Postwar

might be to forget about an all-German resolution and instead incorporate such a western German Zone fully into the western European economy. As General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had confided to his diary on July 27th 1944, ‘Germany is no longer the dominating power in Europe. Russia is… She… cannot fail to become the main threat in fifteen years from now. Therefore, foster Germany, gradually bring her up and bring her into a Federation of Western Europe. Unfortunately, all this must be done under the cloak of a holy alliance of Russia, England and America.’

This, of course, is more or less what happened four years later. Of all the Allied powers it was Britain which came closest to anticipating and even seeking the settlement that finally emerged. But the British were in no position to impose such an outcome, nor indeed to impose very much at all, on their own. By the end of the war it was obvious that London was no match for Washington and Moscow. Britain had exhausted itself in the epic struggle with Germany and could not much longer sustain even the outer trappings of a great power. Between Victory-in-Europe Day in 1945 and the spring of 1947 British forces were reduced from a peak of 5.5 million men and women under arms to just 1.1 million. In the autumn of 1947 the country was even forced to cancel naval manoeuvres in order to save fuel oil. In the words of the American Ambassador William Clayton, a far from unsympathetic observer, ‘the British are hanging in by their eyelashes to the hope that somehow or other with our help they will be able to preserve the British Empire and their leadership of it.’

In these circumstances the British were understandably concerned not that the Russians would attack— British policy was predicated on the assumption that Soviet aggression might take any form except war—but that the Americans would retreat. A minority within the governing British Labour Party would have been happy to see them go, placing their post-war faith instead in a neutrally- inclined European defense alliance. But Prime Minister Clement Attlee had no such delusions and explained why, in a letter to his Labour Party colleague Fenner Brockway:

‘Some [in the Labour Party] thought we ought to concentrate all our efforts on building up a Third Force in Europe. Very nice, no doubt. But there wasn’t either a spiritual or a material basis for it at that time. What remained of Europe wasn’t strong enough to stand up to Russia by itself. You had to have a world force because you were up against a world force… Without the stopping power of the Americans, the Russians might easily have tried sweeping right forward. I don’t know whether they would, but it wasn’t a possibility you could just ignore.’

But could the Americans be counted on? British diplomats had not forgotten the 1937 Neutrality Act. And of course they understood very well the American ambivalence about overseas engagement, for it was not so different from their own stance in earlier days. From the mid-eighteenth century through to the dispatch of the British Expeditionary Force to France in 1914, the English had preferred to fight by proxy, maintaining no standing army, avoiding protracted continental engagements and keeping no permanent force on European soil. In the past, a maritime power seeking to fight a European war with someone else’s soldiers could look to the Spanish, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Prussians and of course the Russians for allies. But times had changed.

Hence the British decision, in January 1947, to go ahead with their own atomic weapons programme. The significance of that choice lay in the future, however. In the circumstances of the initial post-war years Britain’s best hope lay in encouraging continued American engagement in Europe (which meant publicly espousing the American faith in a negotiated settlement) while collaborating with the Soviets in so far as this was still realistic. So long as the fear of German revanchism took precedence over anything else, this policy could just about be sustained.

By early 1947, however, it was clearly crumbling. Whether or not the Soviet Union constituted a real and present danger was unclear (as late as December 1947 even Bevin though Russia less of a threat than a future, resurgent Germany). But what was painfully clear was that the limbo in Germany, where the country’s economy was held hostage to unresolved political discussions and the British were footing enormous bills in their zone of occupation, could not long continue. The German economy needed to be revived, with or without Soviet agreement. It was the British—who had fought two long wars against Germany from beginning to end and had been brought low by their hard-won victories—who were thus most keen to close that chapter, establish some modus vivendi in continental affairs and move on.

In better times the British would have retreated to their Isles, much as they suspected the Americans of wanting to retreat to their continent, and left the security of western Europe to its traditional guardians, the French. As recently as 1938 this had been the basis of British strategic calculation: that France, the strongest military power on the continent, could be relied on as a counterweight not just to German ambitions in central Europe but even against future Soviet threats further east. This image of France as a— the—European Great Power was shaken at Munich, but outside the chancelleries of Eastern Europe it was not yet broken. The seismic shock that ran through Europe in May and June 1940, when the great French army collapsed and fell apart before the Panzer onslaught across the Meuse and through Picardy, was thus all the greater for being so unexpected.

In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation, with Marshall Petain’s Vichy regime playing Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes. Whatever they said in public, French leaders and policymakers could not but know what had happened to their country. As one internal French policy paper put it, a week after the Liberation of Paris in 1944: ‘If France should have to submit to a third assault during the next generation, it is to be feared that… it will succumb forever.’

That was in private. In public, post-war French statesmen and politicians insisted upon their country’s claim to recognition as a member of the victorious Allied coalition, a world power to be accorded equal standing with her peers. This illusion could be sustained, in some degree, because it suited the other powers to pretend it was so. The Soviet Union wanted a tactical ally in the West who shared its suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’; the British wanted a revived France to take its place in the counsels of Europe and relieve Great Britain of continental obligations; even the Americans saw some advantage, though not much, in granting Paris a seat at the top table. So the French were given a permanent seat on the new United Nations Security Council, they were offered a role in the joint military administrations of Vienna and Berlin, and (at British insistence) an occupation district was carved for them out of the American zone in south-west Germany, in an area contiguous to the French frontier and well west of the Soviet front line.

But the net effect of these encouragements was to pour further humiliation upon an already humbled nation. And the French responded at first with predictable prickliness. On the Allied Control Council in Germany they consistently blocked or vetoed the implementation of decisions taken at the Potsdam Conference of the Big Three on the grounds that France had not been party to them. The French provisional authorities initially refused to cooperate with UNRRA and Allied military governments in the handling of displaced persons on the grounds that French refugees and DPs should be located and administered as part of an independent and exclusively French operation.

Above all, French post-war governments felt very strongly their sense of exclusion from the highest councils of Allied decision-making. The British and the Americans were not to be trusted separately, they thought (remembering the American retreat from Europe after 1920 and the July 1940 British destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir); but above all they were not to be trusted together—a sentiment felt especially acutely by De Gaulle, haunted by recollections of his demeaning wartime status as a guest in London and his low standing in the eyes of FDR. Decisions were being taken in Washington and London, the French came to believe, that directly concerned them but over which they had no influence

Like Britain, France was an Empire, at least on paper. But Paris had become estranged from its colonial holdings in the course of the occupation. In any case, and despite the country’s significant possessions in Africa and South-East Asia, France was first and always a continental power. Soviet moves in Asia, or the coming crisis in the Middle East, were matters with which the French, unlike the British, were by now only indirectly concerned. Precisely because France was now shrunk, Europe loomed larger in its field of vision. And in Europe, Paris had grounds for concern. French influence in eastern Europe, an arena where French diplomacy had been most active between the wars, was finished: in October 1938 a shell-shocked Edouard Benes famously confided that his ‘great mistake before History…will have been my fidelity to France’, and his disillusion was widespread in the region.