And the Cold War begins.
Chapter VIII: Early Cold War and the Beginning of the Nuclear Age, 1946-1953.
After the end of the Pacific War with atomic fire and Japan’s unconditional surrender in September 1945, relations between the Anglo-American allies and the Reich remained chilly. Washington and London remained on speaking terms with Berlin as it appeared that Hitler was sticking to his word by relaxing his control of and allowing elections in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway. Elections took place in early 1944.
In France, Pétain and other members of the Vichy regime formed the “Parti National Solidaire de France” (PNSF) based on traditionalism, patriarchy, paternal authoritarianism, conservative Catholicism, corporatism, Anglophobia and the rejection of liberalism, socialism, communism, secularism, republicanism and the legacy of the French Revolution (during the war, the regime hadn’t bothered to form an official political party and had never officially forbidden other political parties, but now had to organize to participate in the elections). Pre-war political parties resurfaced and new ones were founded as the Free French were given amnesty and returned home. Pétain’s PNSF had the advantage of being well funded by the Germans and that allowed them to spread leaflets, brochures and posters while buying nearly all available airtime on the country’s radio stations as well as paying good money to dominate the commercials in cinemas before the main show. Besides that, Milice thugs intimidated voters, PNSF sympathizers were bussed around to vote multiple times and in a few cases votes for liberals, socialists and communists were destroyed. The PNSF won over one third of the seats in the National Assembly and formed a conservative coalition with former Free French General Henri Giraud as a compromise Prime Minister. The positions of Minister of Defence and Minister of the Interior, controlling the armed forces and the police, were awarded to the PNSF. Pétain remained President for now.
In the Netherlands, four years of occupation from 1940 to 1944 had merely suppressed but not eliminated the country’s pillarization, which was the politico-denominational segregation of society typical for the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Belgium. The Catholic, Protestant and Social-Democratic “pillars” with their own social institutions, political parties, trade unions, newspapers, broadcasting organizations, banks, schools, scouting organizations, sports clubs etcetera re-emerged. In this context, the attempts by the pro-Nazi NSB (Nationaalsocialistische Beweging, National Socialist Movement) to dominate the media were less successful, which was compensated with greater electoral fraud. The NSB got roughly 25% of the vote, enough for 37 seats in the lower house of parliament, and formed a minority government with the conservative Protestant Christian Historical Union (CHU) and the slightly less conservative Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP). The Labour Party (PvdA) and the Catholic People’s Party (KVP) were uncompromisingly opposed to the NSB. NSB leader Anton Mussert became Prime Minister.
The Belgian situation was more complicated than the Dutch situation. Besides the phenomenon of pillarization, the country was divided into the Dutch-speaking Flemish community and the Francophone Walloons. In Flanders, a prominent collaborationist party was the Flemish National Union (Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, VNV) and another was “DeVlag” (“The Flag”). In Wallonia, the Rexist Party was the main collaborationist party and it campaigned on a platform of “moral renewal” through dominance of the Catholic Church, forming a corporatist society and abolishing liberal democracy. The February 1944 elections produced a polarized parliament and the issue of the return of King Leopold III was a flashpoint, as he hadn’t gone into exile but had instead allowed his own capture and had met with Hitler. Despite their original royalist stance, Rex adopted the anti-King stance that a majority of Walloons supported: most Walloons wanted Leopold III to abdicate, even if it resulted in a regency for his 13 year-old son Crown Prince Baudouin. In Flanders, the majority supported Leopold III’s continued rule as King and the Germans continued their support of Flemish cultural and political associations. Protests took hold in the entire country and led to rioting, bringing the country to the verge of civil war by mid-1946. The end result after German mediation was that the country was split in two: the County of Flanders under Count Leopold remained independent, while the coal rich region of Wallonia was occupied by Germany in 1947. The German intervention to prevent a Belgian civil war proved to be a watershed event.
