The Cold War's Killing Fields

Paul Thomas Chamberlin

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062367228
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This sweeping, international military history boldly reframes the Cold War as one of the three great conflicts of the twentieth century. The Cold War has long been viewed as a tense diplomatic standoff between global superpowers representing democracy and communism. Yet it fostered a series of deadly conflicts on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy accord hung over Europe, ferocious wars raged in the Cold War's killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history. A superb work of scholarship, The Cold War's Killing Fields is the first global military history of this conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare. Chamberlin explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the United States and the USSR, and determine the fates of societies throughout the Third World.

1

The Iron Curtain Descends

1945–1947

Three hours past midnight on April 16, 1945, approximately nine thousand Soviet guns opened fire on German positions along the Seelow Heights guarding the eastern approaches to Berlin. “Along the whole length of the horizon it was bright as daylight,” a Russian engineer remembered. Soviet troops were forced to cover their ears to avoid burst eardrums from the bombardment. In the sky above, flocks of birds wheeled amid clouds of smoke that poured up from the German lines. Forty miles from the front, terrified residents waited as their walls trembled from the distant barrage. After nearly six years of war, Adolf Hitler’s capital lay besieged before the Red Army. Three Soviet fronts comprising 2.5 million men closed around the last fortress of the Third Reich. In the coming days, Soviet commanders would unleash a crushing assault that devastated Berlin. Savage street fighting tore through city blocks as the last of the Wehrmacht fell before the Soviet onslaught. Russian forces stormed the capital, raping and pillaging in an orgy of mass violence. “A ghost town of cave dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis,” reported a representative from the Red Cross. Seventy-five miles to the west, American forces camped along the Elbe River waited to meet the advancing Red Army. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier, had built the mightiest army the world had ever seen, one that outnumbered American and British forces by a factor of four to one. Though they celebrated the Third Reich’s collapse, no one could have blamed the American commanders for feeling anxious. If Stalin chose not to halt his legions in Germany but to send them into western Europe, perhaps no force on earth could stop the Communist juggernaut. That was about to change.¹

Less than four months later, a brilliant light flashed across the skies above Hiroshima, followed by a crushing shock wave that ripped out across the city, accompanied by a burst of intense heat. At ground zero, the courtyard of Shima Hospital, temperatures reached 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. People near the epicenter of the explosion were instantly vaporized. The explosion reduced human bodies, historian Richard Rhodes would write, “to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away.” The heat from the bomb ignited thousands of fires around the city, which set off a vortex of air currents that took the form of a firestorm. Ninety-two percent of Hiroshima’s 76,000 buildings were destroyed. The stunned survivors found themselves lost in a burned-out wasteland. Corpses clogged the Ota River as a radioactive black rain spattered across the charred ruins of what had been, only hours before, Japan’s seventh largest city. Approximately 130,000 people were killed instantly; 110,000 of them were civilians. Another 140,000 died by the end of the year. Soon after, President Harry Truman announced the bombing. If the Japanese leadership did not surrender, he explained, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” More bombs were in production, and the United States intended to use them. Three days later, Truman made good on his promise and dropped a second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese Empire surrendered, and the largest war in human history came to an end.²

More than sixty million people died in the Second World War. Cities across Europe and Asia lay in ruins. As survivors wandered through the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Allied troops in Europe picked their way through the ghastly remains of Nazi concentration camps, where Hitler’s minions had slaughtered millions as part of a genocidal campaign against Jews, Soviet POWs, Poles, Romani, and others deemed undesirable. The discovery of mass graves scattered across the countryside to the east would soon drive the grisly toll even higher. In China, between ten million and twenty million people had died as a result of Japan’s bid to carve out its own empire in Asia. Japan’s murderous campaigns destroyed decades of European colonial rule throughout the region, replacing it, briefly, with an empire centered in Tokyo that rivaled Berlin in its brutality. Much of the war had been a clash between authoritarian governments—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

On the other side of the Eurasian landmass, a massive stream of refugees moved out across Europe. “The roads, footpaths, tracks, and trains were crammed full of ragged, hungry, dirty people,” writes historian Anne Applebaum. “Starving mothers, sick children, and sometimes entire families camped on filthy cement floors for days on end.”³ A report from the International Labour Office estimated that the war in Europe had driven more than thirty million Europeans from their homes.⁴ Many of the war’s survivors now sought revenge. Soviet forces in the east unleashed a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to carve off the eastern territories of Germany. After seizing valuables, Polish troops forced German civilians into cattle wagons headed west to the new borders of Germany. The German population of East Prussia was reduced from 2.2 million to 193,000. An estimated 200,000 Germans were corralled into labor camps; another 600,000 were sent east to labor in the USSR. Czechoslovakia drove 3 million Germans from their homes, killing 30,000. Another 5,558 committed suicide.⁵

