Producing the Proper Crisis
Note the reference to Harry Truman.
" In 1950 the Truman administration adopted a program to vastly expand the U.S. and West European military services under a National Security Council document called NSC-68. This document was Top Secret for 25 years and, by error, it was released in 1975 and published. The purpose of military expansion under NSC-68 was to reverse the economic slide that began with the end of World War II wherein during five years the U.S. GNP had declined 209S and unemployment had risen from 700,000 to 4.7 million. U.S. exports, despite the subsidy program known as the Marshall Plan, were inadequate to sustain the economy, and remilitarization of Westem Europe would allow transfer of dollars, under so-called defense support grants, that would in turn generate European imports from the U.S. As NSC-68 put the situation in early 1950:
"the United States and other free nations will within a period of a few years at most experience a decline in economic activity of serious proportions unless more positive governmental programs are developed ..."
The solution adopted was expansion of the military. But support in Congress and the public at large was lacking for a variety of reasons, not least the increased taxes the programs would require. So Truman's State Department, under Dean Acheson, set out to sell the so-called Communist Threat as justification, through a fear campaign in the media that would create a permanent war atmosphere. But a domestic media campaign was not enough. A real crisis was needed, and it came in Korea. Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, in their history of the 1945-55 period, The Limits of Power, show that the Truman administration manipulated this crisis to overcome resistance to military build-up and a review of those events shows striking parallels to the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990. Korea at the end of World War II had been divided north-south along the 38th parallel by the U.S. and the Soviets. But years of on-again, off-again conflict continued: first between revolutionary forces in the south and U.S. occupation forces, then between the respective states established first by the U.S. in the south and then by the Soviets in the north. Both states threatened to reunify the country by force, and border incursions with heavy fighting by military forces were common. In June 1950, communist North Korean military forces moved across the border toward Seoul, the South Korean capital At the time, the North Korean move was called "naked aggression," but I.F. Stone made a convincing case, in his Hidden History of the Korean War, that the invasion was provoked by South Korea and Taiwan, another U.S. client regime. For a month South Korean forces retreated practically without fighting, in effect inviting the North Koreans to follow them south. Meanwhile Truman rushed in U.S. military forces under a United Nations command, and he made a dramatic appeal to Congress for an additional $10 billion beyond requirements for Korea, for U.S. and European military expansion. Congress refused. Truman then made a fateful decision. In September 1950, about three months after the conflict began, U.S., South Korean, and token forces from other countries, under the United Nations banner, began to push back the North Koreans. Within three weeks the North Koreans had been pushed north to the border, the 38th parallel, in defeat. That would have been the end of the matter, at least the military action, if the U.S. had accepted a Soviet UN resolution for a cease-fire and UN-supervised country-wide elections. Truman, however, needed to prolong the crisis in order to overcome congressional and public resistance to his plans for U.S. and European rearmament. Although the UN resolution under which U.S. forces were fighting called only for "repelling" aggression from the north, Truman had another plan. In early October U.S. and South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel heading north, and rapidly advanced toward the Yalu River, North Korea's border with China where only the year before the communists had defeated the U.S.-backed Kuomintang regime. The Chinese communist government threatened to intervene, but Truman had decided to overthrow the communist government in North Korea and unite the country under the anti-Communist South Korean dictatorship. As predicted, the Chinese entered the war in November and forced the U.S. and its allies to retreat once again southward. The following month, with the media full of stories and pictures of American soldiers retreating through snow and ice before hordes of advancing Chinese troops, Truman went on national radio, declared a state of national emergency, and said what Bush's remarks about "our way of life" at state recalled. Truman mustered all the hype and emotion he could, and said: "Our homes, our nation, all the things that we believe in, are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union." He also called again for massive increases in military spending for U.S. and European forces, apart from needs in Korea. Of course, there was no threat of war with the Soviet Union at all. Truman attributed the Korean situation to the Russians in order to create emotional hysteria, a false threat, and to get the leverage over Congress needed for approval of the huge amounts of money that Congress had refused. As we know, Truman's deceit worked. Congress went along in its so-called bi-partisan spirit, like the sheep in the same offices today. The U.S. military budget more than tripled from $13 billion in 1950 to $44 billion in 1952, while U.S. military forces doubled to 3.6 million. The Korean War continued for three more years, after it could have ended, with the final casualty count in the millions, including 34,000 U.S. dead and more than 100,000 wounded. But in the United States, Korea made the permanent war economy a reality, and we have lived with it for 40 years. "
And now from today -
How America Became an Empire
Note the reference to Truman again -
"When Roosevelt died, Truman felt overwhelmed, since he had only been VP for three months. Because Roosevelt had been ill during those months, the two men did not see each other very much.