At this point, Hitler no longer felt like keeping up appearances about allowing democracy in Western Europe and told Pétain as much when they met in 1947. In France, new elections were organized in 1948 in which all rightist and royalist parties were compelled to merge into a “Bloc National” together with the PNSF. Tremendous electoral fraud was used, such as burning voting forms in favour of the democratic opposition. Additionally, voters were impressed by Milice men patrolling around polling stations, who also beat up opposition politicians and actively removed opposition election posters. With post-war scarcity not over yet, precious reserves of ink and printing presses were all bought by the Bloc National so the opposition could scarcely print any propaganda material anyway. As the administration controlled the Ministry of the Interior too, the police was directed to search the offices of opposition parties and, if necessary, plant evidence that there were illegal activities going on. One such police search in an office of the communist PCF led to the conclusion that an armed revolution was imminent, upon which Pétain used his powers to declare the PCF illegal and order the arrest of tens of thousands of communists. Those who could fled to Switzerland. The result was that the Bloc National won 70% of the vote. During other elections in 1948 in the Netherlands, Flanders and Norway events followed a similar pattern, ending with the German sponsored collaborationist movements establishing one-party states. In all cases, German troops were stationed in these countries again and the Kriegsmarine moved back into the U-boat bases it had used in the war. The smaller countries were now independent only on paper and Hitler’s views on society were imposed on them while France maintained its independence, but became a conservatively Catholic authoritarian regime much like Spain.
A European Community was founded in 1949, composed of Germany itself as well as Spain, Italy, France, Flanders, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Officially, the EC was a customs union, but in reality it was a protectionist organization that shielded European markets from American products with high tariff walls, allowing German products cheaply made by Eastern European labour to dominate European markets. The fact that the German flag on the European Community’s headquarters was twice as big as those of the other member states was telling. Apart from Switzerland – which was a convenient neutral spot for diplomacy and shady financial deals – all European states had to consider Germany’s interests when they made major foreign policy decisions.
British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said “the fascist jackboot is on our throat again.” To support his British allies, President Truman based B-36 nuclear bombers in Britain that could strike anywhere in Europe. By 1948 the Americans had hundreds of B-36s because investment in them to replace the B-29, vulnerable to interception by Me 262 jetfighters, had increased vastly from 1945 onward. By 1948 the American nuclear weapons stockpile amounted to fifty nuclear weapons, which increased to 170 in 1949 and 299 in 1950. Not only that, but by 1950, the explosive yields of nuclear weapons had increased from 20-25 kilotons to roughly 50 kilotons. Plans in the late 1940s consisted of deploying all B-29s and B-36s, forcing the Luftwaffe to try and intercept them all as they had to assume each one carried an atomic bomb. By the late 40s, the Germans had the radar coverage to see any attack coming, but with a swarm of dummy bombers in German skies, it was guaranteed that a lot of the actual nuclear bombers would get through and destroy dozens of German cities. The destruction of such cities was expected to lead to a collapse of the economy and the Wehrmacht’s supply chain as the targets chosen were the sites of key industrial facilities, power plants, dams providing hydroelectricity, river ports, major sea ports, shipyards, railway shunting yards, major highway bridges, communications facilities, military HQs and the country’s petroleum, oil and lubricants infrastructure. Realizing this, the Germans built a number of food storages, factories, fuel storages, refineries and power stations underground, as well as two major command complexes: one underneath Berlin and another underneath the Obersalzberg, which still acted as a second capital.
