A Military History of the Cold War, 1944-1962

by Jonathan M. House

Overview

The Cold War did not culminate in World War III as so many in the 1950s and 1960s feared, yet it spawned a host of military engagements that affected millions of lives. This book is the first comprehensive, multinational overview of military affairs during the early Cold War, beginning with conflicts during World War II in Warsaw, Athens, and Saigon and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A major theme of this account is the relationship between government policy and military preparedness and strategy. Author Jonathan M. House tells of generals engaging in policy confrontations with their governments’ political leaders—among them Anthony Eden, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy—many of whom made military decisions that hamstrung their own political goals. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere of atomic preparedness, politicians as well as soldiers seemed instinctively to prefer military solutions to political problems. And national security policies had military implications that took on a life of their own. The invasion of South Korea convinced European policy makers that effective deterrence and containment required building up and maintaining credible forces. Desire to strengthen the North Atlantic alliance militarily accelerated the rearmament of West Germany and the drive for its sovereignty.

In addition to examining the major confrontations, nuclear and conventional, between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing—including the crises over Berlin and Formosa—House traces often overlooked military operations against the insurgencies of the era, such as French efforts in Indochina and Algeria and British struggles in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Now, more than fifty years after the events House describes, understanding the origins and trajectory of the Cold War is as important as ever. By the late 1950s, the United States had sent forces to Vietnam and the Middle East, setting the stage for future conflicts in both regions. House’s account of the complex relationship between diplomacy and military action directly relates to the insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and confrontations that now occupy our attention across the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806168753
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Series:	Campaigns and Commanders Series , #34
Pages:	564
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

Jonathan M. House is Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Leavenworth, Kansas. He is author of Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century and Military Intelligence, 1870–1991 and coauthor, with David M. Glantz, of several studies of the Soviet-German conflict during World War II.

Read an Excerpt

A Military History of the Cold War, 1944â"1962

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By Jonathan M. House

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1973 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4690-4

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CHAPTER 1

PROLOGUE

A Tale of Three Cities

OVER WARSAW, NIGHT OF AUGUST 13–14, 1944

The mission would have been risky even if the city had not been defended by anti-aircraft guns and obscured by the smoke of a dozen fires. Polish, British, and South African air crews had to fly a 1,750-mile round trip from Italy, crossing an occupied continent with more Axis night fighters than navigational beacons. With the short nights of high summer, at least part of the trip had to be in daylight, even though some of the B-24 Liberator and British-built Lancaster crews were so shorthanded that their nose machine guns were unmanned. In the middle of this odyssey, the aircraft had to fly one at a time down the Vistula River, pass two bridges, turn hard left, and then locate the faint diamond and T-shaped lights of the drop zone in Krasinski Square. In the smoke and darkness over Warsaw, hitting that square required each airplane to drop down to 500 feet above ground level and slow to a stalling speed of 140 miles per hour. But the Polish resistance was fighting the Germans with their bare hands, and someone had to deliver weapons to them.

The first plane in the stream that night was flown by Captain N. Van Rensburg of No. 31 Squadron, South African Air Force. German searchlights reached up to find the plane, quickly followed by a web of colored tracers from machine guns and 20mm anti-aircraft positions. At such low speeds, the crew felt as if they were hanging in midair. Unable to locate the drop zone on the first pass, Van Rensburg wrenched the lumbering four-engine aircraft around and flew the gauntlet a second time. Finally, the Liberator lurched upward as thirty-six containers spilled out of the bomb bay, their parachutes blossoming unseen to float downward in the darkness. Van Rensburg's plane made it home almost unscathed, but others were not so lucky. Out of twenty-eight aircraft sent to Warsaw that night, three were shot down and a fourth had to crash-land in the Ukraine. Most of the other planes came home with flak damage. Over the course of five moonlit nights in August, the Allied Air Forces in Italy dispatched ninety-two planes to Warsaw, of which seventeen were lost outright and three more crashed on the way home. Reduced to only eight crews, No. 31 Squadron had to stand down from further operations. Despite such sacrifices, less than half of the weapons containers reached their intended recipients.

