[gentle music]
- Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
As the smoke cleared at the end of World War II,
it became obvious that one of the casualties
of the war was colonialism.
Between 1945 and 1955,
some 20 colonies gained their independence,
said to be the greatest change in the world order
since the fall of the Roman Empire.
How did the war bring about that wave of independence?
We're going to look at a world profoundly changed
with Christopher Kolakowski,
the director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Christopher Kolakowski: Well, thanks for having me.
- I remember maps from prior to, let's say, 1955 or so,
you see a map of Africa in particular,
not many different colors on that map
because you had so many countries,
or colonies that became countries
that belonged to France or Britain or Italy,
and things changed very quickly after 1945, 1955,
that profound change.
- So, that's not our phrase.
That's not your phrase.
That's actually their phrase.
The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in August of 1944,
during-- as it became clear that World War II
was gonna draw to a close in 1945,
and it was going to produce Allied victory,
the State Department asked for an assessment
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
What's that gonna mean?
What are the projections?
And they came up with, and they said it's going to be
a world profoundly changed.
And they were the ones who identified
in the last 1,500 years-- then, 1,500 years--
since the fall of Rome in AD 476,
this is gonna be the greatest remaking of the world.
And they talked about the emergence of the United States
and the Soviet Union as superpowers,
Britain and the British Empire, French Empire coming out,
as they put it, greatly diminished,
and what that was gonna mean for the world.
It was a change.
They were absolutely right in my opinion.
It was a change that's still with us today.
In fact, I would argue that, if you look at most of the world,
1945 is yesterday.
And so, to understand the world that we live in,
you have to start with World War II and its aftermath.
- It happened so quickly, though, this profound change.
The war ends August of 1945.
By, well, by 1949, the Soviets have a nuclear bomb.
- Christopher: Right. - And it's a face-off.
- And that's one of the things that really
kind of overshadows all this
is if you look at the previous 250 years of history
before 1945, the great nations of the world,
the Spanish Empire, the British Empire,
the French Empire,
and then you get, you know, a developing United States.
We were still the 13 colonies and then all that.
But the western Europe was really the center
of global geopolitical power.
In 1945, that's all changed.
And it's changed for two--
It's really the culmination of two reasons.
First is 30 years of warfare that ends, starting in 1914.
From 1914 to 1918,
one Frenchman died every seven seconds on the Western Front.
The British Empire, it's been said,
was hollowed out by its losses in World War I.
There were one in three military-age males
that were a casualty,
killed, wounded, or captured, in the First World War.
- Including a lot in the upper classes, which was unusual.
- A lot in the upper classes.
But it's also where you get Imperial troops
that come from around the world.
You know, we think of the Australians
and the New Zealands.
There was also, you know, Indian Army that were there.
The French brought African troops,
they brought Vietnamese that fought on the Western Front.
And what that does is that begins to plant a seed of,
"Well, wait a minute.
We can defend ourselves."
It creates that sense of...
"We're people.
We may be within an empire, but we are people."
And that seed begins to branch into nationalism.
To me, it's no accident that Ho Chi Minh,
who is obviously well known to students of the Vietnam War,
attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919
asking for the independence of French Indochina and Vietnam.
- That far back. - That far back.
So, you've got these empires
that, all of a sudden, are becoming more fragile
because of the costs of the war,
physical, monetary, people,
and then you get this budding nationalism
that begins to build up.
Then, you go to the Second World War.
France falls in 1940.
Britain has a real problem holding on to the Empire.
In fact, in 1942,
when Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt
meet to divide the world,
basically, who's gonna run the war
in this part of the world,
who's gonna run the war in this part of the world,
after Pearl Harbor,
Britain cedes most of its Pacific possessions
to the strategic direction of the United States
because we can't defend them.
And to my mind, that's a big admission at that moment
that the British Empire is...
the tide of the British Empire is now receding.
So, you put all this together,
and then you add in the fact that the Soviet Union
advances, basically, into the middle of Europe,
the United States advances to the other end of Europe.
The United States has a key role in winning the Pacific War
and runs the occupation of Japan,
and it becomes very clear
that what the Joint Chiefs were saying
came to be true.
And they said that, you know, the British Empire
would be diminished,
but would be a valuable ally for one side or the other.
- Just for a moment, I wanna skip
to our contemporary situation. - Sure.
- And use that same phenomenon of empire funneling its colonies
and their military power into the survival of the empire,
and apply that to the Soviet Union,
which, as we know, is not a homogeneous population at all.
- Right, very much so.
- And even though, of course, it has lost some of its...
satellite states, let's say, to independence
or greater independence already,
how does that forebode for some of those other republics
that are still part of the Soviet Union,
if they see we're ethnically different from the Russians,
and yes, Russia is capable
of quite the amount of blundering
in their military conflicts.
What do you think?
- I think that's one of the reasons
why the Soviet Union was structured the way that it was,
particularly with the activities of the KGB.
And you look at the secret police
and you look at the structure of the Soviet state,
and how centralized everything was in Moscow.
There was no question that Moscow was boss.
But there was always a certain uneasiness.
And now that you see some of the papers that have come out,
you notice that there's a certain uneasiness
about some of the Soviet leaders,
about how much control can they cede,
and that's also why, you know, glasnost and perestroika,
under Gorbachev in the late '80s,
it pulled the lid off of that.
