Original subtitles

You had a European civil war that began in 1914.

There was a long Armistice in that war.

It finally comes to an end in 1945.

In the process of coming to the end, what happens is that

sweeping into Europe from the outside are the Russians and the Americans.

They meet at Torgau on the Elbe river in May 1945

with the result that no European nation wins the European civil war.

The winners in the European civil war are outsiders,

the Russians and the Americans, most of all the Americans.

(narrator) Germans had tried to conquer Europe.

It had taken six years to defeat them.

They were peaceful now.

Was there any way of keeping them that way

apart from dismembering Germany itself?

The whole idea was that you would not split up Germany.

The idea had been kicked around in the West,

especially by the American Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,

that Germany ought to be divided.

Germany of course had been a united nation only since 1870.

The newest of all the nations, really,

the youngest of all the nations in the world.

Morgenthau's idea was to divide it up and dismantle all German heavy industry.

Turn Germany into a farming community only

so that Germany can never again pose a threat to the world.

Roosevelt had originally endorsed that idea and so had Churchill.

But by late 1943 they decided this would be economically a disaster for Europe.

If Europe were to recover from the war

she had to have the productivity of Germany and especially the Ruhr.

The Germans themselves would so bitterly resent a division of Germany

that you would have enormous problems in the occupation.

So the basic decision by early '44 had been made,

that Germany would be one nation.

This left problems because Germany is being attacked from both sides.

The Russians from the East, the Anglo-Americans from the West.

That meant that sooner or later they would be meeting each other

with all kinds of dire possibilities, of which the most important was

they would start firing at each other by mistake,

not recognising each other's uniforms. There would be language problems.

You need an agreed-upon demarcation line that you would stop at

and prevent this sort of...

horrendous situation of allies firing at each other.

What happened militarily was the lucky accident

of capturing the bridge at Remagen intact.

It let Eisenhower's armies get into Germany

much faster than anybody had expected.

At the time of Yalta, when the decisions were finally sealed

and the stamp was put on them

that the line of division would be the Elbe river,

it looked like the Russians would probably not only take Berlin

but would get across the Elbe

and quite likely meet the Western allies along the Rhine.

The Western allies at that time were recovering from the Battle of the Bulge

and things looked pretty bad for them.

But the recovery from the Bulge was quite a bit quicker than expected.

That was followed by the capture of the bridge at Remagen

which let Eisenhower get across the Rhine for free.

Until then they thought getting across the Rhine was going to be

as big a job as getting across the English Channel in Operation Overlord.

(narrator) In April the armies met up on the Elbe river as planned.

(Ambrose) There was a great celebration at Torgau where they met.

Dancing and embracing, exchanging of gifts. Very happy time.

(Russian music)

The United States during the war had been propagandised

into seeing Russia as a democracy, a land of freedom lovers

with essentially broad social aims about the same as those of the West.

It seemed to make sense since they were clearly an enemy of the Nazis

and we were an enemy of the Nazis,

thus it appeared we had a great deal in common.

The leaders, especially the British leaders,

and most especially Churchill, never agreed with this view.

But this was in general the view of most of the ordinary soldiers

and the citizenry of the United States.

There was no intention during the war itself

of dividing Germany up between East and West.

Intention at the time was to provide an orderly administration

of the occupied areas.

The first big act after the war is

that everybody lives up to the wartime agreements about zonal boundaries.

The thing that stands out is the Russians do let the West into Berlin,

which is 80 miles within their zone.

They didn't have to do it.

They could have acted in Berlin as they acted in Poland,

and said, "To hell with you, we're not letting you in."

"We're not going to live up to the agreements we signed."

"We're holding on to Berlin. After all, we captured it."

"We paid the cost." 100,000 Russians died.

Stalin was still hoping for an American loan.

He desperately needed to get reparations from Germany, especially from the Ruhr.

If he were to get these things he would have to co-operate with the West.

He recognised this.

In areas in which he felt it was possible to co-operate with the West

without making too many sacrifices in Russian security, he did so.

I would point to Berlin as the chief example of this.

In the case of Poland he simply couldn't allow the Polish colonels,

the Catholic Church, the Polish landlords,

to come back and take control of Poland.

Poland, as he pointed out time and again,

had three times in the past generation

been a gateway for an invasion of Russia.

Berlin he could afford to make concessions on and he did.

Stalin was clearly eager to get along with the West.

He was not a revolutionary.

He wanted to conserve the Bolshevik gains from the Russian Revolution.

He wanted to conserve the Russian state. He wanted security around her borders.

He did not push for world-wide revolution.

There are all kinds of examples.

Greece, for example. The Greek civil war

was being waged at the time

and the British were deeply involved.

British troops fighting against the communists and radicals in Greece

on the side of the monarchy.

Stalin quite clearly lived up to the wartime agreements with Churchill.

He refused to support the Greek communists.

The Americans were asking for an awful lot.

They wanted not only to control the areas their armies had conquered,

but they also wanted to have a major say, or at least an influence,

in the areas the Red Army had conquered.

In 1943, when Italy surrendered,

the Russians wanted to be part of the occupation of Italy.

