better condition. “At a cursory glance it looked like USAFE would be stupid to get mixed up in anything bigger than a cat-fight at a pet show. We had one Fighter group, and some transports, and some radar people, and that was about the story. I had to shake things up right quick, and I kept working day and night to shake them.”
LeMay was particularly concerned with the vulnerability of American supply lines, through Bremerhaven well to the northeast toward the Soviet zone of Germany, “away out in front of our troops… All the Russians had to do was to whiz forward and they could cut our supply lines before they even made contact with our troops.” To sidestep the complex and time-consuming politics of a Germany divided into four zones, each under the authority of a different country, LeMay resorted to extralegal arrangements. Just as he had negotiated privately with Mao Zedong in China, he now negotiated privately with the French and Belgian Air Force Chiefs of Staff:
I told them that I wished to have some fields well in the rear of our troops, back in Belgium and France, all stocked up. Ammunition, gas, food, bombs, mechanical equipment: every type and condition of supplies which we might need…
What the hell was I doing now? I was breaking other nations’ laws into bits.
You couldn't
To disguise the transfer of materiel, LeMay put the supplies on trains and shuttled them around Western Europe. “We zigzagged our trains from hell to breakfast,” parked them on sidings, reworked their bills of lading. Once the origin of the trains was sufficiently obscured, LeMay sent in troops in civilian clothes to unload them at the bases the French and Belgian military agreed to share. “What this amounted to, in effect, was that we had our own private little NATO buzzing along, there in West Germany and France and Belgium, before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ever existed.” Seared with the memory of the United States's lack of readiness at the beginning of the Second World War, neglect he had paid for in his squadrons with the lives of too many young men, the USAFE commander was determined to subvert the renewed complacency of victory.
James Forrestal took a longer view when he analyzed the military situation in early December 1947. Defending the billions the US was preparing to spend on the Marshall Plan in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he wrote:
We are keeping our military expenditures below the levels which our military leaders… estimate as the minimum [necessary to]… ensure national security. By doing so we are able to increase our expenditures to assist in European recovery. In other words, we are taking a calculated risk…
During those years [of calculated risk] — of which the exact number is indeterminate — we will continue to have certain military advantages which go far toward covering the risk. There are really four outstanding military facts in the world at this time. They are:
(1) The predominance of Russian land power in Europe and Asia.
(2) The predominance of American sea power.
(3) Our exclusive possession of the atomic bomb.
(4) American productive capacity.
As long as we can outproduce the world, can control the sea and can strike inland with the atomic bomb, we can assume certain risks in an effort to restore world trade, to restore the balance of power — military power — and to eliminate some of the conditions which breed war.
This incisive analysis was not disingenuous, but Forrestal also had reason to believe that Stalin had no desire to start a war. Averell Harriman — former ambassador to the Soviet Union and now Secretary of Commerce — had testified to the President's Air Policy Commission in September that he was “convinced that [the Soviets] will not take any steps which they feel would bring them into a major conflict in the foreseeable future.” In October, the new Secretary of Defense had asked Harriman's successor in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, where the Soviets stood and Bedell Smith had told him, “Stalin said, we do not want war but the Americans want it even less than we do, and that makes our position stronger.”
Milovan Djilas, riding with Stalin in the Soviet leader's car in Moscow in dark December, noticed “his… hunched back and the bony gray nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal's collar.” To the Yugoslavian diplomat it was “incomprehensible” how much Stalin had aged since he had seen him last, two years before. At dinner, “Stalin spoke up about the atom bomb: ‘That is a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!’ His expression was full of admiration, so that one was given to understand that he would not rest until he, too, had the ‘powerful thing.’” That night and again a few nights later, Stalin predicted that Germany would not be reassembled from its pieces. “The West,” Djilas heard him say, “will make Western Germany their own, and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state.”
The Soviets were biding their time, recovering, turning inward, working toward the bomb. In autumn 1947, the Soviet press began to attack Byrnes, Forrestal and even Truman. “In the American expansionist circles there is a new kind of religion,” Molotov railed in an important November speech. “There is no faith in internal strength, but there is a fanatical faith in one thing — the secret of the atom bomb — even though, for a long time now, no such secrets have existed.” On December 15, to soften the impact of monetary reform, the Soviet government abolished rationing. But a cruel new repression began in the same season, a “vigilance campaign.” “There is still a good deal of toadying to the West in our country,” Molotov rebuked the Soviet people in his November speech, “and far too much slavish admiration for capitalist culture. We have no use for this… Even in the old Bolshevik Party the enemy had his spies and agents — Trotskyites, Rightists, and so on, and in the present international situation Soviet citizens must be particularly vigilant.” The campaign “soon developed into a new kind of spy-mania,” writes Alexander Werth.
The vigilance campaign was cruelly utilitarian. A Canadian woman, Suzanne Rosenberg, a gulag victim whose parents had moved to the USSR before the war to support the Communist experiment and who had been caught up in the Great Terror, saw through the new xenophobia:
[The MVD committed] no worse felonies than the rearrest, on the same charge, of people who had completed their sentences and been released, as well as the non-release of prisoners after they had served their full terms. Those arrested during the bloody years of 1937 and 1938 were either shot or sentenced to ten years; longer terms, especially the ubiquitous twenty-five years, were instituted during and after the war. This meant that large numbers of political prisoners would have to be released in 1947, and the slave labor force so badly needed for the post-war industrial economy greatly depleted.
An ingenious solution was to rearrest the released prisoners and, ten years later, start a new wave of terror — the 1947–1953 mass arrests — to prevent the shutting down of the camps and to provide the new building projects with penal labor. Politically, too, it was most expedient to keep the innocent victims of 1937 and 1938 in continued isolation, lest they besmirch the good name of the Party. It was killing two birds with one stone.
Beria needed camp dust to build his Manhattan Project.
Igor Kurchatov's brother Boris had succeeded by then in extracting the first few micrograms of Soviet plutonium from uranium slugs irradiated in the F-l reactor; a team at the Radium Institute under V. G. Khlopin had begun enlarging the extraction technology to industrial scale. With the coming of freezing weather that autumn, Kurchatov and Vannikov traveled out to the Chelyabinsk-40 building site. “A large city had already sprung up there,” writes Golovin, “populated by thousands of workmen, technicians, and engineers of various categories. The place where the pile was under construction was over ten kilometers from town, and Vannikov, who had recently suffered a heart attack, decided that daily trips over this distance would be hard on him. He moved into a railroad car right next to the construction site. Kurchatov stayed with him and bore the discomforts of the icy winter without complaint.” Chelyabinsk-40 became Kurchatov's base. Ironically, before the Revolution the local Kyshtym mining and metallurgical industry had been managed by a young American engineer named Herbert Hoover, Lewis Strauss's earliest mentor in government service in the years after the First World War.
Not only directors and generals shipped out for Chelyabinsk-40. A conscript soldier remembers being assigned there to guard the
