The Cold War Era: The Beginning

WWII proved to be the most devastating and disastrous war in human history. The military casualties were high, but there were a staggering number of civilian casualties. By 1943, Nazi Germany had 300 concentration camps and the Germans had begun the process of mass extermination known as the “final solution”. The Holocaust took over twelve million lives. The vast majority of these were innocent civilians who committed such crimes as being Jewish, Gypsy, disabled, mentally or physically ill, a political dissident, a religious protester or just an undesirable. Jews made up half of the total and were almost eliminated from the European population. Poland, for instance saw a Jewish population of 2.7 million Jews before the war reduced to less than sixty thousand. Victims were men, women, and children who were first herded into ghettoes and then systematically shipped by railroads to the numerous death camps. The toll was not known until the end of the war when the camps were liberated. All this happened in a country whose military had the highest literacy rate in the world.

Americans were shocked by the horrors of the war and eager to put it behind them as the war ended in 1945. When news of what the death camp liberators found became public knowledge, Americans felt justified for their participation in the “good war”. However, no sooner was the war over than a new chill spread over American society in the form of the “Cold War”. The Cold War was an ideological rivalry that pitted the US and its allies against the USSR or Soviet Union. The unique facet of this war was the reality of nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb had ended WWII and became the most decisive weapon in the Cold War, although it was never used again after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The Russians developed and tested their own bomb in 1949, the same year that Mao Tse Tung’s communist army finally succeeded in ending China’s long civil war victoriously. At this point, two thirds of the world’s population lived under communism. Many Americans believed they had much to fear, and that fear became a large part of the Cold War era.

The turn around that US foreign policy made after WWII from the previous war could not have been more dramatic. It was highlighted by a speech made by President Harry Truman in 1947 to a joint session of congress asking for 400 million dollars for military aid to Greece and Turkey. In it, Truman pledged to support nations whose liberty was threatened by totalitarian aggression for the sake of “free peoples anywhere in the world”. The speech became known as the Truman Doctrine. Combined with George Kennan’s Containment policy, the belief that communism would spread if not systematically met and contained, it validated a series of interventions and covert operations to destabilize communist countries and left-leaning governments around the world for the next 40 years. The controversial Marshall Plan for financial aid to Europe was intended to thwart communism which was thought to spread wherever material deprivation and social injustice was prevalent. The plan proved successful as an economic recovery seeded by the $17 billion in aid revived businesses in Western European, which also led to profits at home for Americans. However, by that time the Soviet Union and the US and its western allies consolidated their power within their spheres of influence in Germany. Although a joint occupation of Berlin had been agreed upon, the city lay well within the Soviet zone. Russian leader Joseph Stalin blockaded the western entrance to Berlin. Truman responded by organizing a massive airlift of food and other supplies to sustain West Berliners. After a year of blockade and approaching the brink of war Stalin gave up the blockade. The Berlin Wall was built separating East and West Berlin and became a permanent fixture symbolizing the antagonism between the two superpowers and ideological enemies for the next 42 years.