Italy had been one of the Axis powers that attacked the Soviet Union.

But the Americans and British systematically excluded the Russians

from any say in the occupation of Italy.

Stalin originally protested against this.

He eventually said, "A-ha, I see. The precedent has been set."

The principle was clear.

Whoever occupies a country imposes upon it his own social system.

Stalin was happy enough to accept that precedent.

The Americans, however, wanted... were not willing to go along with that

when the shoe was on the other foot.

The Americans were demanding a major say in Poland

while being totally unwilling to give the Russians any say

in the areas their armies had conquered.

From the Russian point of view, if the West was going to exclude them

from all areas in which Western armies were in control,

they had the right to exclude the West from the areas

where the Red Army was in control.

They systematically followed this principle for the remainder of the war

and into the post-war period and indeed up to the present time.

(narrator) Russian suffering during the war had been appalling.

Their shattered economy had to be rebuilt.

To do it, Stalin had to choose between self-help,

turning to his allies or stripping the conquered lands.

He had those three alternatives.

He could either do it by forced savings on the part of the Russian citizenry,

who had of course been through hell for the past four years.

But if you continued to make demands of them, force them to work,

provide them with none of the ordinary consumer goods,

Russia could rebuild on her own.

This was the least desirable choice, but it was a choice.

A second choice that worked hand in glove with it was

strip all of the areas that you have conquered.

Move out everything that's moveable

and bring it back to the Soviet Union and restore the Soviet Union that way.

Of course that was done, too.

Both of those were the solutions that were in fact followed.

The third possibility was get investment capital from the United States.

The Soviets did ask

for an American loan.

The Soviets were not about to let the Americans come into Russia

in the way that the Americans were already beginning to move into France

and western Germany

and some ways into Great Britain,

had already moved into South America.

That is the enormous, gigantic American corporations coming in,

making investments and taking control,

to a certain extent, of the economy.

This the Russians wouldn't allow. They wanted a loan with no strings attached.

The Americans were above all capitalist

and capitalists don't make loans unless there are strings attached.

So the only place in the world that the Russians could look to

for investment capital, the USA,

was... How the hell to put it?

It just wasn't available to the Soviets because

it would mean opening up Russia

to Western investment,

to Western inspection teams.

The US, when they discussed the loan,

said, "We want you to open up your books."

Again, it didn't matter if it was a tsarist Russia or communist Russia.

The Russians are suspicious of the West and with very good reason.

There was never a ghost of a chance of the Russians and Americans creating

a kind of world they liked to talk about during the war,

an Atlantic Charter kind of world, a United Nations kind of world,

in which the victors continue to co-operate as they did during the war.

They only co-operated during the war because they were all afraid of Hitler,

with good reason.

Russian ambitions and American ambitions were bound to clash.

Patton said, "Now we've got rid of Hitler

we've got to get with the Wehrmacht

and drive the Russians back to the Volga."

But that was Patton bravado and bluster and no one in positions of authority

ever took such nonsense seriously.

Eventually what you get out of

the end of World War II

is that Russia and America confront each other around the world.

Then you have to sort out

what belongs to who.

Who gets what out of the war?

Lines have to be drawn.

This is what the Truman Doctrine means,

the doctrine of containment

that eventually came in 1947.

This is what Churchill means by the lron Curtain.

Much as he hated it and as much as many people regret

the imposition of the lron Curtain,

in fact the...

the lron Curtain line in Europe

turned out to be,

rather like the division of Germany, the best thing.

People knew who belonged to what.

Or rather what belonged to who.

So that one of the unexpected results is that

without having had a formal peace conference,

you get a better settlement in Europe after World War II

than after World War l.

In World War I they got down on hands and knees with gigantic maps

and drew out the lines of where the new countries would be

with the Austro-Hungarian Empire broken up and the German Empire broken up.

It looked like a very smooth and intelligent settlement.

In fact nothing was settled, as we learned in 1939, if not earlier.

World War II, you get nothing like that kind of a settlement at the end

so, willy-nilly, things fall into place.

We have now had the longest peace Europe has enjoyed in modern times.

The United States in World War II was very wise. Very wise indeed.

What we did was we paid the Europeans to do our fighting for us.

This seems to me the only way that one can look at Lend-Lease.

Lend-Lease is a programme

designed to make it possible for Russia and Britain

to carry on the struggle against Germany,

to maintain a balance of power in Europe

that allows the United States to almost, in effect, stay out of the war

and yet become the great gainer from it.

We get much more out of the war than anyone else.

There's a paradox here that very quickly after the war is over

Americans began to take the attitude that, "A-ha."

"Here it is again. We got fooled once more as we did in World War l."

"We made this enormous effort."

"We beat the Germans and the Japanese and who wins?"

"The Russians win. They get East Europe. We were suckers."

This was very widely felt in the United States.

It was a strange attitude to hold when you look

with whatever objectivity that one can muster about such things

at what the real results of the war were.

The United States came out of the war with, first of all,

not simply an intact physical plant, but a vastly expanded one.

