1 00:00:09,467 --> 00:00:13,345 You had a European civil war that began in 1914. 2 00:00:13,430 --> 00:00:15,973 There was a long Armistice in that war. 3 00:00:16,057 --> 00:00:19,101 It finally comes to an end in 1945. 4 00:00:19,185 --> 00:00:22,354 In the process of coming to the end, what happens is that 5 00:00:22,439 --> 00:00:27,860 sweeping into Europe from the outside are the Russians and the Americans. 6 00:00:27,944 --> 00:00:32,322 They meet at Torgau on the Elbe river in May 1945 7 00:00:32,407 --> 00:00:37,661 with the result that no European nation wins the European civil war. 8 00:00:37,746 --> 00:00:40,497 The winners in the European civil war are outsiders, 9 00:00:40,582 --> 00:00:43,876 the Russians and the Americans, most of all the Americans. 10 00:01:20,663 --> 00:01:24,041 (narrator) Germans had tried to conquer Europe. 11 00:01:24,125 --> 00:01:26,877 It had taken six years to defeat them. 12 00:01:26,961 --> 00:01:30,005 They were peaceful now. 13 00:01:30,590 --> 00:01:32,925 Was there any way of keeping them that way 14 00:01:33,009 --> 00:01:36,637 apart from dismembering Germany itself? 15 00:01:36,721 --> 00:01:39,556 The whole idea was that you would not split up Germany. 16 00:01:39,641 --> 00:01:41,767 The idea had been kicked around in the West, 17 00:01:41,851 --> 00:01:45,604 especially by the American Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, 18 00:01:45,688 --> 00:01:47,397 that Germany ought to be divided. 19 00:01:47,482 --> 00:01:51,902 Germany of course had been a united nation only since 1870. 20 00:01:54,906 --> 00:01:56,865 The newest of all the nations, really, 21 00:01:56,950 --> 00:01:59,576 the youngest of all the nations in the world. 22 00:01:59,661 --> 00:02:06,333 Morgenthau's idea was to divide it up and dismantle all German heavy industry. 23 00:02:06,417 --> 00:02:09,586 Turn Germany into a farming community only 24 00:02:09,712 --> 00:02:13,924 so that Germany can never again pose a threat to the world. 25 00:02:14,008 --> 00:02:17,594 Roosevelt had originally endorsed that idea and so had Churchill. 26 00:02:17,679 --> 00:02:22,891 But by late 1943 they decided this would be economically a disaster for Europe. 27 00:02:23,017 --> 00:02:24,977 If Europe were to recover from the war 28 00:02:25,061 --> 00:02:29,356 she had to have the productivity of Germany and especially the Ruhr. 29 00:02:29,440 --> 00:02:33,485 The Germans themselves would so bitterly resent a division of Germany 30 00:02:33,570 --> 00:02:37,573 that you would have enormous problems in the occupation. 31 00:02:37,657 --> 00:02:42,035 So the basic decision by early '44 had been made, 32 00:02:42,120 --> 00:02:45,789 that Germany would be one nation. 33 00:02:45,874 --> 00:02:49,459 This left problems because Germany is being attacked from both sides. 34 00:02:49,544 --> 00:02:53,964 The Russians from the East, the Anglo-Americans from the West. 35 00:02:54,048 --> 00:02:57,926 That meant that sooner or later they would be meeting each other 36 00:02:58,011 --> 00:03:01,722 with all kinds of dire possibilities, of which the most important was 37 00:03:01,806 --> 00:03:04,308 they would start firing at each other by mistake, 38 00:03:04,392 --> 00:03:09,104 not recognising each other's uniforms. There would be language problems. 39 00:03:09,189 --> 00:03:15,611 You need an agreed-upon demarcation line that you would stop at 40 00:03:15,695 --> 00:03:21,366 and prevent this sort of... 41 00:03:21,451 --> 00:03:24,453 horrendous situation of allies firing at each other. 42 00:03:24,537 --> 00:03:27,414 What happened militarily was the lucky accident 43 00:03:27,498 --> 00:03:30,667 of capturing the bridge at Remagen intact. 44 00:03:30,752 --> 00:03:33,503 It let Eisenhower's armies get into Germany 45 00:03:33,588 --> 00:03:35,797 much faster than anybody had expected. 