All language subtitles for World at War e34 From War to Peace - Professor Stephen Ambrose.en

You had a European civil war
that began in 1914.

There was a long Armistice in that war.

It finally comes to an end in 1945.

In the process of coming to the end,
what happens is that

sweeping into Europe from the outside
are the Russians and the Americans.

They meet at Torgau
on the Elbe river in May 1945

with the result that no European nation
wins the European civil war.

The winners in the European civil war
are outsiders,

the Russians and the Americans,
most of all the Americans.

(narrator) Germans had tried
to conquer Europe.

It had taken six years to defeat them.

They were peaceful now.

Was there any way
of keeping them that way

apart from dismembering
Germany itself?

The whole idea was that
you would not split up Germany.

The idea had been kicked around
in the West,

especially by the American Secretary
of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,

that Germany ought to be divided.

Germany of course had been
a united nation only since 1870.

The newest of all the nations, really,

the youngest of all the nations
in the world.

Morgenthau's idea was to divide it up
and dismantle all German heavy industry.

Turn Germany into
a farming community only

so that Germany can never again
pose a threat to the world.

Roosevelt had originally endorsed
that idea and so had Churchill.

But by late 1943 they decided this would
be economically a disaster for Europe.

If Europe were to recover from the war

she had to have the productivity of
Germany and especially the Ruhr.

The Germans themselves would so bitterly
resent a division of Germany

that you would have enormous problems
in the occupation.

So the basic decision by early '44
had been made,

that Germany would be one nation.

This left problems because Germany
is being attacked from both sides.

The Russians from the East,
the Anglo-Americans from the West.

That meant that sooner or later
they would be meeting each other

with all kinds of dire possibilities,
of which the most important was

they would start firing
at each other by mistake,

not recognising each other's uniforms.
There would be language problems.

You need an agreed-upon demarcation line
that you would stop at

and prevent this sort of…

horrendous situation of allies
firing at each other.

What happened militarily
was the lucky accident

of capturing the bridge
at Remagen intact.

It let Eisenhower's armies
get into Germany

much faster than anybody had expected.

At the time of Yalta,
when the decisions were finally sealed

and the stamp was put on them

that the line of division would be
the Elbe river,

it looked like the Russians would
probably not only take Berlin

but would get across the Elbe

and quite likely meet the Western allies
along the Rhine.

The Western allies at that time were
recovering from the Battle of the Bulge

and things looked pretty bad for them.

But the recovery from the Bulge
was quite a bit quicker than expected.

That was followed by the capture
of the bridge at Remagen

which let Eisenhower get across
the Rhine for free.

Until then they thought
getting across the Rhine was going to be

as big a job as getting across the
English Channel in Operation Overlord.

(narrator) In April the armies met up
on the Elbe river as planned.

(Ambrose) There was a great
celebration at Torgau where they met.

Dancing and embracing,
exchanging of gifts. Very happy time.

(Russian music)

The United States during
the war had been propagandised

into seeing Russia as a democracy,
a land of freedom lovers

with essentially broad social aims
about the same as those of the West.

It seemed to make sense since they
were clearly an enemy of the Nazis

and we were an enemy of the Nazis,

thus it appeared we had
a great deal in common.

The leaders,
especially the British leaders,

and most especially Churchill,
never agreed with this view.

But this was in general the view
of most of the ordinary soldiers

and the citizenry of the United States.

There was no intention
during the war itself

of dividing Germany up
between East and West.

Intention at the time was
to provide an orderly administration

of the occupied areas.

The first big act after the war is

that everybody lives up to the wartime
agreements about zonal boundaries.

The thing that stands out is the
Russians do let the West into Berlin,

which is 80 miles within their zone.

They didn't have to do it.

They could have acted in Berlin
as they acted in Poland,

and said, “To hell with you,
we're not letting you in.”

“We're not going to live up
to the agreements we signed.”

“We're holding on to Berlin.
After all, we captured it.”

“We paid the cost.”
100,000 Russians died.

Stalin was still hoping
for an American loan.

He desperately needed to get reparations
from Germany, especially from the Ruhr.