Two, perhaps even three times as big as the industrial plant of 1939.

In all the world, only the United States had access to investment capital.

A lot of fortunes were made in the United States during World War II.

A lot of people got very rich out of the war.

Manpower losses were almost insignificant.

Compared to the other combatants, insignificant.

Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war.

America was the least mobilised of all the major combatants in World War II.

Altogether we had an army, navy and air force of 12 million men

out of a total population of 170 million.

Of those 12 million probably less than 6 million ever got overseas.

Within the United States...

..first and foremost the problem of the Depression was solved by World War II.

Now, of course economists in the United States and elsewhere,

British economists were just as guilty of this,

felt that during the war the big problem after the war

would be a return to depression conditions.

They agonised over that problem.

What's going to happen when we demobilise these armies?

All of a sudden we'll have 10 or 12 million unemployed again.

What they failed to recognise was money was being made hand over fist in the US

during the war and there was nothing to spend that money on.

So it was being saved.

You had this enormous pent-up demand for consumer goods

that only American factories could satisfy.

Not only within the United States, but for Europe and Asia as well.

At the conclusion of the war, the United States went into an economic boom

that made everything that preceded in America look like peanuts.

The idea that America was the world's great industrial power in 1939

is not exactly right. It potentially was.

When America really takes off, really begins to dominate the world

and what we think of as the American lifestyle today

begins to take hold, is post-1945.

A lot of statistics are available on this sort of thing.

Before World War II, for example,

American per-capita consumption of meat was 50lb per year.

By 1950 it was 150lb per year.

Before World War II less than one out of four American families

owned a private automobile.

The idea that all Americans owned their own car

before World War II was simply wrong.

But by 1950 almost literally every adult male American owned his own automobile.

One could go on with that kind of statistic forever.

The big boom for the United States is after World War II

as a result of the American victory in World War II.

The irony is, that having paid the least for victory,

the United States got the most out of it.

(narrator) The British fought the Nazis longer than anyone.

But the victory they won was a triumph with a difference.

(Ambrose) The British had as many problems, if not more,

in recovering from victory as the Germans did recovering from defeat.

The biggest single criticism I would make of Churchill during the war

was that he overstrained the British economy for victory.

He did more than had to be done.

Britain was certainly among the most mobilised,

if not the most mobilised nation in the war.

The rail system was worn out. The industrial plant was worn out.

The transport system was worn out.

In addition, the British... It wasn't altogether Churchill's fault.

The Americans drove a very hard bargain.

The Lend-Lease Act,

which Churchill called the most unsorted act in all of human history,

may have been that but there was much about it that was petty.

The Americans insisted before they began making the contributions

to Britain via Lend-Lease that the British sell their overseas assets.

This meant that at the end of the war the income the British had depended on

for so long from her overseas investments were no longer there.

They had been sold at American insistence.

What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much.

She lost a very great deal.

I suppose, if you want to look at it positively

she got a moral claim on the world

as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year.

It provided the moral leadership against the Nazis

at a time when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis.

The British, I suppose one would have to say,

paid the most for victory and got the least out of it.

The Russians paid an enormous price for victory,

but the Russians did get gains out of the war.

First and foremost, they got control of East Europe

and the imposition of regimes friendly to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

That is a euphemism that Stalin used time and again.

It means they got control of Eastern Europe

and were able to set up puppet governments there

that were... very much in the control of the Kremlin.

This meant the Soviet Union, for the first time in its existence,

and in many ways Russia for the first time in its history,

was now secure from attack from Europe.

The Soviets were able to create a buffer zone between them

and the industrialised nations of Europe.

In the Far East the Soviets made gains

that the Americans after the war felt were far greater than they deserved,

given their contribution to the victory over Japan,

which Americans thought was a minimal

or even a non-existent contribution.

Although in my own view

the Soviet attacks

on the Japanese army in Manchuria,

beginning on August 8 and lasting for only two days to be sure,

were nevertheless the decisive event in the Japanese decision to surrender.

This gets us into a kettle of worms that I'm not sure we've got time to get into.

The Soviets...

Communism gains out of the war more than the Soviets in a sense.

The communists get North Korea, first of all.

Eventually they get North Vietnam.

And of course China goes communist.

The West gets Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam.

So again, without having had a formal peace settlement,

you get a fairly just, fairly equitable distribution of the spoils in Asia.

The same tends to be true, it seems to me, in Europe.

The West gets western Germany and holds on to France and Italy.

The Russians get eastern Germany

and settle finally the question -

who is going to run Eastern Europe, the Germans or the Russians?

For centuries Germany and Russia

had struggled over control of Eastern Europe.

That question was settled by the Red Army in 1945 when it overran the area

and made it perfectly clear to everyone,

to hell with world moral views

or world public opinion,

they would hold on to Eastern Europe, period.

And of course they have, as we all know.

There's a view around today that World War II turned out disastrously

for all concerned except possibly the communists.

I think one can be very positive about World War II.

The most important single result is that

the Nazis were crushed.

The militarists in Japan were crushed.

The fascists in Italy were crushed.

Surely justice has never been better served.