46 00:03:40,136 --> 00:03:45,307 At the time of Yalta, when the decisions were finally sealed 47 00:03:45,391 --> 00:03:46,892 and the stamp was put on them 48 00:03:46,976 --> 00:03:50,812 that the line of division would be the Elbe river, 49 00:03:50,897 --> 00:03:55,067 it looked like the Russians would probably not only take Berlin 50 00:03:55,151 --> 00:03:56,818 but would get across the Elbe 51 00:03:56,903 --> 00:04:00,155 and quite likely meet the Western allies along the Rhine. 52 00:04:00,240 --> 00:04:04,034 The Western allies at that time were recovering from the Battle of the Bulge 53 00:04:04,118 --> 00:04:06,954 and things looked pretty bad for them. 54 00:04:07,038 --> 00:04:11,291 But the recovery from the Bulge was quite a bit quicker than expected. 55 00:04:11,376 --> 00:04:14,336 That was followed by the capture of the bridge at Remagen 56 00:04:14,420 --> 00:04:17,172 which let Eisenhower get across the Rhine for free. 57 00:04:17,257 --> 00:04:21,134 Until then they thought getting across the Rhine was going to be 58 00:04:21,219 --> 00:04:25,347 as big a job as getting across the English Channel in Operation Overlord. 59 00:04:25,431 --> 00:04:29,893 (narrator) In April the armies met up on the Elbe river as planned. 60 00:04:29,978 --> 00:04:33,438 (Ambrose) There was a great celebration at Torgau where they met. 61 00:04:33,523 --> 00:04:38,735 Dancing and embracing, exchanging of gifts. Very happy time. 62 00:04:41,614 --> 00:04:43,824 (Russian music) 63 00:04:43,908 --> 00:04:46,868 The United States during the war had been propagandised 64 00:04:46,953 --> 00:04:51,540 into seeing Russia as a democracy, a land of freedom lovers 65 00:04:51,666 --> 00:04:56,295 with essentially broad social aims about the same as those of the West. 66 00:04:56,379 --> 00:05:00,424 It seemed to make sense since they were clearly an enemy of the Nazis 67 00:05:00,508 --> 00:05:02,175 and we were an enemy of the Nazis, 68 00:05:02,260 --> 00:05:04,553 thus it appeared we had a great deal in common. 69 00:05:04,637 --> 00:05:08,724 The leaders, especially the British leaders, 70 00:05:08,808 --> 00:05:13,020 and most especially Churchill, never agreed with this view. 71 00:05:13,104 --> 00:05:19,109 But this was in general the view of most of the ordinary soldiers 72 00:05:19,235 --> 00:05:21,320 and the citizenry of the United States. 73 00:05:21,404 --> 00:05:24,781 There was no intention during the war itself 74 00:05:24,866 --> 00:05:28,035 of dividing Germany up between East and West. 75 00:05:28,119 --> 00:05:31,455 Intention at the time was to provide an orderly administration 76 00:05:31,539 --> 00:05:33,874 of the occupied areas. 77 00:05:33,958 --> 00:05:36,626 The first big act after the war is 78 00:05:36,711 --> 00:05:40,422 that everybody lives up to the wartime agreements about zonal boundaries. 79 00:05:40,548 --> 00:05:44,301 The thing that stands out is the Russians do let the West into Berlin, 80 00:05:44,385 --> 00:05:47,346 which is 80 miles within their zone. 81 00:05:47,430 --> 00:05:49,348 They didn't have to do it. 82 00:05:49,432 --> 00:05:52,184 They could have acted in Berlin as they acted in Poland, 83 00:05:52,268 --> 00:05:55,437 and said, "To hell with you, we're not letting you in." 84 00:05:55,521 --> 00:05:58,482 "We're not going to live up to the agreements we signed." 85 00:05:58,566 --> 00:06:01,360 "We're holding on to Berlin. After all, we captured it." 86 00:06:01,444 --> 00:06:04,529 "We paid the cost." 100,000 Russians died. 87 00:06:05,573 --> 00:06:08,658 Stalin was still hoping for an American loan. 88 00:06:08,743 --> 00:06:13,622 He desperately needed to get reparations from Germany, especially from the Ruhr. 89 00:06:13,706 --> 00:06:17,501 If he were to get these things he would have to co-operate with the West. 90 00:06:17,585 --> 00:06:19,252 He recognised this. 91 00:06:19,337 --> 00:06:23,882 In areas in which he felt it was possible to co-operate with the West 92 00:06:23,966 --> 00:06:30,138 without making too many sacrifices in Russian security, he did so. 93 00:06:30,223 --> 00:06:33,016 I would point to Berlin as the chief example of this. 94 00:06:33,101 --> 00:06:37,187 In the case of Poland he simply couldn't allow the Polish colonels, 95 00:06:37,271 --> 00:06:39,815 the Catholic Church, the Polish landlords, 96 00:06:39,899 --> 00:06:42,234 to come back and take control of Poland. 