Meanwhile, the British and Americans immediately seized control of the Belgian Congo to prevent its mineral wealth, which included significant uranium deposits, from falling into German hands (similar to the de facto US occupation of Greenland to prevent the Germans from establishing air bases and missile launch sites there). In the case of the Dutch East Indies, the Americans actively began supplying its independence movement with funds, training, weapons and supplies. That led to its effective independence by 1950, though it would take the Dutch NSB regime until 1956 to recognize Indonesia diplomatically. As far as Congo was concerned, it was nowhere near ready for independence in 1948 as an educated middle class was virtually non-existent, to which the Anglo-American administration responded with a Ten Year Plan. They provided an education system with elementary, secondary and university-level institutions. These spawned a native middle class and upper class of skilled labourers, craftsmen, shop owners, journalists, teachers, policemen, civil servants, military officers, doctors, professors, chemists, engineers, agronomists, economists, bankers and so on. Exactly ten years after the Ten Year Plan entered into force in 1949, Congo became independent in June 1959. It has become the most successful example of “nation building” as today it’s the country with the highest GDP per capita of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the meantime, Hitler and Germany’s military leaders were acutely aware of the disadvantage the American nuclear monopoly put them in. A Panzer Division or a battleship, such as the gigantic 90.000 tonne H-42 class battleships under construction, could easily be destroyed by a nuclear strike. Germany’s second generation Ta 183 jetfighters could reach the altitude required to intercept the B-36 and they were equipped with Ruhrstahl X-4 wire-guided air-to-air missiles in addition to their normal equipment. Besides that, the Germans had continued to improve their Wasserfall remote controlled anti-aircraft missile, which had an operational range of 25 kilometres (16 mi). The altitude it could reach, however, was limited to the optical line of sight of the operator. Nonetheless, they still couldn’t be sure that they would take out all the enemy bombers. The point would be rendered moot in the 1950s as the US nuclear weapons stockpiles grew from hundreds to several thousand devices.
Hitler did have some means of striking back. Nazi Germany was the world leader in the field of ballistic missiles. After the jet-powered V-1 flying bomb, the Germans quickly moved on to actual ballistic missiles powered by rocket engines. The advantage of rocket engines is that they don’t require oxygen, enabling them to fly at altitudes in excess of 80 kilometres and briefly leave Earth’s atmosphere, which makes interception impossible. By mid-1944, after countless tests the Aggregat missile program produced a working design called the A4 that could carry a one tonne warhead over a distance of 320 kilometres (200 mi). It was renamed V-2, short for Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means “vengeance weapon 2.” Mobile launch sites were set up in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, prepared to fire hundreds of V-2s missiles at once in the event of war (plans for a massive industrial scale launch facility were abandoned as the Allies would just drop an atomic bomb on it). A variant called the A4b or A9 had fuselage strakes added to it which extended the effective range to 750 kilometres (~ 450 mi), enabling strikes as far north as Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle. A few hundred missiles with one tonne conventional amatol warheads would do a lot of damage, but nowhere near as much as a hundred atomic bombs detonating over German cities. As a stopgap, the Germans chose to modify a lot of missiles with newly developed nerve gas warheads with tabun, sarin or soman in them. Bombs with nerve gas could also be delivered by the world’s first jet-powered bomber, the Arado Ar 234, which had a top speed of 742 km/h (461 mph) and had a range of 1.556 km (967 mi) with a 500 kilogram payload. Secondly, Germany also had biological weapons available: typhoid, cholera, the plague and anthrax had been weaponized.
Hitler, however, despite all of that immediately decided that Germany had to have nuclear weapons when he learned of their use against Japan. A Nazi atomic bomb program called Uranverein (Uranium Club) existed, but until 1945 it was small and didn’t get a lot of funding compared to spending on the missile program and hadn’t yielded any serious results. Heisenberg, on his part, did claim that he immediately knew how the American device must have worked when he learnt of its use against Japan. After the first bomb was dropped over Japan, it all changed. Lead scientists Kurt Diebner, Abraham Esau, Walther Gerlach, Erich Schumann, Walther Bothe, Klaus Clusius, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Werner Heisenberg were summoned to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. They were led into Hitler’s impressive office where the Führer awaited them, remaining seated behind his big marble desk. Also present was the intimidating figure of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office and Himmler’s righthand man. They were informed that their annual budget was increased from next to nothing to 10 billion Reichsmark and that Heydrich would be the Director of the Nuclear Energy Program. Heydrich was chosen for this because he had a reputation for ruthlessness, which he could now apply to “motivate” the nuclear physicists to build a working bomb. The regime got around Hitler’s restriction forbidding the use of “Jewish science” such as E=MC2 and Special Relativity by simply saying a Jew like Einstein couldn’t have thought it up and had to have ripped it off an Aryan scientist which he must have then murdered (propaganda played into the odious stereotype of Jewish ritual murders).
