Eighty Years Ago This Week

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...