· ..;:Holocaust claimed the lives of almost six million European Jews. In·B.'tens of millions of displace4\Sersons further contributed to the diffic /areas destroyed by war. .," '

At the end of the war in Europe, eight million Germans fled acrto surrender or to seek refuge in the territories soon to be occupiedand the United States. They wanted to avoid capture and presumsRed Arr.nYand Sow;t oCCl~pier~.~he behavi~r of Soviet troops; ,raped WIth abandoIP'm Berlin, did little to alleviate the fears of thos 'cupation. Joining the refugees were twelve million German and Sovi'making their way home, along with the survivors of work and deathmillion refugees from the Balkan lands. This massive population shifton the political transformations taking place in Europe and around

At the same time, the cold war between the Soviet Union and,'was beginning. This long-drawn-out conflict (1947-1990) wouldglobal populations, categorizing humans and nations as sin'Soviet Union or the United States. The cold war came to define-rone of political, ideological, and economic hostility between the"Cold war hostilities affected nations around the globe, but tile',frained from armed conflict in Europe, but not in Asia.

The Origins Throughout most of World War II, Hitler had rested some ofof the Cold War tory on his doubts about the unlikely alliance fighting against',

that the alliance of the communist Soviet Union, imperialist Gnunwarlike U.S. democracy would break up over ideological diffe.the staunch~anticommunist Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) assumtafter Roosevelt's death, however, the Grand Alliance held-at leasHitler underestimated the extent to which opposition to his re ,such unusual allies. Winston Churchill had made the point in ,Britain aligned itself with the Soviet Union after the German ininvaded Hell, I would at least make favorable I!ter~~e to the Dof Commons." Sft"

.' . The necessity of defeating the Axis nations glued the Alliest16:1~ (,j}W there w:ere tension.s amon? them. The Soviets .bristle~r;it the delay"tV the United States m openmg the second front, and differences oLQ

war settlements arose during the wartime conferences held at Yalta:and Potsdam (Iuly-August 1945). By the time of the Yalta Confe,were 64 kilometers (40 miles) from Berlin, and they controlled ,that Churchill and Roosevelt could do little to alter Stalin's pl .rope. They attempted to convince Stalin to allow democracy in-Pesupported their own democratic Polish government in exile, buSoviet-occupied nations prevailed. He installed a communist goveand took similar steps elsewhere in eastern Europe, adhering tothof occupying and controlling those territories liberated by one's.o "

At Yalta, Stalin ensured that the Red Army's presence would.dstates liberated by the Soviets, and at Potsdam the new U.S·ptTruman, initiated the harder-line stance of the United States, confitle Soviet aid would be needed to defeat Japan. The successfiil.tbomb while Truman was at Potsdam stiffened the president's res,over postwar settlements intensified, Having just fought a brutalthe survival of their ways of life, neither the United States-nor;would easily forgo the chance to remake occupied territories ascommunist allies.

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CHAPTER 36 NEW CONFLAGRATIONS: WORLD WAR II AND THE EARLY COLD WAR 967

In Europe and Asia postwar occupation and territorial divisions reflected bothhard postwar realities and the new schism between the Soviet Union and the UnitedStates. All that the Allies could agree on was the dismemberment<16fAxis states andtheir possessions. The Soviets took over the eastern sections of Germany, and theUnited States, Britain, and France occupied the western portions. The capital city ofBerlin, deep within the Soviet area, remained under the control of all four powers.Because of the rising hostility between the Soviets and their allies, no peace treatywas signed with Germany, and by the late 1940s these haphazard postwar territorialarrangements had solidified into a divided Germany. As Churchill proclaimed in

. 1946, an "iron curtain" had come down on Europe. Behind that curtain were thenations controlled by the Soviet Union, including East Germany and Poland, whileon the other side were the capitalist nations of western Europe. A somewhat similardivision occurred in Asia. While the United States alone occupied Japan, Korea re-mained occupied half by the Soviets and half by the Americans.

The enunciatioPof the Truman Doctrine .on 12 March 1947 crystallized the newU.S. perception of a world divided between free and enslaved peoples. Articulated inpart in response to crises in Greece and Turkey, where communist movements seemedto threatened democracy as well as western strategic interests, the Truman doctrinestarkly drew the battle lines of the cold war. As Truman explained to the U.S. Congress:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between al-ternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is basedupon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representativegovernment, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and reli-gion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon thewill of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and repres-sion, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal free-doms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peopleswho are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Postwar TerritorialDivisiond-~,t.<i "'j ~ak

The TrumanDoctrin@al'/noftvl ~~t--

The United States then committed itself to an interventionist foreign policy, dedicated:. to the "containment" of communism, which meant preventing any further expansion S .~}u.\of Soviet influence. The United States sent vast sums of money to Greece and Turkey, r-:;)"~r;.. ,

: and the world was polarize~to two armed camps, each led by a superpower that G}'~ .·provided economic alia IDi1itaryaid to nations within its spheres of influence.