97 00:06:42,318 --> 00:06:44,361 Poland, as he pointed out time and again, 98 00:06:44,445 --> 00:06:47,989 had three times in the past generation 99 00:06:48,074 --> 00:06:50,784 been a gateway for an invasion of Russia. 100 00:06:50,868 --> 00:06:55,080 Berlin he could afford to make concessions on and he did. 101 00:06:55,164 --> 00:06:58,959 Stalin was clearly eager to get along with the West. 102 00:06:59,043 --> 00:07:00,627 He was not a revolutionary. 103 00:07:00,711 --> 00:07:04,381 He wanted to conserve the Bolshevik gains from the Russian Revolution. 104 00:07:04,465 --> 00:07:08,760 He wanted to conserve the Russian state. He wanted security around her borders. 105 00:07:08,845 --> 00:07:11,263 He did not push for world-wide revolution. 106 00:07:11,347 --> 00:07:12,889 There are all kinds of examples. 107 00:07:12,974 --> 00:07:16,143 Greece, for example. The Greek civil war 108 00:07:16,269 --> 00:07:18,854 was being waged at the time 109 00:07:18,938 --> 00:07:20,856 and the British were deeply involved. 110 00:07:20,940 --> 00:07:25,152 British troops fighting against the communists and radicals in Greece 111 00:07:25,236 --> 00:07:27,446 on the side of the monarchy. 112 00:07:27,530 --> 00:07:32,617 Stalin quite clearly lived up to the wartime agreements with Churchill. 113 00:07:32,702 --> 00:07:35,829 He refused to support the Greek communists. 114 00:07:35,913 --> 00:07:38,039 The Americans were asking for an awful lot. 115 00:07:38,124 --> 00:07:42,127 They wanted not only to control the areas their armies had conquered, 116 00:07:42,211 --> 00:07:48,008 but they also wanted to have a major say, or at least an influence, 117 00:07:48,092 --> 00:07:50,177 in the areas the Red Army had conquered. 118 00:07:50,261 --> 00:07:52,554 In 1943, when Italy surrendered, 119 00:07:52,638 --> 00:07:55,765 the Russians wanted to be part of the occupation of Italy. 120 00:07:55,892 --> 00:07:59,811 Italy had been one of the Axis powers that attacked the Soviet Union. 121 00:07:59,896 --> 00:08:03,565 But the Americans and British systematically excluded the Russians 122 00:08:03,649 --> 00:08:06,109 from any say in the occupation of Italy. 123 00:08:06,194 --> 00:08:09,696 Stalin originally protested against this. 124 00:08:09,780 --> 00:08:13,617 He eventually said, "A-ha, I see. The precedent has been set." 125 00:08:13,701 --> 00:08:15,160 The principle was clear. 126 00:08:15,286 --> 00:08:19,706 Whoever occupies a country imposes upon it his own social system. 127 00:08:19,790 --> 00:08:23,376 Stalin was happy enough to accept that precedent. 128 00:08:23,503 --> 00:08:29,591 The Americans, however, wanted... were not willing to go along with that 129 00:08:29,675 --> 00:08:31,927 when the shoe was on the other foot. 130 00:08:32,011 --> 00:08:35,096 The Americans were demanding a major say in Poland 131 00:08:35,181 --> 00:08:38,225 while being totally unwilling to give the Russians any say 132 00:08:38,309 --> 00:08:40,352 in the areas their armies had conquered. 133 00:08:40,436 --> 00:08:44,231 From the Russian point of view, if the West was going to exclude them 134 00:08:44,315 --> 00:08:47,108 from all areas in which Western armies were in control, 135 00:08:47,193 --> 00:08:49,986 they had the right to exclude the West from the areas 136 00:08:50,071 --> 00:08:51,738 where the Red Army was in control. 137 00:08:51,822 --> 00:08:55,784 They systematically followed this principle for the remainder of the war 138 00:08:55,868 --> 00:08:59,621 and into the post-war period and indeed up to the present time. 139 00:09:00,581 --> 00:09:04,292 (narrator) Russian suffering during the war had been appalling. 