While Japan’s path to recovery from the devastation of World War II under the occupation of the United States was pretty straightforward, German recovery was very much complicated by the concerns of victorious nations that distrusted one another and sought to gain strategic advantages for themselves. Prior to the war, Stalin had earned a reputation as a brutal dictator, and that demeanor was unchanged by the devastation of World War II. Like Hitler, Stalin felt a sense of invincibility for having won Russia for himself and then defeating the axis powers. Having built a huge war industry, and being hardened by the ferocity of warfare, the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as a formidable power. And, again like Hitler, Stalin was also handicapped by a fighting mentality. Even after fighting the White Army for control of Russia, and the Japanese, and the Germans that almost defeated him, Stalin was still fighting an ideological war with capitalism, both at home and abroad.
Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but assumed the name Joseph Stalin, meaning man of steel. As a dictator, Stalin was responsible to no one, and had complete control of the media. While the western republics were responsible to and at least superficially considerate of their constituents, Stalin was perceived to be much less sensitive about sending millions to their deaths and inviting another calamity for the citizens of the Soviet Union. So, he posed a grave threat in the mind of western countries as a man not afraid to start yet another World War.
Stalin is also reported to have learned through his extensive spy network that the U.S. hadn’t been building more atomic bombs since their use against Japan. So, it came to be that Stalin forced his will on the victorious Allies in much the same manner as Hitler had in the run-up to the Second World War. To reduce the threat of Germany making yet another attempt at world domination, the country was partitioned among the Allies with Russia taking control of East Germany.
Stalin also extended Soviet influence and control over many of the countries of Eastern Europe. He used military force to establish puppet regimes in the countries that came to be considered the Communist Bloc. Unlike America which committed thirteen billion dollars to European recovery and integration through the Marshall Plan, the Soviets were seeking to recoup their losses. In addition to monetary and supply reparations Stalin demanded from Finland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania; he had 380 factories removed from West Berlin before transferring control to the U.S., U.K. and France, and even dismantled and moved a couple hundred more factories from East Germany to the Soviet Union.
Exerting his control of the Communist Bloc countries, Stalin severed ties with the west. He foresaw a communist world, and his desire for Soviet control of a unified Germany that he could essentially enslave for war reparations conflicted with the French, British and American design for a prosperous Germany that didn’t feel oppressed and frustrated, and was thereby less prone to lash out again. When Stalin didn’t get his way, he went so far as blockading West Berlin from the other Allies, precipitating the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49 that kept the people of West Berlin supplied, at great expense to the western Allies. And it was that sort of reckless action by Stalin the dictator that dashed hopes for good international relations following the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
Stalin used the Red Army and secret police forces to crush dissatisfaction and revolts in Communist Bloc countries in order to maintain communist rule. Clearly, the failure of Stalin’s oppressive policies was made plainly obvious by the act of fencing in the citizens and shooting those trying to flee to the West; as it’s hard to argue that people were being shot for their own good, or fleeing communist rule because they liked it. Yet Stalin succeeded in enveloping Eastern Europe in an Iron Curtain.
To counter the communist threat, western nations, frustrated and concerned by Stalin’s aggressive behavior and dictatorial power, formed a military alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the Communist Bloc countries pledged mutual defense in the Warsaw Pact of 1955. Though western republics opposed the spread of oppressive communism, Stalin embarked on campaigns of expansion; supporting and encouraging communist regimes to seize power and invade neighboring sovereign states. However, the communist aggression was partially provoked by European colonialism that endured beyond the Second World War. For instance, while most of the remaining British colonies were gaining independence, Vietnam was fighting to overthrow French rule.
Against a backdrop of hundreds of years of colonial rule around the world, persistent campaigns of conquest, and ideological differences between communism and capitalism, the Korean Peninsula had been partitioned by the Soviets and Americans at the 38th parallel at the end of World War II; with the stated goal of uniting under a common government in four years. But the communists and American leaning democratic factions became so entrenched in the North and South respectively that the peninsula was divided even after the official Soviet and American withdrawal.
Harboring secret plans to secure all of Korea as a Soviet ally, on June 25, 1950 communist North Korean forces, led by former Soviet soldier Kim Il-Sung and backed by Stalin, invaded pro-American South Korea, quickly overwhelming the South Koreans and pushing south to occupy Seoul within just three days. The country would have quickly been unified under the communist north had the United Nations not issued a resolution on June 27 in support of South Korea. As a result, sixteen nations, led by the United States with troops stationed in nearby Japan, came to the aid of South Korea.
