When Attlee went to see King George VI at Buckingham Palace to be appointed Prime Minister, the notoriously laconic Attlee and the famously tongue-tied King stood in silence; Attlee finally volunteered the remark, “I’ve won the election.” The King replied “I know. I heard it on the Six O’Clock News.”
Ernest Bevin was made the new Foreign Secretary.
And Churchill?
Well at least his worst fears didn’t come true – he wasn’t dead and he wouldn’t be the man to see the sun set on the British Empire.
That honour would go to Attlee and Bevin.

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#66 – Potsdam Begins

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 09:19:35 +0000

Stalin arrived in Potsdam a day late. Claimed he had a small heart attack. Might have been a ruse. It gave the others a day to take a tour of Berlin on July 16 and see the destruction first hand. During the first week of the conference, everyone was jubilant, having won the war – but Truman quickly learned the Russians weren’t going to give in to his demands, and the Allies and Stalin both had secrets. The Allies had a successful test of Trinity, the first atomic bomb. Stalin had Hitler’s body. Of course, the A Bomb wasn’t really a secret. Meanwhile Clement Attlee is there but being ignored by everyone.

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#65 – Michael Neiberg

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 06:18:56 +0000

Prof Michael Neiberg is Chair of War Studies and Professor of History, Department of National Security and Strategy, US Army War College. He has also written a number of excellent books on the First World War – as well as the book we are talking about today – Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe.

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#64 – Towards Potsdam

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 06:44:31 +0000

After a string of fuckups, Truman starts listening to other people, like Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1937-38, one of the guys he had ignored before his first meeting with Molotov. They decide a new meeting of the Big Three is needed – and start to plan the Potsdam Conference. Truman announced James Byrnes, the man who should be President, would be his new Secretary of State. And he finally learns the details of the S-1 project he had uncovered as a senator two years earlier – AKA the Manhattan Project.

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#63 – The Old One-Two

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 08:33:32 +0000

Truman listens to certain people who tell him he should get tough with the Russians. At his first meeting with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister said “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”
“Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Truman replied.
Then Truman decides to look tough by ending the Lend Lease shipments to the Soviets. Unfortunately nobody seems to have told him that the USA was still counting on Soviet support to end the Pacific War.

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#62 – Truman

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 06:40:55 +0000

Harry S. Truman. Farmer. Soldier. Failed businessman. Given his political career by a mobbed-up bootlegger. Became President through fate. Adopted John Wayne persona to try to look tough.

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#61 – FDR Dead

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 07:08:56 +0000

Then, on April 12, 1945, FDR died, aged only 63.

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#60 – In Like Flynn

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 06:31:46 +0000

FDR sends one of his inner circle, Edward Flynn, a staunch Catholic, to meet the Pope to try to keep the peace between him and Stalin. Stalin meanwhile revived caesaropapism, the old tradition dating back to Constantine, making himself head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not a bad promotion for someone who once studied to become an Orthodox priest.

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#59 – Stalin Versus The Pope

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 06:08:45 +0000

Stalin crushes the Ukrainian Catholic Church, partly because socialists believe religion is the opium of the masses, and partly because the Pope, Pius XII, had done a deal with Hitler and was a virulent anti-Communist.

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#58 – Operation Sunrise

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 22:35:32 +0000

March 8, 1945. Allen Dulles, the Bern station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), met in secret with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the former head of Heinrich Himmler’s secretariat, who in the last years of the war became the commander of SS forces in northern Italy, to discuss Germany’s surrender. The Anglo-Americans neglected to tell the Soviets about the meeting – a breach of their agreements. The Americans called it “Operation Sunrise”. Some historians call Operation Sunrise the first episode of Cold War.

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#57 – Alger Hiss

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 08:33:33 +0000

On February 13, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius and his staff were invited to a reception hosted by Vyshinsky in the commissariat’s guesthouse in Moscow. Little did the Americans know that one member of their staff was a Soviet spy.

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#56 – Dracula

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 07:30:57 +0000

What does Dracula have to do with the Cold War? The next issue to drive a wedge between the Big Three was the government of Romania.

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#55 – Cold As Ice

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:02:33 +0000

Our first post-Yalta episode! Churchill and Roosevelt go home and give big speeches about how well Yalta went and how the Big Three really get each other. And then it all fell apart.

