The Third World War
 |
| The cover art of Collier's
magazine, October 27, 1951, depicting a fictional World War III ending
with the occupation of the Soviet Union (Illustration by Richard Deane
Taylor) |
In 1951,
Collier's magazine published "
Preview of the War We Do Not Want," an entire issue devoted to chronicling a hypothetical World War III set in the near future. The war, described as the deadliest in history, lasts from
1952 to 1955, and pits a United Nations coalition against the Soviet Union
after an uprising in Yugoslavia triggers worldwide conflict. Nuclear attacks are launched on major
American and Russian cities, including
Washington, D.C. and
Moscow. The issue's intent was to provide a "cautionary tale" of just how devastating a large-scale war in the Atomic Age could be.
This literary narrative by
Robert E. Sherwood outlines the full history of this war. The story begins with an assassination attempt on Marshal Josip Tito in Belgrade.
From
Collier's magazine, October 27, 1951, pp. 19-20; 22-31; 68-78:
THE THIRD WORLD WAR
By ROBERT E. SHERWOOD
Resulting from a terrible Kremlin miscalculation, it plunged a whole world into incredible horror. But the outcome was inevitable: a smashing victory for the West, and the promise of a better era.
Since the end of hostilities in 1955 the UN Historical Commission has been preparing the history of the War with the U.S.S.R. The completion of this massive work is many years distant, but Collier's at this time has asked Robert E. Sherwood, one of the American delegates, to write a broad outline of the findings to date. — THE EDITORS
Moscow, 1960
The most unnecessary, most senseless and deadliest war in history—the third World War—reached the shooting stage at exactly 1:58 p. m.
G.M.T., Saturday, May 10, 1952.
At that moment, Marshal Tito
smiled benevolently at a delegation of 120 Serbian peasants whose
leather-thonged moccasins scuffed on the forecourt of the White Palace
in Belgrade as they rushed toward him cheering and singing: "Tito our
little white violet."
They were peasants of the state farm at Bavanište, one of the first collectives established in Yugoslavia. They
were on hand to receive the marshal's personal thanks for their seven
years of above-quota production. Tito had been coming ever closer
physically to the people. In recent public appearances he had often been
engulfed by crowds of admirers—once at the opening of an art exhibit
and again at the ceremony celebrating the linking of two branches of the
Youth Railway in Bosnia.
This had been a source of extreme worry
to General Alexander Ranković, the devoted officer who was responsible
for Tito's security. But Tito scoffed at the general's fears and
constantly sought to wave away the secret police when they intervened
between him and the enthusiastic crowds.
Ranković infiltrated
several of his own policemen, dressed in peasant costumes, among the
delegation from Bavanište. He did not know that the MVD in Moscow had
also infiltrated two of its secret agents into this crowd. They were
Dushan Petrović and Luka Borlic, Moscow-trained fanatics who knew only
one god, and that one god was Stalin.
In the past four years they
had been extremely clever in giving the Yugoslav secret police no cause
whatsoever to suspect them. Their mission in life was the assassination
of Tito. They were careful never to depart from the peasant routine.
They came to Belgrade only when groups of other coworkers visited the
capital. Then they made contact with their MVD liaison in Topčider, the
park to which the people of Belgrade flock when the weather is good.
The Bavanište delegation arrived in Belgrade on the evening of May 9th and
were installed in the Balkan Hotel in the center of the city. They were
welcomed by Ministry of Agriculture officials and told to enjoy
themselves in their weekend visit to the capital, the high point of
which would, of course, be their reception by Marshal Tito himself.
Petrović and Borlic persuaded several of their comrades to join them in a trip
to Topčider's crowded restaurant. As the slivovitz flowed freely, Petrović and Borlic left the table for the washroom, where they were
hailed by a friend who greeted them warmly and gave them a handful of
cigars, a rare luxury in Yugoslavia at that time. When the assassins
returned to their table, they did not share the cigars with their
comrades.
The following afternoon, as Petrović and Borlic
advanced toward Tito, two of these cigars, unlighted, were clenched in
their teeth. There was nothing unusual about this. Other peasants who
were lucky enough to have cigarettes or cigars were smoking as they
carried baskets of fruit and vegetables for presentation to their
leader. It was not considered social awkwardness nor a mark of
disrespect.
The assassins maneuvered themselves into positions
behind little Maria Serdic, eight years old, who had been selected from Bavanište to present a bouquet of spring flowers to the marshal.
Ranković's
policemen were joining in the exuberant shouts of "Zivio Tito!" ("Long
live Tito!") and the chanting of "Tito our little white violet." But
they were keeping their eyes on the peasants around them.
When
they were approximately 20 feet from Tito, first Petrović, then Borlic
tossed the cigars at the marshal and, as they did so, flung themselves
to the ground.
Two explosions ripped the court and screams
reverberated throughout the suburban Dedinje district which the White
Palace dominates. The cigars which Petrović and Borlic had obtained in
the washroom of Topčider's restaurant were lethal Soviet adaptations of
the so-called "Bouncing Betty" pocket grenades developed by the Nazis.
• • •
In
Belgrade's magnificent new broadcasting station, the Yugoslavian
Symphony Orchestra had just completed the third movement of Beethoven's
Fifth. As the sweeping second hand of the studio clock touched 2:00 p.
m. G.M.T., six members of the orchestra left their seats. They were
armed. One of them advanced to the microphone. The others took up
strategic positions around the studio. At that same instant an armed man
appeared in the engineering control room. Yugoslavia and monitors
throughout the world heard this: "Tito is dead! Tito is dead! The
Yugoslav people have arisen and put to death the Fascist, Trotskyite
bandit Tito!"
This was the signal for the start of 32 months of
unlimited catastrophe for the human race, in the course of which
millions of innocent people met violent deaths—millions of people who
had asked only for the right to live among their neighbors in peace.
Among their scorched, shattered graveyards were the atomized ruins of
Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, London and
eventually Moscow.
At 2:00 p. m. G.M.T. (it was 9:00 a. m.
E.S.T., in Washington) the President of the United States arrived at the
Anacostia naval base to board the Presidential yacht Williamsburg for a
weekend cruise on Chesapeake Bay. As he boarded the ship he chided the
Secretary of the Treasury, who accompanied him, on the "excessive"
number of Secret Service men assigned for his protection.
The
British Prime Minister at that same moment was driving from London on
the Portsmouth Road to the races at Sandown Park. The night before, in
the House of Commons, he had listened to speeches by extreme left-wing
Socialists demanding drastic reductions in rearmament expenditures.
The
President of France was finishing lunch with General Eisenhower in the
latter's home at Marnes-la-Coquette, a sleepy suburb of Paris,
preparatory to inspecting the latest French armored division to join
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) forces.
In Moscow, at
2:30 p. m. G.M.T., Lavrentiy Beria, head of the MVD, raised his glass and
wished long life to Joseph Stalin, who remarked humorously that his
life would now be easier with Tito a corpse.
But Tito was no
corpse. Petrović made one mistake: when he took the cigar from his
mouth, he drew back his hand too deliberately, as though it were not a
cigar but a heavy grenade he was hurling. One of Ranković's men who was
behind the assassins noticed this odd gesture and shouted "Haida!"
("Watch out!"). There was an instantaneous, long-practiced rush of
policemen about Tito's person.
