Fighting World War Three from the Middle East

Allied Contingency Plans, 1945-1954

Michael J. Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781136246982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This description of Allied contingency plans for military operations in the Middle East - in the event of conflict with the Soviet Union - argues that diplomatic events and crises in the Middle East in 1945-55 are understandable only in the context of assets sought by the Allies in that region.

1 American global strategy

In July 1945, at the first post-war peace conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, it soon became apparent that the Soviets were not going to honour the Yalta agreements to permit free elections in those states of Eastern Europe that had been occupied by the Germans and liberated by the Red Army.

The 'Cold War' had in fact begun well before World War Two had been won by the Allies. Stalin had given clear indications of his intentions back in August 1944. At that time, with his own armies approaching Warsaw, he had encouraged the pro-Western Polish Home Army to rebel against the Germans. Cynically, Stalin halted the advance of the Red Army, thereby allowing the Germans to decimate the Polish rebels.¹ This paved the way for the appointment by the Soviets of a pro-communist puppet regime. After the war, in a series of rigged 'elections' and stage-managed coups, communist regimes were installed in Eastern Europe, and an 'Iron Curtain' separated East from West.

At the same time, the Soviets exerted pressure in the Balkans and along the Northern Tier – against Greece, Turkey, and in northern Iran. Soviet support for the Tudeh Party in Iran revived painful memories of Hitler's incitement of local Nazi parties in Austria and Czechoslovakia prior to World War Two. Western leaders prided themselves on having 'learned the lessons' of Chamberlain's now-discredited pre-war appeasement policy.

The years 1946-48 witnessed a series of international crises – in Eastern Europe and across the Northern Tier, culminating with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in March 1948, and the Berlin crisis during the summer of that same year. They appeared to many in the American administration to portend a Soviet expansionist trend, a search for buffer zones, or spheres of influence between themselves and Western Europe. But Soviet actions might easily lead, if only by accident, to another global conflict, this time between the Western (capitalist) and the Soviet (communist) blocs.

In March 1946, the American Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC), attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), warned that Soviet pressure against Turkey and Iran might well ignite the spark that would start World War Three. Any Soviet success in Turkey would create pressure on vital British interests in the Middle East (oil and the Suez Canal), and might well force the UK to fight.²

After the war, there were two different interpretations of Soviet behaviour. One suggested that Soviet expansionism was motivated by the legitimate needs of self-defence (the erection of a Soviet-controlled barrier of satellites, to prevent another invasion from the West). The other believed the Soviets were embarked on an ideological, anticapitalist crusade for world domination. The latter school of thought, fathered by George Kennan, was pre-eminent in American military circles.

On 9 February 1946, following a UN Security Council demand that the Soviets withdraw from Iran, Josef Stalin made a speech condemning capitalist designs of encircling the 'peoples' democracies', and stressed the incompatibility of capitalism and communism. Stalin implied that future wars between the two systems were inevitable, until communism replaced capitalism as a world system. The State Department requested an estimate of Soviet intentions from its Moscow embassy. This elicited the highly-influential, so-called 'long telegram' from George Kennan, then a second-rank official at the embassy. Kennan's paper explained the ideological determinants of Soviet expansionist foreign policy, which no American actions could assuage. Kennan endowed the Truman administration with a new policy, the doctrine of containment.³

In November 1946, a JWPC strategic study made the following assessment of Soviet intentions:

. . . Soviet political policy is directed toward the expansion of their totalitarian state. Under the thesis that the world is divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps – Soviet and non-Soviet – Soviet expansionist aims must be considered as unlimited and not confined to areas which are at present of immediate and obvious concern to the Soviet Union. The proximate objective of Soviet foreign policy appears to be the establishment of Soviet domination over the Eurasian continent and control of the strategic approaches thereto.⁴

But the true motives laying behind Soviet strategy were almost irrelevant to Western strategic planners. Soviet actions, even through miscalculation, might lead to World War Three. The mission of the Chiefs of Staff, and their planning staffs, on both sides of the Atlantic, was to recommend measures whereby their countries might best ready themselves to prevail over the Soviet Union and its satellites, in the event of a new global conflict.