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#54 – Nyet

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 05:46:35 +0000

The last day of Yalta! We’re out, baby!

Churchill fell asleep in the middle of an important debate and then woke up ranting about the wrong things.

Iran wants everyone to leave their oil alone but no-one cares.

Stalin wanted access to the Black Sea Straits.

And Frank does the last big deal of his life – getting Joe’s agreement in writing to join the fight against Japan.

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#53 – Declaration of Liberated Europe

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 06:09:52 +0000

Just when I thought I was out… they pulled me back in! To Yalta!

Before the Big Three left Yalta, they signed a document that promised to allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice”. Of course, at the time, the British were waging a war in Greece to prevent the people creating a government of their own choice… but let’s not worry about inconvenient details like that.

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#52 – German Reparations Part II

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 08:57:56 +0000

As the Yalta conference comes to a close, the question of German reparations is settled on, but it’s obvious that Stalin still doesn’t trust the other two. And the feeling is mutual.

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#51 – German Reparations

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 07:13:46 +0000

Stalin goes hard on the issue of German reparations but meets with pushback from Churchill, while Roosevelt can’t seem to make up his mind.

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#50 – Summary Execution

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 06:15:35 +0000

So after they agreed on Poland, the rest of the February 9 plenary session is spent talking about Germany.

Specifically – what to do with the Nazi big dogs.

Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that Churchill had been advocating since 1942 for a policy of summary execution for the top Nazis.

But Stalin suggested, you know, maybe they should be put on trial before being shot like animals?

Everyone was shocked.

But Joe still wanted $10 billion in reparations – and to keep France off of the Control Commission.

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#49 – Prof. Serhii Plokhii, Harvard

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 09:35:54 +0000

We have a very special guest. Professor Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s the author of quite a few award-winning books including “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine”, which in 2015 won the world’s most important award for non-fiction, the Lionel Gelber Prize – and a book that’s been invaluable to us while we discuss the Yalta conference, “Yalta: The Price of Peace”. Serhii was kind enough to join us to talk about the importance of the Yalta conference and his analysis of the key players, the Big Three, FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

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#48 – Settling The Polish Question

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 09:02:04 +0000

Day 9 at Yalta! The official, famous photographs are taken, and someone worries that he’s going to be sent to the Gulag as a result. And the Polish question is finally settled to everyone’s relief. They can almost go home. Oh and there was no raping.

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#47 – The Rapist

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 26 May 2017 06:38:55 +0000

Someone else was at the dinner on February 8, Day 4, at Koreiz villa – Lavrentii Beria the head of the dreaded People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – a known womanizer and rapist.

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#46 – The Big Threesome

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 18 May 2017 06:47:31 +0000

At the end of a long day full of hard bargaining, The Big Three could still relax in one another’s company. In this episode we discuss the most important dinner of the conference.

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#45 – Stalin Agrees On Japan

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 12 May 2017 11:53:48 +0000

A deal was struck between FDR and Stalin: the Soviets will join the war with Japan in exchange for territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China.

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#44 – The Bombing Of Dresden

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 22:52:34 +0000

The city of Dresden was the primary victim of the “zone of limitation” agreement reached at Yalta—one of the few direct outcomes of the military consultations held there. In early 1945 Dresden was one of the few major German centers to have escaped systematic Allied bombing. On the night of February 13 – only two days after the end of the Yalta conference – the Royal Air Force Bomber Command executed the first night air raid on the city. “Florence on the Elbe”, as it was known, was reduced to rubble by Allied bombers in three major raids between February 13 and 15 – known by the Allies as Operation Thunderclap.
Altogether 1,300 British and American bombers dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs including 1,100 tons of incendiaries on a city with one million civilians.

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#43 – The Battle of Balaclava

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 12:30:58 +0000

On Feb 7, the British Chiefs of Staff decided to take the day off to visit the site of the Battle of Balaclava, infamous for the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854. Meanwhile, the Americans and the Soviet military commanders took the opportunity to talk about Russia’s entry into the Pacific War against Japan.

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#42 – Poland’s Borders

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 23:11:03 +0000

Conversation at Yalta turns to Poland’s borders. Stalin had a new proposal that would mean moving the southern part of the Polish-German border 200 kilometers west – into Germany, right up to the Oder & Neisse rivers. Which was actually giving Poland more of Germany than the U.S. and UK were happy with. They believed it would create 8 or 9 million German refugees.