The end result was that a 22 kiloton device under the codename “Siegfried” was successfully detonated at the Ohrdruf military training area on Wednesday November 9th 1949. Later, a lot of small hamlets and villages in the areas were cleared out, their inhabitants paid to move out while those who refused went to the nearby Ohrdruf concentration camp, in Thuringia. This way a 10.000 square kilometre (1 million hectare, 2.5 million acre) test area was formed where larger tests could take place, known as the Ohrdruf Nuclear Testing Facility. It would take a lot of time to catch up though: in 1950 the Reich had four nuclear weapons to the US’s 299; by 1953 the German stockpile had grown to 110 atomic bombs, but the US had 1.169. An interesting development in that regard was the A9/A10, a two-stage missile with a range of 5.000 kilometres (~ 3.100 mi), first successfully tested in 1950. It could hit the United States’ eastern seaboard from launch sites in France. If the Nazis successfully achieved warhead miniaturization, they would have a means of delivering nuclear weapons against which no defence could be mounted. For now, however, the Luftwaffe had to settle for the Ju 390 “Amerika” bomber, which had a range of 10.000 kilometres and could carry a first generation A-bomb. Though nuclear warheads weren’t miniaturized yet, the Germans could still equip their missiles with nerve gas or germ warfare warheads. In response, in October 1952, the Americans detonated the Ivy Mike device, which was the world’s first thermonuclear device and had an explosive yield of 10.4 megatons. Due to its enormous size, the Ivy Mike design couldn’t be used as a weapon, but deployable thermonuclear designs would follow. In addition to that, Britain tested its first nuclear weapon in 1952 as well. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction now went in effect.
A war against Nazi Germany was now, nevertheless, no longer a first choice to deal with renewed Nazi expansion. In the early 1950s, with roughly one hundred bombs and a small number of bombers, the United States would likely get off lightly. Many bombers would be intercepted over the Atlantic Ocean and thusly only a few American cities would be lost. In return, the Americans could fly from bases in Britain and Iceland with jetfighter escorts far into Europe. Strategic Air Command’s 1953 “Basic War Plan”, planned for an attack with 650 bombers simultaneously, now with each one carrying an atomic bomb as the stockpile was big enough and still leaving over 500 nuclear weapons for a second strike if that was necessary. The flipside of the coin was that fifty British cities or more were going to be nuked too as most German bombers would get through with jetfighter escorts (the Ta 183 had the range for it and was rumoured to have broken the sound barrier in dives), besides possible chemical and biological attacks with missiles.
After years of poor relations with the Soviet Union because they had made peace despite promises not to quit the war without consulting each other first, Truman decided to improve relations with Moscow the moment the Nazis detonated their first nuke in 1949, a policy that Nixon continued in his first term after he defeated Truman in the 1952 elections (he had gained national attention when, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he'd managed to capitalize on his role in uncovering a spy ring of Americans recruited by the Germans). Truman decided to seek out Stalin because he saw support to the USSR as an alternative to nuclear war, hoping to slowly sap German strength by helping the Soviets support an endless guerrilla war in the East. The US embassy in Nanjing, in the reunified Republic of China, initiated contacts with the Soviet embassy in late 1949. This resulted in a meeting between Stalin and US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the temporary Soviet capital of Novosibirsk in January 1950, followed by a return visit by Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, the former Soviet ambassador to the US (after that he had rapidly risen through the ranks of the Foreign Ministry as a result of Stalin’s latest purge, becoming Foreign Minister in 1944 when he was only 35 years old). Realizing he needed the Americans more than they needed him, Stalin went to the US despite his fear of flying and met Truman at Camp David. The end result was the Soviet-American Treaty of Friendship signed in June 1950.
That wasn’t signed a minute too soon. Hitler and Stalin had both always intended to resume the war and finish the job. The period of peace between 1942 and 1946 had been used by both sides, but the Soviet Union was left reeling by the 1943-’44 purge and a major famine due to the loss of its main grain producing regions in its former Western territories. The Soviets were nowhere near ready to resume the war in 1946. Nazi Germany, on the other hand, had used its own resources, those of occupied Europe, resources freed up by the end of the war with the West, the resumption of normal international trade, and an ocean of Slavic slave labourers to build an extensive network of railroads, asphalted roads, supply dumps, airfields and radar stations in the areas annexed by Germany in the 1942 Peace of Stockholm (with the exception of the Crimea, which was cleared of its inhabitants and filled with Strength through Joy hotels and resorts and under direct SS control).