But the U.S. was timid, as President Truman was scared of further Chinese and Soviet involvement. The man who ended World War II by ordering the use of atomic bombs against Japan, reacted tentatively, overruling General Douglas MacArthur’s desire for airstrikes against North Korea. Instead the U.S. landed a ground force that was quickly defeated and General William Dean was captured by the North. The Americans and South Koreans were driven back to the southern port city of Pusan, very near collapse, followed closely by North Koreans executing South Korean government workers and American sympathizers.
The half-hearted war effort quickly turned into a crisis, and over the next few months, U.N. (essentially U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK)) ground forces were assisted by heavy American air and naval support while they waited for reinforcements to arrive. Finally, in September, U.N. forces counterattacked and drove the Communists back into North Korea where they were joined by the Chinese Army, with Soviet MIG fighter air support.
Under the barrage of waves of Chinese troops the U.N. forces raced back in retreat yet again, and kept giving ground until they were once more at the southern end of the peninsula, before regrouping in 1951 and liberating the devastated South Korean capital of Seoul for a second time. In coming months the tide of battle see-sawed, but the U.S. was still concerned with broadening the war and U.N. forces stopped just north of the 38th parallel and dug in, content to return the Korean peninsula to the tense status quo as a divided state that existed prior to the beginning of the conflict. The remainder of the war was relatively uneventful, but it lingered on like a bad rash, with fighting continuing in a near stalemate for two more years before an armistice was finally signed.
Since that armistice was signed in 1953, the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) has consistently been among the most heavily fortified regions in the world. For decades, ill-will, mistrust and antagonism has continued to make life all the poorer without just cause, and indicative of the failure which is North Korean communism, similar to the failure of communism in East Germany, the North instituted a policy to shoot anybody attempting to flee the wretched living conditions of constant repression and gloom by defecting to the South across the DMZ.
Equally alarming, beginning in 1974, four tunnels were discovered that the Communists constructed under the DMZ as future avenues of invasion, in case they decided to invade the South again with their million man standing army. When the tunnels were discovered the North Koreans claimed they were coal mines, although they were excavated through igneous rock that the Communists painted black. Today the DMZ still remains as one of the last holdouts of the Cold War, guarded by nearly a million men and laced with minefields.
Shortly after the U.S. pulled out of Korea, the French finally pulled out of their former colony that included Vietnam. With the U.S. supporting a republican government in the south and the Soviet Union and China supporting a communist government in the north, the Vietnam War in many ways mirrored the Korean War. North and South Korean forces even participated on opposite sides of the Vietnam War. For the United States it was another limited and undeclared war against Soviet and Chinese sponsored communism.
But there were significant differences between the partitioning of Korea and that of Vietnam into communist and capitalist camps, and certainly all was not as it seemed in America. The antagonism fomented by men like Senator Joseph McCarthy overshadowed many important facts. During the Second World War, in 1941, the Viet Minh, or more formally the League for the Independence of Vietnam, was formed and Ho Chi Minh assumed leadership. Ho Chi Minh had long been working political channels to achieve the very reasonable goal of Vietnamese independence from French control. It was that long-term control by a foreign power that was at the heart of discord in Vietnam.
Citing the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Ho accepted authority of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in 1945 from the wartime emperor Bao Dai. Ho was friendly with American soldiers already in Vietnam and is reported to have welcomed American forces; asking for recognition and good relations with the United States. But the United States declined to acknowledge Ho’s government in order to appease the French who wanted to maintain Vietnam as a French state; with that decision also reflecting America’s exaggerated fear of communism. It’s interesting to consider how moderate and stable Ho’s government might have been had the United States, with President Truman still in office, fully supported the basic democratic principle of freedom of the Vietnamese people from foreign rule.
Instead of cooperating with the DRV however, the United States supported the French in opposing the DRV and maintaining a presence where they were largely unwanted. At the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies decided that Vietnam would be occupied by China and Britain, as China wasn’t yet a communist country. But shortly after asserting control, the Chinese and British ceded their interest in Vietnam to France. The French did meet with Ho and the DRV to form a government, but those negotiations broke down because France insisted on Vietnam being a part of the French Union, which was a copy of the British Commonwealth. After Ho rejected the concept of Vietnam remaining part of the French Empire, the French invaded the North. Ho sent pleas for assistance to President Truman, but those pleas were ignored and Ho was forced into the mountains where he began an insurgency.