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#41 – Frank Makes Shit Up

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 07:05:17 +0000

On Feb 8, when Stalin arrived for his lunch date with Roosevelt, FDR told him that the Foreign Ministers had met that morning and agreed to accept the two extra countries for the Soviet’s in the UN General Assembly. It was good timing for FDR, because that day they were going to be talking about getting Russia involved in the war with Japan, and he wanted him on side. THE ONLY SMALL PROBLEM – the Foreign Ministers had NOT actually agreed to the two extra votes! Roosevelt made it up! Why? How? To what end? Listen and find out!

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#40 – Stalin Plays With Pooh

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 23:32:50 +0000

At Yalta, Feb 7 and 8 – days 4 and 5 – are going to be about trying to get agreement on the Polish issues and the issue of the Soviets entering the war with Japan. Winnie The Pooh is getting played by Uncle Joe, who senses that the US/UK love fest is struggling.

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#39 – Stalin Drops The Mic

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 08:26:37 +0000

Back to the question of Poland. Roosevelt suggests changing the Polish-Russian border – in the favour of the Poles. Why? It’d really help him out in the upcoming U.S. election. Churchill agreed with him. Why? It would really help him out in the upcoming British election. Stalin, as you can imagine, was not impressed with their logic.

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#38 – Warm Water Ports

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:26:06 +0000

Despite their attempts to get the U.K. and U.S.S.R. to give up on the concept of spheres of influence, the Monroe Doctrine remained the dominant way that America built its economic empire after WWII. Russia has always longed for more warm water ports and we explain why that’s important. We do a mini bio on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs. And we talk about why George Kennan wanted to kill off the idea of the United Nations.

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#37 – Poland

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 09:13:51 +0000

We are back talking about Poland and why it was such an important issue to the Big Three at Yalta. As Churchill himself said, Poland was so important, it was discussed at seven out of the eight plenary sessions and the official British record contained 18,000 words on Poland spoken by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. We also talk a little about Operation Paperclip, where America grabbed 1600 Nazi scientists and engineers and took them back to work on for the U.S. government.

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#36 – That Little Rat Leo Pasvolsky

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 05:15:59 +0000

So after Sumner Welles resigned, the majority of the work on the UN charter was done by an interesting guy no-one remembers – Leo Pasvolsky. When he died in 1953, his New York Times obituary was subtitled “Wrote Charter of World Organization.” In a 1967 letter, Dean Acheson criticized American moralism in international affairs, which he saw as culminating in “that little rat Leo Pasvolsky’s United Nations.”

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#35 – The United Nations

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 09:35:32 +0000

During the rest of Day Two of Yalta they discuss how much Germany should pay in reparations and how many Germans should go to Russia as slave labour.

On Day Three, the talk turns to FDR’s passion project – The United Nations. We go into some detail about the early vision for the UN, the men behind it, the concerns the Big Three had about how it would impact on their own plans for global and regional dominance – and the use of the Security Council veto.

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#34 – Charles de Gaulle

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 05:33:10 +0000

As the Yalta conference now turns to whether or not France should have a role in the occupation of Germany, the Allied Control Commission and the UN Security Council, we thought it was a good time to do a quick bio on France’s post-WWII leader, Charles de Gaulle, aka “The Big Asparagus Stalk”, aka “Chucky D”.

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#33 – Dismemberment

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 05:59:06 +0000

We’re finally back! Sorry about the long wait.

On day two of the Yalta Conference Franky wanted to discuss the role of France in the German occupation. Joey hijacked the agenda to demand agreement on dismemberment. And Winny just sucked his thumb because no-one cared what he thought about anything.

PS ignore the episode number I think it is when we recorded the show. I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

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#32 – Fidel Castro Part 4

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 05:17:11 +0000

Part four (!!!) of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests.This is absolutely the last part, we promise!

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#31 – Fidel Castro Part 3

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:48:03 +0000

Part three (!!!) of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests. And yes – there is a part four! But it’s the last part, we promise!

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#30 – Fidel Castro Part 2

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 07:25:17 +0000

Part two of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests.

