ABSTRACT
Western Europe’s political and economic position and military security looked precarious in 1945-47. Agricultural output in 1946-47 was only 75 per cent of the 1938 level; a UN Commission estimated in 1946 that 100 million Europeans lived on less than 1,500 calories per day (i.e. they were going hungry). In the UK, bread and potatoes were rationed from mid-1946 – not during the war itself – to enable supplies to be sent to the British Military Zone in Germany. In 1947, industrial production in Belgium, Netherlands and France was still 30-40 per cent lower than in 1939. European conditions were made worse in 1946-47 by a wet summer and a severe winter leading to poor harvests and a fuel crisis as snow disrupted coal supplies. There were massive shortages of fuel, food and industrial capital goods (Germany had been eliminated as the main pre-war supplier of the latter); this meant a large trading deficit with the US as the alternative supplier, and a dollar shortage. Governments were faced with a severe fall in foreign trade (the UK’s trade
was only 70 per cent of the pre-war level in 1946-47) and were threatened with inflation (prices were driven up by shortages) and the need to increase exports well above pre-war levels. Nevertheless, despite such evidence, Western Europe’s economic recovery from this austere state was already remarkably swift, assisted by Marshall Aid, which provided a marked increase in capital goods imports from the US between 1947-52. The recovery was sustained as a long boom through the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1948-50 annual sales of washing machines grew from 94,000 to 311,000 in the UK and from 20,000 to 100,000 in France. By 1950 Western Europe’s foreign trade was already 20 per cent above pre-war levels and production was rising every year. The political situation in post-war Europe was also potentially chaotic.
Reinstated national governments (many of which spent 1940-45 in exile in London) were faced with danger from gunmen. The UK had armed communist and non-communist resistance forces in the war. Fifty thousand Sten guns had been dropped and, in wartime, killing military and political opponents was sanctioned, a habit which tended to persist into peacetime as old scores were settled. After liberating each state, the Western Allies tried to disarm the Resistance quickly to avoid the danger of reinstated authorities
being overturned by communist or other gunmen in Western Europe, as occurred in Greece in 1944. The Communist Party also increased its strength in Western Europe after
the war (even though only 10 per cent of Resistance forces were communist) because of widespread sympathy for the USSR and its war effort between 1941 and 1944 (it lost between 20 and 40 million civilians and service personnel and killed 3 million German troops). Post-war governments in France, Belgium and Italy included Communist Party ministers up to 1947. Moscow’s Cominform in 1947 meant that the USSR exercised control over Western Europe’s Communist Parties which duly took Moscow’s side in the Cold War. In 1947-48 numerous communist-led strikes in France, Italy and Britain (notably in the docks) were essentially protests against economic hardship and the high cost of living that were exploited by the Communist Parties and the USSR. Liberation brought exaggerated hopes and expectations. This, combined
with the political and economic disruption of the first 18 months of peace, created a dangerous situation. It was in this context that the USA’s offer of Marshall Aid was made in 1947. As Ernest Bevin, the British Labour Government’s Foreign Minister 1945-51, confessed, this offer seemed ‘like a life-line to sinking men’. The end of the war and the end of the common enemy meant the collapse
of the wartime Grand Alliance of the ‘Big Three’. The US had not abandoned its ‘one world’ efforts to reach agreement with the USSR over Germany, Eastern Europe and elsewhere and it reduced its troop strength in Western Europe very rapidly from 3.5 million in June 1945 to 200,000 by June 1947; even at the end of 1945 Britain had 488,000 stationed in Germany compared with 390,000 American troops. This showed that America had not accepted any permanent military commitment to European defence after 1945. Many aspects of the wartime special relationship with Britain were quickly
ended by President Truman in September 1945, including the Anglo-American administrative machinery such as the combined Chiefs of Staff Committee. The atomic partnership was also scrapped, despite being enshrined in the Quebec Agreement of August 1943 and the Hyde Park Memorandum of September 1944. Technical co-operation had ceased by April 1946 and the McMahon Act of August 1946 stopped any further exchanges of nuclear information. This setback meant that from January 1947 Britain started its own atomic weapons programme. As Bevin told the Cabinet Committee authorising it, ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs … we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.’ The USA’s swift withdrawal from Europe in 1945 took place as the USSR
appeared menacing and remained in strength. This meant that Britain (Europe’s only undefeated power) bore the main burden of European security against the USSR in the mid-1940s. This accounts for the renewed genuine enthusiasm between 1945 and 1948 for Western European co-operation and