When communists under Chairman Mao Zedong seized control of China, they sent aid to the DRV. By 1954 the French were out, having at least enough sense to cut their losses, but not before leading the U.S. to oppose North Vietnam and establish a pro-American government in the South. With French withdrawal, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were finally granted independence after about ten years of unnecessary fighting. But by that time the U.S. was hard set against any communist government that might be aligned with Stalin’s Russia, or even China. Ironically, Vietnam would actually have been a good buffer against Chinese expansion considering age-old Vietnamese resentment over a thousand years of Chinese rule. But America’s vision had been corrupted by the Cold War, Korean Conflict, and alarmist politicians like McCarthy. By 1954 the U.S. was so deep into the war in Vietnam that it was reported to be financing eighty percent of French/American involvement.
In what may have been self-defeating policy, America encouraged strong-arm tactics and a rigged election in the South to maintain an American puppet regime; trampling the spirit of democracy in a rush to prevent the spread of communism. As the rift between North and South grew, the North fueled a vast terrorist insurgency in the South in which all manner of authority and symbolic figures including village chiefs, government officials, teachers and others were murdered. They supplied that vast insurgency network known in the South as the Viet Cong, via the Ho Chi Minh trail; eventually helping to establish the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF).
With the widespread support the NLF had in South Vietnam, the die was cast; the struggle would be internal, and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem was not, and would not be up to the task. John Kennedy made the mistake of escalating American involvement in the early sixties after a reconnaissance trip by Lyndon Johnson. He increased the number of military advisors in South Vietnam, on top of the supplies America was already pouring into the country.
Advisors warned Kennedy that America would meet the same end as the French and that it would long be a heavy financial and emotional burden, but he lacked the experience to recognise any viable alternative to the standing U.S. doctrine of blindly opposing the spread of communism at all cost. To make matters worse, some members of the U.S. government actively encouraged a coup of the sometimes difficult, and largely incompetent South Korean leader Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother in charge of the hated secret police. But their executions in late 1963 seemed to add to the turmoil; and within three weeks, Kennedy had also been assassinated.
As the situation continued to deteriorate, the U.S. military actively engaged the North in 1964. In Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Lemay’s words, the U.S. was going to bomb the Communists back into the stone age. That optimism proved unfounded however, and contrary to what military and political figureheads would say in the following years, America’s experience in Vietnam was the result of poor judgement and poor diplomacy; resulting in almost unmitigated disaster. President Johnson and General Westmoreland were responsible for supervising one of the poorest war efforts in American history and consistently lied to the American people to cover up that fact. America tried to fight a war against the Soviet Union and China by dropping bombs, napalm, and agent orange on an enemy that often couldn’t be seen hiding amongst the natives and in dense jungle terrain.
On May 16, 1968 the frustration of fighting against guerilla insurgents that attacked and then blended back into the population was evidenced by the My Lai massacre in which American forces attempted to annihilate an entire village by killing every person and animal and burning the houses and outbuildings. Nearly four hundred people, including many elderly and children, were executed, with some having been raped and tortured prior to being killed. News of such atrocity, added to growing resentment over those against the war being forced to serve through the draft, and the 1969 invasion of Cambodia, fueled increasingly vocal anti-war protests in America. On May 4, 1970 the tensions between protestors and domestic authorities came to a head at Kent State University in Ohio when National Guardsmen shot and killed four civilians and wounded nine others.
Shortly after John Kennedy had committed the U.S. to the war he was looking for a way to get out of it with honor, as was his bumbling replacement, Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, campaigned by saying he would achieve peace with honor. But there was little honor in the manner in which the conflict dragged on until the withdrawal of American forces in 1973, precipitating the utter defeat of the South and the fall of Saigon in 1975; with Saigon being soon thereafter renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victorious communists.
Neighboring Cambodia, which had long fought alongside the Vietnamese for independence from France, was also plagued by civil war. There again American and communist influences were pitted against each other. Backed by North Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge enjoyed large rural support, contributed to in-part by resentment over heavy U.S. bombing; and they also emerged triumphant in 1975. The Khmer Rouge regime subsequently became one of the worst examples of governing authority in modern times. Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership is known around the world almost exclusively as the murderous savages responsible for the Killing Fields, subject of a film by the same name. Pot and his comrades purged Cambodia of independent thought as they transformed the country into an archaic society.
Almost immediately the Khmer Rouge banned travel, closed borders and isolated the country to maximize control and minimize news of their atrocities. In their reign of terror they killed anybody believed to have a reason to resist them. They killed Vietnamese, Chinese and other ethnic minorities. They tortured and executed educated people, people with possible ties to the previous government or foreign influences, professionals, homosexuals, wealthy people, religious people and anybody else that stood apart from the crowd they were forming. Factories, telephone and postal systems, even schools and hospitals were closed and modern medicine was rejected in favor of folk remedies.
The cities were emptied and families separated as the citizens were relocated to farm labor camps. Private property, finance and religion was outlawed and infrastructure deteriorated. The country was a land of peasants that couldn’t provide for themselves, yet in exchange for weapons to suppress the people, the Khmer Rouge traded rice to China while many of their countrymen starved. Still, there was also a shortage of arms and many of the victims of the killing fields were hacked, and bludgeoned with clubs, picks and other hand tools for lack of bullets.
Even if the Khmer Rouge could maintain control of the terrorized population, economically the country couldn’t maintain a powerful military. So it happened, that in a world of surprises, it was Vietnam that responded to the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and aggression toward Vietnam by invading Cambodia and driving the Khmer Rouge out of power. However, few of those responsible for the mass murders and genocide totaling an estimated 1.7 million deaths ever faced trial, as they retreated to the jungles where they continued guerilla warfare for another twenty years. The new Cambodian government, wearied by continued fighting, was too fearful and tarnished to press the issue of bringing the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.
Pol Pot died in 1998, never having to answer for his crimes. But, pressure and financing from the United Nations finally convinced the Cambodian government, led by former Khmer Rouge soldier, Prime Minister Hun Sen, to participate in a Tribunal to bring former heads of the Khmer Rouge to justice for their roles in crimes against humanity. Former military chief Ta Mok died in government detention in 2006. In 2007 Pol Pot’s second in command, general secretary and Brother Number Two as he was known, Nuon Chea was arrested by the tribunal; joining him in custody was fellow accused Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Dutch who headed the former Khmer Rouge S-21 prison.
United States participation in the Korean and Vietnam Wars was termed police actions because in both cases the sitting President bypassed the intent of the Constitution which reserves the authority to declare war for Congress. During the tension of the Cold War, the Superpowers preferred to fight their ideological battles in Third World backyards because the disagreements weren’t significant enough to risk destruction in their own homelands. As a result, Korea and Vietnam were devastated and superpower economies were severely strained, yet at no point was the tension of the Cold War higher after the Russian blockade of Berlin of 1948-49 than during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The previous year at the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro and the Cubans easily defeated a contingent of invaders trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency that were intent on removing Castro from power. And it was shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion was put down that Nikita Khrushchev ordered the start of construction of the Berlin Wall.
After the Second World War the United States failed to take advantage of it’s technological superiority; letting Stalin dictate too many terms and exercise too much power. And that advantage was essentially lost in 1949 when the Soviets developed their first nuclear weapon based on stolen U.S. technology. Since then both camps of the Cold War were rightly fearful of the devastation of nuclear warfare. And through the years, effort that should have been applied to bridging differences were directed toward developing ever more powerful bombs and delivery systems to fly them faster and carry them farther.
Not long before the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets detonated the largest atomic bomb of all time. The gigantic Tsar Bomba had the power of fifty million tons of TNT and shook the Earth with a force measuring over 5 on the Richter Scale. When Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev mentioned a 100 megaton bomb, twice as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, in a speech to the Soviet Parliament, U.S. officials were even more on edge because they had no way to confirm such a bomb was just part of a fictitious bluff.
The following year, on October 14, 1962, a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba photographed construction of Soviet missile silos capable of launching nuclear warheads well into the U.S. Unbeknownst to the general American public, those missile silos were ordered constructed by Kruschev very much in response to the U.S. stationing nuclear missiles near the Soviet border in Turkey, a member of NATO. However, the Soviets had repeatedly denied preparing to introduce such offensive weapons into Cuba only recently before the silo sites were discovered by America. President Kennedy and his staff were understandably alarmed by the buildup of considerable nuclear strike capacity just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, though Soviet submarines representing similar offensive capabilities were arguably much more dangerous because they could strike from any oceanic coast without warning, just as American submarines constituted a very real threat to Russia.
Kennedy and Kruschev engaged in a public war of words; and in private negotiations through telegraph and associates. The U.S. military and diplomatic leadership worked feverishly in the following days to neutralize the threat of missiles on Cuban soil; quickly mobilizing air, army and naval forces for battle. Plans considered by the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) included bombing strategic Cuban installations, invading Cuba, and implementing a naval blockade. Some military advisors felt that a rapid forceful military response was the only practical solution, but Kennedy was aware that nothing happening in Cuba would be isolated and that Kruschev would react to hostilities in Cuba by using force in Europe to take control of West Berlin, or worse.
Though it could be considered an act of war, Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba, but he called it a quarantine and received the permission of the Organization of American States to strengthen a claim of legality. On October 22, six days after seeing the spy plane photos, Kennedy announced the discovery in an address to the nation in which he also announced the quarantine of Cuba. Tensions quickly escalated even further and the U.S. military was placed on readiness level DefCon 3. Khrushchev claimed the blockade was illegal and ordered Soviet ships to ignore it. Of nineteen ships destined for Cuba, sixteen reversed course, the tanker Bucharest proceeded through without being intercepted and two ships Gagarin and Komiles continued toward Cuba under submarine escort. Tensions were very high as the USS Essix naval group approached the Gagarin and Komiles, but both sides breathed a little sigh of relief when the Soviet ships and their submarine escort stopped short of challenging the U.S. Navy warships.
With the future of world relations uncertain, on October 24th, in the midst of Soviet threats to attack the ships of the blockade, and as progress on the readiness of the Cuban launch sites continued, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was elevated to DefCon 2. Kruschev’s first response for Kennedy’s demand to withdraw the missiles from Cuba was to demand that the U.S. not interfere with Cuban politics, something the U.S. was still actively involved in after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Americans were uneasy, but unaware on October 25th that Kennedy authorized loading of nuclear weapons onto planes readied to fly against Russia.
The following day Kennedy told his advisors that he believed an invasion of Cuba was inevitable, but he was going to try the diplomatic course a while longer in hopes of success. Meanwhile, Castro, a brazen man always prone to dramatic extreme with minimal diplomatic consideration, was convinced an attack was eminent and requesting Kruschev to attack the U.S. in a preemptive strike. That same day a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba and it looked as though the conflict was about to come to a head, as Kennedy had previously determined such an act would lead him to order an attack. But as American and Russian citizens went about their daily routines unaware of the proximity of imminent nuclear destruction, as push came to shove, Kennedy backed off from pulling the trigger and gave the process of diplomacy a little more time.
As Kennedy was readying a proposal in response to Khrushchev's first demand letter seeking a guarantee of Cuban security, Khrushchev's second letter arrived. In the second letter he demanded the U.S. withdraw the nuclear missiles in Turkey. That presented a problem for the U.S. because as a member of NATO, Turkey wanted the missiles there to deter Soviet aggression. If Kennedy agreed to the pullout it might seem to the other NATO countries that America was selling out Europe to further its interests closer to home, or that the U.S. couldn’t be counted on to stand up to the Soviets. On October 28th, the CIA advised that all the Cuban launch sites were operational.
But that very day, with mounting awareness of consequences quickly outpacing anticipated gains, the two sides came to an understanding. Kennedy was praised as a vigilant hero when he publicly agreed not to invade Cuba in exchange for removal of the missiles. But privately, Kennedy also agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, just as Khrushchev had demanded. But by withholding the information concerning missiles in Turkey from public discussion, Kennedy appeared to have won the battle, and Kruschev appeared weaker in the eyes of those not in the know; perhaps contributing to an over-confidence when Kennedy decided to commit to war in Vietnam, and to the future ouster of Nikita Khrushchev by his hard-line Politburo rival Leonid Brezhnev. What both sides were apparently left with was a reassurance that they’d rather fight from a distance in third-world countries than face their own nuclear ruin. And the intrigue of international political posturing played on.
The Soviets and Americans continued to scheme and plot against each other for world domination. What was labeled a battle of ideology between democracy and communism had seemingly more to do with strategic competitive positioning than social debate. In 1979, contemporaneously with the Iranian revolution and Iran-Iraq war, Muslims revolted against the communist government of Afghanistan. Christians and Muslims had warred to eliminate each other nearly since Islam’s militant birth. But in what had traditionally been a mortal enemy bent on the destruction of non-Muslims, and general ignorance-fueled violence, the CIA saw a potential ally against the spread of enemy number one, Russian communism. And the CIA supported the attem