The Cold War: October 1951-1991
Many important events, including the Cold War and a formal apology to the interned Japanese Americans, occurred during the years that followed World War II. On June 21, 2000, U.S. president Bill Clinton awarded 20 Medals of Honor, most of them posthumously, to the Japanese American soldiers of the 442d Regimental Combat Team from World War II. This formal ceremony represented more than just overdue acknowledgment of the soldiers' bravery under fire.
The award of the Medal of Honor was also a way of acknowledging that a wrong had been done to the Japanese American community in the crisis years of World War II, when 120,000 had been interned in American camps. The echoes of the Second World War have reverberated to the present in a myriad of different voices, and they can still be heard more than 60 years after its end.
The decades since the war have been among the most eventful in history, but they have not seen a repeat of the two cataclysmic conflicts that transformed Europe and Asia from 1914 to 1945. The absence of any major war between any of the states that fought the last war has been perhaps World War II's most enduring legacy.
Although the Korean conflict provoked renewed anxieties about a Third World War, such a scenerio was averted. China, the Soviet Union, and the United States recognized that the stakes were too high. In 1953 a cease-fire was called, and the two Korean states found themselves back where they had started in 1950. South Korea went on to become one of the boom economies of the Pacific Rim, while North Korea became and remained a Communist dictatorship, impervious to the eventual collapse of world communism 40 years later.
The absence of general war did not mean the absence of crises and conflicts, many of which developed as a direct consequence of World War II and its aftermath. In Asia, the collapse of the colonial order brought about by Japanese aggression contributed to the rapid end of the old empires throughout the region.
Nationalist revolt in the Dutch East Indies began in 1945 with a declaration of independence. After a violent anticolonial war, the Dutch were expelled and an independent Indonesia was established in 1949. In Malaya, Communist insurgency resulted in a prolonged anticolonial campaign that the British government fought with a mixture of brutality and concession. When the area won independence in 1957, communism had been defeated.
In French Indochina, the reverse happened. French colonial forces and the local French population responded to Communist insurgency with widespread violence. In 1954 French forces suffered a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu and abandoned the whole region. Indochina was divided into the separate states of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with the last divided like Korea. North Vietnam became a Communist state led by veteran nationalist Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam became a pro-Western dictatorship backed by American aid.
As in the case of Korea, the North soon began to put pressure on the southern area, and in 1957 it launched a full-scale guerrilla war. In 1960 Communist sympathizers in the South formed the National Liberation Front and provoked a civil war as well. The result was more than a decade of violence along the battle lines of the global Cold War. Only in 1975, towards the end of the Vietnam War did Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam finally become Communist states, putting an end to the long postwar crisis.
Go to the next page to learn about the formation of the state of Israel.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
The State of Israel is Created
The end of World War II led to the rapid disappearance of French and British influence throughout the Arab world, as the rapid eclipse of the old imperial powers transformed the politics not only of Asia but of the Middle East and Africa as well. The mandated territories granted by the League of Nations after World War I were granted independence. These included Syria and Jordan in 1946 and Lebanon in 1943. The mandate in Palestine was liquidated, and a Jewish homeland -- promised after World War I but never granted -- was created in 1948: the State of Israel.
The realization of the full horrors of the genocide of the European Jews had led to growing demands for a Jewish state. British forces stood in the middle between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers and immigrants, but a prolonged guerrilla conflict and growing American pressure forced the British to abandon the area. Israel was established by compelling Arab acquiescence, but the consequence has been six decades of violence. The surrounding Arab states fought Israel unsuccessfully in 1948 and again in 1967 and 1973.
In 1956 Israel found unlikely allies in Britain and France in the attempt to forcibly prevent the new nationalist regime of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser from taking over the Suez Canal. The Suez crisis was the last flourish of old imperial Europe. American and Soviet Union pressure ended this European operation, making it finally evident that the long period of European hegemony that had dominated the wider world for two centuries was gone for good.