140 00:09:04,377 --> 00:09:07,045 Their shattered economy had to be rebuilt. 141 00:09:07,129 --> 00:09:10,924 To do it, Stalin had to choose between self-help, 142 00:09:11,008 --> 00:09:14,844 turning to his allies or stripping the conquered lands. 143 00:09:14,929 --> 00:09:18,014 He had those three alternatives. 144 00:09:18,099 --> 00:09:23,603 He could either do it by forced savings on the part of the Russian citizenry, 145 00:09:23,688 --> 00:09:26,940 who had of course been through hell for the past four years. 146 00:09:27,024 --> 00:09:32,153 But if you continued to make demands of them, force them to work, 147 00:09:32,238 --> 00:09:36,866 provide them with none of the ordinary consumer goods, 148 00:09:36,951 --> 00:09:40,245 Russia could rebuild on her own. 149 00:09:40,329 --> 00:09:44,040 This was the least desirable choice, but it was a choice. 150 00:09:44,125 --> 00:09:48,795 A second choice that worked hand in glove with it was 151 00:09:48,879 --> 00:09:52,382 strip all of the areas that you have conquered. 152 00:09:52,466 --> 00:09:54,384 Move out everything that's moveable 153 00:09:54,468 --> 00:09:59,639 and bring it back to the Soviet Union and restore the Soviet Union that way. 154 00:09:59,724 --> 00:10:01,224 Of course that was done, too. 155 00:10:01,309 --> 00:10:05,812 Both of those were the solutions that were in fact followed. 156 00:10:05,896 --> 00:10:10,942 The third possibility was get investment capital from the United States. 157 00:10:11,027 --> 00:10:12,193 The Soviets did ask 158 00:10:12,278 --> 00:10:14,029 for an American loan. 159 00:10:14,113 --> 00:10:18,825 The Soviets were not about to let the Americans come into Russia 160 00:10:18,909 --> 00:10:22,412 in the way that the Americans were already beginning to move into France 161 00:10:22,496 --> 00:10:23,747 and western Germany 162 00:10:23,831 --> 00:10:25,749 and some ways into Great Britain, 163 00:10:25,833 --> 00:10:27,959 had already moved into South America. 164 00:10:28,044 --> 00:10:31,254 That is the enormous, gigantic American corporations coming in, 165 00:10:31,339 --> 00:10:33,381 making investments and taking control, 166 00:10:33,466 --> 00:10:35,425 to a certain extent, of the economy. 167 00:10:35,509 --> 00:10:39,554 This the Russians wouldn't allow. They wanted a loan with no strings attached. 168 00:10:39,639 --> 00:10:41,723 The Americans were above all capitalist 169 00:10:41,807 --> 00:10:45,310 and capitalists don't make loans unless there are strings attached. 170 00:10:45,394 --> 00:10:50,315 So the only place in the world that the Russians could look to 171 00:10:50,399 --> 00:10:56,446 for investment capital, the USA, 172 00:10:56,530 --> 00:11:01,159 was... How the hell to put it? 173 00:11:02,286 --> 00:11:05,580 It just wasn't available to the Soviets because 174 00:11:05,665 --> 00:11:08,166 it would mean opening up Russia 175 00:11:08,250 --> 00:11:09,542 to Western investment, 176 00:11:09,627 --> 00:11:11,127 to Western inspection teams. 177 00:11:11,212 --> 00:11:13,713 The US, when they discussed the loan, 178 00:11:13,798 --> 00:11:16,758 said, "We want you to open up your books." 179 00:11:16,842 --> 00:11:20,929 Again, it didn't matter if it was a tsarist Russia or communist Russia. 180 00:11:21,013 --> 00:11:24,224 The Russians are suspicious of the West and with very good reason. 181 00:11:24,308 --> 00:11:28,520 There was never a ghost of a chance of the Russians and Americans creating 182 00:11:28,604 --> 00:11:31,731 a kind of world they liked to talk about during the war, 183 00:11:31,857 --> 00:11:35,193 an Atlantic Charter kind of world, a United Nations kind of world, 184 00:11:35,277 --> 00:11:39,197 in which the victors continue to co-operate as they did during the war. 185 00:11:39,281 --> 00:11:43,326 They only co-operated during the war because they were all afraid of Hitler, 186 00:11:43,411 --> 00:11:44,452 with good reason. 