The obvious question is, Why was such a suicidal mission necessary? Perhaps more to the point, why did these airmen have to fly halfway across Europe to help the Poles when their mutual allies of the Soviet Union's Red Army were only a few kilometers away?

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was in many ways the curtain-raiser for the Cold War. The resistance forces in Poland, known as the Armia Krajowa (Home Army, or AK), were led by professional soldiers loyal to the London-based Polish government in exile of Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. Neither the leaders in Warsaw nor those in London had forgiven the Soviet Union for helping Nazi Germany defeat Poland in 1939. The Soviets insisted that they were only recovering territory lost in 1920, territory that was ethnically non-Polish and therefore belonged under Soviet control. In July 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had persuaded the Polish exile government to establish diplomatic relations with Moscow, but even those fragile ties had ended two years later, after the revelation that the Soviets had murdered thousands of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest.

From Joseph Stalin's viewpoint, the London government and its Home Army were nuisance groups that would never accept Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. They might, in fact, become a threat to the postwar security of the Soviet state. This was precisely why Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, had murdered 14,500 Polish officers and cadets at Katyn and elsewhere in 1940 and then attempted to blame the Germans for the massacre. Four years later, when the Red Army reentered eastern Poland, the Soviets quickly arrested leaders of the Home Army while drafting their followers into the Moscow-controlled First Polish Army. On July 27, 1944, Lieutenant General Tadeuz Komorowski, commander of the Polish resistance forces, told his London government that such action "indicates that the Soviets want to destroy the Home Army."

The failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, encouraged the Poles to believe that Germany was close to collapse. At the same time, the Red Army appeared on the verge of taking Warsaw. In five weeks, the huge encirclements of Operation Bagration had destroyed more than thirty German divisions while moving the battle lines three hundred kilometers westward. The Germans were clearly in retreat, and had even begun to withdraw from the Polish capital. This Soviet victory placed General Komorowski in a quandary. The temptation was to seize control of Warsaw, defeating the hated occupiers and giving the London government some stature in future negotiations with Stalin. Unfortunately, Komorowski had previously sent most of his scarce weapons to the eastern provinces, where the first battles of liberation would occur as the Red Army advanced. This left the Warsaw branch of the Home Army almost unarmed. At most, there were 1,000 carbines, 67 machine guns, 35 anti-tank launchers, and 1,700 revolvers to equip 40,000 Warsaw members of the AK. Such a collection of light weapons might have been sufficient to launch an urban terror campaign, but not to seize control of the city. As one resistance officer wrote later, "It was easier to part with a girl[friend] than with a rifle."

If Komorowski did nothing, however, the Soviets would occupy the Polish capital and impose their own puppet government, ending any chance for what he and his assistants defined as Polish liberty. To further complicate his calculations, Komorowski knew that the AK was a hodgepodge of political groups that might desert the organization if their leaders stood idle in the crisis. After five years of occupation, the Poles were more interested in striking at the hated Germans than in debating policies about the arriving Soviets.

The exile government in London was not only far from the battlefield but also leaderless at the moment of decision. In late July 1944, Prime Minister Mikolajczyk left for Moscow in a vain effort to reach some accommodation with Stalin. Before his departure, Mikolajczyk had authorized his political representative inside Poland, J. S. Jankowski, to order a rising on his own initiative if the circumstances seemed favorable. The Polish commander-in-chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, had also abdicated his responsibility. Sosnkowski had privately encouraged the Home Army to make its own decisions without waiting for civil authority. Fearing that Mikolajczyk would concede too much to the Soviets, the senior Polish military leader deliberately put himself out of communication with the prime minister and the Home Army so that he could not be ordered to surrender to the Soviets. At the end of July, Sosnkowski embarked on an inspection tour of Polish exile units in Italy and ignored repeated urgings to return to London. By some accounts, the general had forbidden any uprising without a prior agreement with the Soviets; unfortunately, the London government had censored these statements out of its messages to Warsaw.

The British and American governments were equally unhelpful. Both Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt had reluctantly concluded that Stalin's forces would inevitably control Poland at the end of the war, and both had encouraged the exiled Poles to reach an accommodation based on that reality. The U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff had not even recognized the Home Army as part of their forces, saying that Poland fell outside of their strategic sphere.