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#29 – Fidel Castro

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 11:07:10 +0000

With the recent death of Fidel Castro, we decided to take a quick detour from our linear narrative to jump ahead in time and talk about one of the major figures, not only of the Cold War, but of the 20th century. A hero to many, reviled by just as many, his death brought on a new spate of Western media coverage. After reading much of it, we just had to provide our own perspective. We decided to tackle the subject by taking one of the major media obituaries, by the New York Times, and break it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making this episode free to guests.

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#28 – Yalta: Let The Small Birds Sing

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 01:08:20 +0000

Like he had before Tehran, FDR refused the idea of an Anglo-American bloc when he and Churchill met briefly in Malta before the conference.
He’s trying hard to avoid putting Stalin on the defensive.
Because he knows that in the game of wartime diplomacy, the player with the most troops on the ground had the loudest voice.

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#27 – Yalta: Day One

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 05:48:47 +0000

We FINALLY start talking about day one of the Yalta conference, explaining the key cast of characters – and a lemon tree.

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#26 – Prof Fredrik Logevall

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 10:02:54 +0000

Today we have another special guest – Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences – Prof Fredrik Logevall. He’s also the co-author of America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (co-authored with Campbell Craig, who we had on in episode 20).

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#25 – Maclean

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 04:41:33 +0000

This is the third and final of our episodes about the Cambridge Five!

This week – Donald Maclean. After being recruited at Cambridge, he started working for the Foreign Office assigned to the division that looked after the League of Nations. Over the next few years, 45 boxes of documents were photographed and sent to Moscow. He rose to become the First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington and Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on atomic energy matters, where he was Moscow’s main source of information about US/UK/Canada atomic energy policy development. After returning to London, he became the head of the American Department in the Foreign Office.

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#24 – Burgess

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 07:58:50 +0000

This is the second of our episodes about the Cambridge Five!

This week – Guy Burgess. Where the others were highly self-controlled and shunned public scrutiny, he was wildly flamboyant, openly homosexual and often embroiled in scandal because of his drunken behaviour. He had the ability to charm anyone he sought out, including Churchill, and attracted an astonishing array of contacts, as well as lovers, as he flitted between MI5, MI6, the BBC and the FO. At one point he was simultaneously running agents for both British and Soviet intelligence. Between 1941 and 1945 he passed more than 4,600 documents to Moscow.

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#23 – Philby

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 07:07:16 +0000

This is the first of two episodes about the Cambridge Five!

This week – Kim Philby, arguably the most effective spy in the history of spying.

The man running British operations against the Russians in the early years of the Cold War was actually working for the Russians himself. And there was every possibility that had it not been for one mistake, Philby would have gone on to become CSS, Chief of the British Secret Service. That mistake – sharing a flat with Guy Burgess – the subject of next week’s show.

If you want to know more about Philby’s amazing life, read his autobiograpy, MY SILENT WAR.

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#22 – Yalta (part 1)

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 22:00:28 +0000

By the time the Big Three finally met again after Tehran, it was February 1945, the US had re-taken the Phillipines. But the they were still a long way from Japan. And in Europe, they were all facing fierce crystal-meth fuelled German resistance. Plus we have Pomeranian dogs, golden fleece, a Greek revolutionary, a Jew who is burned at the stake, and the introduction to the Cambridge Five!

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#21 – The First Vietnam

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 06:37:57 +0000

Today we go back to 1898 and discuss The Philippine–American War, sometimes referred to as “The First Vietnam”. Trust us – it’s relevant to our story. Why did the United States invade the Philippines in 1898? And why did 200,000 Filipinos have to die as a result? And why did the US occupy it for the next 50 years? Listen and find out.

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The Music: We want to get down on our knees and worship the amazing and talented composer who offered us the use of one of his amazing tracks, “Resistance”, as our theme music: Jofre Horta. He’s already a big deal in the composing world but he’s going to be even bigger – and you can say you heard him first on our little show! Listen to his whole album on Spotify or iTunes.

#20 – Campbell Craig

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 07:30:15 +0000

Professor Campbell Craig is the Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University.

He has held senior fellowships at Yale University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the European University Institute, and, most recently, at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol, and has given invited lectures at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Chicago, Columbia, Cambridge, Sciences-Po, the Free University of Berlin, the London School of Economics, University of Copenhagen, and other universities.