Few eyewitnesses have ever been
able to agree in their descriptions of what happened. Five policemen and
four innocent peasants lay dead in the forecourt of the White Palace;
three other policemen and nine peasants were dying or maimed. The
mangled body of little Maria Serdic was covered with the spring flowers
from her bouquet.
Petrović and Borlic were also dead, their bodies riddled with bullets from the guns of the police.
Tito
was stunned by the explosions, but not so badly that he was unable to
give immediate orders for medical aid for the victims of the outrage.
• • •
 |
| "Yugoslav
guards leap to protect Tito as Soviet murder attempt fails. Despite
careful Kremlin plotting, incident misfired, set off war" (Painting by
Walter Richards, p. 26) |
Within
the hour, uprisings organized by the Cominform took place at key points
in Yugoslavia; communications were sabotaged throughout the country,
including the dynamiting of the radio transmitters, directly after the
announcement had been broadcast to the world.
For months, tension
had been building in the country over the Macedonian, Albanian and
Hungarian minority questions and the Croat-Serb differences. All of this
had been carefully fostered by the Cominform, whose agents had been
given precise instructions for action when the flash came.
Intense
confusion and despair prevailed throughout the nation. The silence of
Radio Belgrade was terrifying. To the Yugoslav people—and to the rest of
the world— the words "Tito is dead" meant that "Yugoslavia is dead,"
that the country would now become a slave camp, deprived of
independence, dignity and hope. This, of course, was precisely what
Moscow had counted on; Stalin, the dictator, had reason to know the
overwhelming importance of the person of Tito, the dictator.
Moscow
broadcast to the Yugoslavs that not only was their former leader dead,
but their country was in a state of revolt "to wipe out the last vestige
of Tito's treachery and to liquidate the people's enemies, the lackeys
of Wall Street imperialism."
At the height of the terror, the following hurried report was cabled from Belgrade by Collier's correspondent Seymour Freidin:
"A
huge mass of humanity, jabbering excitedly, packed the center of the
city. Coffeehouses on the Terazije emptied magically and the wicker
chairs on the sidewalk cafes were trod to bits by thousands of tramping
feet as the crowds milled in search of news at the hub of the capital.
"Office
workers—their day completed at 2:00 p. m.—hailed freshly arrived
peasants from the outlying districts of the capital, while oxcarts
careened into the jammed streets. The screech of automobile brakes could
scarcely be distinguished above the rising crescendo of shouts and
screams from the hysterical, bewildered Yugoslavs.
"The lone
policeman who usually directs traffic in the capital's main square had
given up. His light khaki uniform and white-visored cap could be seen
occasionally among the dark brown of the army, the blue of special
police off duty and the patchwork of frayed civilian clothes and
brightly hued peasant dress.
"Among these apprehensive people,
agents of Moscow, the agit-props (agitator-propagandists), spread their
messages of defeat. To the news-starved population they passed along
rumors, which became distorted from mouth to mouth. A cargo plane from
Zemun airport, circling the city on a routine flight, was singled out:
"'Russian planes!'
"The
tragic memories of mass German bombing of Belgrade 11 years before
hadn't been effaced from most minds. Hoarse shouts echoed from the
crowds. Mothers screamed for their children. On the corner leading
toward the domed Parliament building, a group disentangled from the
crowd and began to run.
"The streets became a shrieking scene of
thousands seeking to fight their way in a wild, aimless dash for safety. 'Russian bombers!' The cry was taken up by 50,000 throats.
"Men, women and children trampled on one another. Horses and oxen snorted in fear and plunged through the hysterical crowds.
"Suddenly,
sirens keened above the shouting crowds. The noise only heightened the
impression of an air raid. But these were armored cars sealing off the
square. Helmeted police and soldiers, tommy guns and bayonet-fixed
rifles cradled in their arms, took up positions at every intersection.
"From microphones on the armored cars boomed the message: 'Remain tranquil. Calm yourselves. We are prepared to meet the enemy. Do not help them with hysteria.'
"The
soldiers blocked exits from the square. Crowds hurled themselves at the
human roadblocks. 'Behave like true Yugoslavs,' the microphones
thundered. 'Become quiet! Proceed peacefully to your homes!
Otherwise—face the consequences.'
"A wrecked wicker chair was
heaved at an armored car. Bottles flew at the police and soldiers.
Pandemonium increased. Rifle shots went into the air, but the crowds
were beyond control. They flung themselves at the armored cars and armed
men.
"Bursts of machine-gun fire raked the square. But the
security force was soon swallowed up by the crowd. They fired at one
another and at the terror-stricken people. Some were torn to pieces in
the nightmarish dash for safety. Within a few minutes the streets were
deserted and silent except for the dead that littered the square and the
agonizing screams from the wounded and injured."
Within two
hours radio broadcasting had been restored in Belgrade and Tito himself
went on the air to assure his people and the world that he was very much
alive. But it was too late.
At 2:19 p. m. G.M.T. the first
Bulgarian tanks thrust across the frontier. In the next 70 minutes
Yugoslavia was invaded by satellite troops from Romania, Hungary and
Albania. Backing them were 15 divisions of the Red Army (a total of
approximately 160,000 men) to be used only in the unlikely event that
the satellites would meet with formidable organized resistance from the
leaderless Yugoslav forces.
The Moscow propaganda machine was now
in full blast, informing the world that this Yugoslav revolt was purely
an "internal" matter and that the "People's Democracies of Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria and Albania have intervened at the invitation of the
patriot leaders of the new People's Republic of Yugoslavia."
At
first this misinformation from Moscow was the only news that reached the
Western World. Correspondents of the great press associations were
unable to transmit the true story, even when they got it, until
communications were restored. However, those three words, "Tito is
dead," were sufficient to convince the heads of every government that
the world had reached another crisis of historic proportions.
The
Presidential yacht Williamsburg had not even cast off from the dock
when the news came. The President immediately returned to the White
House for a meeting with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of
Defense and the Chiefs of Staff. A crowd began to gather outside the
White House in Lafayette Square. They were silent; they knew that the
biggest news of all would come from the building across Pennsylvania
Avenue.
• • •
The British Prime Minister did not see the
second race at Sandown Park. There was a crowd, also silent, in
Whitehall as his car and those of other Cabinet ministers turned into
Downing Street.
Nor did General Eisenhower see the French armored
division—not at any rate on this ceremonial occasion. He rushed to the
teletype room at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe).
The President of France dutifully stood to attention while the troops
rolled past; he wondered sadly where this grim procession would end.
When Marshal Tito went on the air, he said:
"We
have been attacked. Our country has been invaded, without warning,
without provocation, from four different points. Many of the invading
troops are under direct Soviet command. All of them are under the
control of one man, Stalin, the betrayer of the people's trust, the
murderer of the great principles of Marx and Lenin.
"I call upon the conscience of mankind to bear witness to this imperialistic act of rape.
"The
following Yugoslav towns have been invested: Debar, Yablanitsa, Đakovica, Bezdan and Subotica. Our magnificent army is moving into
action and will inflict frightful punishment on these dupes of the
Kremlin.
"However, behind the forces of Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary and Albania are 15 Red Army divisions, ready to come to the
rescue of these unfortunates who have been pushed by their Soviet
masters into this criminal aggression.
"We have no war with our neighbors to the north and the south. We have no cause for war with Russia herself.
"But war has been made on us and we shall fight it to the death, as we so gloriously fought the Nazis of Adolf Hitler."
Later,
Belgrade broadcast the confessions obtained from several ringleaders of
the "revolt" who had been quickly rounded up by the police.