And so, all of a sudden, the Latvians,
the Lithuanians, the Estonians,
which were independent nations between the world wars,
and then annexed by the Soviets,
very quickly, first opportunity,
jumped ship and became independent.
Same with the Ukrainians, same with the Kazakhs.
You know, you look at all of these different...
The Soviet Union timeline was a little bit different,
but it was very much experienced,
very much the same sort of,
same sort of dissolution that the British and the French did
in the middle part of the 20th century.
They just did it in 1989 to 1991.
- And to some extent,
places like the former Czechoslovakia,
Poland...
Moldova, countries that we barely know where they are
because they were parts of other countries for so long,
were colonies of the Soviet Union.
- Very much, and actually, I think the map
that we're showing here illustrates that.
And that's why I like to start a discussion of this period
with this map.
To understand Russia today
and to understand the Soviet Union after 1945,
you've got to understand their experience during the war.
The Soviets had been involved as an ally of the Germans
from 1939 to 1941.
And then, on June 22, 1941,
the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
The Soviets lost by...
Depending on whose estimates you believe,
I've seen-- The most consistent estimates I've seen
is 35 million people in 4 years.
- Civilians and military.
- Civilians, military, most of them dead.
And the Germans advanced 1,500 miles
into the gates of Moscow, to the gates of Stalingrad.
It would be the equivalent today
if somebody were to invade the East Coast
and advance to Kansas City,
and then have to be forcibly evicted from the United States.
So...
And some of the bloodiest battles in history
were fought between the Germans and the Soviets
on the Eastern Front. - Notoriously.
- Exactly.
And preventing that from ever happening again
has been something--
First of all, it maimed a generation.
It burrowed itself very deeply into the Russian psyche.
But preventing that has been something
that every Russian leader and Soviet leader since
has wanted to do.
I would argue today that if you want to understand
Vladimir Putin's thinking,
you have to start with his parents' experience
in the Second World War
where they survived the horrific siege of Leningrad.
At one point, his mother was given up for dead,
but his father was able to rescue him.
Putin was born after the war,
but that's the story he grew up with.
And then, this whole, with the, you know,
with the German invasion, things like that,
that's why Joseph Stalin, at the end of the war,
wanted to set up the chain of satellites.
We know it as the Warsaw Pact after 1955,
and it's a series of buffer states
to provide for some additional layers of security
to the Soviet Union.
Of course, as soon as the Soviet Union fell,
virtually all of those Warsaw Pact states
wanted to join NATO. - Yes,
which was a little much, wasn't it, for the Soviets?
- Well, and think about it.
All of a sudden, the NATO borders start marching east,
and then, they start talking about
bringing in the Baltic countries,
which used to be part of the Soviet Union proper,
and start talking about bringing in Ukraine.
Which, all of a sudden, if that were to happen,
the NATO borders now start to approximate
the German front line for most of the German invasion.
- No buffer. - Bingo.
And so, when you understand all of that,
you begin to realize, some of Putin's statements--
I don't say...
You begin to understand why Putin
has the perspective he has.
- And well, we could kind of guess
as to whether that's the, kind of...
front line motive for Putin,
or whether there's a lot of ego involved
in just rebuilding the empire.
But contrast him with Gorbachev, then,
who, apparently, I mean, from our standpoint in the West,
allowed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Why would Gorbachev be willing to dissolve it?
He had the same-- actually more, I think,
of a wartime experience than Putin,
who was born in 1952. - Right.
- How would you account for the contrast
between those two attitudes?
- Gorbachev lived through the war,
but Gorbachev, from everything that I've seen,
Gorbachev made a calculation,
and he realized-- He didn't just see
through the prism of the war.
He also looked at 1956,
when the Soviets brutally overthrew some peace movements,
1953 in East Germany, same thing.
- Hungary in particular. - Hungary, '56.
There was also in Poland at the same time.
Most people don't realize that.
And then, of course, '68,
the brutal suppression of Prague Spring.
- Yes. - And then, solidarity.
And the police state that, you know,
it's becoming increasingly clear that...
The communists have to grip tighter and tighter
to keep the control on their countries.
And Gorbachev realized, "I can either grip tighter
"and start wading through a sea of blood,
"which makes me, puts me in the category of Joseph Stalin,
"or we can try to open up
and try to let some of the pressure out."
And obviously, when he did that,
a lot more-- And it just basically collapsed.
The tensions couldn't hold it together.
- The differences between Putin and Gorbachev
seeming to be that Putin wouldn't care
if he were compared to Stalin.
- Actually, he has glorified the Second World War
and has used the memory of World War II,
to-- and the propaganda--
And I will admit, I have some serious problems
with how he interprets World War II,
but nonetheless, the creating it
and actually analogizing what they're doing in Ukraine
to World War II.
And it's, you...
- It touches a nerve. - It touches a nerve.
But it also points up exactly what we're talking about,
about how 1945 is yesterday.
And you got to understand World War II and its aftermath
to even begin to understand
his thinking and his country's thinking today.
- Well, then, let's go back to before,
let's say, September 1, 1939, and look at Europe.
- So, Europe in September of 1939 is
a place that's teetering on the balance.
Hitler's taken power in Nazi Germany
and he's been expanding.
He's annexed Austria, he's annexed Czechoslovakia,
and he's aiming at Poland.
- Norman: This is all without firing a shot so far.
- Christopher: That's right, that's right.
And it's because of that
he's becoming increasingly emboldened.
Six months after the annexation of Czechoslovakia,
which was in March,
the final annexation was in March of 1939,
he decides to go after Poland, and his big, big thing is the...
If you look at the border of Poland,
you'll see there's a little finger
that extends up to the Baltic Sea.
That was actually there for 500 years
until the partition of Poland in 1772.
And so, when they redrew Poland's map
at Versailles in 1919, they redrew the 1772 borders.
But that didn't-- don't let the facts get in the way...
- Norman: Right. - ...in the German chancellor--
in Hitler's office.
So, he decides to go after Poland and invades Poland.
And at that point, it precipitates two things.
Number one, the British and the French
go to war to protect Poland.
- Because of treaties. - Because of treaties.
And the Germans have conducted a treaty of their own,
on August 23, 1939,
a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union,
which also includes a secret clause
that, once Poland is overrun in six weeks,
they will activate, which is the fourth partition of Poland
to cut Poland down the middle.
The border that was drawn in 1939
is, today, the eastern border of Poland.
So, all that land that was given to the Soviet Union
is, today, either part of Belarus or Ukraine,
and some of it's Lithuania.
- You could argue that those borders, of course,
witness, you know, 1772 or whatever,
have been shifting around a lot over the centuries, anyway.
- Right, the borders of Europe start moving in 1939, again.
They move, you're right, they move in fits and starts
all through European history.
The latest of that sequence starts in September of 1939.
And when the borders of Europe stop moving,
we get the modern map that we have,
and they don't really stop moving
until you get the final breakup of Yugoslavia
in the 1990s.
But that also, that does two things
that we need to think about today.
Number one, it sets a precedent
for what's gonna happen after the war.
More borders will move because of force,
but it also creates a desire to codify in international law.
And you see it in the negotiations over Ukraine,
where one of the big issues is, you know,
do we really wanna move borders as a result of force?
- Even if you can do it relatively successfully,
it sets a precedent. - Right.
And it all goes back to September 1939.
A lot of the international laws that were put in place,
the United Nations, for example,
and the Geneva Conventions in 1949,
are a direct reaction to World War II and its conduct.
- So, we're looking at colonial powers there,
Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy.
- Yep.
- And before '39, Italy was already on the move,
colonizing parts of North Africa.
- They were making a lot of trouble
down in the Mediterranean, absolutely right.
- And the Britons, the Brits,
already had big chunks of Africa,
and of course, the French, also, and the Belgian Congo and so on.
- By the way, Hitler believes
he's building a new German empire.
Reich, Third Reich, translates as empire.
And actually, some of the German, the Nazi politicians,
referred to Poland, but especially the Soviet Union,
as "our India."
"We want to take control of it and we want to make it our...
what India is to the British."
- It's a strange thing to say, but...
colonizing was fashionable. - Yeah.
- Empire building was fashionable.
- Very much.
- I mean, even Theodore Roosevelt, you know,
America is not above that empire building.
The Philippines, Caribbean...
- We have our own empire in the Philippines, exactly.
Yep. - Even some Germans would say,
"Well, war is an honorable pursuit.
And what we can get by war is ours."
- Christopher: Right of conquest.
- Yes. - And it's...
That precipitates a lot of things.
And when you accept that as part of your philosophy,
it leads to a lot of...
It leads to a lot of blood
and it leads to a lot of atrocity,
as you see in the history of World War II in Europe.
And it took the combined forces
of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union,
and a variety of other allies
to ultimately crush Nazi Germany in 1945.
And...
One of the things that you'll see
is the way that they set it up, in contrast to World War I,
the way they set it up is the four powers,
Britain, France, the United States,
and the Soviets, will occupy Germany
and they will also move borders and expel millions of Germans.
Because one of the arguments that Hitler had made
is, you know, there are ethnic German minorities
in all these countries. - Yes.
So, we should control them. - Right.
And so, well, we're not gonna do that anymore.
We're gonna expel them,
and we're going to put them all in Germany
and make these states to be very, very homogenous.
And so, you get a lot of population transfers,
and then you get others, quite frankly, like my grandfather,
who was in the Polish Army in 1939,
spent two and a half years in the Gulag,
ended up in London during the war
with the free Poles, and at the end of the war,
didn't wanna go live under the communists,
so ended up here in the United States.
So, there's this massive population transfer
that, for a variety of reasons, occurs in eastern Europe.
And also, the borders of Europe move as well.
If you look at-- you compare the map,
that we're looking at right now to the map we had before,
you'll see how Poland has changed,
but you'll also see how the Soviet Union itself
has moved west.
And I direct your attention to East Prussia,
which is that little red glob
right at the northern top of Poland there
that's split in half.
The northern half went to the Soviet Union.
And the reason they wanted that
is because Joseph Stalin wanted a warm water,
all ice-free port all year.
- Norman: The Russians have always longed
for being more European.
- Christopher: That's right.
After the fall of the Soviet Union,
that enclave is still Russian.
If you look at a map of Russia today,
it's known as the Kaliningrad Enclave.
- Yes, it's just, as you say,
that little finger going up to the Baltic.
- Bingo, and it's still there.
It's packed with all kinds of troops and defenses,
and it's surrounded by NATO territory,
but it's there.
And just like East Prussia was for the Germans,
kind of that European, eastern European outpost,
this is for the Russians.
But it's still a geopolitical, geostrategic fact.
And it's right there.
You know, people look at that and say, "Oh, what is that?
How did that come to be?"
It came out of 1945, World War II and its aftermath.
- It's interesting what you said
about relocating Germans and Czechs,
and there were a number of-- well, and Poles, also,
the distinction between nationality and nationalism.
In other words, a lot of those Germans
may have been happier not moving back to Germany,
you know, given that they were already...
comfortable, incorporated into other nation states.
- Well, a good example of that is the Germans that are,
the ethnic Germans that are expelled from Czechoslovakia.
They were actually part of the Austrian Empire.
They had never been citizens of Germany,
and they were part of the Austrian Empire
until Czechoslovakia became independent in 1919.
And so, they lived under the Czechs.
And when they were expelled to Germany,
most of them didn't really,
you know, didn't feel any alliance.
Most of them pined to go home.
Of course, they were never gonna go back home.
- Well, think about Germans in this country.
They would not have wanted to be deported to Germany.
- That's right.
- Obviously, they came over here for a reason.
- Yeah, that's right. - Same for any other,
you know, Irish, or any other nationality
that you want to pick. - Christopher: Exactly.
- We have some traveling to do now that we've looked at Europe.
- Sure. - And these repercussions
that we're talking about at the end of World War II,
definitely global because of these colonies
that we've talked about. - Christopher: Right.
- And one of the ones
in the news practically every day
and has been, ever since 1948, at least, is Palestine,
Israel, that part of the Middle East.
- So, the map of the modern Middle East
starts with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire
at the end of World War I, to continue with our theme here.
And the British and the French drew it
in such a way to serve their interests.
They didn't know the Arabian Peninsula had oil.
It wasn't discovered until the 1920s.
And by then, from their perspective, it was too late.
But the British also accept a mandate for Palestine,
and they create a land route to India
from Haifa across to Basra.
That's why Iraq is shaped the way it is
and Jordan is shaped the way it is.
So, the British would always have that
in case the Suez Canal ever got closed.
But the British, at the end of the Second World War,
particularly as Jews are coming from Europe,
Holocaust survivors are coming in increasing numbers
to Palestine,
the British realize they can't, they have--
To use the analogy we used earlier with the Soviets,
they've got a lid on a pressure cooker
that is just building.
- The enmity between the Palestinians and the Israelis
or the Jews. - The Jews, right, and...
They were given a mandate to kind of protect the area
after World War I,
and they said, "Our mandate is almost over.
We can't keep this."
So, they go to the U.N.
and try and negotiate a partition,
and you'll see that word again with some other places.
It's a fairly popular thing in the late '40s,
to try and negotiate a partition,
which one side accepts, and one side does not,
precipitates what becomes
the Israeli War of Independence in 1948,
and then every Arab-Israeli conflict ever since.
But it comes out of that post-World War II.
And then, if you look at the,
you know, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem
and what it means for the memory of the Holocaust
and what the Holocaust means
in the national identity of Israel today,
you know, that's another nation where,
to understand what it is, who they're about,
you have to understand the experiences of World War II
and its immediate aftermath.
- Well, the Jews had been there since time immemorial,
as the Palestinians had been. - Correct.
- The Jews had the diaspora, which lasted
a couple thousand years. - Christopher: Right.
And have gone through this horrific genocide
during World War II, 6 million, roughly,
Jews killed during World War II, which, to a great extent,
meant that there was a lot of sympathy for the Jews.
- There's some evidence that a lot of people
wanted to give them Israel.
- Norman: Give them the homeland.
- Give them the homeland, as a way to...
I don't wanna use the word "atone,"
but as a way to...
What's the word I'm looking for here?
- Accommodate. - Yeah.
That's a good way to put it, that's a good way to put it.
And of course, the Palestinians in the area...
- Didn't have much say-so in that.
- No, they didn't.
And I understand that side too.
You know, it's...
- They've been there for thousands of years.
- And that's a population that, a lot of them got displaced
into neighboring countries
and still are displaced to this day.
And the right of return remains a big sticking point
in any negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Again, all of these issues
come right out of those decisions,
'45 through '48, '49 time frame.
- Norman: So...
Israel goes, what we call Israel today,
goes from being, was it a protectorate?
Not exactly a colony...
What was it? - It was a protectorate.
- It was a protectorate? - Yeah.
- It goes from that status,
which is pointing toward colonialism.
- Yeah, it's one foot--
It's not completely a colony,
but it's got one foot in that direction.
- It goes from that status to independence in 1948.
- Right. - And that's,
as they say, a story that's still very much with us today.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- Well, that leaves us a lot of southeast Asia
and other parts of Asia to look at too.
Colonies there that, probably, most of us
were barely even aware of.
- So, southeast Asia,
and this is another area that's very much in our headlines.
In fact, I would argue that most of the conflicts in Asia
have their roots in some way in World War II and its aftermath.
You know, the map we're looking at right now
is Asia in 1941,
right before Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
And you'll notice the various colonial powers,
particularly in the southwestern part of the map,
the French in Indochina,
which, today, is Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia,
the Dutch East Indies, which, today, is Indonesia,
British Malaya, British Burma, British India,
Australia, New Zealand, and then, of course,
the United States and the Philippines.
- Norman: Yeah, when you think about it,
you throw in, yes, Australia and New Zealand,
also colonies at one point.
Obviously, long before the time we're talking about here.
But yeah, all of that area.