Global Reconstruction and the United NationsAs an economic adjunct to the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. government developed a The Marshall Plan, plan to help shore up the destroyed infrastructures of western Europe. The Euro-pean Recovery Program, commonly called the Marshall Plan after U.S. secretary of· state George C. Marshall (1880-1959), propos~ to rebuild European economiesr , .ithrough cooperation and capitalism, torestallingiltommunist or Soviet influence in :~1~1.I~·~:.'the devastated nations of Europe. Proposed ill '1947 and funded in 1948, the Mar- c:t-. .shall Plan provided more than $13 billion to reconstruct western Europe.

Although initially included in the nations invited to participate in the Marshall"Plan, the Soviet Union resisted what it saw as capitalist imperialism and countered,with a plan for its own satellite nations. The Soviet Union established the Council forMutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1949, offering increased trade withinthe Soviet Union and eastern Europe as an alternative to the Marshall Plan. Both theSoviet and U.S. recovery plans for Europe tended to benefit the superpowers eitherby providing lucrative markets or resources. Yet even these economic programs were·cut back as more spending shifted to building up military defenses.

NATO and the The creation of the u.S.-sponsored North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)Warsaw Pact and the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact signaled the militarization of the cold war. In

1949 the United States established NATO as a regional military alliance against Soviet :.aggression. The original members included Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, GreatBritain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and theUnited States. The intent of the alliance was to maintain peace in postwar Europethrough collective defense. When NATO admitted West Germany and allowed it torearm in 1955, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact as a countermeasure. A military al- .'liance of seven communist European nations, the Warsaw Pact matched the collectivedefense policies of NATO. Europe's contrasting economic and military alliances were .'part of postwar global reconstruction, and they gave definition to the early cold war.

;to / The United States and the Soviet Union had become global superpowers as a re-~ 3ttu'1J, It/;'N~"Of!ult of World War II--:-eithe~ through territorial ~ggrandizemer;land a massive army,din the case of the Soviet Union, or through tremendous economic prospenty and in-dustrial capacity, in the case of the United States. The dislocation of European andAsian peoples aided the superpowers' quests for world !.:.egemony,'but so too didtheir idealism-however much that idealism cloaked self-interest. Each wanted toguard its preciously won victory by creating alliances and alignments that would sup-port its way of life. The territorial rearrangements of the postwar world, either a di- .rect result of the war or a consequence of the decolonization that followed, gave .'both superpowers a vast field in which to compete.

Despite their many differences, the superpowers were among the nations thatagreed to the creation of the United Nations (UN), a supranational organizationdedicated to keeping world peace. The commitment to establish a new internationalorganization derived from Allied cooperation during the war, and in 1944 represen-tatives from China, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States finalizedmost of the proposals for the organization at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.The final version of the United Nations charter was hammered out by delegatesfrom fifty nations at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945. TheUnited Nations was dedicated to maintaining international peace and security andpromoting friendly relations among the world's nations. It offered an alternative forglobal reconstruction that was independent of the cold war. q;;

It rapidly became clear, however, that international peace and security ~ boththe United Nations and the superpowers. The cold war dominated postwar recon~struction efforts. It remained cold for the most part, characterized by ideological andpropaganda campaigns, although certain events came perilously close to warming up ...the conflict-as when the Chinese communists gained victory over the nationalists iri1949, thereby joining the Soviets as a major communist power. The cold war also be-,came "hot" in places like Korea between 1950 and 1953, and it had the potential toescalate into a war even more destructive than World War II. The Soviet Union brokethe U.S. monopoly on the atomic bomb in September 1949, and from that point o~:;the world held its collective breath, for a nuclear war was too horrible to contemplate.I.!::!.;.

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PART VII THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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At rl'l{ _ of World War II, it was possible for a U.S. marine to enjoy the hospi-.tal~ a,/(a'Fanese family in Nagasaki, but not for Soviet and U.S. troops to .

i~,--/tinue !E.9J?ll'tingin camaraderie. World War II was a total global war that forcedlent encounters between peoples and radically altered the political shape of