187 00:11:45,454 --> 00:11:50,458 Russian ambitions and American ambitions were bound to clash. 188 00:11:50,543 --> 00:11:52,919 Patton said, "Now we've got rid of Hitler 189 00:11:53,003 --> 00:11:54,838 we've got to get with the Wehrmacht 190 00:11:54,922 --> 00:11:57,882 and drive the Russians back to the Volga." 191 00:11:57,967 --> 00:12:02,721 But that was Patton bravado and bluster and no one in positions of authority 192 00:12:02,805 --> 00:12:05,807 ever took such nonsense seriously. 193 00:12:08,602 --> 00:12:11,020 Eventually what you get out of 194 00:12:11,105 --> 00:12:12,397 the end of World War II 195 00:12:12,481 --> 00:12:17,026 is that Russia and America confront each other around the world. 196 00:12:17,111 --> 00:12:19,028 Then you have to sort out 197 00:12:19,113 --> 00:12:20,989 what belongs to who. 198 00:12:21,073 --> 00:12:23,032 Who gets what out of the war? 199 00:12:26,662 --> 00:12:28,079 Lines have to be drawn. 200 00:12:28,164 --> 00:12:30,123 This is what the Truman Doctrine means, 201 00:12:30,207 --> 00:12:31,624 the doctrine of containment 202 00:12:31,709 --> 00:12:34,127 that eventually came in 1947. 203 00:12:34,211 --> 00:12:36,629 This is what Churchill means by the lron Curtain. 204 00:12:36,714 --> 00:12:40,842 Much as he hated it and as much as many people regret 205 00:12:40,926 --> 00:12:43,094 the imposition of the lron Curtain, 206 00:12:43,179 --> 00:12:46,014 in fact the... 207 00:12:46,098 --> 00:12:49,184 the lron Curtain line in Europe 208 00:12:49,310 --> 00:12:52,312 turned out to be, 209 00:12:52,396 --> 00:12:55,774 rather like the division of Germany, the best thing. 210 00:12:55,858 --> 00:12:58,359 People knew who belonged to what. 211 00:12:58,444 --> 00:13:01,279 Or rather what belonged to who. 212 00:13:01,363 --> 00:13:05,950 So that one of the unexpected results is that 213 00:13:06,035 --> 00:13:08,787 without having had a formal peace conference, 214 00:13:08,871 --> 00:13:11,706 you get a better settlement in Europe after World War II 215 00:13:11,791 --> 00:13:13,750 than after World War l. 216 00:13:13,834 --> 00:13:17,086 In World War I they got down on hands and knees with gigantic maps 217 00:13:17,171 --> 00:13:20,131 and drew out the lines of where the new countries would be 218 00:13:20,216 --> 00:13:25,261 with the Austro-Hungarian Empire broken up and the German Empire broken up. 219 00:13:25,346 --> 00:13:28,848 It looked like a very smooth and intelligent settlement. 220 00:13:28,974 --> 00:13:34,062 In fact nothing was settled, as we learned in 1939, if not earlier. 221 00:13:34,939 --> 00:13:38,608 World War II, you get nothing like that kind of a settlement at the end 222 00:13:38,692 --> 00:13:40,777 so, willy-nilly, things fall into place. 223 00:13:40,861 --> 00:13:44,948 We have now had the longest peace Europe has enjoyed in modern times. 224 00:13:49,286 --> 00:13:53,957 The United States in World War II was very wise. Very wise indeed. 225 00:13:54,041 --> 00:13:58,086 What we did was we paid the Europeans to do our fighting for us. 226 00:13:58,170 --> 00:14:01,464 This seems to me the only way that one can look at Lend-Lease. 227 00:14:01,590 --> 00:14:04,467 Lend-Lease is a programme 228 00:14:04,552 --> 00:14:07,637 designed to make it possible for Russia and Britain 229 00:14:07,721 --> 00:14:09,848 to carry on the struggle against Germany, 230 00:14:09,932 --> 00:14:12,433 to maintain a balance of power in Europe 231 00:14:12,518 --> 00:14:17,981 that allows the United States to almost, in effect, stay out of the war 232 00:14:18,065 --> 00:14:20,733 and yet become the great gainer from it. 233 00:14:20,818 --> 00:14:24,320 We get much more out of the war than anyone else. 234 00:14:24,405 --> 00:14:28,658 There's a paradox here that very quickly after the war is over 235 00:14:28,742 --> 00:14:32,120 Americans began to take the attitude that, "A-ha." 236 00:14:32,204 --> 00:14:36,666 "Here it is again. We got fooled once more as we did in World War l." 237 00:14:36,750 --> 00:14:38,418 "We made this enormous effort." 