great disappointment in England: “What has been done… is to transfer property not to the workers but to the Government. Workers continue to be employees, subject to all the frustrations working under orders in large undertakings…. Those who expected nationalization to raise wages have… been disappointed…. It does not solve the problem of labor relations; it reduces private wealth… it raises unsolved problems of control; and it raises the issue of how much power we want our Government to have.”{92}
The Communist Conquest in Indo-China
After the Korean Armistice the Chinese Communists did not allow Russia’s domestic problems to dull their appetite for further aggression. They marched off to complete the Red conquest of Indo-China. Originally the war in Indo-China had been an attempt by the native population to free itself from French colonialism. However, Red infiltration by Communist Chinese had finally changed the conflict from a war for freedom to a war between France and the Chinese Reds. The compromising influence of the French Communist Party (the largest single party in France) made the fatal outcome of the war dependent only on the passing of time. Defeat to the French came on July 21, 1954. At Geneva the Red Chinese jubilantly agreed to stop fighting in exchange for 12,000,000 people and 61,000 square miles of Indo-China.
Mao Tse-tung was now intoxicated with double success. Even Russia felt it necessary to make concessions to Mao and his Chinese Communists in order to insure their continued loyalty to the Communist Motherland. In October, 1954, Russian officials trekked to Peiping and flattered Mao with the following promises:
1. To evacuate Port Arthur which Russia was authorized to lease at Yalta.
2. To sell to China (on easy terms) the railroads and other industries which Russia had been operating since the war as a “Partner.”
3. To loan China 130,000,000 dollars.
4. To help build two railroads across China.
5. To help China build 15 new heavy industrial projects.
6. To campaign for the seizure of Formosa.
7. To campaign for the inclusion of Japan in the Communist orbit.
It was apparent that even though Russia was talking “peaceful coexistence” the free world would have little relief from the war-making plans of Red China.
The Task of Isolating a World Aggressor
From the point of view of the United States, the Indo-China fiasco was a dismal political tragedy. The 100 Communists in the French Parliament (who even refused to stand in tribute to the French war dead) engineered the collapse of the seven-year war. As the U.S. Secretary of State addressed the armistice meeting at Geneva he lashed out at the cowardice and subversion which had sacrificed 12,000,000 more human beings to Red aggression: “Peace,” he said, “is always easy to achieve—by surrender. Unity is also easy to achieve—by surrender. The hard task, the task that confronts us, is to combine peace and unity with Freedom!”
Secretary Dulles left Geneva to carry out a feverish, round-the-world campaign to get all free nations to make an “agonizing reappraisal” of the ridiculous concessions which were being made to Communist imperialism. In 20 months he covered over 152,000 miles and when he was through the United States had become a party to (or strengthened its position in) a chain of regional compacts specifically designed to reinforce Communist containment. To the dismay of the Soviet strategists, Article 52 of the U.N. Charter contained a loophole which permitted this procedure. Therefore, the United States openly began to use NATO, SEATO and similar regional organizations as collective agencies for mutual security. To a large extent this nullified the paralyzing choke-hold which the Soviets had previously held on the West through its abusive use of the veto power in the U.N. Security Council.
The United States also announced that she did not intend to sit back and watch Russia construct its armada of long-range bombers which Communist press releases described as capable of dropping H-bombs on American cities. The U.S. answer to this was the rapid construction of a ring of U.S. defense bases on the fringe of the Iron Curtain. Immediately the roar of an injured bear came thundering out of Russia: “We are being threatened with annihilation!”
Secretary Dulles soberly reaffirmed a truth which he was well aware the Communists already knew— namely, that no nation need fear these bases except an aggressor. Then he expounded in clear-cut, hard-hitting terminology the new doctrine of “massive retaliation” which he warned would be triggered instantly in case the Soviet Empire dared fulfill its oft repeated threat of a surprise attack on the free world.
For awhile there was an ominous silence in Moscow.
Russia Tests the New U.S. “Get Tough” Policy
Toward the latter part of 1954 it became apparent that serious political adjustments were going on inside Russia. A bellicose, bullet-headed personality named Nikita S. Khrushchev and a punctilious party politician named Nikolai Bulganin began to appear more frequently in the news. An ex-Soviet official (Nikolai E. Khokhlov) declared this to be a bad sign. He described Khrushchev and Bulganin as promoters of world Communism, in contrast to Malenkov and Beria who wanted first to improve living conditions for Russians.
In the fall of 1954, Khrushchev and Bulganin led a delegation to Peiping. There the Chinese were given instructions to prepare for an assault on Formosa. From this, it became apparent that completely new lines of power had been drawn in Russia. Eventually it came out that Malenkov had deserted his partner, Beria, and joined forces with the new Khrushchev-Bulganin forces. In the latter part of December, Beria and three of his aides were shot. Malenkov was summarily demoted but he had switched sides in time to save his life. Bulganin took his place and Khrushchev hovered in the background setting policy and announcing the new slogans, “return to heavy industry—armaments” and “the growing of food by decree.”
Meanwhile the Chinese Communists had also caught the spirit of the new leadership and began fronting for Moscow by tantalizing the democracies with the shocking announcement that they had deliberately held back U.S. officers and men in violation of the prisoner-exchange agreement at the close of the Korean War.
The armistice agreement at Panmunjom had specifically provided that all U.N. prisoners who desired repatriation would be returned even though some of them might be charged with some crime. Now, however, the Chinese Communists were defiantly announcing that they had secretly held back a number of American prisoners because they were charged with espionage or some other type of crime. U.S. indignation reached a white heat as many Americans began to realize for the first time how completely impossible it is to depend on a Communist pledge.
In spite of public indignation, however, American feelings were somewhat compromised at this particular moment by a rapidly growing desire on the part of many citizens to forget the whole foreign “mess” and get on with home-front developments which promised to provide an all-time record of American free enterprise prosperity.
Mao Tse-tung accurately diagnosed this national feeling as an anti-war sentiment, and he therefore accelerated his campaign of propaganda throughout Asia by representing the United States as a “paper tiger.” He taunted the United States with additional disclosures of illegally-held American prisoners of war and by open implication boastfully defied the United States Government to try and do something about it.
He became so enthusiastic in his campaign that he finally decided to prove the impotency of American influence to the entire world by acting on Khrushchev’s fighting orders and strike at Formosa. In a matter of weeks the offshore islands in the hands of the Nationalists began to be bombed from the Chinese mainland. It was the preliminary phase of an all-out attack on Chiang Kai-shek’s last outpost.