His most recent books are The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (with Sergey Radchenko), and America’s Cold War: the Politics of Insecurity (with Fredrik Logevall).

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#19 – Bretton Woods

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:00:05 +0000

– A month after the opening of the second front, the Roosevelt administration organized a conference on postwar economic planning in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, at which American officials set up institutions designed to open up free trade around the world and to promote industrial development in former European colonies.
– It was a gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of World War II.
– It’s known as the Bretton Woods Conference.
– And it was a major turning point in the global economy.

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#18 – Tehran

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:54:54 +0000

Roosevelt and Churchill had their first war summit meeting in Casablanca in January 1943.
The first Big Three conference was held in Tehran, Iran in November 1943. It turned out to be the most important summit of the war. In four days of meetings, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin debated the second-front question and hashed out the basic outline of a postwar European order.

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#17 – Disgustingly Ugly

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 21:00:56 +0000

We start in August 1942. Churchill is still in Moscow, getting down with Uncle Joe. Stalin accuses the British of being a bunch of pussies, too scared to fight the big bad Nazis.
To try to break up the UK/USA/USSR love nest, the Nazis dig up 3000 dead bodies of Polish generals and lay the blame on the Soviets who deny it (but their fingers are crossed behind their backs). And Stalin dissolves the Comintern, pretending, for the moment, that he has no intention of trying to spread Communism any further around the globe.

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#16 – Dr Peter Ellyard

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 07:48:47 +0000

Our guest today is Dr Peter Ellyard, a futurist, strategist, speaker and author living in Melbourne, Australia. He is known for his unique perspectives on global trends and emerging global markets. He talks to us about the role that “planetism” and the rising global middle class has on the future of the species and preventing future global wars.

You can read more about Peter here or order his books here.

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#15 – The Grand Alliance

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 23:00:19 +0000

In June 1941, the UK, USA and USSR slowly started to come together to defeat Germany and Japan. The Grand Alliance is often called the “Strange Alliance” because it united the world’s greatest capitalist state, the greatest communist state and the greatest colonial power.

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Cold War 14 – Ribbentrop, Molotov, Barbarossa

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 23:00:43 +0000

In this episode we talk about the non-aggression pact signed between Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939, known as the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact, and then how Hitler decided to terminate it in 1941 when he launched a surprise invasion on the USSR, known as “Operation Barbarossa”. We also talk a little of the history of Poland, The Munich Agreement, and Stalin’s fondness for a good tune.

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Cold War 13 – The Great Terror

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 05:13:14 +0000

Today’s episode starts off with part 4 of our series on economics, where we look at the role of the media, and then launches into Stalin’s “Great Terror”. And we finish answering a question from a listener about Brexit.

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Cold War 12 – Doug La Follette

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 11:06:02 +0000

Our first guest on the Cold War series is Doug La Follette, Secretary of State of Wisconsin!

Here’s some background.

– Doug is the Secretary of State of Wisconsin a position to which he was first elected in 1974!
– And he’s been the SoS pretty much ever since then, with a short break for a few years in the late 70s.
– Doug’s a member of the La Follette political dynasty.
– He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Marietta College, a Master of Science in chemistry from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Columbia University.
– Doug was known as an environmentalist before running for public office, and was an organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970.
– He is the author of the book The Survival Handbook: A Strategy for Saving Planet Earth.
– He has also served on the board of directors of Friends of the Earth and the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Sierra Club.
– And he was a Fulbright Distinguished American Scholar in 2003.
– And finally – he’s a very old friend of Sir J. David Markham.

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Cold War 11 – Economics Pt 3

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:00:22 +0000

Part 3 of our three-part series on economics and war, where we drill down into the various ways companies profiteer from war and how it stimulates the economy via “Military Keynesianism”. On the suggestion of my wise friend Tony Kynaston, we’re making this episode available to non-subscribers, because the subject we’re talking about is that important.

To summarise the last three episodes, here are some of the main ways war is good for business:
1. It’s good for companies selling weapons, both to their own country and to other countries, funded by tax dollars.
2. It’s good for companies selling other goods required during and after a war, including everything from food and clothing to reconstruction efforts – also funded by tax dollars.
3. It’s good for companies who want to gain access to undeveloped markets with new sources of natural resources and cheap labour.
4.It’s good for companies who want to lock up control of export markets that they can sell their goods and services to.
5. It’s good for companies who use war to get primary technological research done (and paid for by the taxpayers) that then makes its way into the hands of corporations.

