Eighty Years Ago This Week

  Strikes organized by the Greek communist party KKE strikes had been poorly supported and failed to reverse measures taken against it in the upshot of the civil war, notably the dissolution of the military wing ELAS. The KKE declared that it would not participate in the upcoming elections as the only means to fight "fraud and violence." Its prospects for electoral success were poor; even Royalist parties had come back from the margins. A non-communist coalition government was the most likely outcome. KKE abstention would allow the communists to claim that the government was not democratically legitimate and to continue to seek power by extra-parliamentary means. The USSR had backed away from outright conlict over Iran when it ordered its troops to withdraw but it continued the diplomatic fight. The  UN Security Council was still set to debate the Iranian motion which complained of Soviet behaviour and Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate, attempted to delay the debat...

  The local commander of the Indonesian independence forces in Bandung, one of the country's most elegant cities and a favoured haven for pre-war Dutch colonialists, responded to an attempt by the British divisional commander to disarm or expel his men by launching a scorched earth operation. The British were regarded as proxies for the Netherlands,  which still entertained some hopes of restoring its colonial regime. The destruction of Bandung deprived the Dutch of any possible kudos from reoccupying the city and served as a statement that the Indonesians would sacrifice their homes rather than accept a return to subjugation.  Practically all the houses in the city were destroyed, some in large fires, and hundreds of thousands inhabitants were evacuated.  The episode is remembered under the name as    Bandung Lautan Api (The Bandung Sea of Fire) as a key episode in the fight for independence. As the UN Security Council began to debate an Iranian complaint...

  Prime Minister Attlee made a statement to Parliament of the mission of the ministerial delegation that was to go to India. He announced the end of the Raj and was emphatic that they should use their, "utmost endeavours to help her to attain [...] freedom as speedily and fully as possible. What form of government is to replace the present regime is for India to decide.....India herself must choose what shall be her future Constitution, and what will be her position in the world." The statement was widely welcomed in India although it left open the mechanism for independence. Insidiously it seemed to place the onus for solving the question of communal relations on the Indians themselves. The government of Iran lodged a formal protest at the  the continuing, illicit presence of Soviet forces in the country with the UN Security Council.  It was based on the tripartite treaty of 1942 which featured a withdrawal by the occupying forces at the end of the war. The Sovi...

   The Aga Khan, leader of the world's Ismaili Shia muslim community, was ceremonially weighed on the sixtieth anniversary of his accession in front of 70,000 Indian Ismailis gathered in Bombay's Brabourne Stadium. He was presented with his weight in diamonds, 243lb (107kg) worth  £640,000 at the time. The diamonds had been bought by his followers but he returned the gift for the betterment of the community. He had played a part in the ultimately unsuccessful "round table" conferences on reforming the Raj in the early 1930s but he played no serious part in discussions with the British Cabinet Mission then in India to create a framework for independence. General Mihailovic, the former leader of the mainly Serbian Cetnik movement in Yugoslvia was captured  after two years in hiding. Mihailovic had gone from being the acknowledged Royalist leader of resistance to Axis occupation to the head of one faction in a virtual civil war. In 1943 he had lost British backing which...

  Churchill delivered a speech at Fulton, Missouri in the presence of President Truman under the title "The Sinews of Peace." It contained the sentence  “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent". The phrase "iron curtain" entered the language as a shorthand for the division of the world into the communist controlled area and democracies which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Once again Churchill's gift for language had caught a fundamental development in politics. The Potsdam conference had decided that the occupation of Iran by the Allies undertaken in late 1941 should be terminated at the end of the war in line with the initial Tripartite Alliance. The US and UK complied but the Soviet Union did not. Indeed it began to increase its military presence in the Azerbaijan region to sustain a puppet communist government. The US delivered a strongly worded note o...

  A major mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy involving 10,000 men (perhaps over  half of the total) on  56 vessels and shore establishments. The RIN had expanded hugely during the war but did not have the same close relationship with the British Royal Navy that its (much larger) army counterpart had. The mutineers were motivated by a mixture of classic grievances at serving conditions, terms of demobilisation, racist language by British officers and active political goals. Neither Congress nor the Moslem League gave their support and the mutiny folded in the face of the threat of overwhelming force. Whilst the mutiny was not part of the campaign for independence, it was a clear sympton of widespread discontent at the Raj. A US diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan, responded to an enquiry from Washington as to the implications of a speech by Stalin with an 5,000 word analysis dubbed the "long telegram." He derided Soviet fears of an attack by the US and UK as absurb, b...