If he were to get these things he would
have to co-operate with the West.

He recognised this.

In areas in which he felt it was
possible to co-operate with the West

without making too many sacrifices
in Russian security, he did so.

I would point to Berlin
as the chief example of this.

In the case of Poland he simply
couldn't allow the Polish colonels,

the Catholic Church,
the Polish landlords,

to come back and take control of Poland.

Poland, as he pointed out
time and again,

had three times in the past generation

been a gateway
for an invasion of Russia.

Berlin he could afford to make
concessions on and he did.

Stalin was clearly eager
to get along with the West.

He was not a revolutionary.

He wanted to conserve the Bolshevik
gains from the Russian Revolution.

He wanted to conserve the Russian state.
He wanted security around her borders.

He did not push for
world-wide revolution.

There are all kinds of examples.

Greece, for example. The Greek civil war

was being waged at the time

and the British were deeply involved.

British troops fighting against
the communists and radicals in Greece

on the side of the monarchy.

Stalin quite clearly lived up to
the wartime agreements with Churchill.

He refused to support
the Greek communists.

The Americans were asking
for an awful lot.

They wanted not only to control
the areas their armies had conquered,

but they also wanted to have
a major say, or at least an influence,

in the areas the Red Army had conquered.

In 1943, when Italy surrendered,

the Russians wanted to be part of
the occupation of Italy.

Italy had been one of the Axis powers
that attacked the Soviet Union.

But the Americans and British
systematically excluded the Russians

from any say in the occupation of Italy.

Stalin originally protested
against this.

He eventually said, “A-ha, I see.
The precedent has been set.”

The principle was clear.

Whoever occupies a country imposes
upon it his own social system.

Stalin was happy enough
to accept that precedent.

The Americans, however, wanted…
were not willing to go along with that

when the shoe was on the other foot.

The Americans were demanding
a major say in Poland

while being totally unwilling
to give the Russians any say

in the areas their armies had conquered.

From the Russian point of view,
if the West was going to exclude them

from all areas in which Western armies
were in control,

they had the right to exclude
the West from the areas

where the Red Army was in control.

They systematically followed this
principle for the remainder of the war

and into the post-war period
and indeed up to the present time.

(narrator) Russian suffering during
the war had been appalling.

Their shattered economy
had to be rebuilt.

To do it, Stalin had to choose
between self-help,

turning to his allies or
stripping the conquered lands.

He had those three alternatives.

He could either do it by forced savings
on the part of the Russian citizenry,

who had of course been through hell
for the past four years.

But if you continued to make demands
of them, force them to work,

provide them with none of
the ordinary consumer goods,

Russia could rebuild on her own.

This was the least desirable choice,
but it was a choice.

A second choice that worked
hand in glove with it was

strip all of the areas
that you have conquered.

Move out everything that's moveable

and bring it back to the Soviet Union
and restore the Soviet Union that way.

Of course that was done, too.

Both of those were the solutions
that were in fact followed.

The third possibility was get investment
capital from the United States.

The Soviets did ask

for an American loan.

The Soviets were not about
to let the Americans come into Russia

in the way that the Americans were
already beginning to move into France

and western Germany

and some ways into Great Britain,

had already moved into South America.

That is the enormous, gigantic
American corporations coming in,

making investments and taking control,

to a certain extent, of the economy.

This the Russians wouldn't allow. They
wanted a loan with no strings attached.

The Americans were above all capitalist

and capitalists don't make loans
unless there are strings attached.

So the only place in the world
that the Russians could look to

for investment capital, the USA,

was… How the hell to put it?

It just wasn't available
to the Soviets because

it would mean opening up Russia

to Western investment,

to Western inspection teams.

The US, when they discussed the loan,

said, “We want you
to open up your books.”

Again, it didn't matter if it was
a tsarist Russia or communist Russia.

The Russians are suspicious of the West
and with very good reason.

There was never a ghost of a chance
of the Russians and Americans creating

a kind of world they liked to talk about
during the war,

an Atlantic Charter kind of world,
a United Nations kind of world,

in which the victors continue to
co-operate as they did during the war.

They only co-operated during the war
because they were all afraid of Hitler,

with good reason.

Russian ambitions and American
ambitions were bound to clash.

Patton said,
“Now we've got rid of Hitler

we've got to get with the Wehrmacht

and drive the Russians
back to the Volga.”

But that was Patton bravado and bluster
and no one in positions of authority

ever took such nonsense seriously.

Eventually what you get out of

the end of World War II

is that Russia and America
confront each other around the world.

Then you have to sort out

what belongs to who.

Who gets what out of the war?

Lines have to be drawn.

This is what the Truman Doctrine means,

the doctrine of containment

that eventually came in 1947.

This is what Churchill means
by the Iron Curtain.

Much as he hated it
and as much as many people regret

the imposition of the Iron Curtain,

in fact the…

the Iron Curtain line in Europe

turned out to be,

rather like the division of Germany,
the best thing.

People knew who belonged to what.

Or rather what belonged to who.

So that one of the unexpected results
is that

without having had
a formal peace conference,

you get a better settlement
in Europe after World War II

than after World War I.

In World War I they got down
on hands and knees with gigantic maps

and drew out the lines
of where the new countries would be

with the Austro-Hungarian Empire broken
up and the German Empire broken up.

It looked like a very smooth
and intelligent settlement.

In fact nothing was settled,
as we learned in 1939, if not earlier.

World War II, you get nothing like
that kind of a settlement at the end

so, willy-nilly, things fall into place.

We have now had the longest peace
Europe has enjoyed in modern times.

The United States in World War II
was very wise. Very wise indeed.

What we did was we paid the Europeans
to do our fighting for us.

This seems to me the only way
that one can look at Lend-Lease.

Lend-Lease is a programme

designed to make it possible
for Russia and Britain

to carry on the struggle
against Germany,

to maintain a balance of power in Europe

that allows the United States to
almost, in effect, stay out of the war

and yet become the great gainer from it.

We get much more out of the war
than anyone else.

There's a paradox here
that very quickly after the war is over

Americans began to take
the attitude that, “A-ha.”

“Here it is again. We got fooled
once more as we did in World War I.”

“We made this enormous effort.”

“We beat the Germans and the Japanese
and who wins?”

“The Russians win. They get East Europe.
We were suckers.”

This was very widely felt
in the United States.

It was a strange attitude to hold
when you look

with whatever objectivity that one can
muster about such things

at what the real results
of the war were.

The United States came out of the war
with, first of all,

not simply an intact physical plant,
but a vastly expanded one.

Two, perhaps even three times as big
as the industrial plant of 1939.

In all the world, only the United States
had access to investment capital.

A lot of fortunes were made in the
United States during World War II.

A lot of people got very rich
out of the war.

Manpower losses were almost
insignificant.

Compared to the other combatants,
insignificant.

Only slightly more than a quarter of
a million Americans died during the war.

America was the least mobilised of all
the major combatants in World War II.

Altogether we had an army,
navy and air force of 12 million men

out of a total population
of 170 million.

Of those 12 million probably less than
6 million ever got overseas.

Within the United States…

…first and foremost the problem of the
Depression was solved by World War II.

Now, of course economists in
the United States and elsewhere,

British economists were
just as guilty of this,

felt that during the war
the big problem after the war

would be a return
to depression conditions.

They agonised over that problem.

What's going to happen when
we demobilise these armies?

All of a sudden we'll have
10 or 12 million unemployed again.

What they failed to recognise was money
was being made hand over fist in the US

during the war and there was nothing
to spend that money on.

So it was being saved.

You had this enormous pent-up demand
for consumer goods

that only American factories
could satisfy.

Not only within the United States,
but for Europe and Asia as well.

At the conclusion of the war, the
United States went into an economic boom

that made everything that preceded
in America look like peanuts.

The idea that America was the world's
great industrial power in 1939

is not exactly right.
It potentially was.

When America really takes off,
really begins to dominate the world

and what we think of as
the American lifestyle today

begins to take hold, is post-1945.