The unraveling of empire became complete with the independence of colonial Africa. The Allies had used African forces and resources extensively during the war. But Africa's nationalist and anticolonial forces -- small before the war -- increased during the years of fighting. In North Africa, the defeat of France in 1940 and the expulsion of Italy in 1942 undermined the credibility of Western imperialism and paved the way for independence.
Libya became independent in 1951; Egypt followed in 1954 and Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. In Algeria, where an entrenched French settler community existed, there was strong resistance to withdrawal. A savage civil war broke out between French colonists, Islamic revolutionaries, and native nationalists. The French army fought the insurgency with considerable brutality, but after eight years of conflict, the new French president, Charles de Gaulle, accepted defeat. In 1962 the French army and French colonists abandoned Algeria for good.
In the rest of colonial Africa, independence was granted state by state in the 1950s and 1960s. Only in southern Africa did the colonial system persist. In southern Rhodesia, white settlers declared independence on their own behalf in 1965 and tried to suppress black demands for a democratic state and more equal distribution of land. Only in 1980, after another violent civil war, did the white settlers abandon the struggle and accept the new state of Zimbabwe. In the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, an anticolonial war backed by Communist forces ended with Portuguese withdrawal and independence in 1975.
The last bastion of the old order was South Africa. Dominated by a powerful nationalist movement led by its predominantly Dutch settlers, South Africa was expelled from the British Commonwealth for embarking on a quasi-Fascist policy of race discrimination known as apartheid (separateness). The white minority kept a harsh grip on the rest of the population, including a fraction of white dissenters who opposed the regime. Cut off from the rest of the world by sanctions and moral pressure, the white regime finally conceded defeat in 1990 and proceeded to dismantle apartheid. In 1994 free elections brought victory for the African National Congress under its leader, Nelson Mandela, who recently had been released from a government prison. He became democratic South Africa's first president.
In the next section, read about the spread of communism in the post-World War II world.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
The Spread of Communism
In 1953 strikes and protests during the Cold War in East Germany produced the first internal reactions against the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. The hostility of the population was put down by units of the Red Army stationed there. When Hungarian nationalists and intellectuals staged an anti-Communist revolt in October 1956, the Soviet Union ordered troops from the Soviet bloc into Budapest to crush resistance. When similar demands for reform and openness developed in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact forces intervened. In 1968 tanks appeared in Prague and Communist orthodoxy was reinstated.
The Western states responded little to these internal Communist crises. However, the Cold War intensified when the status of independent West Berlin was once again threatened by the Soviet bloc. In 1961 the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, ordered a solid frontier wall to be built across Berlin, dividing the capitalist west from the Communist east. The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the permanent division between the two different ways of life.
The history of the Cold War was marked by the complete shift in the international balance of power, made possible by the rise of Soviet Union and American military and economic strength during World War II. The confrontation between the two camps was not entirely new, since the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s had been feared by much of the West as the vanguard of a new social order. In the 1950s, however, the Soviet Union was perceived to be a much greater threat -- not only a challenge to Western assumptions about personal freedom, but the center of a worldwide Communist web that menaced the established order throughout the developing world. The American government developed a strategy of "containment" designed to limit the spread of communism.
The strategy was supported by America's allies in NATO but opposed by a growing youth movement hostile to what was seen as a new form of imperialism, and anxious about the growing threat of nuclear war. The first major test for containment came in 1959 when Fidel Castro led a Communist-inspired revolt in Cuba. The new revolutionary regime was supported by the Soviet Union. When it became clear in 1962 that Castro was being supplied with Soviet Union missiles, Washington issued an ultimatum to the Soviet Union to remove them, and ordered a naval blockade of Cuba.