Allowing
for the obvious colorations of the speeches and bulletins from
Belgrade, there was no doubt in the White House, Downing Street or the
Quai d'Orsay of the basic legitimacy of Tito's accusations. The
deployment of the 15 Soviet divisions close to Yugoslavia's borders was
well known to intelligence agencies of the West. It was obvious that the
timing of the assassination attempt and the movement of satellite
troops could have been ordered only from Moscow.
The very
glibness of Radio Moscow was in itself suspicious, to say the least.
Within 20 minutes after the first flash from Belgrade, the Soviet
propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, was broadcasting a speech which appeared
to have been long prepared and well rehearsed. (Subsequently we learned
from Ehrenburg himself that this speech and many others on Radio Moscow
that day had been recorded a week or more previously.)
When the
news came that Tito was not dead—indeed that he was talking on the
radio—Moscow ignored it for a long time. This was one development that
had not been foreseen and rehearsed. Eventually the Kremlin issued
orders as to how this was to be handled: the original broadcast of the
assassination was to be described as a deliberate fraud by Tito, egged
on by the "Western imperialist warmongers, for the purpose of promoting
strife in the Balkans and destroying world peace."
During the
next few days Tito made good his promise to inflict "frightful
punishment" on the satellite invaders. The organization of his command
had long been prepared, whereas his immediate attackers were woefully
lacking in co-ordination. The highly efficient Yugoslav army of nearly
half a million men, a large proportion of whom had been seasoned in
actual combat, proved to be more than a match for their bewildered
adversaries, who had been propagandized into the belief that they would
be welcomed in Yugoslavia as "liberators" and were unprepared
psychologically for fierce combat.
The Western World was thrilled
by the news of heroic and successful Yugoslav resistance to aggression.
The Russian and satellite propaganda agencies tried to claim victories,
but there were many reliable press correspondents with the Yugoslav
forces (among them Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, Cyrus
Sulzberger of the New York Times, Sefton Delmer of the London Daily
Express, Robert Sherrod of Time-Life and Andus Burras of the Oslo
Arbeiderbladet) who dramatically verified Tito's claim.
Yugoslav
morale rose to the seething point. This people, who had never
capitulated to Hitler, now felt eternally unbeatable, and fought with an
exultant ferocity. And as Yugoslav morale ascended, so did Tito's
prestige throughout the anti-Communist world. He was the hero of the
hour, comparable to the R.A.F. fighters in September, 1940, and General
MacArthur and the "Battling Bastards of Bataan" in the grim winter of
1942.
The Communists in Western Europe and in the United States
strove submissively to organize public sentiment against intervention in
what they termed "this local Balkan revolution," but their clamor was
drowned out by the popular cries for aid for "Heroic Yugoslavia."
On
Sunday night, May 11th, President Truman broadcast his famous demand to
Stalin: "If, as you say, you really want to make peace, the time to
make peace is now—it is now or never."
He added that it was "clear to the whole civilized world that these acts of brutal aggression
by your satellites have been made at your command. The fighting can be
ended also at your command."
The only answer from the Kremlin was
a curt restatement of the propaganda line that this was merely an "internal" matter in Yugoslavia.
Forty-eight hours later the 15
Soviet divisions moved into this "internal" matter to take over the war
from the disorganized satellite forces. They were supported powerfully
by the Soviet air force, which began a systematic bombing of Yugoslav
cities. Within eight hours after that, the citizens of Belgrade saw the
first dusty tanks of the enemy rumbling through the capital.
Tito's
army retreated from Belgrade and the plains of Croatia and the
Voivodina to take up the positions in the Bosnian and Serbian mountains
from which the Germans had never been able to dislodge them in World War
II, and from which they never ceased to harry the Russian left flank in
World War III.
By May 14th the United States and all other
countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were committed to
the aid of Yugoslavia and the utter defeat of Stalinist Communism.
Greece had already entered the war by attacking Albania in support of
the Yugoslavs. Turkey's entrance was immediate. Israel joined the UN as a
belligerent 10 days later. The most important neutrals at the outset
were Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Egypt, India and Pakistan. Spain,
after considerable delay and indecision, eventually joined the West, but
not until one year later.
The branding of the U.S.S.R. and the
satellites as aggressors was backed by the overwhelming majority of the
United Nations. The Soviet and satellite delegations in New York,
together with their diplomatic representatives, were returned to Russia
on the Swedish ship Gripsholm.
Strong detachments of U.S.
Marines guarded the departing Soviet and satellite diplomats and their
truckloads of electric refrigerators, 20-inch television sets,
calculating machines and other devices, which they had acquired in America—but all of which, of course, had been invented by the Russians.
When
World War III became an inescapable reality the first reaction of the
American people was one of relief; whatever horrors were to come (and
few people had any real conception of the nature or extent of these
horrors, as Americans still felt safe behind the oceans), at least the
long period of suspense was ended. There had been a strong sentiment for
a "preventive war," a feeling that could be expressed in the weary
words, "Oh—let's drop the atom bomb now and get it over with. Let's for
once get the jump on the aggressors."
This dangerous policy—which
could truthfully be described as "un-American"—had been resolutely
rejected by the U.S. government and by the principal leaders of both
political parties. But it was still there, beneath the surface, and now
it erupted in an outburst of "holy war" hysteria which was fanned into
fury by such callous and stupid acts of sabotage by Soviet agents as the
bomb planted in New York's Grand Central Terminal which killed 22
innocent people and did no damage whatsoever to the UN war effort.
The
more skillful and effective acts of sabotage were carried out by the
secret organizations under the directions of the MVD, which the Kremlin
had been building up in the U.S. throughout the years. Among their
spectacular failures was the attempt to poison Baltimore's water supply
and to destroy the Soo Locks in Michigan on the Canadian border. More
successful was the sabotage of the electrical supply lines from the
plant at Niagara Falls, which stopped a substantial part of U.S.
chemical production for a period of nearly a week. The remnants of the
American Communist party knew less about these special MVD organizations
than the FBI did; they were given only scanty information from the
Kremlin, which regarded them with suspicion and contempt. American
Communists made some attempts on their own but these were largely
amateurish and bungled.
• • •
 |
| "In an effort to terrorize people, Soviet agents planted bomb in New York's Grand Central Terminal, killed 22. Americans were outraged" (Illustration by Birney Lettick, p. 31) |
There was no period of "phony war" as there was at the beginning of World War II—certainly no
long years of trench warfare when the front line fluctuated only a few
hundred yards one way or the other, as between 1914-1918. Nor were there
months and years of sparring while the U.S. made up its mind whether to
come in or not, and further months and years for the U.S. to develop
its war potential. This time the U.S. was ready and willing to strike
immediately—and to strike with the most terrible weapon of all.
Despite
Russian expectations, the first American atom bombs did not land on
Moscow. In fact, no deliberate attacks were made on Russian population
centers until more than a year later. We were not at war with the
Russian people and we had no intention of unifying them by bombing any
target which might be symbolic of Russian nationalism; therefore, so far
as was humanly possible, we aimed at strategic targets only.
Our
bombers delivered a concentrated attack of atomic bombs, the like of
which had never been dreamed of by the most fanciful author of
scientific fiction and which will never be repeated, pray God, again! On
that night—May 14th, 1952—atomic bombs fell on the long-range air base
outside Smolensk; on the headquarters of the second long-range air army
near Vinnitsa-Uman; on the airfields near Warsaw and Sevastopol; and on
the Asiatic bases of the Soviet Union at Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk.