238 00:14:38,502 --> 00:14:42,005 "We beat the Germans and the Japanese and who wins?" 239 00:14:42,089 --> 00:14:46,009 "The Russians win. They get East Europe. We were suckers." 240 00:14:46,093 --> 00:14:49,971 This was very widely felt in the United States. 241 00:14:50,055 --> 00:14:53,182 It was a strange attitude to hold when you look 242 00:14:53,267 --> 00:14:56,561 with whatever objectivity that one can muster about such things 243 00:14:56,645 --> 00:14:58,688 at what the real results of the war were. 244 00:15:00,024 --> 00:15:03,067 The United States came out of the war with, first of all, 245 00:15:03,152 --> 00:15:08,114 not simply an intact physical plant, but a vastly expanded one. 246 00:15:08,198 --> 00:15:12,911 Two, perhaps even three times as big as the industrial plant of 1939. 247 00:15:14,121 --> 00:15:17,957 In all the world, only the United States had access to investment capital. 248 00:15:20,836 --> 00:15:24,339 A lot of fortunes were made in the United States during World War II. 249 00:15:24,423 --> 00:15:26,925 A lot of people got very rich out of the war. 250 00:15:27,009 --> 00:15:29,469 Manpower losses were almost insignificant. 251 00:15:29,553 --> 00:15:32,096 Compared to the other combatants, insignificant. 252 00:15:32,222 --> 00:15:36,017 Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war. 253 00:15:36,101 --> 00:15:41,314 America was the least mobilised of all the major combatants in World War II. 254 00:15:42,441 --> 00:15:45,693 Altogether we had an army, navy and air force of 12 million men 255 00:15:45,778 --> 00:15:48,738 out of a total population of 170 million. 256 00:15:48,822 --> 00:15:52,951 Of those 12 million probably less than 6 million ever got overseas. 257 00:15:54,370 --> 00:15:56,829 Within the United States... 258 00:15:59,124 --> 00:16:04,379 ..first and foremost the problem of the Depression was solved by World War II. 259 00:16:04,463 --> 00:16:07,715 Now, of course economists in the United States and elsewhere, 260 00:16:07,841 --> 00:16:10,218 British economists were just as guilty of this, 261 00:16:10,302 --> 00:16:13,054 felt that during the war the big problem after the war 262 00:16:13,138 --> 00:16:16,349 would be a return to depression conditions. 263 00:16:16,433 --> 00:16:18,267 They agonised over that problem. 264 00:16:18,352 --> 00:16:21,479 What's going to happen when we demobilise these armies? 265 00:16:21,563 --> 00:16:25,149 All of a sudden we'll have 10 or 12 million unemployed again. 266 00:16:25,234 --> 00:16:29,654 What they failed to recognise was money was being made hand over fist in the US 267 00:16:29,738 --> 00:16:32,907 during the war and there was nothing to spend that money on. 268 00:16:32,992 --> 00:16:34,158 So it was being saved. 269 00:16:34,284 --> 00:16:38,454 You had this enormous pent-up demand for consumer goods 270 00:16:38,539 --> 00:16:40,790 that only American factories could satisfy. 271 00:16:40,874 --> 00:16:44,627 Not only within the United States, but for Europe and Asia as well. 272 00:16:44,712 --> 00:16:52,218 At the conclusion of the war, the United States went into an economic boom 273 00:16:52,302 --> 00:16:56,472 that made everything that preceded in America look like peanuts. 274 00:16:56,557 --> 00:17:03,604 The idea that America was the world's great industrial power in 1939 275 00:17:03,689 --> 00:17:07,442 is not exactly right. It potentially was. 276 00:17:07,526 --> 00:17:10,945 When America really takes off, really begins to dominate the world 277 00:17:11,030 --> 00:17:13,823 and what we think of as the American lifestyle today 278 00:17:13,907 --> 00:17:17,368 begins to take hold, is post-1945. 279 00:17:17,453 --> 00:17:20,288 A lot of statistics are available on this sort of thing. 