The confrontation was one of the most dramatic episodes of the postwar period. At the final moment, Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered Soviet Union vessels bound for Cuba to turn back. U.S. president John F. Kennedy was saved from having to make a final decision for military action. A year later, Kennedy was assassinated; in 1964 Khrushchev was removed from office by his party colleagues.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the Cold War came to direct conflict between the two superpowers. The conflict was played out thereafter by proxy: one side or the other lending support to third-party states, engaging in espionage and covert operations, and arming and funding guerrilla movements and insurgencies. In 1964 the United States, led by President Lyndon Johnson, made the decision to commit troops and aircraft to the civil war in South Vietnam, and for 10 years the U.S. fought to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union. In 1975, following prolonged antiwar protests in the United States and Europe, the last American forces were withdrawn.
Four years later, the Soviet Union sent troops to fight in Afghanistan in support of the Communist regime, an intervention that lasted 10 years and cost the lives of thousands of Soviet Union soldiers. The United States provided aid and arms for the anti-Communist guerrilla movement. In 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. Both the Vietnam and Afghan wars were the longest periods of active fighting for both states since World War II. Both involved high casualties, considerable cost, and eventual defeat. Cold War by proxy proved deeply damaging to both of the superpowers that fought it.
On the next page, read about nonproliferation treaties and arms limitation talks that attempted to ease tensions throughout the world.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
The Era of Detente Begins
Many explanations exist for why the Cold War never turned into open conflict. Memories of the horrors of World War II certainly played a part. Most of the world's leaders in the 20 years after 1945 had experienced the war directly and understood its uncompromising and destructive nature. As the two superpowers produced increasingly destructive weapons, including the "superbomb" (hydrogen bomb) in 1952, they became increasingly fearful of an all-out war. They understood that nuclear weapons and, from the late 1950s, intercontinental missiles could produce terrible levels of mutual destruction.
In 1963 nuclear testing above ground was banned. In 1968 the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and 59 other nations agreed on a nonproliferation treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. A year later, the first arms limitation talks (SALT I) began. The period of so-called détente that followed produced further agreements on reducing armaments.
In 1975 the Helsinki Accords were signed between 33 European states, the United States, and Canada. The agreements committed the signatories to accept the existing frontiers of Europe, drawn up in the 1940s, and to promote human rights. In 1977 further agreement was reached in the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention, which defined more effective protection for civilians from the effects of war. In the 1980s, a new round of negotiations (START) was initiated by U.S. president Ronald Reagan, which led to more comprehensive arms limitation agreements by 1987.
One of the significant contributions to the long period of peace lies in the stabilization and revival of the international economy. Some of the rivalry and violence of the interwar years had been fueled by industrial and financial crisis, the closure of markets, and beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the developed world experienced an economic boom of unprecedented scale. The newly emancipated areas of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa stimulated the boom by demanding industrial products and supplying food and raw materials in return. The Soviet bloc also experienced high levels of planned industrial development.
The boom owed a great deal to international cooperation. In 1947 a General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs was signed, which freed world trade from the protectionist straitjacket of the 1930s. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund kept world currency and trading systems more open and flexible while modern industrial corporations developed more sophisticated and increasingly global operations. In Europe, major new trading blocs stimulated high levels of employment and trade. These blocs included the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union), founded in 1957, and the Communist COMECON organization, set up in 1949. Economic management, informed by improved macroeconomic theory, replaced the traditions of liberal free-market economics.
Among the most striking beneficiaries of the boom were Germany, Italy, and Japan. The three former Axis partners became major international economies, thoroughly integrated with the West and sharing access to international resources on equal terms. After 1945 there was never again talk of territorial "living space" as the answer to economic difficulties. Japan and Germany built into their new constitutions a prohibition on using their armed forces for any military activity outside their frontiers. When the economic boom slowed down in Germany in the 1980s and in Japan in the 1990s, there was no serious political backlash.
On the next page, read about how the fall of the Soviet Union opened the door for a new global enemy: terrorism.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
The Fall of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Terrorism
The victory of communism in 1945 assured the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War and for more than 40 years, but the international Communist movement was anything but united. Tito's Yugoslavia refused to be part of the Communist bloc in 1948. Instead, it embarked on a more flexible Communist experiment, with firmer links with the West and less rigid economic controls.
