Eighty Years Ago This Week

     In the first elections to the French National Assembly under the new constitution the Communist Party emerged with the largest representation with 165 seats compared to 160 for the MRP, the largest right-of-centre group. The PCF polled half a million more votes than the MRP on a turnout of around 24.5m. The Socialists were the big losers. De Gaulle himself had turned his back on parliamentary politics after the failure of his campaign against the new constitution but a small group campaigned as the Union Gaulliste without his backing but only won eight seats.  No party was close to dominating the assembly nor was there any obvious combination which could command a majority.  The King's Speech on behalf of Attlee's Labour government opened with grand statements about Britain extending its place in a harmonious world order and the government's commitment to national well-being. The planned law to increase the school leaving age could be fitted into the latte...

    The Democrats suffered huge losses against the Republicans in the US mid-terms elections. The Democrats lost majorities in both houses which they had held since 1932. The Republicans gained 58 seats to 246 in the House of Representatives almost exactly reversing the position before the vote. The era of FDR and the New Deal was firmly at an end. The poll was generally seen as a vote on President Truman and few now expected him to survive into a second term. Left-wing Democrats had revolted against Truman's swing against the Soviet Union, his handling of the nationwide strike wave alienated labour and meat prices had rocketed when price controls ended.  The British government leapt on a public condemnation of terrorism by the inner Zionist Council to back away from harsh measures to maintain British rule. It was desperate to draw a line under the whole affair. Extreme zionist Moshe Shertok and supporters were released and Palestine Arabs were freed from detention in the...

    The TUC congress voted to support government foreign policy but only by 3.6m member votes to 2.4m. The delegates voted on behalf of their members. There had been extensive criticism of the British policy in Greece to support the anti-communist side in the civil war. There was also hostility towards the prime minister's direct rejection of  communist tactics in Britain. The Electrical Trades Union was especially vocal on both counts. A motion calling on Britain to suspend all economic contact with the Franco regime in Spain was approved by 4.5m to 1.4m.  In co-ordinated overnight operations Soviet security forces and troops  seized some 2,500 German scientists and engineers together with 4,000 family members and deported them forcibly to the USSR. The largest number worked for the aviation ministry. Some were taken after a dinner to which they had been invited. The university town of Jena which was also home to a large optics industry was a major focus of the...

    The energy minister, extreme left-winger Manny Shinwell assured Parliament that the 5m ton gap (about one third of the amount required) in coal supplies needed for the winter was nothing to worry about. This would be the industry's first winter since  nationalisation and a key register of how well it performed in public ownership. The shortage could be dealt with by increased output from the mines and reduction in consumption. He skirted over how the former was to be achieved but did admit that 5,000 workers including "incorrigibles" had recently been "shaken out." He relied on assurances from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and did not address the question of absenteeism which was running at two and a half times the pre-war rate. Politically the government was unwilling to challenge the NUM on this problem. Bengal suffered another major surge in communal violence in the Noakhali district between Hindus and Moslem as tension mounted in the blocked se...

  The government announced plans to construct a new building to house the Colonial Office, integrating on a single site activities spread around five separate ones. Extra space was needed to meet "new and important responsibilities as a result of the great developments in the colonial Empire."  These presumably referred to the new possessions awarded to Britain by the Versailles Treaty over twenty-five years before, which included Palestine which Britain was frantically trying to slough off. It was to be an immense building across the road from Westminster Abbey covering a comparable area; it would have dominated the area north of the Palace of Westminster. Providing a suitable venue to receive visiting foreigners (presumably colonials) was part of the brief. It was to take some years to clear the site and history rapidly overtook the project which was never begun. The opposition found a way of introducing the question of the closed shop into a debate on fair wages for employ...

At the apparently unilateral decision of Britain the conference on Palestine was suspended until December 16 at the earliest. The ostensible reason was that the upcoming  first meeting of the UN General Assembly made it impractical to continue the discussions. In fact prime minister Attlee was already concerned at the possibility that permitting the immigration of 100,000 Jews, which was under discussion at the conference and was supported by President Truman, would inflame Moslem sentiment worldwide and increase the difficulty of the Indian independence process which was deadlocked by the stand-off between the Moslem and Hindu communities. The conference had, anyway, been floundering with no agreed solution in sight; India was the far larger problem.  Truman responded with a public endorsement of the 100,000 immigration plan and a far more direct statement in favour of an independent Jewish state. Attlee appointed A. V. Alexander as the first minister in charge of a newly cre...

  The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg  delivered its verdicts on 22 men accused of major Nazi war crimes. Twelve were sentenced to hang and three were  acquitted. Goering was the most important figure to be sent to the gallows followed by foreign minister von Ribbentrop, the Nazi rulers of occupied Europe were fully deserving and the sentences on generals Keitel and Jodl gave the lie to the later myth of the Wehrmacht having fought a "clean" war. They were careerist lackeys but Hitler's successor Admiral Doenitz was a convinced Nazi and still escaped the noose. Two paid the ultimate price for propagandist support: Rosenberg, a theoretican, and Streicher, a loathsome anti Jewish newspaper editor, had no direct involvement in war crimes. Albert Speer was every bit as guilty of the Nazi's murderous slave labour programme as Fritz Sauckel, head of the relevant department, but his veneer of civilised education saved his life. The Soviet judge dissented strongl...