280 00:17:20,372 --> 00:17:22,331 Before World War II, for example, 281 00:17:22,416 --> 00:17:26,377 American per-capita consumption of meat was 50lb per year. 282 00:17:26,462 --> 00:17:30,048 By 1950 it was 150lb per year. 283 00:17:30,132 --> 00:17:34,052 Before World War II less than one out of four American families 284 00:17:34,136 --> 00:17:35,595 owned a private automobile. 285 00:17:35,679 --> 00:17:37,972 The idea that all Americans owned their own car 286 00:17:38,057 --> 00:17:40,308 before World War II was simply wrong. 287 00:17:40,434 --> 00:17:46,105 But by 1950 almost literally every adult male American owned his own automobile. 288 00:17:46,190 --> 00:17:50,234 One could go on with that kind of statistic forever. 289 00:17:50,319 --> 00:17:53,071 The big boom for the United States is after World War II 290 00:17:53,155 --> 00:17:56,365 as a result of the American victory in World War II. 291 00:17:56,450 --> 00:17:59,077 The irony is, that having paid the least for victory, 292 00:17:59,161 --> 00:18:01,204 the United States got the most out of it. 293 00:18:02,956 --> 00:18:07,001 (narrator) The British fought the Nazis longer than anyone. 294 00:18:07,086 --> 00:18:12,006 But the victory they won was a triumph with a difference. 295 00:18:12,091 --> 00:18:14,842 (Ambrose) The British had as many problems, if not more, 296 00:18:14,927 --> 00:18:18,471 in recovering from victory as the Germans did recovering from defeat. 297 00:18:18,555 --> 00:18:23,226 The biggest single criticism I would make of Churchill during the war 298 00:18:23,310 --> 00:18:26,229 was that he overstrained the British economy for victory. 299 00:18:26,313 --> 00:18:28,189 He did more than had to be done. 300 00:18:28,315 --> 00:18:30,733 Britain was certainly among the most mobilised, 301 00:18:30,818 --> 00:18:33,736 if not the most mobilised nation in the war. 302 00:18:33,821 --> 00:18:38,491 The rail system was worn out. The industrial plant was worn out. 303 00:18:38,575 --> 00:18:40,952 The transport system was worn out. 304 00:18:42,704 --> 00:18:47,917 In addition, the British... It wasn't altogether Churchill's fault. 305 00:18:48,001 --> 00:18:50,753 The Americans drove a very hard bargain. 306 00:18:50,838 --> 00:18:52,713 The Lend-Lease Act, 307 00:18:52,798 --> 00:18:56,551 which Churchill called the most unsorted act in all of human history, 308 00:18:56,635 --> 00:19:00,346 may have been that but there was much about it that was petty. 309 00:19:00,430 --> 00:19:05,017 The Americans insisted before they began making the contributions 310 00:19:05,102 --> 00:19:09,730 to Britain via Lend-Lease that the British sell their overseas assets. 311 00:19:09,815 --> 00:19:14,318 This meant that at the end of the war the income the British had depended on 312 00:19:14,403 --> 00:19:18,739 for so long from her overseas investments were no longer there. 313 00:19:18,824 --> 00:19:21,325 They had been sold at American insistence. 314 00:19:21,410 --> 00:19:24,996 What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much. 315 00:19:25,080 --> 00:19:28,166 She lost a very great deal. 316 00:19:28,250 --> 00:19:30,835 I suppose, if you want to look at it positively 317 00:19:30,919 --> 00:19:34,255 she got a moral claim on the world 318 00:19:34,339 --> 00:19:38,301 as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year. 319 00:19:38,385 --> 00:19:41,137 It provided the moral leadership against the Nazis 320 00:19:41,221 --> 00:19:45,433 at a time when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis. 321 00:19:46,518 --> 00:19:50,021 The British, I suppose one would have to say, 322 00:19:50,105 --> 00:19:52,940 paid the most for victory and got the least out of it. 323 00:19:53,525 --> 00:19:56,235 The Russians paid an enormous price for victory, 324 00:19:56,320 --> 00:19:59,530 but the Russians did get gains out of the war. 325 00:19:59,615 --> 00:20:03,451 First and foremost, they got control of East Europe 326 00:20:03,535 --> 00:20:08,581 and the imposition of regimes friendly to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. 