Eighty Years Ago This Week

    The British government warned the public that it might be necessary to ration bread because of a poor harvest. Bread had remained off-ration throughout the war although propaganda encouraged people to eat less of it. With much of Europe in a state of near famine North American exports had to be sacrificed. Nonetheless this was a powerful sign that austerity had become more severe during peacetime. At a mass rally of the Moslem League, its leader Jinnah, gave a hard-line speech setting down a marker ahead of the  deliberations of the British Cabinet delegation in India to set a path to independence. He proclaimed that the League would not accept any proposal which derogated from the full sovereignty of Pakistan, then a broad term embracing the whole Muslim community of the sub-continent. He inisted that Pakistan's status would have to be established before talks began. He described the mainly Hindu Congress party as fascist. In practice he was demanding full partition....

  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...