Conclusion

total war

A war that uses all resources at a state’s disposal including the complete mobilization of both the economy and society.

see Chapter 13

When Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945 the process leading to the post-war division of Europe had already begun.

On a lesser scale, the division of Europe was symbolized by the quadripartite control of the victorious Powers over Berlin. Indeed, it was Berlin that remained the focal point of tension in much of the first decade and a half of the Cold War. In 1948—49 it was the scene of the Berlin blockade, and in 1961 the Soviets, worried about the corrosive political and economic impact of a large flood of East Germans to West Germany, built the Berlin Wall. But it also became a stabilizer of sorts, for after the wall was built, the ‘German question’, while a continued point of contention between the United States and the Soviet Union, seemed to lose some of its central character.

The period from the surrender of Germany in 1945 to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 thus saw the dramatic onset and the uneasy stabilization of the Cold War in Europe. Indeed, by the early 1960s, the Cold War division of Europe was taken almost as the normal state of affairs. Thus, however abnormal it might seem to build a wall to divide the once-proud centre of Hitler’s Third Reich, in reality it only confirmed the division of Europe that had emerged at rapid pace after Germany’s surrender. But at the same time as that confirmation took place, the contest between the East and the West - and ultimately between the United States and the Soviet Union - was about to enter another phase, which would be dramatically highlighted by an ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation in October 1962.

Recommended reading

There is no shortage of books on the issues covered in this chapter. For some of the more recent comprehensive analyses on the entire period see John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997) and The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2006), Richard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War (New York, 1995), David S. Painter, The Cold War (New York, 1999), Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, 2007), Martin Walker, The Cold War (New York, 1994), Marc Trachtenberg, The Constructed Peace (Princeton, NJ, 2000), William Curti Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 1993) and David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (New York, 1999).

The German question is discussed in William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), Thomas A. Schwartz, America’s Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1991), Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1990), Carol Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany (New York, 1996), Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1997), Frank Ninkovich, Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question since 1945 (New York, 1995), Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade (Berkeley, CA, 1983) and Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement (Princeton, NJ, 1999). For the renewed crisis in Berlin, see William Burr (ed.), The Berlin Crisis, 1958—1962 (Alexandria, VA, 1994) and Michael Beschloss, Kennedy vs. Khrushchev: The Crisis Years, 1960-1963 (New York, 1991).

Different viewpoints on containment during the early Cold War are offered in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power (Stanford, CA, 1992), Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York, 1972), Thomas Paterson, On Every Front (New York, 1992), John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York, 1982), Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century (Baltimore, MD, 1995), Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron (New York, 1998) and Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: Harry S. Truman and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 2002). For more specific issues, see Louise Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of1946 (New York, 1992) and John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley (eds), Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy (University Park, MD, 1995). On the Marshall Plan and economic warfare, see Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (New York, 1987), Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe (New York, 1984), Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1985) and Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY, 1992).

On the role of other West European countries see David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (New York, 2000), John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940-1957 (New York, 1995), James Miller, The United States and Italy, 1945-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Scandinavia and the United States: An Insecure Friendship (New York, 1997), Philip Gordon, France, Germany and the Western Alliance (Boulder, CO, 1995), and William I. Hitchcock, France Restored (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998).

NATO is covered in Michael Brenner, NATO and Collective Security (New York, 1998), Lawrence Kaplan, NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance (New York, 1994), Geir Lundestad (ed.), No End to Alliance (New York, 1998), Charles Cogan, Forced to Choose: France, the Atlantic Alliance and NATO (Westport, CT, 1997), Olav Riste (ed.), Western Security: The Formative Years (New York, 1985) and Kevin Ruane, The Rise and Fall of the EDC: Anglo-American Relations and the Crisis of European Defence, 1950-1955 (New York, 2000).

For Soviet policy, Vladislav Zubok and Constantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996) is probably the best account covering the Cold War period, while Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007) offers a comprehensive survey of the entire Soviet era. See also Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity (New York, 1996), James G. Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Baltimore, MD, 1994), Donald Filtzer, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953-1964 (Basingstoke, 1993) and James Goldgeier, Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (Baltimore, MD, 1994).

For Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc (Cambridge, MA, 1967) is still useful. More recent studies include Neil Fodor, The Warsaw Treaty Organization (New York, 1990), Bradley Gitz, Armed Forces and Political Power in Eastern Europe (New York, 1992), Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC, 1986) and Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956Hungarian Revolt (Stanford, CA, 2006), Odd Arne Westad et al. (eds), The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945—1989 (New York, 1994), Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 1945—1948 (New York, 1987), Kersten Krystyna, The Establishment ofCommunist Rule in Poland, 1943—1948 (Berkeley, CA, 1991) and Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds), A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact (Budapest, 2006). For two perspectives on American policy in Eastern Europe see Geir Lundestad, The American Non-Policy in Eastern Europe (New York, 1975) and Bennett Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe (New York, 1991).

The various aspects of West European integration are discussed in Francis Heller and John Gillingham, The United States and the Integration of Europe (New York, 1996), Wolfram Kaiser, Using Europe, Abusing the Europeans: Britain and European Integration, 1945—1963 (New York, 1996), Geir Lundestad, ‘Empire’by Integration: the United States and European Integration, 1945—1997 (New York, 1998), Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (Berkeley, CA, 1992), Derek W Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration (New York, 1991), John W. Young, Britain and European Unity, 1945—1992 (New York, 1993) and Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe (New York, 1993).

Basic works on the cultural Cold War include Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2002), Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain (Basingstoke, 1997), Richard Pells, Not Like Us (New York, 1997), Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, 1991), Hans J.

For Soviet-American relations and the nuclear arms race in the 1950s, see Gunter Bischof and Saki Dockrill (eds), Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000), John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1988), Andreas Wenger, Living with Peril: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nuclear Weapons (Lanham, MD, 1997), David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Nuclear Arms Race (New Haven, CT, 1983), David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939—1956 (New Haven, CT, 1994), Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy (New York, 1996), Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace (New York, 1998), Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY, 1995) and Stephen Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Race, 1945—1964 (Novato, CA, 1993).