The Wehrmacht’s opening move, from their launch positions in the former Belarussian SSR, was a titanic pincer move on Moscow. Six weeks into the campaign, German forces took Klin to the northwest and Podolsk to the south of Moscow and another two weeks later the encirclement was completed. The defenders could rely on multiple concentric belts of defences around and the city and the Moscow Defence Area were under the command of the gritty Marshal Vasily Chuikov, who had faced the Germans before at Stalingrad. Furious counteroffensives ordered by Stalin failed to break the encirclement and Moscow fell on August 18th 1946. This meant the Soviets had lost the nexus of their railway system and communications network and had suffered a crushing blow to morale. Given the horrid nature of the enemy, that all Soviets citizens were long since aware of, resistance continued. Moscow itself was booby trapped and many buildings holding any kind of significance exploded when the Germans entered. Despite Hitler’s plans to turn it into a lake, Moscow was preserved as Speer and Wehrmacht officers convinced him of Moscow’s central place in the Soviet railway network the Wehrmacht relied on for resupply.
After the dramatic Fall of Moscow, a lot of Russia west of the Ural Mountains fell into German hands and the Soviets moved their capital to Sverdlovsk and later Novosibirsk. Given the American threat of intervention if Germany nuked the rump-USSR, Hitler refrained from nuclear weapons. A stalemate resulted with a frontline roughly following the Urals, but with regular outbreaks of illnesses as Nazi forces used biological weapons (and chemical weapons). Nonetheless, the sheer distance prevented the Germans from advancing further while the Soviets couldn’t push them back. When Hitler was told this war would be a permanent partisan war, he responded: “Excellent, that will make sure the nation will remain alert against foreign threats and will preserve the vitality of our race.” For Hitler and many other Germans it was a brushfire war thousands of kilometres away, one that the Wehrmacht and the ruthless SS seemed to be winning as they systematically cleared areas from everyone not required to work for the Germans.
For Stalin, it was a desperate struggle for survival as his country could now barely produce enough food at the best of times, resulting in rationing: 2.000 calories for the troops as part of the “military first policy”, 1.500 calories for everyone in “vital industries” and 1.000 calories per day for everyone else. This was lowered several times between 1947 and 1950 and it got to the point that Stalin dramatically declared he would abstain from luxuries like drinking and smoking until the war was won (something he mostly managed to stick to in the following years, markedly improving his health). After the Soviet-American Treaty of Friendship in June 1950, that changed as American deliveries of staples like bread, potatoes, canned meats, canned fish, dairy products, salt and sugar arrived. Lots of American-made tractors and other modern farming implements were supplied to the kolkhozes in southwest Siberia and Central Asia, where wheat, barley, rye and potatoes could be grown, along with sheep and cattle grazing. The food imports were such that the hunger came to an end. To ensure that the food got to where it had to go, American aid also included thousands of locomotives, tens of thousands of railway cars, and countless trucks and jeeps, that were also gratefully accepted for military uses by the Red Army. Copious amounts of gasoline and coal to fuel them were delivered by American oil tankers and cargo ships. Furthermore, weapons like M1 Garand semi-automatic rifles, M24 Chaffee light tanks, M4 Sherman medium tanks and F-86 Sabre jetfighters bolstered the Red Army.
Finally, a team of American geologists, geographers, mining experts and figures from the oil industry arrived to assist the Soviets in conducting a geological survey. Once thought of as a frozen wasteland with little to offer, it was discovered over the course of the 1950s that Siberia was rich in coal, oil, natural gas, gold, nickel, lead, molybdenum, zinc, and silver. Stalin, ruthless as he was, used the gulag system to develop these riches while Hitler did the same west of the Urals with a system of concentration camps of his own. Thusly, by the early 50s, the war of annihilation launched on June 22nd 1941 seemed like it would continue forever.