In 1958 Soviet Union relations with Communist China deteriorated sharply at the moment when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to modernize the Chinese economy. By 1960 there was an open rupture between the two powers. Albania and a number of Communist movements in the developing world followed Mao's lead, and the Communist world divided between allegiance to either Moscow or Beijing.
In Western Europe, Communist parties became increasingly critical of the crude authoritarianism of the Soviet Union model. By the 1980s, Communist nations were forced to adapt to the realities of the more prosperous West. In 1985 a new Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, embarked on a new policy of openness and restructuring (glasnost and perestroika) to try to introduce a reformed communism with greater economic freedoms. Reform in the Soviet Union encouraged other Soviet bloc populations to question the Communist system.
When in 1989 Gorbachev prompted the other Communist regimes to accept change, there was widespread upheaval. A non-Communist regime emerged in Poland in August 1989, and over the following four months every Soviet bloc regime collapsed. That fall the Berlin Wall was breached, and in 1990 the divided halves of Germany were united again in a single state. In 1990 the Soviet Union itself began to crumble as the separate republics demanded independence, and in 1991 the Union was scrapped. The Communist parties were at least nominally dissolved and parliamentary systems were adopted throughout the former Soviet bloc, bringing to an end a long era of European dictatorships. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin was elected president on June 12, 1991.
The problems faced by the world in the 1990s and the early 21st century were problems not inherited directly from World War II. Global warming and environmental crises, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the turmoil in the Middle East, and the emergence of China as an economic superpower were the products of the postwar transformation of the industrial and political landscape. The "war on terror," provoked by the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, is a war quite different from World War II.
This new war is set in an unfamiliar international setting in which, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there is only one major power, the United States. American defense spending is currently equal to the spending of the rest of the world combined, but the targets of American intervention have been failing states (Afghanistan and Iraq). The contest takes place on a global scale, and it combines the very latest electronic technology against primitive bomb attacks and ambushes. Yet this enormous technological and military gap has not produced the assurance of victory as it did in 1945.
In the next section, read about the ongoing impact of World War II, which can be felt even today in countries around the world.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
The Continuing Impact of World War II
Even today, the shadow of World War II remains thinly visible. On one level, the war generated myths that became embedded in popular culture. Images from the war enjoyed an iconographic status: St. Paul's cathedral standing amid the ruins of the Blitz, U.S. servicemen raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, and the portrait of German Jewish girl Anne Frank, perhaps the Holocaust's best-known victim. Memorials to the dead were still being erected more than 60 years after the end of the war.
Meanwhile, the idea of "victim" and "perpetrator" has assumed a fresh poignancy. There has been much discussion, for instance, of "comfort women," the war-time sex slaves of Japanese soldiers. Moreover, the significance and impact of strategic bombing on civilians in Germany and Japan has been debated.
Other categories of victims were found among the forced labor force of the German and Japanese empires, and among the vast population of the Soviet Union concentration camps, which operated at the same time as Auschwitz and Dachau. The sense of right and wrong, which initially colored the popular view of the war, has become blurred.
In the West, the most enduring legacy of the war has been the memory of the Holocaust. No other single element of the war has recently attracted greater attention. In Washington, Berlin, London, and many other cities, museums dedicated to the Holocaust and to Jewish history have been founded within the last two decades. Stolen or confiscated Jewish assets have been tracked down, and a renewed effort of restitution has been set in motion.
The memory of the Holocaust also keeps alive the historical image of Adolf Hitler. Although World War II was comprised of many different wars, which between them had many causes, it is the terrible war unleashed by Hitler against the Jewish people that remains the most grotesque and conspicuous legacy of the 1940s, the most violent and murderous decade of modern times.
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- Postwar Europe and Japan: October 1945 - September 1951
John S. D, Eisenhower, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Rochard Overy Ph.D., David J. A. Stone, Wim Coleman, Martin F. Graham, James H. Hallas, Mark Johnston Ph.D., Christy Nadalin M.A., Pat Perrin, Peter Stanley Ph.D.