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Cold War 10 – Economics Pt 2

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 19:51:44 +0000

Part 2 of our three-part series on economics and war. Still talking about trade and access to foreign markets. We look at the CIA’s overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, the Marshall Plan and the Open Door policy.

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Cold War 9 – Economics Pt 1

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 21:28:40 +0000

This is going to be the first in a series of episodes where we talk about economics and war. I know – economics is a scary boring subject, but it’s really just the study of how people make and spend money. In this episode we’re going to argue that economics (money) was a significant factor in the genesis of the Cold War (and pretty much every other war in history too). We’ll talk about imperialism, gunboat diplomacy, big stick diplomacy, dollar diplomacy, propaganda, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, economic hit men, and the Monroe Doctrine. As Major General Smedley Butler wrote: “War is a racket”.

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Cold War 8 – Mansplaining Capitalism

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 22:59:18 +0000

Okay so we’re still talking about IDEOLOGY.

On our last episode we didn’t get time to get into talking about CAPITALISM, so that’s what we’re doing on this episode. We talk a little about the history of capitalism, try to define it, and discuss how the United Kingdom’s imperialist control over 25% of the world’s economy wasn’t something that FDR was willing to tolerate. If the UK wanted US support in WWII, they were going to have to bend over and take it up the English Channel.

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Cold War 7 – Socialism

Cameron Reilly — Thu, 26 May 2016 22:13:49 +0000

Welcome Premium Subscribers! Thanks for your love and support and the occasional reach-around. We want to tickle you in all the right places.

On this episode, our first premium episode, we continue talking about IDEOLOGY.

SOCIALISM v CAPITALISM.

TWO IDEOLOGIES ENTER, ONE IDEOLOGY LEAVES.

Or something like that.

What are they? How are they different?

This episode is a very quick overview of SOCIALISM. If you want to know more, we suggest you read a fucking book.

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Cold War 6 – The First Red Scare

Cameron Reilly — Sat, 21 May 2016 04:34:42 +0000

This is part one of a few episodes that will explain the military, ideological and economic conflicts and tensions between the US, UK and USSR before the Cold War. In this episode, we look at the “Polar Bear Expedition” and the first “Red Scare” in the US.

Warning – this will be our last free episode. Episode 7 and onwards will be the beginning of our premium series.

Cold War 5 – FDR Part Two

Cameron Reilly — Wed, 04 May 2016 11:04:54 +0000

Part Two of our mini-biography of FDR.

Cold War 4 – FDR Part One

Cameron Reilly — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 13:01:06 +0000

Part One of our mini-biography of everyone’s favorite wheelchair pilot, FDR. His family background (opium traders), his rise, his polio, his affairs, his reforms, his ballsy attitude, his assassination attempt, his concentration camps and how incredibly fucked America was when he was sworn in. In 1933, the US was in dire straits. Three years into the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and a third-rate military. When he died in 1945, it was the world’s leading economic and military superpower.

Cold War 3 – The Man Of Steel

Cameron Reilly — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 04:49:11 +0000

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili aka STALIN. Unlike Churchill and Roosevelt, Joseph wasn’t born into the elite classes of society. His father was a cobbler; his mother, a housemaid. As a young man, he trained to become a priest, but it didn’t take. Soon afterwards he discovered the writings of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, ending up the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.

Cold War 2 – Enter Churchill

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 05:04:41 +0000

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a fascinating character. His reputation as a “great man”, as the brave British wartime leader who defeated the Nazis, hides his reputation before and after WWII – a racist who enjoyed participating in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” and who even his peers thought had extremely racist views. We’re not here to demonise Churchill, but, on the other hand, it’s our job to peel away the layers of mythology to find the real man who popularised the term “the Iron Curtain”.

If you like our intro music, it’s by the very great Jofre Horta Antoniou!

Cold War 1 – Series Introduction

Cameron Reilly — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 04:08:37 +0000

Where your intrepid hosts set off on the audio journey of a lifetime and introduce the series.

If you like our intro music, it’s by the very great Jofre Horta Antoniou!