Yet the scale of destruction reached beyond the horrifying human toll. The greatest war in human history laid waste to a world order that had existed for centuries. For nearly five hundred years, the Great Powers of Europe (and, more recently, Japan) had pursued a relentless campaign of expansion that divided most of the world into colonial possessions. While colonized peoples often exercised significant autonomy at the local level, the imperial powers dominated the world stage. The Second World War dealt a deathblow to this old order. While the United States had crushed Japan’s empire in the east, the battle for Europe broke Britain’s and France’s holds on their colonies. Though victorious governments in London and Paris sought to reconstruct ties to their colonies, the twilight of their empires had long since fallen.* The world now entered one of the greatest geopolitical transformations in history. As the tide of imperial power receded, the shape of the postwar global order remained unclear. If the end of the war marked the twilight of the imperial era, it also signaled the beginning of a general crisis in world affairs.

The battle for control of this new global order would take place amid the ruins of empire.⁶ The two most powerful rivals for succession, the United States and the Soviet Union, commanded massive armed forces. The battle-hardened Red Army represented the largest military force ever assembled. While numerically smaller, the U.S. Army wielded nuclear weapons capable of instantaneously incinerating entire population centers. Having built these awesome forces, the superpowers faced the choice of whether to sheath their weapons or to embark on a new campaign to achieve global preeminence. Although Washington and Moscow were the strongest contestants in the struggle for supremacy, they were not the only ones. As the imperial powers’ ability to control their empires failed, a host of nationalists, revolutionaries, and warlords surged forward to claim power throughout the colonized world. What these postcolonial forces lacked in military might, they sought to make up for in revolutionary zeal. In the months following the end of World War II, the broad shape of the world crisis came into view. While the two superpowers engaged in an increasingly tense struggle for global power that would soon become known as the Cold War, the peoples of the developing world fought to establish their own states in a sweeping and often violent process of decolonization. Meeting upon a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, superpowers, revolutionaries, and small states would each play a role in the post-1945 world crisis and in shaping the world that followed.

TREACHEROUS ALLIES

On May 24, 1945, sixteen days after Germany’s surrender, British prime minister Winston Churchill commissioned a top-secret study titled “Operation Unthinkable” to investigate the possibility of launching a joint U.S.-British attack on the Red Army to begin on July 1. Churchill hoped to force Stalin to relax his grip on Eastern Europe. British military planners warned that such an action could prove disastrous. Anglo-American forces could draw on 47 divisions for an offensive, leaving 40 divisions for reserve and defensive operations. The Soviets could respond with 170 divisions “of equivalent strength” and muster a two-to-one advantage in armor. In order to counter this advantage, military planners suggested rearming German units (recently defeated Nazis) and sending them once again into battle against the Red Army. Furthermore, they did not expect Anglo-American strategic bombing to provide a decisive advantage given the dispersal of Russian industry. Likewise, British strategists warned that there was “virtually no limit to the distance to which it would be necessary for the Allies to penetrate into Russia in order to render further resistance impossible.” The British chief of the Imperial General Staff therefore concluded that the “chances of success [were] quite impossible.” Although Churchill insisted that the operation was nothing more than a contingency study, generals in the Red Army (whose spies had informed them of the study almost immediately) were not so sure.⁷

The behavior of Moscow’s wartime allies hardly inspired confidence in the Kremlin. After all, Britain and France had been the first to appease Hitler’s ambitions in 1938 at Munich, where Neville Chamberlain had proclaimed “peace in our time.” Chamberlain’s successor, Churchill, was an inveterate anticommunist. In 1941, as millions of Russians were being slaughtered by the Germans, a junior senator from Missouri had suggested that the United States sit back and feed the flames of war in Europe: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” That junior senator, Harry Truman, was now president of the United States. Even after Washington entered the war, the Americans and the British proved lukewarm allies. While the Wehrmacht rampaged through Western Russia, leaders in Washington and London bided their time. Stalin’s pleas in 1942 for his allies to open a second front in western Europe went unheeded. Instead, the British and Americans launched an invasion of North Africa—seemingly aimed at preserving British imperial possessions in the Mediterranean. Rather than striking at Nazi power in France and Germany in 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill chose to invade Italy. The Allies would not open a true second front until June 1944, nearly a year and a half after the Soviet Union turned back the German invasion at the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. By the time British and American soldiers stormed the beaches at Normandy in June 1944, the Red Army had the Wehrmacht on its heels. Even worse, Washington and London refused to share the secrets of the atomic bomb with Moscow. While American and British scientists hurried the weapon to production, Stalin relied on an extensive network of spies to provide news of its development. Such a betrayal could hardly have surprised the Soviet leader. The Americans and the British had launched a clumsy intervention in 1917 at the Russian port of Archangel in a bid to prevent a Communist victory in the Russian Civil War. That the capitalist governments should prove treacherous allies in the great battle against Nazism was no great shock.