These atomic bombings were continued on a round-the-clock basis for a period of three months and 16 days.
All
of these raids were made from bases in Britain, France, Italy, Greece,
the Middle East, Japan and Alaska. Starting with that first night, we
hit A-bomb manufacturing and storage facilities, oil installations,
industrial plants and troop concentration areas.
• • •
Now
it was World War. The all-too-familiar process was again in operation—but it was to achieve a pattern which had been familiar to no one except
the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the goats and guinea pigs at
Bikini and Eniwetok.
Such was the start of the consummation of the Atomic Age, the triumph of Man's genius over Nature, and over himself.
Such were the beginnings of the destruction of many of the noblest and least selfish works of Man.
Let
us repeat and remember that it was senseless and unnecessary. It
accomplished nothing but the defeat of the instigators. It ended several
years of an "armed truce." We know now that this armed truce could have
been prolonged indefinitely; it should have been resolved
peacefully—except that in all history it has never worked out that way.
The
bombing raids were costly for the UN. The young men who gave their
lives in the first stages of the first phase of the third World War were
members of the same generation that Stalin had tried to recruit as
members of the "Youth Movement for Peace." Many lives were sacrificed
needlessly because of the traditional tendency of politicians to put
political expediency first. The late and greatly lamented Senator Arthur
H. Vandenberg had said, shortly before he died, that in his devotion to
a bipartisan foreign policy he was thinking of the next generation
rather than the next election, but his words of wisdom were not
sufficiently heeded by some members of the U.S. Congress, who chose to
chisel when they should have built. It is a matter of record that when
this war started, in May, 1952, the United States had fewer than 97
operational B-36 bombers with which to insure our ability to bomb any
point in the Soviet Union from bases in North America.
Although
the UN air forces during this first phase of the war had a slight
qualitative edge over the Reds, our planes were outnumbered in the
principal combat areas by a ratio of five to three. This Soviet
advantage was of great importance over the battlefields of Europe.
American, British and French infantrymen who were veterans of World War
II, with memories of complete Allied supremacy in the air, were
particularly bitter that now they had to fight under skies dominated by
the enemy. (The same was true of the last remnants of the UN occupation
forces in the Korean "Dunkerque," who were subjected to unremitting air
and submarine attacks before they could reach the comparative safety of
Japan.)
The Reds pushed forward with powerful ground forces of
half a million men across the north German plain. This massive movement
was orderly and deliberate. They did not seek to duplicate the speed of
the German blitz of May, 1940. They were properly aware of the dangers
to their lines of communication through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
northern Yugoslavia and Germany. They knew all too well that these
areas between the U.S.S.R. and the theater of operations were to a very
large extent hostile territory. The mounting spirit of revolt in the
satellite countries was now being fanned into flames by Tito's
indomitable resistance and by numbers of secret agents from the Western
democracies. No road, no railroad track, no bridge of strategic
importance could be considered safe from sabotage.
The heavily
outnumbered UN forces could wage only a war of attrition—a strategy of "hold and retreat"—to impose upon the Reds the maximum cost in men and
materiel for every yard that they gained. Our own costs were enormous.
The UN was compelled to trade precious lives for precious time. The
heavy battle casualties were by no means limited to the troops. The
miserable masses of refugees were pushed ahead of the Red Army to
detonate the mine fields. When these plodding refugees blocked the
roads, thereby obstructing the Soviet advance, they were massacred.
Throughout
this first phase of the war, from May to December, 1952, the UN buildup
of arms continued unceasingly. The Atlantic Ocean and the English
Channel were themselves major battlefields as they had been in 1942. The
Soviet schnorkel submarines inflicted severe losses in tonnage and in
human lives.
On September 4, 1952, a Red Army task force landed
in Alaska and succeeded in capturing Nome. It was by no means a major
operation indicating serious invasion, but it was extremely effective at
the time as propaganda and as a strategic diversion. It caused many
people in the U.S. to demand that we withdraw all of our forces from
Europe, the Middle East and other points overseas for the defense of our
own continent. For this was the first time in 91 years that hostile
troops had landed on the North American mainland.
Two days after
the landings in Alaska the Red air force delivered the first atomic bomb
on American territory. Previously, its main bombing emphasis had been
on our overseas bases.
The first atomic target was Hanford, a
village on the Columbia River in the state of Washington, a dot on the
map, of which few people had ever heard although its identity as the
site of an atomic bomb plant had been no secret. Immediately, the
American people jumped to the frightened conclusion that this bombing
had been done from newly established bases in Alaska. Such was not the
case. The base for the raid was on the Chukotski Peninsula in Siberia.
Nine
Tupolev bombers, the Soviet copy of the B-29, participated. Only three
of these carried atom bombs, the others serving as decoys. One of these
three was destroyed in mid-air, another was turned back and dropped its
bomb near Vancouver, British Columbia, then crashed into the Canadian
forest wilderness. Some of the bombers actually returned to their
Siberian bases. The crews of badly damaged planes bailed out and not all
of these men were captured or accounted for. We eventually learned that
some of them were secret agents equipped with civilian clothes, fake
papers, plenty of dollars and a good working knowledge of the English
language (in fact, two of them, captured later, were American Communist
bail-jumpers).
The bomb which was dropped on Hanford was two and a
half times greater in explosive power than the original American bomb
that was dropped on Hiroshima.
• • •
Having achieved this
spectacular strike on a remote, pinpointed military target, the Soviets
next aimed to produce unadulterated terror. They wisely selected the
most famous industrial city of all—Detroit. This time only one plane
carried an atom bomb, but that one reached its target with perfect
precision. This bomb exploded above Twenty-third Street and Hancock,
West. It visited fearful destruction, devastation and death on an area
of about 28 square miles. The annihilating effects of the bomb covered
an area of two square miles, about the Lincoln and Cadillac plants,
while fire caused extensive damage to the huge Ford plant three and a
half miles away. Among the plants outside the radius of damage was the
huge Kaiser-Frazer works 23 miles to the west.
The attacks on
more distant points, such as Detroit and subsequently on New York,
Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago, were all "suicide" raids, as the
Soviets had no bombers with sufficient range for returning to home
bases. However, as in the case of the Hanford raid, those crews which
had to bail out included a number of trained MVD agents for espionage
and sabotage.
Casualties were immeasurably greater than they
should have been because of the failure of civil defense. This failure
was not due primarily to lack of intelligent planning. The trouble was
that the plans had remained on paper. The American people had not
bothered to learn that civil defense involves the active, instantaneous
participation of every able-bodied man, woman and child.
When an
atom bomb hit northern London in October, 1952, the casualties were less
than half those in the first raid on New York, although the area of
destruction was more than twice as large. (In New York the area was nine
square miles with the first bomb, 12 square miles with the second, the
radius of the blasts being restricted by the concentration of
steel-constructed skyscrapers; in London the area was 27 square miles,
extending from Kensington to Golders Green.)
The explanation of
the difference in the number of casualties was obvious: the experienced
Londoners knew how to behave themselves under fire.
It was not
the deficiencies of civil defense which proved most shocking to the
Americans; they felt they could remedy that themselves and intensive
training started in deadly earnest in every city, town and crossroads
village.
The real wave of fear that swept over the U.S. and
threatened for a time to have disastrous consequences to the whole war
effort was caused by the seeming failure of national defense. How had
the Soviets got through? Were the operators of those far-flung radar
stations all asleep at the switch, as on the morning of Pearl Harbor?