Churchill delivered a speech at the University of Zurich entitled the Tragedy of Europe. He contrasted the ravaged state of most of the continent with the prosperous state of Switzerland and expressed a wish to prevent a recurrence of the war. One avenue that he proposed was a United States of Europe with, as a first practical step, a Council of Europe to direct it. He hoped that the US, Great Britain and, with more good will than realistic expectation,  the Soviet Union could be its friends and sponsors. To many this marked the beginning of the EU although whether he ever contemplated that Britain might be part of it is hotly debated. Ho-Chi-Minh left France after the failure of the Fontainebleau conference on the future of Indochina conducted under the auspices of France as the colonial power. Some form of self-rule for the poorer provinces of Tonkin and Annam but the wealthy area of Cochin China, which had unilaterally been declared an autonomous republic, would remain a French ...

  President Truman suffered dissent from his foreign policy when Henry Wallace the Commerce Secretary delivered a speech  calling for a soft line towards the Soviet Union and a hard line towards Britain's imperialist policy. Wallace had been Roosevelt's vice president 1941-5 and lay on the left, a vocal New Dealer. Truman sacked him, in a move that set the seal on the US policy of containing the Soviet Union. Wallace went on to found the Progressive Party with a near socialist platform. Stalin's long standing foreign minister Molotov attacked one aspect of Byrne's speech of hope which prefigured the rebuilding of a democratic Germany as a counter weight to the Soviet Union. Byrne had stated that Poland's western frontier was open to negotiation. Molotov insisted that the Curzon Line boundary held good. Given the mass removal of Germans to the west which had already taken place, Byrne's claim had little more than symbolic value as a gesture towards Germany. The e...

      James Byrnes, the US Secretary of State, gave a speech in Stuttgart under the title "Restatement of Policy on Germany." It was delivered to a large  audience including the three ministers president of the states in the US zone, who had greeted Byrnes when he had arrived train in a highly symbolic photocall. In particular Byrnes declared that Germany should not become the satellite of any power or a dictatorship. He stated that the economic conditions ruling in the country divided into four zones of occupation made it impossible to maintain a peace-time economy and that free exchange between the zones was needed. He looked forward to a future when the government of Germany would be returned to the German people. In practice he was rejecting the Soviet policy of treating its zone of occupation merely as a resource to be exploited purely for Soviet benefit. Byrnes claimed the authority of the Potsdam Agreement for his vision, but in practice he was proposing the c...

          The British army drastically eased conditions of service. There had been widespread discontent at the continuation of rigorous, essentially pre-war regulations into peacetime conscripted service. In particular, mandatory wearing of uniforms off-duty was abolished and the system of granting short term leave permission softened. Privates and NCOs would be allowed to socialize off-duty. The wearing of collar and tie which had been the prerogative of officers was extended down the ranks. The General Staff also recognised that the pre war model of long term enlistment of volunteers was no longer viable and was anxious to make three to five year fixed-term engagements more appealing.   The US announced the sale of $20m of war surplus aircraft in the Pacific theatre to the Kuomintang regime in China. Combat aircraft were excluded and they were mainly transport aircraft, but the apparent support for one side in the civil war was unmistakable. Gene...

     The London Passenger Transport Board, predecessor to TfL, ended a dispute that had begun in 1937 by accepting a closed shop agreement under which only members of the Transport and General Workers union would be employed as operating or maintenance staff. It was the first major public corporation to bring in a closed shop and set a powerful precedent. By the 1960s it had become routine throughout industry. The formal closed shop has been made illegal but in practice still rules today on the London Underground. Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, formed an interim government as set out in the programme for independence to replace the Executive Council. The government would administer the country's affairs. It was fatally flawed from the start. Congress participated but Jinnah's Muslim League refused to participate. Five of the fourteen seats were to be held by Moslems but three were appointed by Congress. In practice Jinnah was rejecting the continuance of India as a si...

    Jinnah's Muslim League staged a "Day of Action" involving a general strike and protest meetings to sustain claims to an independent Pakistan which was emerging as key demand in the process of Indian independence. This rapidly degenerated into extreme communal violence  in Calcutta. Both Hindu and Moslem communities participated, Some thousands were killed and corpses lay unburied for days. Five British army battalions and four of the Indian army helped restore order. Led by Andrei Zhdanov the General Secretary of the communist Party  the Soviet regime launched a campaign (known as the Zhdanovoschkina ) to extend complete ideological conformity into every form of art, writing in particular. Henceforth all art was deemed to have support for the Stalin regime as its sole purpose. In the first line it targeted two literary magazines Zvezda and Leningrad . The poet Anna Akhmatova was singled out for criticism. The US and the UK staged a concerted open protest...