American and British leaders were equally suspicious of Stalin. Although their wartime propaganda lauded “Uncle Joe” as a stalwart ally in the fight against Hitler, officials in Washington and London had few illusions about the Communist dictator. As the shadow of war loomed over Europe in 1938, Moscow signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Germany and the Soviet Union pledged not to attack one another and agreed to divide Poland, a tragic casualty of Great Power diplomacy.

While Hitler struck at France and Britain in 1940, Stalin stood aside. It would take a full-scale German invasion of the Soviet Union to draw Stalin into the war. The Russian people paid dearly for Stalin’s misplaced trust in Hitler. More than twenty million Russians would die in the heaviest fighting of the war. To turn the tide, Stalin assembled a massive war machine that had smashed its way to the Elbe, crushing all resistance in its path. Leaders in Washington and London now had every reason to believe that Stalin would maintain his hold on eastern Europe. Furthermore, if any wondered what Soviet dominion over eastern Europe might look like, they needed to look no further than Stalin’s brutal reign in the Soviet Union itself. In the decade before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Soviet regime had unleashed a campaign of violence against its own people. Some 5 million people died as a result of forced collectivization in the early 1930s; 750,000 were shot as part of political purges; another million were sent to the Gulag.⁸ Stalin was just as harsh toward eastern Europeans. In March 1940, on the recommendation of his chief of security, Lavrenty Beria, Stalin ordered the mass execution of at least 25,000 Polish prisoners (many of them military officers) as a means of quashing any resistance to Soviet occupation. Soviet officials dumped their corpses in mass graves in Katyn Forest in Russia.⁹

Yet the animosity between Washington and Moscow ran deeper than wartime disputes. At its heart lay an ideological clash between competing American and Soviet visions for a postwar international order. As the world’s largest capitalist country, the United States hoped to lead the way in creating a world of nation-states with free-market economies and linked by a common global market across which goods and capital flowed largely unimpeded. Washington also supported liberal-democratic political systems, although political freedom was secondary to free trade. As the world’s largest economy and manufacturer circa 1945, the United States had much to gain from such a world. In contrast, the Soviet Union, as the world’s first successful socialist state, looked to lead a postwar world marching toward communism. Stalin and his comrades were convinced that, while the capitalist and imperialist powers of the world would resist revolution, their exploitative socioeconomic models were bankrupt—as evidenced by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and Nazism in the preceding decade. Having crushed the Third Reich, the Soviets hoped to encourage the rise of fellow Communist states around the world.¹⁰

PROBING ACTIONS

Such ideological rivalries might have remained academic had it not been for the scale of destruction wrought by the Second World War. The collapse of the old imperial order left a massive power vacuum throughout swaths of Eurasia and opened the door to superpower competition to fill the void. At the center of this emerging struggle sat the city of Berlin and the so-called German question. The Allied powers divided a prostrate Germany into zones of occupation at the close of the war. British and American leaders, and the somewhat less enthusiastic French, hoped to rebuild Germany as one of the cornerstones of a stable, prosperous postwar Europe. Failure to integrate Germany into the emerging western European capitalist system would not only strip that system of one of its strongest members but also sow deep resentments among the German people. But Moscow, which had suffered the brunt of the Nazi assault, favored a policy of repression. Stalin was adamant that Germany never regain the ability to threaten the USSR. In the months following the end of the war, the differences between the Allied victors fell into increasingly sharp relief. By the end of 1945, leaders in both Moscow and Washington came to embrace the idea of separate spheres of influence in Germany and, ultimately, Europe. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system,” Stalin told Yugoslav Communists in April 1945. “Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” If this arrangement appeared to settle the matter of superpower influence in Europe, it left open the question of superpower influence in the rest of the world. British and American leaders hoped that Stalin, having been granted a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, would be content to leave the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Anglophone powers. But Stalin was hardly content with dominion in Eastern Europe. The United States and Britain each had spheres of influence outside Europe, but the Russians, Stalin complained to British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, “had nothing.” A stunned Bevin protested, explaining “that the Soviet sphere extended from Lübeck ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Geography of Cold War–Era Violence
• 1: The Iron Curtain Descends, 1945–1947
• Part I: The East Asian Offensive and the Rise of Third World Communism, 1945–1954
• Part II: The Indo-Asian Bloodbaths and the Fall of Third World Communism, 1964–1979
• Part III: The Great Sectarian Revolt of the Late Cold War, 1975–1990
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher