Quick questions on Origins of the Cold War 1945-1949: VCE Modern History Unit 4

The Grand Alliance (the US, Britain and the USSR) was a marriage of convenience against Nazi Germany. It began to strain even before victory. The Tehran Conference (28 November to 1 December 1943) agreed on a second front in 1944. The Yalta Conference (4 to 11 February 1945) was attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in the Crimea.

Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. His successor Harry Truman met Stalin and Churchill (replaced mid-conference by Clement Attlee) at Potsdam (17 July to 2 August 1945). The atmosphere had hardened. On 16 July 1945, the US successfully tested the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Churchill, by then out of office, delivered the "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." George Kennan's "Long Telegram" from the US embassy in Moscow (22 February 1946), and his subsequent "X" article in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), argued that Soviet expansionism was structural and required "containment."

Between 1945 and 1948, communists used "salami tactics" (Matyas Rakosi's phrase) to slice opposition parties out of coalition governments. The pattern: communists took the interior ministry (controlling the police), discredited rival leaders, then engineered single-list elections.

In Greece, communist-led ELAS forces fought a civil war against the British-backed royal government (1946 to 1949). Britain told the US in February 1947 that it could no longer afford to support Greece and Turkey.

The European Recovery Program ("Marshall Plan"), announced by Secretary of State George Marshall at Harvard on 5 June 1947, offered economic aid to all European states (including the USSR and Eastern Europe) in exchange for coordinated recovery plans. Stalin briefly considered participation, then forbade the Eastern bloc to join. Around 13 billion dollars was disbursed from 1948 to 1951 to 16 Western European countries.

The four occupation zones evolved on different tracks. The US and British zones merged into the "Bizone" on 1 January 1947 for economic administration; France joined to form the "Trizone" by April 1949.

Stalin closed all road, rail and canal access between the Western zones and West Berlin on 24 June 1948. Around 2.5 million West Berliners faced starvation. The Western Allies had three options: withdraw, force a passage, or supply by air.

The Brussels Treaty (17 March 1948), signed by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, was a five-power defence pact. Negotiations to expand it into a transatlantic alliance produced the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington on 4 April 1949 by 12 states (the Brussels Five plus the US, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Iceland).

John Lewis Gaddis (We Now Know, 1997; The Cold War, 2005) is the leading post-revisionist. With access to Soviet archives, he emphasises Stalin's ideological hostility and personality as primary causes.

Roosevelt extracted real concessions at Yalta: a UN with a US veto, Soviet entry into the Pacific war, and a paper commitment to free elections. The alternative was to invade Eastern Europe.

The Plan rebuilt European markets for American exports and was conditional on coordinated planning that the USSR would not accept.

Truman Doctrine (12 March 1947) was a security commitment to Greece and Turkey. Marshall Plan (5 June 1947) was an economic recovery program for all Europe.

NATO (April 1949) preceded the Warsaw Pact (14 May 1955) by six years. The Soviet bloc did not need a formal alliance because it already controlled Eastern European armies through bilateral treaties.