exceptional destiny… Through the Empire, to God!’ Feliciano Cereceda,
76
Bing.
77
Wartime humour in Britain had typically concentrated on material shortcomings, mild sexual innuendo and an undercurrent of resentment at over-privileged American GIs. Sometimes on all three at once: ‘Have you heard about the new Utility underpants? One Yank and they’re off!’
78
But note that France had more publications devoted to cinema than the other two combined.
79
Trevor Grundy,
80
Rationing in Eastern Europe was not abolished until 1953 in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria; 1954 in Romania, 1957 in Albania and 1958 in East Germany. But since the Communist economy induced shortage systemically, comparisons with Western Europe are inappropriate.
81
J. H. Plumb,
82
In March 1951, under US pressure, the Dutch, overcoming considerable domestic neutralist sentiment, had reluctantly agreed to double their defense budget and ready five divisions for deployment by 1954.
83
Based, according to Eden, on an idea dreamed up in his morning bath.
84
The only explicit restriction placed on German rearmament was an absolute prohibition of any German nuclear arms program, then or ever.
85
Austrian neutrality was not in the original text; it was inserted by the Austrian parliament during the debate over the State Treaty.
86
The Americans were not the only ones panicked by displays of Soviet hardware. In 1960 the British Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan privately concluded that ‘They [the USSR] are no longer frightened of aggression. They have at least as powerful nuclear forces as the West. They have interior lines [of communication]. They have a buoyant economy and will soon outmatch capitalist society in the race for material wealth.’
87
It was left unclear what say, if any, the British would have in their use. At the time (1952) a joint Churchill- Truman communique rather obscurely declared that ‘the use of these bases in an emergency would be a matter for joint decision… in the light of circumstances prevailing at the time.’
88
American pressure on the British and French to withdraw from Suez in November 1956 (see Chapter Nine) had led to fears among the NATO countries that when it came to a war the US might retreat to its hemisphere, abandoning the exposed Europeans. Hence the perceived need in Washington to ‘stand firm’, first on Berlin and later on Cuba, in order to reassure America’s vulnerable allies.
