ABSTRACT
Much of the British tactical development was conducted against a background of an intensifying political and military threat from the Soviet Union. The political acceptance of the aggressive nature of this threat had been hesitant, and the Americans, in particular, greeted Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March 1946 with little enthusiasm.1 The British, too, wanted to work in harmony with both America and Soviet Russia in the immediate post-war era, but problems soon developed. ‘The work of the quadripartite administration in Germany’, Clement Attlee later wrote, ‘was frustrated constantly by Russian intransigence, while at [the United Nations Organization] the Russian representative soon showed his intention of abusing the Veto.’2 The Americans soon became disillusioned with their prickly wartime ally, and this had the effect of drawing them closer to the British. It was the issue of Marshall Aid in 1947, proposed by the US and instantly supported by Britain, but rejected by the Russians, that dashed hopes for the integration of Europe. The Russian rejection was one stage in the gradual hardening of the political division of Europe over this period and marked another hesitant step into the ‘Cold War’.3 Attlee soon realized that military strength was the only factor which impressed the Russians. Even so, war-weariness amongst all the wartime allies, including the Soviet Union, as well as the American monopoly of the atomic bomb, made all-out war unlikely in the near future.4 The JIC concluded that while the Soviet Union ultimately sought World domination, she would, at least in the near term, rely on a ‘Cold War’ strategy, short of all-out war.5 There was not, however, a sudden schism between the wartime German threat and the new Cold War Russian menace, at least at the political level, and this helps to explain why the Royal Navy was developing its future anti-submarine doctrine against a ‘generic’ threat. By 1948, as Sir Percy Cradock, a one-time chairman of the JIC, noted:
The Berlin blockade is in place. The two superpowers confront one another, each with its attendant states and its military and economic groupings. This is the Cold War as popularly understood. But, as the records show, it was preceded by a more fluid and uncertain period, which saw the transformation of Russia from heroic wartime ally to principal enemy … .6