- Christopher: They're parts of the British Empire,
as is Canada on this map. - Norman: Sure, yeah, right.
Hard to believe, isn't it? - Christopher: Yeah, I know.
Japan, when they attack, one of the things Japan wants to do,
they've been fighting a war in China since 1939.
That's that big red splotch that you see in northeastern China.
And it's been bogged down.
And to seize the resources that they need to continue the war,
they attack south, to the Philippines,
to all the places I just named,
and they conquer them in about six months.
- Norman: Yeah, quite quickly, they just fold like cards.
- Christopher: Yeah, they fold, yeah.
And basically, conquer most of what you see
on the map west of the International Date Line.
It's a huge loss of prestige for these empires.
The British suffer the greatest surrender,
the greatest defeat in the history of the British Army
at Singapore in February of 1942.
I actually had ancestors get captured there.
- It was apparently very poorly defended.
- It was very poorly defended, very poorly led.
And come to find out, after the war,
30,000 Japanese captured 90,000 British,
Indian, and Australian troops on that island.
So, you can imagine the absolute humiliation.
The other thing that it does is the Japanese create
what they call the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
In reality, it's a way to organize all these countries
so that they feed the Japanese war effort.
But one of the things that they do
is they give each country a puppet government.
So, for the first time, you get these former colonies
that glimpse self-rule.
Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, who I know has been in the news,
her father was in the puppet government
the Japanese set up in Burma.
That's one of the ways the family got so prominent.
- That became Myanmar, ultimately.
- Yeah, it's also known as Myanmar.
So, Japan obviously is defeated in 1945.
Some of these colonial powers try to come back
and try and reset the clock,
the British, the French, the Dutch in particular.
The United States is not part of that
because the United States had actually promised in the 1930s
that we were gonna give our independence to the Philippines
on July 4, 1946. - We did, in '46.
- We kept that promise.
And also, Douglas MacArthur,
when he left the Philippines, said, "I shall return."
And he kept that promise too.
We weren't part of that.
But that idea of coming back
and being able to turn back the clock
precipitates a lot of conflicts.
The Indonesians fight a war of independence,
very bloody war of independence, for four years,
from 1945 to 1949,
before the Dutch finally quit and go home.
The British-- we can talk about India and the partition
and what happens there.
Just incredibly bloody.
And the British realize shortly after World War II,
not only can't we hold the Middle East,
we can't hold the Eastern Empire.
And so, Myanmar becomes Burma at the time,
becomes independent in 1948.
Sri Lanka, Ceylon at the time, independent in 1948.
You start looking at all these-- Malaya in the '50s.
You know, these dominoes begin to fall very quickly.
One of the empires that tries the hardest
to hang on to their colonies is the French.
And that precipitates the first Indochina War,
which ends at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
- And then, they needed somebody to take over.
- It's funny you mention that because one of the things
in my recent research I discovered is, by 1954,
the United States was paying 80% of the bills
for the French to fight that war.
- I mean, in this case,
is it all really the domino theory that...
I realize it became even more of a thing
by the time we got into the later '50s and into the '60s,
but the idea that, "Well, as French Indochina/Vietnam,
"Cambodia, Laos falls to the Chinese, presumably,
"so might the rest of Southeast Asia
right on down to and perhaps including Australia."
- I'll give you two thoughts on that.
Number one, that goes back--
That's why I started this discussion with the Cold War,
is because that conflict,
and I would argue even the American period in Vietnam,
is all viewed through the prism of the Cold War.
It's a fight against the communists.
So, that's the first part.
The second part is there's something to that, because,
that domino theory.
Because in 1940, after France fell,
the Japanese moved into northern Indochina,
occupied the northern half,
summer 1941, they occupied the southern half.
That then became one of the major springboards
for their attacks into the rest of Asia during World War II.
And when...
Who's running the United States?
Who's running-- Who's the world leaders?
People like Dwight Eisenhower and people who had been...
- World War II experience, yeah. - ...had fought in World War II.
- Right, and so, they look at that and say,
"Well, the communists are trying to run the same playbook."
- As the Japanese? - As the Japanese did.
And they're trying to do exactly the same thing,
just ten years later.
Ten, fifteen years later at this point.
And so, when you realize that,
you know, we look at these historical events
as discrete events,
but never forget that they're all part of a continuum.
You know, when Eisenhower is president in the 1950s,
his view of the world,
his view of how to approach strategic issues
and security issues
is informed by General Eisenhower of the 1940s.
- Sure, and why build an interstate system?
It's so that you could land planes
or move military material more quickly in this country.
- Exactly.
- There's a famous conversation between Robert McNamara,
who was one of the proponents of the domino theory
during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
and ambassador from North Vietnam,
formerly North Vietnam, who said, "Mr. Secretary,
"did you really think we were gonna let China
"come into Vietnam?
We've been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years."
Were those domino theorists really that far off?
That-- Again, we're getting into nationalism,
post-colonialism.
Would the Chinese have been dissuaded
from going farther south because of the nationalism,
rising nationalism of these former colonies?
- This is a whole talk in itself.
This is a whole other episode in itself.
- We'll come back. - Yeah.
But I...
The Vietnamese were fighting a nationalist war.
Ho Chi Minh allied himself with the communists
because that gave him the best chance for independence.
From the outside looking in, from Washington,
from McNamara's perch, he didn't see a nationalist.
He saw a communist.
