Eighty Years Ago This Week

  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...