Where were all the interceptor planes at the secret airfields in Alaska,
Canada and Greenland? There was a widely held belief that the Soviets
were beating us at our own game, or what we had been kidded into
imagining was our own game.
It took the American people a long
time to realize that the Communists were not outdoing us in atomic
bombing—in fact, the ratio was roughly 100 to 1 the other way round. But
every bomb that they delivered loomed huge in the headlines and the
known casualty lists, whereas no word came out of the Soviet Union as to
the effect of any bomb dropped by us. To the average American, or the
average Briton, the announcement of a bomb dropped on a steelworks in
the Caucasus was as impersonal and uninspiring as an explosion on the
planet Jupiter.
The American people were given plenty of cause
for alarm in those days. The first bomb on New York fell between Grand
Central and Pennsylvania Stations (the actual point of detonation was
above Madison Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street), taking a particularly
heavy toll of lives in the concentrated garment district. The blast
sheared off the entire tower of the Empire State Building and gutted the
UN Building with its 5,400 windows through which people of all races
had looked in the hope of seeing a better world.
In Chicago the
area of greatest damage stretched from the Lincoln Park Zoo on the North
to Thirtieth Street on the South Side, from Sacramento Boulevard in the
west to the breakwater of the Outer Harbor. The awful concussion of
this first A-bomb attack on Chicago released hundreds of crazed animals
from the stockyards into the streets, which impeded considerably the
rescue work.
The day after the first attack on Chicago, the
President flew to that stricken city and broadcast a speech which had a
reassuring effect on the entire nation. He explained the enormous
problems involved in making entirely secure "the new frontiers of
freedom, which cover thousands of miles of arctic wilderness all the way
from the Bering Strait to the island of Spitsbergen."
He
revealed figures on the number of Soviet heavy bombers, bound for
American targets, which had been detected by radar and shot down by the
U.S. and Canadian air forces. He said, "These are achievements which
cannot be dramatized from day to day in the news. I cannot reveal where
or how these interceptions have been made, since this would be
information of utmost value to the enemy, but I can tell you that our
defenses are strong and getting stronger by the minute."
The
President said that the Red Army which had landed in Alaska had been "written off" by Stalin. "Our Navy and Air Force," he said, "have made
it impossible for the Soviets to maintain supply lines to the troops
whom they so rashly sent onto American soil."
The President spoke
with biting scorn of "those patriots who, at the first hint of
approaching danger, loaded up their cars and station wagons with
provisions and fled from our great cities." He shrewdly used this
scathing reference as an introduction to the announcement of extremely
rigorous gasoline rationing.
The President dropped his own
bombshell near the end of the speech. He broke the news that General of
the Red Air Force Vasily Stalin, son of the Communist Czar of all the
Russias, had been shot down by French antiaircraft batteries while on a
reckless reconnaissance flight over the Saar. The bomber that he was
piloting made a belly landing and young Stalin and the members of his
staff "are now prisoners of the United Nations."
This was not considered a serious loss to Soviet armed might, but it made pleasant reading.
• • •
 |
| "Stalin's son, on a reckless Saar reconnaissance flight, was shot down and captured—in full regalia as General of the Red Air Force" (p. 30) |
In
general, the President's speech expressed a sober optimism which was
justified by subsequent developments. The Soviets had paid a heavy
penalty in strategic bombers for their accomplishments in the raids on
American cities and on London. (They never atom-bombed Paris, Rome or
any other capital on the European continent because the military
advantages would have been negligible and the political liabilities very
great indeed, for such bombs would have obliterated the Communist
parties in France, Italy and other Western democracies.) Furthermore, in
this first phase of the war the relatively small stockpile of Soviet
atom bombs was largely depleted.
But, production of these weapons
was being stepped up; the world had not yet seen the end of Soviet
atomic bombing—not by any means.
The first phase of World War III ended on the morning of Christmas Day, 1952.
This
was D day for the great Communist offensive which was intended to
complete the conquest of Western Europe and to make the British Isles
untenable as bases. The time seemed favorable for crushing conquest. The
U.S.S.R. air force was still superior in strength. By the spring of
1953, this superiority might be wiped out. Furthermore, the next five
months would bring formidable reinforcements of ground troops and armor
to the UN armies in Europe.
So they started the big decisive
push, and on that morning, the birthday of the Prince of Peace, the UN
defenders opened up for the first time with atomic artillery.
Many
writers and many soldiers have attempted to describe the havoc of these
battles but nobody has come close to the terrible reality. The massed
forces of the Soviets, depending as they constantly did on heavy
concentrations of docile flesh and blood, provided tragically large
targets. In the space of 15 minutes the UN's atomic artillery inflicted
on the Communist infantry an atomic barrage equal in power and intensity
to a barrage of 1,000,000 shells from the heavy howitzers of World War II.
To
this day, more than seven years later, we can make no more than wild
guesses at the extent of the losses suffered by the Soviets during the
week that followed Christmas, 1952. We do know a great deal, from
interrogation of Russian soldiers captured at the time, and from much of
Russian literature that has been written since the war, of the
demoralization that was produced by the first tactical atomic weapons.
Here was another historic instance of propaganda acting as a boomerang; the Soviet
troops had been so stuffed with word pictures of the unutterable
horrors of the atomic bombs with which the peace of the world was being "menaced by war-mongering imperialists" that when these simple soldiers
had atomic energy hurled at them from close range they believed they
were involved in the ultimate calamity, the end of the life of mankind
here on earth.
The Red Armies were stopped, at least temporarily,
on the ground in Western Europe. However, the mounting optimism in the
U.S. was blasted in April, 1953, when it became apparent that the Reds
had produced a new stockpile of atomic bombs and were ready to use them
with increased fury against American targets. New York, Chicago,
Detroit, and Hanford, Washington, were hit again; Philadelphia was hit
with disastrous damage to the Navy Yard across the river in Camden and
the obliteration of Independence Hall—"the Cradle of Liberty."
Albany,
New York, was hit by a bomb which we learned later was intended for the
General Electric plant at Schenectady. The atomic bomb that was
earmarked for delivery on Pittsburgh actually hit the tiny village of
Unity five miles away, a community of 513 souls, 472 of whom were
killed. A few days later the few survivors had put up a crudely lettered
signboard on Route 80 which proudly told passing military convoys, "Nobody ran out of Unity in station wagons."
After the second
atomic bombing of New York (this time the bomb hit the lower part of the
city between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges), Moscow exultantly
announced that the crew of the lead bomber had been returned safely to
the U.S.S.R. This statement seemed incredible at the time, but it was
later proved to be true. The Red pilot had flown 50 miles to sea,
successfully ditched his aircraft, and he and four others of the crew of
12 were picked up by a U.S.S.R. submarine. The Soviets evidently
attempted to repeat this stunt at other points, but they soon realized
that the lives of their airmen were of far less importance than the
risks run by their submarines.
• • •
On May 10, 1953, the
first anniversary of the start of the third World War, a Soviet atomic
bomb was detonated over Washington. Originally aimed for the Capitol,
the A-bomb exploded approximately one mile away at 11th and D Streets,
S.W.
The Capitol, the Senate and House office buildings, the
Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, among many other
buildings in the center of Washington, were shattered. The White House,
the reconstruction of which had only recently been completed, was a
scorched shell. So was the National Gallery; but of course its priceless
art treasures had long since been removed to points of safety, as had
the contents of all the great galleries and museums of the Western World
and of the U.S.S.R.
It is needless now to enumerate the details
of the appalling destruction of our national monuments. It is impossible
to appraise the profundity of the insult thus conveyed to American
national pride.
The sense of outrage that swept over the entire
nation of 150,000,000 people—and through the American armed forces in
combat on every sea and every continent—was most eloquently expressed by
one photograph: it was a picture of the statue of Abraham Lincoln
catapulted forward so that Lincoln's stone face was lying on the
crumbled steps of the Lincoln Memorial and, in the shattered background,
were legible the remnants of an inscription: ". . . for the people,
shall not perish from the earth." The bomb on Washington destroyed 18
square miles.
One of the gigantic mistakes made by the late Adolf
Hitler was the pathologically vicious bombing of London, the "cathedral
cities" such as Canterbury and Coventry, and most particularly, the
attacks on Buckingham Palace. These were attacks on the centers of the
unity of the British Commonwealth: they served no military purpose,
except to solidify and perpetuate that unity in the face of the enemy
who inflicted them.
It must be remembered that at this time, a
full year after the start of World War III, the UN had dropped no atomic
bombs on or near Moscow. The Kremlin, the Museum of the Church of St.
Basil the Blessed—all of the historic buildings treasured by the Russian
spirit long before Stalin was born—were still completely intact. The UN
grand strategy had been firmly fixed; we were not making war on the
Russian people, our limitless destructive powers were to be directed at
the centers and the instruments of Soviet militaristic aggression and
not against the humble, simple, peace-loving Russian peasants and
workers whom we wanted eternally to be our friends.
For six
months past there had been chalked on walls in the ruins of New York,
London, Chicago, Detroit and other targets of the Soviet atom bombs the
ominous demand, "BOMB MOSCOW!" Now, with Washington in ruins, the
popular clamor for violent retaliation against the Soviet capital was
far more vociferous.
At this point in the second phase of the war
American morale was at its lowest ebb. Rationing and controls of all
conceivable items from clothing to cosmetics had far exceeded the worst
restrictions of World War II. There was little in the news to indicate
that the war could be won within the foreseeable future. Even though the
advance of the ponderous Red Army ground forces had been halted in
Western Europe, the UN had not yet been able to mount forces of
sufficient strength to launch any appreciable counteroffensives.
• • •
The
Soviets introduced a new weapon, which had more propaganda value than
military destructiveness. They propelled atomic-headed missiles from
submarines against San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and the naval
bases at Norfolk, Virginia, and Bremerton, Washington—and on the other
side of the Atlantic, at Brest, Cherbourg and Southampton. The
destructive area of these missiles was limited to approximately 1.5
square miles and the attacks were inaccurate and mainly ineffective. The
submarines had to stand offshore at a distance of 30 miles and to
expose themselves by surfacing.
By now, the civil defense
training had improved so greatly in the U.S. that casualties were
measurably reduced, and so was the attendant damage by fire.
The
peak of Red submarine warfare was passed in the middle of the summer of
1953 when the UN carrier-based atomic bombings of Soviet submarine bases
began to take full effect. At this same time the UN achieved
superiority in the air.
The UN bombing offensive against European
and Asiatic Russia had been sustained from the outset, gaining in power
as aircraft production increased. Atom bombs were used on the larger
installations, such as hydroelectric plants.
Factories,
marshaling yards in or near Moscow and other large cities and the
smaller installations in more remote areas had been attacked with what
were known as "conventional bombs." This strange use of words led one
young American pilot to ask, as he watched a 20,000-pounder being loaded
into his aircraft, "Just how 'conventional' can a bomb get?"
The
widespread demands for the atomic bombing of Moscow could no longer be
ignored. On the night of July 18, 1953, a flight of B-36s flew over
Moscow dropping leaflets which warned that between July 21st and 26th
more B-36s—flying from bases in the United States—would drop an atomic
bomb on the Kremlin. The people of Moscow were urged to evacuate the
city so as to reduce the toll in human life. During the next four days
this same message was broadcast to Russia every hour on the hour from
all the transmitters of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the
British Broadcasting Corporation and every other available United
Nations facility.
The emphasis on the fact that these B-36
bombers would fly from American bases was of utmost psychological
importance. It informed our Allies as well as our enemies that the
President of the United States was taking full responsibility before
history for this action.
The bomb was dropped at midnight on July
22nd. More flights of B-36s were ready with more bombs in the event that
the first bomb missed the Kremlin.
• • •
Of course,
Moscow had not been evacuated, except by some of the upper echelons of
the Soviet hierarchy, who, as we now know, had left for the Urals at the
outbreak of war. The people, terrified by the warnings of the leaflets,
would have surged out of the city immediately and gone as far from the
Kremlin as their legs could carry them, but every street was heavily
patrolled by the armored cars of the police. And not one individual who
was not on authorized government business was allowed to leave. The area
of destruction covered 20 square miles, from the Dzerzhinsky district in
the north, to the Kirovsky district in the south and from the
Pervomaysky district in the east to the Krasnopresnensky district in
the west.
The Lubyanka Prison, the grim monument to long years of
tyranny and injustice under the czars and the Soviets, stood within a
few hundred yards of the dead center of the area of utter annihilation.
Very little of it was left visible above the level of the ground. But as
the towering column of radioactive dust which had been Moscow was blown
eastward toward Siberia, wretched figures began to crawl from the
Lubyanka Prison, political prisoners who had never expected again to see
the light of day.
One of them was Professor Nikolai Orloff, a
biologist who had made the mistake of disagreeing with the Lysenko
theory of inherited characteristics. He told us recently: "As I looked
about me with my weak eyes I did not know what had happened. I did not
know why. Strangely enough it did not even occur to me for some time to
wonder what had become of the Kremlin. All I knew was that, for some
inexplicable reason, for one moment, I was free . . . It is an ironic
thought that the only reason I am alive today is that I was one of the
few fortunates in the underground dungeons of the Lubyanka."
It
was at this time that psychological warfare began to be a potent factor.
The mounting UN air superiority made it possible to drop millions of
leaflets a day on U.S.S.R. and satellite territory. In World War II the
dropping of leaflets on Europe achieved a total of 11,000,000 a day. In
World War III this figure was more than quadrupled.
The emphasis
in these leaflets was not on fabricated propaganda but on straight
news—and now the news from the United Nations point of view was getting
more and more favorable.
Not only leaflets were dropped.
Thousands of agents were parachuted into the satellite countries for
purposes of sabotage, propaganda and general disruption of the Soviet
system of communications. The great majority of these agents had been
refugees from the countries to which they were now returned.
It
was not until late in 1954 that adequate co-ordination of UN
psychological warfare was achieved; before then, listeners to the radio
in Poland might hear one version of a story from British sources,
another version from the Americans and still another from Italy. But the
major events spoke for themselves and the most eloquent of all was the
bomb on the Kremlin.
• • •
 |
| "Destroyer (left center) is firing at torpedo bomber, while also attacking with charge of hedgehogs against rapidly diving schnörkel submarine" (Painting by Fred Freeman, p. 25) |
Another event of gigantic
psychological impact was the historic exploit of "Task Force Victory,"
the most daring and imaginative airborne operation of this or any war,
in which more than 10,000 American and British paratroopers, Rangers and
Commandos attacked and destroyed the Soviet underground atom-bomb
storage facilities in the Ural Mountains.
The bases from which
this operation was launched were in the Middle East, 1,800 to 2,000
miles from the target. These were the types of planes used: Douglas
C-124 Globemaster, Boeing C-97A Stratofreighter, Chase C-122 and C-123
Avitruc, Fairchild C-120 Packplane, Fairchild C-119B Packet, B-47 and
B-50 bombers, jet fighters and converted B-29 aerial tankers from which
planes were refueled in midair.
Participating, apart from the Air
Force personnel, were two airborne regimental combat teams which
totaled about 8,000 men, two airborne infantry battalions of 1,600 men
and a special task force of about 500 experts and technicians. The first
attacks immediately followed intensive atomic bombing of the area,
which cleared it of Red troops except those in heavily protected
defenses around the perimeter.
The first objective was the
airstrip. The Fairchild and Chase planes did not have range enough
without aerial refueling to fly back to their bases, but these planes,
particularly the Packet, were required for lifting the initial
paratroopers and advance elements.
The proportion of paratroopers
in the task force was relatively small. The rest of the airborne forces
were air-landed by Avitrucs, specially designed to land on short, rough
runways.
The first paratroopers were dropped 11 minutes after
the last A-bomb burst, the transport planes avoiding the atomic clouds.
They were followed closely by the air-landed troops and engineers to
improve the airstrip. Then the heavy four-engined Globemasters and
Stratofreighters came in to disgorge heavy equipment. Several of these
heavy aircraft were assigned to wait to fly back any Soviet A-bomb
material that could be seized.
Another drop was made near the
underground storage depots some miles away in the foothills of the
mountains. This, too, followed hard on atomic bombing. The immediate
casualties were considerably heavier here as strong Red detachments had
remained safe from the bombing in the deep concrete shelters. The
objective was to seize the entrance to the storage depots and hold
them until the main forces from the airfield could come up.
This objective was successfully achieved. It required speed in every phase of the operation—tremendous speed and perfect timing.
During the entire, furious fight, there were incessant battles between jet fighters in the air.
Of
the task force of more than 10,000 men, 38 specialists, including
nuclear physicists, technicians (and six press correspondents who later
filed their breath-taking stories from Tel Aviv), were returned safely
to the Middle Eastern bases. They carried with them some Soviet
fissionable material.
Otherwise, of the entire task force there
were less than 1,000 survivors. The final achievement of "Task Force
Victory" was the detonation of the underground A-bomb stockpiles, an act
of suicidal defiance.
General Eisenhower expressed the virtually unanimous sentiment of the United Nations when he said, "Each and
every one of these valiant men deserves the Congressional Medal of
Honor and the Victoria Cross and the gratitude of history."
There was no more atomic bombing by the Reds in World War III—nor, we may now believe, will there ever be.
• • •
Early
in September, 1953—one month after the astonishing exploit of "Task
Force Victory"—the General Assembly of the United Nations convened in
Denver, Colorado, and produced its momentous Statement of War Aims,
usually known as the "Denver Declaration." Where Wilson's Fourteen
Points and the Roosevelt-Churchill Atlantic Charter had dealt in noble
but broad generalities, this document, subscribed to by 49 nations,
provided in detail the pattern of the postwar world.
The Denver
Declaration stated that the primary war aim of the United Nations was,
simply, "the establishment and pегpetuation of world peace." It affirmed
that "no peace can long endure unless it is firmly founded on universal
friendship, respect for the rights of others, determination to rise
above the interests of selfish nationalism in world-wide co-operation to
enforce justice, secure equity and raise the standard of living for all
peoples everywhere."
To expedite the achievement of genuine
peace, the Declaration assured the peoples of Russia, China and the
satellite states that there would be no demands for reparations, no
war-crime trials, and immediate return for them to full and honorable
membership in the United Nations, with no "probationary period" such as
was imposed on the vanquished after World War II.
Above all,
there would be no attempt to force any arbitrary systems of government
or religion on any people, so long as all peoples accepted and respected
the basic concepts of human rights and the brotherhood of man, with no
Iron Curtains anywhere.
A passage in the Declaration relative to
this was largely the contribution of one of the American delegates,
George F. Kennan: "Forms of government are forged mainly in the fire of
practice, not in the vacuum of theory. They respond to national
character and to national realities. There is great good in the Russian
character, and the realities of that country demand a form of
administration more considerate of that good than the present
imperialistic regime."
It was a vital principle of the
Declaration that whereas the rights of the individual must be ensured,
the rights of governments must be restricted to obedience to the common
code of international morality, and the common code prohibited that form
of tyranny known as "totalitarianism."
"Ancient concepts of
national sovereignty," said the Denver Declaration, "must never again
mislead any nation into the arrogant belief that it has the right to
lower an Iron Curtain between itself and its neighbors. Freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, freedom of communications are essential to
international understanding and world peace." Of historic importance
was the fact that this was stated not as an expression of pious hope; it
was laid down as a principle to be incorporated as enforceable law.
To
the Chinese people were guaranteed the restoration of their rights in
Manchuria, including Dairen and Port Arthur, and in Inner Mongolia. The
future government of Korea would be determined by the free votes of all
the Korean people.
• • •
The Declaration provided the
blueprint for the United Nations Temporary Occupation Commission
(UNITOC). The area of occupation of European Russia was limited to the
Crimea, the Ukraine and Moscow—and, in the Far East, to the Primorsk,
between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
UN forces would remain in the
former satellite countries and the liberated Baltic States only for as
long as they were needed to ensure law and order and the holding of free
elections.
Provision was also made for the revival of UNRRA
(United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the
establishment of UNIHOPE (United Nations Housing and Providing
Enterprise) and the other benevolent, unarmed agencies which have been
in operation for the past five years.
The statement in the Denver
Declaration which was probably of greatest interest to the peoples of
the Western democracies was this:
"The United Nations will
establish and maintain an international police force of land, sea and
air components; the primary objective of this force will be the
attainment of total disarmament by all nations within a period of 10
years from the cessation of hostilities."
The UN would maintain a
commission for international control of atomic energy in accordance
with the provisions of the Baruch-Acheson-Lilienthal Plan—which, it is
melancholy to recall, would have been adopted many years previously had
it not been for persistent, insistent Russian obstructionism at Lake
Success.
"The progress made in nuclear fission," said the
Declaration, "has been a closely guarded military secret. This condition
will end. Full knowledge will be shared by scientists of all
countries. Thus, we can greatly expedite the advance of atomic energy
for industrial purposes, including a vast increase in the world's supply
of food."
The new UN Atomic Energy Commission was described as "the cornerstone for the building of world federation for the
safeguarding of peace."
What was said in the Denver Declaration
was what men of good will had been saying, and hoping and praying for,
throughout all the centuries. It told the parents of little Maria
Serdic, in Yugoslavia—and all the families of all those who had died
since she went forward to give some spring flowers to Tito—that these
lives had not been sacrificed in vain.
• • •
 |
| (Painting by Birney Lettick, p. 28) |
The Denver
Declaration had an instantaneous and profound effect in all parts of the
world, but most significantly, perhaps, in China, where the assurances
relating to Manchuria and Inner Mongolia were received with surprise and
delight.
The Chinese Communists had played their own devious
game in World War III. They had driven the last of the United Nations
forces out of Korea. They continued to foment internal strife in Burma,
Malaya, Indochina, Indonesia and the Philippines. They had joined with
the Soviets in only one actual operation: the seizure of the island of
Hokkaido in northern Japan, in which they were aided by the
Communist-trained Japanese insurgents.