- Yes, right, again, that dichotomy.
- Right. - The way of viewing the world.
- And we now know, at the time,
that they didn't seem to fully appreciate
that the communist bloc was not a united front.
That the Chinese, the red Chinese, the Soviets,
the North Vietnamese were not all marching in lockstep.
We now know that was not the case.
But at the time, there was a perception
that they did march in lockstep.
- And that you had to move quickly.
- Right.
And it was a much more monolithic approach to Asia
than it really was.
As a matter of fact, the best evidence of that
is the 1979 war.
The Chinese tried to invade Vietnam in early 1979,
and it did not go well.
And that's something that the Chinese armed forces
has always remembered and has informed their approach
to what they're trying to do now.
- It's, well...
making a more efficient military in many ways.
But again, getting back to, kind of, the domino theory,
from a distance, it would be easy to think,
Well, look, China, upwards of a billion population.
The rest of southeast Asia, what?
Far less than that.
How could they possibly resist this power that was China?
- The U.S. ambassador told Ernest Hemingway in 1941,
China is so big, China will do whatever it chooses to do.
And that's very close to a quotation.
And it's true today.
We haven't even talked about the Chinese Civil War,
which ended in 1949 and ended without a peace treaty.
And that's why you get the whole Taiwan Strait,
South China Sea crisis.
That's a very big domino that fell for the communists.
And the difference is, though,
is once you get into southeast Asia,
the terrain, and you look at the conduct
of the Southeast Asian War,
both the French War and also the American War,
you see how the terrain and the jungles
really make it much more difficult
to operate and sustain a force.
You know, there's a reason why the French
came to grief Dien Bien Phu,
once they lost control of the airstrip,
because overland communications were so difficult
into that valley.
And they didn't think the Vietnamese
would be able to do what they did
to move an army and fight that battle.
- Always, always...
...in the top list of things not to do
when you are moving an army
is do not underestimate your opponent.
- Absolutely.
So, you know, you look at all of that
and there's a...
as the Vietnamese proved again and again,
it's a relatively...
it's a good place to go fight a guerrilla war.
And it's a good place to ensnare a conventional army
and basically force them to, you know, do a lot of things,
but ultimately, to very little profit on the battlefield.
- So, it wasn't a war of communism versus democracy,
let's say, or Americanism.
It was a nationalist war
that the Vietnamese were fighting.
- They were using communism to their own end.
But at the end of the day, it was a war for independence.
As a matter of fact, Ho Chi Minh,
on September 2, 1945,
when he proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
he borrowed a lot of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
for his language.
And there's a guy named Bernard Fall,
wrote some great stuff,
and he talked to the North Vietnamese,
and they talked about how we're about
something called revolutionary war.
It's a political war, it's a military war,
it's an economic war.
But it's our population fighting for our independence.
And we are willing to do whatever it takes
for however long it takes.
And ultimately, we will win.
- Well, that is-- isn't it kind of the underpinning
of this whole decolonizing...
These countries have this national identity,
and they are willing to make greater sacrifices
than those trying to impose colonialism on them?
- Remember when we talked about Versailles
and I talked about Ho Chi Minh there,
and the seeds of nationalism
that were planted in the wake of World War I?
In this case, and there are other cases
that we could talk about, but this case
is one of those examples of how it has flowered
over the decades between 1919 and the end of World War II,
and how it found very fertile soil in the,
you know, the immediate aftermath of World War II.
And how World War II led directly, and its aftermath,
carried directly the seeds of the conflict.
First, the French Indochina war
and then the United States' involvement.
As a matter of fact, I would argue that...
Whenever I lecture about Vietnam,
I always start in 1945, and I say it's a 30-year war
that ends with the fall of Saigon,
and it starts with the Japanese surrender.
And there are a lot of other places
where you can draw these as well.
Vietnam being very prominent, obviously, to us
and the American memory
of the latter part of the 20th century.
But again, 1945 is yesterday.
This is just another example of it.
- Well, and getting back to this rising nationalism
versus the colonial overlord,
I mean, same thing in the American Revolution, really.
You know, I mean, we were much more determined
and knew the ground better than the Britons
who were the colonial power.
- And the Vietnam analogy has been drawn
by some Revolutionary War scholars
who know their military history,
have said that a lot of the same problems
that the French and the Americans faced in Vietnam,
the British faced the same issues
in the 1770s and the early 1780s
in the American war for independence.
So, yeah.
- Well, I think it was Mark Twain
who said history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
- That's right. [Norman chuckles]
We have a lot more to look at, both in southeast Asia
and in other parts of that sphere.
For example, we haven't really done more than mention India,
which is certainly a huge former colony.
Obviously, completely different history
and culture, or group of cultures,
and one of the former British colonies.
- Christopher: British India was known as the jewel
in the crown of the British Empire,
was what it was called.
And the Indian Army in World War II was 2 million.
It was an all-volunteer force, 2 million strong.
It's the largest all-volunteer army
in the history of the world,
and the Indian troops fought everywhere.
They were quite literally on every battlefront
fighting for empire.
45,000 of them got captured at Singapore,
which I'll get back to here in just a second.
I do wanna point out, as people are looking at this map,
the dates of independence,
which shows exactly what we were talking about,
how, just this wave in the 10, 15 years after World War II.
So, India, during the war
and even today, has a very complicated memory
of World War II, because on the one hand,
so many Indians fought for the British.