  The evacuation of 1.5m Germans from Poland began under an agreement between Britain and Poland which implemented one of the decisions at the Potsdam conference. These first people were to be settled in the British zone of Germany. Many Germans had already fled the advancing Soviets and many more were to  follow. Practically the entire enclave of East Prussia was to become a purely Polish zone. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth were unwound. As had happened to the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia a root cause of Nazi German expansion was being extirpated.  The Soviet Union delivered the first veto on a UN Security Council decision. It prevented the Council recording a formal decison on the Soviet attempt to force withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon of French and  British forces which were blocking nationalist movements. In practice this was mere diplomatic manoeuvering; neither power was commited to long term occupation. A three man delegation of ...

  The British government presented a stark picture of the future for the public in a debate on food supply. They would have to make further sacrifices on top of accepting the savage food rationing to which they were still subject. Wheat was in particularly short supply. The scale of sacrifice rather depended on the massive loan from the US which was still being arranged. Inevitably the problem was exaggerated for US consumption. The despatch of a whaling fleet to the Antarctic held some prospect of increasing the edible oil supply.  Rationing remained strict for several years; indeed it was tightened; bread, which had been freely available  during the war,  was put on ration.  Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, the "white rajah" abdicated as the third rajah of Sarawak which had been in his family's hands since 1841, a relic of the free-booting days of the British empire. As a young man he had fought in two military campaigns; in one of these, one fifth of the Dyaks under...

  News broke publicly in Canada that Igor Gouzenko, a junior officer of the Soviet GRU intelligence service, had defected the previous September. He had been able to brief his handlers on a range of Soviet espionage operations most notably into the programme to develop nuclear weapons.  The prime minister Mackenzie King had hoped to brush the affair under the carpet to avoid ructions with what was still officially an ally but the affair became the first full revelation of aggressive Soviet intelligence activities against the West. Gouzenko lived the rest of his life in hiding. In an acrimonious debate at the UN Security Coucil the Soviet Union demanded that British forces be withdrawn from Greece where they served to block a communist takeover. Ernest Bevin the British foreign secretary firmly rejected the Soviet accusation that the British were in any way endangering peace. The Soviet Union formally annexed the Kuril Islands chain which it had invaded under the authority of t...

  The Czechoslovak government began the expulsion of German speakers in line with a policy established by the government-in-exile in London during the war and supported by the then British government. The Sudetens were concentrated around the country's borders with Germany and Austria. Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland under the Munich agreement of 1938 was a major step on the road to war and the move aimed to remove the risk of some future recurrence. The plan had been approved at the Potsdam Conference. Ultimately over 2m people would be forcibly resettled in US and Soviet zones of occupied Germany.   The first resolution passed by the UN general assembly established the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission to "to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy."  In particular it was to find ways of ensuring that atomic energy was to be used solely for peaceful purposes and to eliminate nuclear weapons from "national arsenals". Th...

  General de Gaulle resigned as the head of government. There was no single, overwhelming issue; rather he felt he was unsuited to the contingencies and compromises of party politics if he was not able to dominate the whole political scene. He had debated his intentions in the course of a week's holiday at Antibes and seemed to have accepted that he ought to have withdrawn immediately after the liberation in a vividly imagined vision of his role model caught by a far more banal fate than the one which actually befell her, "...one can't imagine Joan of Arc married, a mother, and who knows, deceived by her husband." (Je n'imagine pas Jeanne d'Arc mariée, mère de famille et, qui sait, trompée par son mari). It was more appropriate for the saviour of the nation to be martyred than to be swallowed by life in all its ordinariness. The Soviets used the newly established UN Security council as a springboard for two attempts to assert their power. Off their own bat the...

  As the United Nations General Assembly met for the first time in London, other key features of the new organization began to emerge clearly. Paul-Henri Spaak, a leading Belgian socialist politician, was elected as chairman of the assembly by 28 votes to 23. He defeated Norwegian Trygve Lie, also a socialist politician. The debate over who should become the first UN Secretary-General was a far more delicate affair. The Soviet Union was opposed to the de facto US candidate, Lester Pearson, because he was a North American; whilst the Soviet Union was running two candidates openly, a Pole and a Yugoslav, it was clear from the outset that a compromise candidate was the likely winner and Lie's name was in the frame from the outset. Both Spaak and Lie were to go on to high profile and successful careers, perhaps a reflection of the UN's far better standing than the League of Nations. The  Secretary-General was, and still is, the most important single individual in the organisation ...

  The General Assembly of the newly established United Nations Organization held its first meeting in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster after intense efforts to create from scratch a key body that was to avoid the failures of the League of Nations. The hall had just enough space to accomodate the delegations of the 51 original member countries and had been redecorated by the Ministry of Works in lieu of rental; the light blue colour emblematic of UNO still today predominated. The massive organ was masked by the UNO's globe emblem. In the rehearsals for the opening session a British diplomat had adopted the identity of the delegate from Antarctica and delivered a moving speech on the aspirations and disappointments of the penguins. The four occupying powers met to discuss the shape of the German economy in peacetime. Their paramount consideration was to prevent a resurgence of German military might. Their first firm conclusion was that steel output - then the prime measure o...