The UN had wisely
refrained from attacking Chinese population centers either with atomic
or "conventional" bombs. But they expected the eventual delivery of
these bombs upon their cities, and they had no means of retaliation.
They made repeated demands on Moscow for bombs and bombers, but they
were given the deaf ear. In fact, Soviet supplies of all kinds to China
were steadily reduced to the vanishing point as Soviet desperation
increased.
Late in November, 1953, the Red agents in Peiping
reported to the Kremlin that Chinese leaders were holding secret
meetings with the Swiss Minister, and then Stalin knew that Mao Tse-tung
was hitting the trail to Titoism and negotiating with the UN. (It may
be noted that this was 10 years after Stalin privately told Roosevelt,
at Tehran, of his deep mistrust of the Chinese Communist leaders.)
The
Chinese leaders throughout the war listened most attentively to the UN
information services as broadcast from San Francisco and London. Thus,
they got the true story of what was actually going on, as contrasted
with the versions furnished them by Moscow—and the contrast was very
great indeed.
The third and final phase of the war began at the
end of April, 1954, when the UN had at last amassed sufficient strength
to mount a counteroffensive on all fronts. This final phase depended—as
do all final phases of all wars—on the brains of the generals and the
feet and the guts of the infantrymen. Modern wars may start in the air,
in the wild blue yonder, but they end like ancient wars in the bloody
mud. They may start with the fission of uranium, but they end with
bayonets fixed.
As the UN spearheads drove forward to the Pripet
Marshes, to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and into the Crimea, it was
obvious that the monolithic Soviet state was disintegrating. Fierce
revolt flared up in the satellite states.
On September 21st a Red
Army general, captured near Warsaw, made the startling announcement
that Joseph Stalin had disappeared and that Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless
head of Russia's secret police, was now the dictator of the crumbling
Soviet Union. UN intelligence officers assumed that this was one of the
wild rumors that afflict all soldiers, even generals. But it was no
rumor. Stalin had indeed disappeared—so completely that we do not even
know today whether he died quietly in bed, of old age, or was murdered,
or committed suicide, or is still alive in some obscure hide-out.
We
have been given very complete information by the aged Andrei Vyshinsky
(he's now seventy-seven) after he escaped into Turkey before the final
disintegration of Soviet power. Some of this evidence may be revealing,
but all of it is necessarily suspect. We cannot forget that Vyshinsky
was once a right-wing Menshevik, militantly anti-Soviet who, after his
forced conversion to Stalinism, attempted to seek atonement for previous
ideological sins by being one of the most vehement and uncompromising
exponents of Stalinism.
After his flight from Russia he tried to
clear himself in the eyes of the civilized world; indeed, he offered to
testify against his former Soviet colleagues at the trials of war
criminals. (These trials, of course, were never held, but the people of
Russia and the former satellites visited their own vengeance on the
Communist leaders who survived.)
• • •
There were no
records of importance left in the Kremlin at the time of its
obliteration, and such official documents as have been discovered in the
ruins of Moscow, or in the various points to which the government was
dispersed in the Urals, have shed little light on the conferences held
and decisions taken on the highest levels—and no lower levels mattered
in the top-heavy Soviet state.
As one of the executive
secretaries of the Party Central Committee told the commission when we
were starting our investigations in 1955, "I was taught that it was
safer to keep a nest of vipers in my desk than to keep a diary."
However,
the record of Stalin's major miscalculations is clear. Its ultimate,
disastrous phase began in 1945, immediately following V-E day in World
War II.
Then the Soviets enjoyed unprecedented prestige. They had
and deserved the admiration and gratitude of their allies in victory.
The Western democracies wanted friendship and peace; they wanted to
demobilize and disarm and they did so with almost frantic rapidity.
But
then the Reds made the great shift to a policy of open hostility toward
their former allies; they broke their pledges right down the line—they
doggedly obstructed all attempts at amiable settlement of difficulties,
either through the UN or other means—they steadily sabotaged the UN with
their vetoes and made it appear impotent—they lowered the Iron Curtain
and did all in their power to make it more and more impenetrable. The
results were the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Schuman Plan,
the North Atlantic Treaty, Korea and World War III.
As one of my
colleagues on the commission, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, has pointed out
in Tito and Goliath there is no doubt that Stalin was reluctant to kill
Tito when the latter was at the summit of his glory. Stalin would
greatly have preferred to have discredited and disgraced the Yugoslav "heretic" before putting him to death in the cellar of the Lubyanka
Prison. But this had proved impossible.
It was the mounting
tension of discontent and disobedience in the satellite countries that
finally forced Stalin to his fateful decision that Tito must die. The
seeds of rebellion against the reactionary, imperialistic Soviet tyranny had sprouted and flourished in Yugoslav soil. They had been
carried by the irrepressible winds across frontiers, particularly into
Czechoslovakia and Poland, two countries with long experience in
passionate devotion to freedom and defiance of tyranny. These same seeds
had penetrated even into Russia itself, and were sprouting in the
fertile soil of the Ukraine.
The plan for Tito's assassination
seemed reasonably foolproof on paper, and with Tito dead it was
extremely unlikely that the Western democracies would precipitate world
war by rushing to the aid of a Yugoslav government which had ceased to
exist. But the greatest miscalculation of all by Stalin was based on the
fact that the intelligence which came to him from all over the world
was made to fit the pattern of Communist propaganda, and Communist
wishful thinking, as opposed to the real truth.
He completely
misjudged the essential unity and determination of the United States and
of the vast majority of free peoples everywhere. Like other dictators
before him, he had been misled into believing his own propaganda. Again
and again he had said, "The trouble with Hitler was that he did not know
when to stop—he went too far. I will never go too far."
But the
juggernaut that he had created ran away with him. Stalin in the
beginning counted on the Yugoslav forces being leaderless and
consequently disorganized. Now it was the forces of what had been the
Soviet Union who were leaderless and disorganized. The result was
widespread revolt and a whole series of civil wars across the entire
expanse of Russia—civil wars in which the political prisoners in Siberia
eventually played an important part.
The tragedy of 1952-'55
came to a confused conclusion. No over-all armistice was signed; there
was no need of one; Russia had disintegrated into complete chaos. By
January, 1955, formal hostilities had ceased. It was just as well: the
U.S., after four years of intensive development, had just begun to
mass-produce atomic-powered planes and submarines.
• • •
It
is not within the province of the UN Historical Commission to delve
into the events of the past five years since the war ended, so I shall
not attempt to describe the chaos and anarchy that prevailed for so long
in many parts of Russia and China, the relapses in some regions into a
state of feudalism, and the gradual, wondering realization by the
bewildered masses that a new day of civilization was dawning for all
mankind.
But I cannot close this summary without a word of
admiration for the remarkable qualities of the Russian people, among
whom I have been living and working these past five years. These people
have been oppressed and enslaved, tortured and massacred, through
countless centuries of barbarous tyranny; but all the czarist and
Communist tyrants could not destroy the essential Russian spirit. Now
this spirit is being given limitless opportunities to flourish in the
climate of freedom and peace.
Thoreau once wrote: "There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it."
The light is now shining in Russia, and in all other darkened places of the earth.
It
is the light of hope—and today, in the year 1960, hope surges not from
man's wishful dreams, but from the reality of his God-given strength. — THE END