But there was this politician named Subhas Chandra Bose.
He had a falling out with Mohandas Gandhi
right before the war
because Bose wanted more direct action,
more political action,
whereas Gandhi was much more nonviolent resistance
to the British. - Sure.
- Bose escapes to the Germans.
He ends up with the Japanese and recruits an army,
the Indian National Army, out of these prisoners of war.
- Yeah, that's one of those odd little sidelights
of history, isn't it?
- It's a sidelight, but I'll tell you something.
He is a national hero.
They've named streets after him.
- To the Indians. - To the Indians.
He's a national hero in India.
And to understand,
they're using him today to stoke some of their,
kind of, national identity.
And the idea is he was anti-British.
We're not gonna worry about the fact he fought with the,
you know, he fought with the Japanese.
- My enemy's enemy is my friend. - Exactly.
At the end of the war, he dies in a plane crash.
But at the end of the war,
they capture some of his top subordinates,
and they try them in the Red Fort in New Delhi.
And most Indians had not heard of the Indian National Army
until the trial.
They get convicted, and all of a sudden,
the Indians are like, "Hey, wait a second.
"They were just fighting for a free India.
We don't like this."
You know, Britain, this is not...
And so, all of a sudden, national strikes happen,
the Indian navy mutinies, and it lights that fuse
that will lead directly to the partition in 1947.
The reason India is partitioned
is the subcontinent has majority Muslim areas,
up on the eastern and the western sides
you see as Pakistan and Bangladesh today,
it was known as East and West Pakistan at the time.
They originally try and hold the Pakistanis,
the Muslims, and the Hindus,
all try and hold 'em all together.
There's also Christians and Sikhs.
It's a real tapestry of ethnicities.
They try and hold them in one, but they can't.
And so, Earl Mountbatten realizes we have to partition
and we're gonna create Pakistan east and west.
And then in 1971, East Pakistan breaks off
and becomes Bangladesh.
They fight a war of independence.
And so, on the 15th of February--
or, 15th of August, 1947, they partition India.
But they don't draw the borders for a couple of days.
So, there's a lot of people... - Moving back and forth.
- Moving back and forth, who, all of a sudden,
they're "on the wrong side of the line."
And so, and if you've seen the movie Gandhi,
they actually show some of this
where you'll see caravans going back and forth,
and there will be fighting.
Because, you know, the hatreds, the tensions have built so much.
They're still in conflict today. - Right.
Yeah, and the atomic powers...
- Well, and now, they're both nuclear powers.
But this conflict comes right out of World War II
in its immediate aftermath.
And if you want to understand India
and understand some level of kind of what it believes
about itself, particularly during World War II,
you've got to understand Bose and the Indian National Army.
- That's one thing we haven't gotten into too much,
except, I think, by implication, and that is the colonial powers,
while they were in control of these now former colonies,
could be rather cavalier about drawing borders.
- Yes, they could, and in the--
Actually, the India-Pakistan border is a great example.
The guy who drew it was a guy named Stafford Cripps.
And he had not a lot of Indian experience.
He showed up, took an ethnographic map,
and started drawing.
Started drawing lines.
And if you are...
In the case of New Delhi, there still is a large Muslim--
There's 25 million Muslims that live in India.
One of the largest mosques in the world
still is in New Delhi today.
But New Delhi was significantly,
had a significant Muslim minority.
They all packed up and went west into Pakistan.
Most of them did, I'm being a little bit too general,
but that population just, you know,
millions of people in this population change.
It rivals...
In fact, it's even bigger,
just the number of people, than anything
that we were talking about going on in Europe,
which is going on at the same time,
in the late 1940s.
- When the Indians and populations
from some of the other British colonies, we'll say,
and may well apply to the French, also,
when the British and the French got into these wars
that were a little more than they could handle,
armies always seemed to need more men,
more firepower than they have,
did the British, and the French, and the other colonial powers
promise those colonial populations anything?
"If you will support us in the war effort with, you know,
men and resources?"
- I'll give you the historians' answer.
It depends. [Norman laughs]
- That's always a good answer. - For the African colonies
that provided divisions to the British army,
it was greater self-government.
You'll still be part of the empire.
Greater self-government.
Those colonies don't get independent
until the '50s and '60s for the most part.
India, actually, it was a real issue
because the Viceroy of India,
when he got the telegram saying "We're declaring war on Germany"
because he is basically the king's representative in India,
he went ahead and said, "Well, we're going to war too."
And there were a lot of Indian politicians,
Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru,
who later became the first prime minister of independent India,
who said, "Wait a minute, you've been talking to us
"about self-government.
"You've been talking about us having a say in how to govern.
"And then, you go ahead and take a unilateral decision
to take us to war?"
- And the Brits obviously had their backs to the wall.
I mean, look at Dunkirk, for example.
- Christopher: Right. - So, they're desperate.
They don't really have time to consult.
But what do they say to the Indians?
- Well, the viceroy at the time basically says,
"It's my power, I'm gonna do what I want."
As the war doesn't go very well,
and the Japanese actually invade Burma in 1942,
there's the movement called the Quit India movement,
a nationwide strike in the summer of 1942,
and basically, the British throw Gandhi and Nehru
and many of these nationalist leaders
into jail for the rest of the war.
- Norman: They just don't wanna hear from 'em.
- Right.
But that still stokes the fire, and it makes them martyrs.