The Hardliners Emerge
Once Roosevelt was dead, the hardliners on the Russia issue took over, including Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Navy Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Leslie Groves, and Churchill.
Truman began to favor Churchill and England in the allied relationship, something Roosevelt tried to avoid. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 182) Byrnes, a South Carolina politician with little foreign experience, told Russian Foreign Minister V. H. Molotov that Truman planned on using the atomic bomb to get the USSR to comply with American demands on post-war behavior. (ibid. p. 184)
Wallace, who stayed on as Secretary of Commerce, was being marginalized. Truman nominated financier Bernard Baruch to head the Atomic Energy Commission, which oversaw development of nuclear strategy. Baruch laid down terms that all but eliminated the Soviets from joining in the effort.
Finally, Truman invited Churchill to America to make his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946. As the authors note, it was that militant, bellicose speech which “delivered a sharp, perhaps fatal blow to any prospects for post-war comity.” (p. 191)
A few months later, Henry Wallace tried to counter the sharpness of Churchill’s speech at Madison Square Garden. There, appearing with Paul Robeson and Claude Pepper, Wallace pleaded for a foreign policy that tried to understand the fears of Russia, that tried to meet her halfway. After all, he argued, Russia had been invaded twice by Germany in less than 30 years and had suffered over 20 million dead by the blitzkrieg alone.
Wallace also asked that America not follow the British imperial model in the developing world. And he added that the proper body to have far-flung foreign bases around the world was the United Nations, not the United States. (p. 201)
The speech was sharply criticized in the mainstream press as being a straight right cross to the chin of Byrnes. Even though Truman had read the speech in advance, he fired Wallace, thus eliminating one of the few remaining voices for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviet Union. (Pgs. 202-04)
The ouster of Wallace also was the death knell for any hope that FDR’s more balanced strategy toward the World War II alliance would survive into the post-war era. The same month of Wallace’s speech, Elliot Roosevelt published an article in Look detailing how Truman and Churchill had derailed his father’s plans for peace after the war. (ibid, p. 200) Churchill feared Wallace so much that he placed spies around him. (p. 138)
This aspect of the Stone-Kuznick book directly ties into the decision to use the atomic bomb. The first point to recall is one that is mentioned by the authors in passing, that the Germans had abandoned their atomic bomb research. Yet, that research was the reason that FDR approved the Manhattan Project in the first place. (p. 134)
Therefore, by the time frame of 1944-45, when the testing of this devastating new weapon was approaching, the reason d’être for the bomb – to serve as a deterrent to a German bomb – had disappeared. But Truman still used it on the remaining Axis Power belligerent, Japan.
Why Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The question has always been: Was it necessary to use the bomb to induce Japan into surrendering? Or were diplomacy and a second-front invasion by Russia in 1945 enough to get a surrender without either the bomb or an American invasion? (A particularly good polemic against using the bomb is the late Stewart Udall’s The Myths of August.)
Soviet leader Josef Stalin had promised Roosevelt that he would open up a second front against Japan three months after Germany was defeated – and Stalin kept his promise. On Aug. 8 – two days after the first U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and one day before the second bomb destroyed Nagasaki – the Soviets launched a three-pronged invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria.
The Soviet invasion was so successful that the Manchurian emperor was captured, and the offensive spread to Korea, Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. Stone and Kuznick note that Japan, which had already suffered devastating fire-bombings of major cities, seemed less concerned about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than the dramatic loss of territory to an old enemy, the Russians. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, after the Russian offensive had secured Manchuria.
The book also notes that in the war’s final months, the hardliners in Truman’s administration, like Byrnes, insisted on an “unconditional surrender” by Japan. To the Japanese, this meant the emperor had to go and that Japanese society would have to be completely restructured.
Yet, there were voices outside the White House, like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who advised Truman to let the Japanese keep the emperor in order to make it easier for them to surrender. MacArthur was confident that maintaining the emperor would be a help and not a hindrance to rebuilding the country.
The irony of this protracted argument is that, after Hirohito’s announcement of surrender, the allies did let the emperor stay. And he reigned until his death in 1989. Indeed, Hirohito had been looking for a way to surrender since June 1945.
Today it seems fairly clear that the combination of the Soviet invasion and an altering of the unconditional surrender terms could have avoided the hundreds of thousands of deaths and maimings brought on by the two atomic bombs, and perhaps stopped the dawn of the atomic age."
I disagree with that last sentence. I think getting the Russians to start building atomic weapons was by-design. They wanted a crisis, to justify building of the arms and all military expansion.
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