  The British motor trade recognised government concern at what was happening in the car market. Anyone lucky enough to receive one of the few new cars being produced could immediately resell it at a higher price, making a large profit. It was a goldmine for spivs as participants in the informal parallel economy created by massive government regulation came to be called. To ward off formal government regulation the industry trade association instituted a scheme under which buyers signed a formal agreement  to hold onto new cars for six months.   The Soviet Union launched a full-scale attempt to take control of the Dardanelles. Turkey had consistently refused passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean to Soviet warships and now Moscow demanded that control of the straits  should be exercised internationally, in practice dominated by the Soviets. The US detected that the ultimate Soviet goal was the full subjugation of Turkey and prepared to resist. Gas supp...

  Thirty tonnes of gold then worth $32m  was returned from Frankfurt to the Hungarian National Bank in Budapest. It  had been held by the US Army which had taken it (with Hungarian agreement) from  a Benedictine abbey in Austria to which it had been smuggled by train in January 1945 to hide it from the German and Soviet armies. This allowed the Hungarian government to bring to an end the hyperinflation which had ravaged the economy for months.  The Pengo was abolished as a currency and replaced by the Forint, backed by gold.   The Tribunal set up as part of the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act ruled that the former owners of Britain's coal mines should receive the then colossal sum of £164m (4% of all government expenditure) in compensation for their assets. The industry was chaotic and badly in need of rationalisation and investment; the mine-owners were getting a bargain. The British government asserted the integrity of Austria, then occupied by th...

  The foreign ministers of the victor powers decided that Italy should retain South Tirol which it had been awarded in 1915 as a reward for joining the Entente powers fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. It had been formally annexed in 1920. The region had never belonged to any Italian political entity before, had no Italian culture and spoke German or Ladin; the Fascist government had imposed italianization. The Italian name by which the area is known, Alto Adige, is an invention although the new administrative unit includes the historically Italian Trentino region to the south. By all the principles of the Atlantic Charter it should have been returned to Austria but Italy switched sides to join the allies in 1943 as the monarchy's only way to survive, but the Austrian state had vanished in 1938 and was being reconstructed according to the wishes of the victor powers. Italy was once again being rewarded for an unprincipled diplomatic choice. Protests in the...

  The wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed the headquarters of the British authorities in Palestine was destroyed by massive bombs planted by Jewish insurgents killing 91 people mostly working for the authorities, British, Palestinians both Arab and Jewish and other nationalities. The supposed purpose was to destroy documents seized in the massed raids of Operation Agatha which connected the Jewish Agency with violent acts, but it served more as simple retaliation. Ambiguous and garbled warnings were issued beforehand. Despite protests from the baking industry, public hostility and political opposition the British government implemented  its scheme to ration bread. Bakers were warned publicly that they would be punished if they did not comply. Bread had not been rationed even during the darkest days of the war and the move was emblematic of the sacrifices demanded by the Labour government. The scheme was immensely detailed and bakers were banned from selling ...

  The US Senate approved the bail-out loan to Britain and it was granted. Not only had US law-makers been at odds over the loan but the State and Treasury Departments had been opposed. The $3.75bn (£2.2bn) loan was presented as cheap money given the 1.62% rate of interest, but, unremarked at the time, one of the terms set the headstone on the grave of Britain's status as a financial superpower. Britain agreed to allow "sterling balances" held in London to be converted freely into other currencies after a year. This money totalled  £3.5bn and had mainly been deposited by the countries of the British Empire, notably India and Egypt. Within twelve months Britain faced the prospect of having to pay out in foreign currency (in practice US dollars) one and a half times what it had just borrowed. Intentionally or otherwise, US largesse worked hugely to the benefit of Britain's former possessions. The US accepted the British proposal to the conference on the German peace trea...

  Designer Louis Reard presented a two piece swimsuit to the world at the Piscine Molitor in Paris. No established catwalk model would take the risk of appearing in such a revealing item and it was worn by a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline Bernardini. A competing designer had launched a two-piece swimsuit a few weeks before under the name "Atome" with the copyline, "the world's smallest swimsuit." Reard baptised his creation the bikini after the site of the atom bomb test a few days before and promoted it with the line "smaller than the smallest swimsuit." The name stuck and Bikini Atoll, now uninhabitable and unproductive because of radiation contamination, is largely forgotten.   The Hungarian economy had been ravaged by severe inflation since the end of the war and this developed into hyper-inflation far worse than experienced in Weimar Germany in 1923. At its worst prices were doubling in about fifteen hours. A banknote of 100 quint...

  In order to test whether military ships could survive a nuclear explosion Operation Crossroads was staged at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. It might also have been intended to serve as a warning to the Soviet Union. The fourth nuclear bomb ever to be detonated exploded in the midst of some 95 warships. The test had been announced in advance and international observers including Soviet scientists were invited to attend. The bomb missed its aiming point and only five ships were sunk outright although nuclear contamination meant that almost all the survivors were useless. The Soviet Union made the first serious use of its veto at the UN Security Council when it turned down a statement on Franco's Spain which it deemed was too gentle. The Soviets sought an outright call on members to cease diplomatic relations with Spain. The resolution thus passed to the General Assembly. In response to the Night of the Bridges attacks the British authorities in Palestine launched Operation Agatha, th...