327 00:20:08,665 --> 00:20:14,545 That is a euphemism that Stalin used time and again. 328 00:20:14,630 --> 00:20:16,881 It means they got control of Eastern Europe 329 00:20:16,965 --> 00:20:19,425 and were able to set up puppet governments there 330 00:20:19,509 --> 00:20:25,681 that were... very much in the control of the Kremlin. 331 00:20:26,725 --> 00:20:30,311 This meant the Soviet Union, for the first time in its existence, 332 00:20:30,395 --> 00:20:33,231 and in many ways Russia for the first time in its history, 333 00:20:33,315 --> 00:20:35,566 was now secure from attack from Europe. 334 00:20:35,692 --> 00:20:39,695 The Soviets were able to create a buffer zone between them 335 00:20:39,780 --> 00:20:42,615 and the industrialised nations of Europe. 336 00:20:42,699 --> 00:20:45,493 In the Far East the Soviets made gains 337 00:20:45,577 --> 00:20:50,539 that the Americans after the war felt were far greater than they deserved, 338 00:20:50,624 --> 00:20:53,292 given their contribution to the victory over Japan, 339 00:20:53,377 --> 00:20:55,419 which Americans thought was a minimal 340 00:20:55,504 --> 00:20:58,047 or even a non-existent contribution. 341 00:20:58,131 --> 00:21:00,174 Although in my own view 342 00:21:00,259 --> 00:21:03,719 the Soviet attacks 343 00:21:03,804 --> 00:21:07,223 on the Japanese army in Manchuria, 344 00:21:07,307 --> 00:21:11,477 beginning on August 8 and lasting for only two days to be sure, 345 00:21:11,561 --> 00:21:16,232 were nevertheless the decisive event in the Japanese decision to surrender. 346 00:21:16,358 --> 00:21:21,070 This gets us into a kettle of worms that I'm not sure we've got time to get into. 347 00:21:22,656 --> 00:21:24,657 The Soviets... 348 00:21:26,368 --> 00:21:30,871 Communism gains out of the war more than the Soviets in a sense. 349 00:21:32,916 --> 00:21:36,585 The communists get North Korea, first of all. 350 00:21:36,712 --> 00:21:39,171 Eventually they get North Vietnam. 351 00:21:39,256 --> 00:21:42,508 And of course China goes communist. 352 00:21:42,592 --> 00:21:48,014 The West gets Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam. 353 00:21:48,098 --> 00:21:51,225 So again, without having had a formal peace settlement, 354 00:21:51,310 --> 00:21:57,148 you get a fairly just, fairly equitable distribution of the spoils in Asia. 355 00:21:57,232 --> 00:22:00,443 The same tends to be true, it seems to me, in Europe. 356 00:22:00,527 --> 00:22:04,905 The West gets western Germany and holds on to France and Italy. 357 00:22:04,990 --> 00:22:06,782 The Russians get eastern Germany 358 00:22:06,867 --> 00:22:09,118 and settle finally the question - 359 00:22:09,202 --> 00:22:12,621 who is going to run Eastern Europe, the Germans or the Russians? 360 00:22:12,706 --> 00:22:14,332 For centuries Germany and Russia 361 00:22:14,458 --> 00:22:16,751 had struggled over control of Eastern Europe. 362 00:22:16,835 --> 00:22:21,630 That question was settled by the Red Army in 1945 when it overran the area 363 00:22:21,715 --> 00:22:24,425 and made it perfectly clear to everyone, 364 00:22:24,551 --> 00:22:27,511 to hell with world moral views 365 00:22:27,637 --> 00:22:29,096 or world public opinion, 366 00:22:29,181 --> 00:22:31,807 they would hold on to Eastern Europe, period. 367 00:22:31,892 --> 00:22:34,060 And of course they have, as we all know. 368 00:22:34,686 --> 00:22:38,189 There's a view around today that World War II turned out disastrously 369 00:22:38,273 --> 00:22:40,858 for all concerned except possibly the communists. 370 00:22:40,942 --> 00:22:43,694 I think one can be very positive about World War II. 371 00:22:43,779 --> 00:22:46,655 The most important single result is that 372 00:22:46,740 --> 00:22:48,657 the Nazis were crushed. 373 00:22:48,742 --> 00:22:51,077 The militarists in Japan were crushed. 374 00:22:51,161 --> 00:22:53,287 The fascists in Italy were crushed. 375 00:22:53,372 --> 00:22:55,623 Surely justice has never been better served.