So, when they are released,
"Hey, look at what we did, look at the sacrifice we made.
"And oh, by the way, look at how our troops
"fought overseas and helped save the empire,
and this is the thanks we get."
I'm putting it very simply, but that's the message.
And then, you add the Red Fort trials,
and you can see how it very quickly...
- How did those trials turn out?
- There were three, the three principal subordinates
were tried and convicted in 1946,
and they were not gonna be executed.
They were gonna be exiled.
- From India?
To where? - Wherever.
They were probably gonna end up in Japan.
They hadn't gotten that far...
- Home sweet home. - Yeah.
...when they decided to reverse the ruling.
They hadn't gotten as far as to say,
"Well, where are you going?"
It's "You're getting out of here."
And then, after the strikes,
the viceroy, who was a new viceroy,
came in and said,
"Okay, I'm gonna commute the sentences
and reverse the convictions,"
in a way to try and tamper it down.
But by then, the fires of independence
and the fires of anti-British feeling
were just burning too hot.
And in a matter of months,
it became clear that the British were going.
The question was, were they gonna leave two nations,
or were they gonna leave one behind?
- We've certainly been looking a lot at Asia,
central Asia, southeast Asia.
And I know it falls chronologically,
mostly, out of this 1945 to '55 phenomenon
we've been talking about, but if we go into the late '50s,
into the early '60s, and we look at Africa,
which, as you say, Chris,
did provide troops to the colonial powers,
and again, you look at some of the way
those boundaries were drawn,
just straight lines through who knows how many tribes
and cultures and everything. - Yep.
- Why do you think it took longer
for those African countries to ask for their independence?
Or did it, for that matter, in terms of asking for it?
- There were independence movements.
I'd say the communists, the Soviets
really pushed a lot of that.
They took the opportunity to do that.
I think part of it is...
The colonial regimes and that part of the world,
like South America, remained relatively physically untouched
by the Second World War.
What supercharged what we're talking about here
is where you get governments.
Armies moved across these areas,
but you also get governments that were either deposed
or weakened as a result of fighting.
And that was indirectly-- That was not directly the impact
in Africa, with the notable exception of North Africa,
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia,
Egypt, Libya, actually, and all of those
prove the rule because, by 1962,
they are all independent nations.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a little bit longer process
because they weren't as directly affected
by fighting, direct fighting on the battlefront.
- Well, North Africa, of course, certainly was.
- Right. - Extensive, extensive war.
And...
I also have to wonder a little bit about,
I'll say whether it was exactly colonial status,
but certainly influence of colonial powers
for places like Iraq, in particular,
and to some extent, Iran.
- They were nominally independent.
There was a fascist movement,
and the British actually occupied and administered Iraq,
and we actually used the Persian Gulf
and up through Tehran and up through Basra,
into the Soviet Union as a Lend-Lease area.
So, there actually is a significant U.S.
and British presence, and Soviet presence,
in that region.
And then, they all withdraw after World War II.
Fun fact, Norman Schwarzkopf? - Yes.
- You know, the victor of the Persian Gulf War.
- Yeah. - He's Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.
Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., as a brigadier general,
was one of the administrators
of the Persian Gulf Command, as it was known at the time,
of Lend-Lease through Iraq
into the Soviet Union during World War II.
- He was also the host of a show called Gangbusters
on radio for a time, Schwarzkopf Sr.
- I didn't know that.
- [chuckles] Yes, a man of many different parts.
- Yeah. - But there was then
considerable cooperation at that point,
as we get into World War II, between the colonial powers,
and I'll include the United States in that,
fighting as part of the Allied forces,
with Iran and Iraq at that point.
- Yes, I would agree with that.
And there's a reason why the Tehran conference
is there in November of 1943.
It's right on the back door of the Soviet Union,
but you know, Churchill and Roosevelt
are able to meet there.
It's the first big meeting... - And Stalin.
- ...of the big three-- Yeah, with Stalin.
And that's where they plan to win the war.
And so, to me, that's the perfect, you know,
one of the perfect pieces of evidence.
In fact, the Poles, like my grandfather,
are evacuated from the Soviet Union.
They're collected at the southern border
of the Soviet Union and evacuated through Persia.
And some of them end up fighting in the Mediterranean.
Others, like my grandfather,
end up with the free Poles in Britain.
So, you know, you put those two things,
and that illustrates exactly the support that we're getting
from that part of the world,
or the Allies are getting from that part of the world.
- Well, we could certainly do another hour, Chris,
from an Allied standpoint,
how a lot of it fell apart after all that independence.
But for now, we see pretty clearly
how quickly things happened in, really, just ten years,
from '45 to '55. - Right.
- Because of the alliances and the way World War II played out.
- You know, I bring it back to the thing we started with,
a world profoundly changed,
and it changed comparable to the fall of Rome.
Every corner of the globe got touched in some way
and still is touched by World War II
and its immediate aftermath.
And I think, you know,
what we've been able to talk about today,
we've given a pretty good survey,
but there's a lot more to learn.
But it's...
1945 is yesterday, it really is.
- But it's still in the newspapers today.
- Yes, it is.
- Chris Kolakowski, a pleasure touching bases with you...
- Christopher: My pleasure. - ...on the aftermath,
which we still live with,
of World War II and postcolonialism.
- Thanks for having me.
- I'm Norman Gilliland,
and I hope you can join me next time around
for University Place Presents.
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