A lot of statistics are available
on this sort of thing.

Before World War II, for example,

American per-capita consumption
of meat was 50lb per year.

By 1950 it was 150lb per year.

Before World War II less than
one out of four American families

owned a private automobile.

The idea that all Americans
owned their own car

before World War II was simply wrong.

But by 1950 almost literally every adult
male American owned his own automobile.

One could go on with
that kind of statistic forever.

The big boom for the United States
is after World War II

as a result of
the American victory in World War II.

The irony is, that having paid
the least for victory,

the United States
got the most out of it.

(narrator) The British fought the Nazis
longer than anyone.

But the victory they won was a triumph
with a difference.

(Ambrose) The British had
as many problems, if not more,

in recovering from victory as the
Germans did recovering from defeat.

The biggest single criticism I would
make of Churchill during the war

was that he overstrained
the British economy for victory.

He did more than had to be done.

Britain was certainly
among the most mobilised,

if not the most mobilised nation
in the war.

The rail system was worn out.
The industrial plant was worn out.

The transport system was worn out.

In addition, the British…
It wasn't altogether Churchill's fault.

The Americans drove a very hard bargain.

The Lend-Lease Act,

which Churchill called the most unsorted
act in all of human history,

may have been that but there
was much about it that was petty.

The Americans insisted before
they began making the contributions

to Britain via Lend-Lease that
the British sell their overseas assets.

This meant that at the end of the war
the income the British had depended on

for so long from her overseas
investments were no longer there.

They had been sold
at American insistence.

What did Britain get out of the war?
Not very much.

She lost a very great deal.

I suppose,
if you want to look at it positively

she got a moral claim on the world

as the nation that had stood against
Hitler alone for a year.

It provided the moral leadership
against the Nazis

at a time when everyone else
was willing to cave in to the Nazis.

The British, I suppose
one would have to say,

paid the most for victory
and got the least out of it.

The Russians paid
an enormous price for victory,

but the Russians did get gains
out of the war.

First and foremost,
they got control of East Europe

and the imposition of regimes friendly
to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

That is a euphemism
that Stalin used time and again.

It means they got control
of Eastern Europe

and were able to set up
puppet governments there

that were… very much
in the control of the Kremlin.

This meant the Soviet Union,
for the first time in its existence,

and in many ways Russia
for the first time in its history,

was now secure from attack from Europe.

The Soviets were able to create
a buffer zone between them

and the industrialised nations
of Europe.

In the Far East the Soviets made gains

that the Americans after the war felt
were far greater than they deserved,

given their contribution
to the victory over Japan,

which Americans thought was a minimal

or even a non-existent contribution.

Although in my own view

the Soviet attacks

on the Japanese army in Manchuria,

beginning on August 8 and
lasting for only two days to be sure,

were nevertheless the decisive event
in the Japanese decision to surrender.

This gets us into a kettle of worms that
I'm not sure we've got time to get into.

The Soviets…

Communism gains out of the war
more than the Soviets in a sense.

The communists get North Korea,
first of all.

Eventually they get North Vietnam.

And of course China goes communist.

The West gets Japan,
South Korea, South Vietnam.

So again, without having had
a formal peace settlement,

you get a fairly just, fairly equitable
distribution of the spoils in Asia.

The same tends to be true,
it seems to me, in Europe.

The West gets western Germany
and holds on to France and Italy.

The Russians get eastern Germany

and settle finally the question—

who is going to run Eastern Europe,
the Germans or the Russians?

For centuries Germany and Russia

had struggled over control
of Eastern Europe.

That question was settled by the Red
Army in 1945 when it overran the area

and made it perfectly clear to everyone,

to hell with world moral views

or world public opinion,

they would hold on
to Eastern Europe, period.

And of course they have, as we all know.

There's a view around today that
World War II turned out disastrously

for all concerned
except possibly the communists.

I think one can be very positive
about World War II.

The most important single result
is that

the Nazis were crushed.

The militarists in Japan were crushed.

The fascists in Italy were crushed.

Surely justice
has never been better served.