Left to decide on their own, Komorowski and his staff hesitated for several days in late July. Broadcasting in Polish, Soviet radios called on the Poles to rise up against the occupation. A rival communist resistance group, the People's Army, issued a proclamation on July 29, falsely claiming that the AK leadership had deserted Warsaw and again calling on the populace to rebel. On the afternoon of July 31, the AK staff, dressed in nondescript civilian clothes, assembled at their secret headquarters in Warsaw to learn of the prime minister's trip to Moscow. They hoped that this would initiate cooperation between the AK and the Red Army. Then the AK commander for the city, Colonel Antoni Chrusciel, arrived with a report that Soviet tanks were entering Praga, a Warsaw suburb on the eastern bank of the Vistula. With the Red Army seemingly only hours away, it appeared imperative that the AK seize the capital and establish its own, pro-London government before the Soviets could introduce their puppets. Komorowski summoned the underground political leadership, including Jankowski, who endorsed the military's plan to begin the uprising at 5 P.M. the next day, August 1, 1944. They confidently expected that the British and Americans would force the Soviets to come to their aid.

The result was an epic of missed opportunities and gallant futility. The Home Army failed to secure the four bridges across the Vistula, without which it had little hope of linking up with the Soviets. After the first few days of fighting, the Germans were able to regain control of major routes through the city, dividing the rebels into five separate segments that were systematically defeated, block by block. Outraged by the Polish rising, Heinrich Himmler ordered various SS police units, composed in equal parts of violent criminals and Soviet turncoats, to subdue the city. The result was a crime wave that horrified not only the Polish population but even the German governor, SS general Erich von dem BackZelewski. Back-Zelewski had been heavily involved in genocide killings, but he eventually countermanded Hitler's orders to execute women and children, and demanded that the worst SS thugs be withdrawn. Ultimately, the German commander even offered surrendering AK partisans the legal status of prisoners of war.

While the Germans cleared block after block of Warsaw, the defenders waited in vain for reinforcements. With complete disregard for the staggering distances and logistical problems involved, Polish commanders demanded that the British and Americans deliver to the battlefield not only weapons but also whole formations of the Polish exile army and air force. The best that the British could provide was a forlorn stream of long-range bombers dropping weapon containers over the stricken city, hoping that at least some of those containers would reach the Home Army.

The rising that was supposed to hold out for a few hours or days dragged on for weeks, and still the Red Army did not arrive. In hindsight, Komorowski and the other soldiers commanding the AK should have realized that, at the end of a three-hundred-kilometer mechanized advance, the Soviet spearheads had already expended most of their ammunition, fuel, and manpower. Major General N. D. Vedeneev's 3rd Tank Corps reached a point within fifteen kilometers of Warsaw on July 30, but there a German counterattack struck Vedeneev's depleted spearheads. Most of the German armored units involved were also severely under strength. In the crisis, however, the Germans assembled more than one hundred self-propelled guns normally assigned to police security units. These guns ambushed Vedeneev's lead elements outside Warsaw. Then, over the next few days, the German defenders were joined by 4th Panzer Division and 5th SS Division Viking severely mauling Vedeneev and other elements of the Soviet Second Tank Army. By August 5 the Soviets had lost the initiative and were stalled east of Warsaw. They did not resume the advance until late August, and did not approach the suburbs of Warsaw until September 13, six weeks after Colonel Chrusciel had announced their imminent arrival. In fact, Warsaw did not finally fall into Soviet hands until January 1945.

Churchill repeatedly urged Stalin to aid the Home Army, but with little success. On August 5, the Soviet leader replied to one such appeal from the British prime minister: "I think that the information which has been communicated to you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and does not inspire confidence.... The Home Army of the Poles consists of a few detachments which they incorrectly call divisions. They have neither artillery nor aircraft nor tanks. I cannot imagine how such detachments can capture Warsaw."

Following their defeat in early August, the Soviets apparently did make further efforts to relieve the defenders of Warsaw. Yet, to overcome the German defenses in the area, the Red Army would have had to abandon its future plans and completely reorient its troops and supplies to break into the capital. A pause was inevitable to allow time for the Soviet units to rebuild their strength. Even if they had succeeded, the Russians would have faced a bitter struggle to clear the Germans from the ruined city, a city that would have formed an unsuitable base from which to launch a new offensive. Long after the events, the memoirs of Soviet commanders continued to blame the Poles for failing to communicate and cooperate with the Red Army, whereas both sides were equally at fault.

