The Path to Power

environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. In the winter of 1946 I read the American journalist John Hersey’s report on Hiroshima, first submitted to the New Yorker and subsequently published as a Penguin Special. Oddly enough, even more affecting than the accounts of the hideous injuries, the fire, the fall-out and the radiation sickness was the bitter-sweet image of weeds and wild flowers sprouting through the ashes — their growth unnaturally stimulated by radiation from the bomb.

Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2? million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.

Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear co-operation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.

If the atomic bomb raised one set of questions about Britain’s role in the post-war world, the situation in India raised another. The subject retained its fascination for me. I knew that Churchill, for whom my admiration by now knew no bounds, had fought ferociously against the moves to appease nationalist opinion in India, which had been implemented in the Government of India Act of 1935. The situation in India had deteriorated sharply in the war years and it seemed highly unlikely that even the earlier prospect of Dominion status would seriously lessen the pressure for independence. This was, moreover, against the background, which we did not yet all fully understand, of a much less significant world role for Britain after the war. The two material circumstances which had allowed us to fight Hitler all but alone — the existence of huge accumulated overseas investments and the most successful and extensive empire the world had seen — had been lost or greatly diminished as the price of victory in that great struggle.

For all that, people of my age — even those committed to the links with Empire developing into a Commonwealth — took a more positive view of what was happening in India than did many of our elders. I myself read at about this time two books which emphasized the role of Britain, not just as guarantor of sound administration and humane justice in our Imperial territories, but rather as a kind of midwife for their birth, growth and maturity as responsible members of the international community. Leo Amery’s Thoughts on the Constitution (lectures delivered at Oxford) emphasized the crucial need to ensure Imperial ‘unity of thought and purpose’ through free co-operation: such thinking also, for a time at least, attracted me towards ideas of Imperial Preference as a means of sustaining our community of interest. I also read Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth which saw our evolving Empire as an example of unity and co- operation:

To have spread organized political freedom across the world; three times to have saved Europe, and twice the world as well, from a tyrant; to have ended slavery, and taught other nations to end it too; to have been so reluctant to acquire territory, and so often to have acquired it in the interests of others; to have learned wisdom from adversity and to have held a giant’s power without using it like a giant… all this has richly earned the Empire survival hitherto, and has given it abundant titles to the gratitude of mankind… And it may well be that the island from which the world learned the art of freedom will yet teach it the art of unity. It may well be that her present sufferings have finally fitted Britain for that role.

In retrospect, much of this was self-deception. We could not both give independence to the colonies and continue to determine their future afterwards. At that time, however, such ideas seemed to promise a continued world role for Britain, without either the burden or the guilt of empire.

Between the spring 1946 mission of Stafford Cripps to India to seek agreement among Indians on the future of their country and the summer of 1947, when the Government finally endorsed a settlement based on partition, I followed events closely. I felt that there was much to criticize in the means, but that the ends of our policy were right and in the direction of progress for Britain, India and the wider Commonwealth. But the Labour Government and Mountbatten as Viceroy undoubtedly tried to move too fast. In a tragic sense the civil war which now broke out, in which a million people died, showed the degree to which British rule had been the guarantee of Indian unity and peace.

These thoughts, however, seemed out of place in a post-war world in which the new global institutions were the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, and in which the European colonial empires had a very limited future. Indeed, we have still not achieved a full and successful transition from a stable colonial to a stable post-colonial world. As crises like Somalia demonstrate, there are parts of Africa and Asia where order cannot be provided locally, but for which the international institutions have no remedy — certainly no remedy as effective as colonial rule was a century ago.

But the greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time — and the one which would have a great impact on my political life — was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. True, many of the facts were available if anyone had cared to investigate and report them. But by and large and for a variety of reasons they did not. As I have described, I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to The Road to Serfdom in 1976 he too felt that he had ‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.

So too, by and large, did the newspapers. For example, the Daily Telegraph gave little prominence to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and even after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 oddly interpreted the Russian invasion of eastern Poland as a sign of ‘tension’ with Hitler. In wartime, Anglo-Soviet friendship societies bloomed. Smiling, soft-hearted Uncle Joe, the creation as much of Western wishful thinking as of Soviet propaganda, concealed the reality of the paranoid tyrant. Douglas Hyde’s I Believed (which appeared in 1950, and which I read) reveals the extent to which British communists infiltrated, manipulated and distorted so as subtly to shape political debate. Hyde’s account shows too how the war of disinformation in Britain was as ruthlessly and directly controlled from Moscow as were the communist movements which worked in Eastern Europe alongside the advancing Red Army to impose Stalin’s grip on countries whose liberties we had fought the war against Hitler to defend.

A strong case can be made to mitigate Churchill’s and Britain’s role in the abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe. The famous half sheet of paper on which Churchill scribbled his proposals for shared spheres of influence in the Balkans when he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 does indeed have a whiff of cynical realpolitik about it, as Churchill himself accepted when he described it as a ‘naughty document’. It clearly flies in the face of the proclaimed principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. But it recognized the reality that the Red Army had occupied a large part of Eastern Europe — and it may have helped to preserve Greek independence. Churchill at least saw, as the Americans did not, that the precipitate withdrawal of our troops in the face of the Red Army would leave the central zone of Germany in Soviet hands and effectively remove any chance at all of our being able to influence the fate of Eastern Europe.

That said, there is a difference between recognizing reality and legitimizing it. For legitimacy tends to set injustice in concrete. So the Conservatives who abstained or voted against the Government on the issue of the Yalta Agreement of February 1945 — among them Alec Douglas-Home — were right. My own unease was