A. The Dimension of the Soviet Threat and Initial Strategic Studies

Notwithstanding the strategists' anxieties, the Soviets' expansionist stratagems after World War Two found the United States 'unprepared militarily, politically, and psychologically.'⁵ American contingency planning for the eventuality of World War Three was inefficient, ad hoc, and beset by civilian-military, and inter-service rivalries. In the initial postwar years, the JCS was able to agree on war plans only for short-term or emergency contingencies, on the basis of forces that would hopefully be available some time in the future. Each of the four strategic plans approved before 1950 was later declared to be infeasible, on the basis of its logistic and force requirements.

Strategic blueprints for war were based on incomplete intelligence estimates, and on unrealistic assessments of the military potential of her new allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, established in April 1949). At times, the JCS harboured inflated expectations about the areas the United States would be able to defend. At other times, planning forecasts reflected exaggerated fears about the extent of the territories the Soviets would be able to overrun in their opening ground offensive.

Frequently, planners failed to keep up with the pace of events. The majority of staff plans and studies generated by the various subcommittees of the JCS addressed current problems that, for better or worse, had usually faded from view before the studies had reached their final draft. Had war with the Soviets actually broken out at any time between 1945 to 1950, the Americans would have been forced to improvise in the field. They were unable to anticipate, or to plan ahead, and were therefore ill-prepared for a global conflict with the Soviets.

After World War Two, the United States, as leader of the 'free world', assumed prime responsibility for providing a military answer to the Soviet Union's overwhelming conventional military superiority on the ground. This superiority became the more pronounced, as domestic pressures inside the United States led to the rapid, accelerated demobilisation of American armed forces after the war. One week after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (6 August 1945), President Truman promised to release five-and-a-half million men and women from the armed forces within 12 to 18 months. He was better than his word. Within just eight months, nearly seven million members of the armed forces had been demobilised. By June 1946, American armed forces had been reduced from their wartime level of over ten million, to approximately three million. By June 1947, that number had been reduced to just over one and a half million.⁶

In 1946, the Soviet Union was estimated to have a total of four-and-a-half million men under arms. These were distributed among some 208 ground divisions, of which 93 were deployed facing allied forces in Europe. They were also estimated to have some 15,500 combat aircraft (including 11 bomber regiments, comprising 1696 aircraft), of which 7200 aircraft were deployed against Europe. To these, there had to be added some 100 ground divisions and 3,300 aircraft belonging to the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. American intelligence believed that, in the event of war, the Soviets would be able to mobilise up to ten-and-a-half million men within 30 days, and to reach a peak of fifteen million in 150 days.⁷

Opinion polls revealed that a majority of the American public believed that a major war with the Soviets was inevitable. On 17 March 1948, Truman called for the return of the military draft. It is not to be wondered then that American post-war military thinking was dominated by 'the realization that the United States was unprepared to counter Soviet conventional forces'. However, this situation of potential vulnerability was not accompanied by any immediate, direct threat to American interests.⁸

All contingency planning posited that the Soviets' primary goal in a war would be the conquest of Western Europe. But officials of the Truman administration, both civil and military, did not believe that the threat of a Soviet military attack in that theatre was imminent. They were convinced that the Soviet Union would need several more years to make good the damage its economy had suffered during the war, and to modernise its armed forces. The Soviet potential for war was considered to be low, and Western planners concurred that the Soviets would need considerably more time in which to assimilate their satellites, and to develop a strategic air force or an effective air defence sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary of contingency plans
• Introduction
• 1. American global strategy
• 2. The United States and the Middle East
• 3. The Middle East in British global strategy
• 4. The Strategic and Military importance of Palestine
• 5. The Egyptian Base – and alternative options
• 6. British plans for the defence of the Middle East
• 7. Israel's place in Allied Middle East plans
• 8. Regional defence schemes
• 9. The demise of the Egypt-centred strategy
• 10. The switch to the Northern Tier
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Costs of Maintaining the British base in Egypt, 1937-1953 00
• Bibliography
• Index