If relieving Warsaw was impractical, there was still little military justification for the Soviet failure to aid the defenders and thereby wear down the Germans. In particular, the Western Allies asked for permission to use a preexisting system, known as Operation Frantic, to supply the Poles. Under Frantic procedures, B-17 Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Army's Eighth Air Force regularly conducted shuttle raids, flying from Britain over Germany to bomb deep targets and then continuing on to an airfield in the Ukraine. A few days later, the process would be reversed. However, the Soviet government initially refused to authorize the use of the Frantic base to aid the Home Army. On August 16, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky replied to such a request by saying that the Soviets "decidedly object to American or British aircraft, after dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, landing on Soviet territory, since the Soviet government did not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw."

Stalin finally relented in mid-September, but by that time the partisan enclaves had become so reduced in size that they were too small to serve as drop zones, especially for high-altitude delivery. One hundred and seven B-17s dropped a total of 1,284 weapons containers over the city on the 18th, but only 228 of those containers actually reached the Home Army. In late September, the Soviets themselves flew air cover and dropped some supplies to the defenders, although this assistance arrived far too late.

The Home Army held out until October 4, 1944, a total of sixty-three days. Without adequate arms, the Poles nonetheless tied up more than 21,000 German troops. The Warsaw Uprising cost at least 17,200 Poles killed or missing, and inflicted almost equal casualties on their better-equipped and -trained foes.

At the time and for decades thereafter, the Western Allies reproached the Soviets for not doing enough to help the Home Army. Such criticism of the Red Army, which suffered half a million casualties to reach Warsaw, became a self-fulfilling prophesy. The issue simply confirmed Stalin's belief that the Home Army and the London exile government were implacable foes of the Soviet Union, and thus the deaths of Poles and Germans alike only simplified the task of conquering Poland in order to provide for postwar Soviet security.

ATHENS, GREECE, DECEMBER 11, 1944

Field Marshal Harold Alexander had just become the Allied Commander-in-Chief for the Mediterranean Theater, but his first duty had nothing to do with defeating Germany. Instead, he flew into an airfield outside Athens in an attempt to resolve a weeklong struggle between the liberating British forces and the dominant resistance organization in Greece, an alliance of left-wing groups known as the National Popular Liberation Army, or ELAS. The British were convinced that ELAS was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Greek Communist Party. When Alexander asked for transportation from the airfield to the capital, he learned that he needed an armored vehicle because the route was under sniper fire from ELAS. Moreover, ELAS controlled the telephone system between the two British enclaves. As Alexander related later,

Not a happy welcome! However, the Communists obligingly put through my call to the commander of our troops in Athens, [Lieutenant] General Ronald Scobie, who by now had some 5,000 men at his disposal, and in due time two armouredcars arrived to take us the six or seven miles to Athens. We bought a lot of bullets on the journey—we could hear them hitting the outside of my armoured-car—but we were not stopped.

When I arrived at General Scobie's headquarters ... I learnt that the Communists were in control of most of the city, and that only the centre, an area which embraced British Military headquarters and the British Embassy, was still in our hand ... I was told that we had only three days' supply of food.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Military History of the Cold War, 1944â"1962 by Jonathan M. House. Copyright © 1973 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

1 Prologue: A Tale of Three Cities 3

2 Origins, Interests, and Forces 23

3 The Greek Civil War 53

4 Armed Forces in an Atomic Age 76

5 Confrontations and Alliances 107

6 The Chinese Civil War 133

7 The Korean Conflict 164

8 European Alliances and Armaments 209

9 The Philippines and Taiwan 243

10 The Twenty-Year War: France, Indochina, and Algeria 269

11 The Decline of Empires 299

12 The United States Enters the Middle East 336

13 Nuclear Nightmares 367

14 Four Confrontations, 1960-1962 392

15 The Cuban Missile Crisis 415

Conclusion 441

Acronyms, Abbreviations, and Other Terms 449

Notes 457

Bibliography 509

Index 535