Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

Author:Giles Milton [Milton, Giles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529393187
Google: lPzmDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 125024756X
Published: 2021-05-27T18:12:17.850000+00:00

12

Crime and Punishment

BRITAIN’S FOREIGN SECRETARY, Ernest Bevin, worked tirelessly for the rebuilding of a shattered Europe throughout the spring and summer of 1946. In April and May he attended the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Paris, spending as many as nine hours a day in acrimonious arguments with his Soviet opposite number, Vyacheslav Molotov. Working alongside his American and French partners, James Byrnes and Georges Bidault, Bevin haggled over the future of Greece, the Balkans, Iran, Italian reparations and Trieste. A great deal was at stake. ‘The choice’, said the Manchester Guardian, ‘is no longer between a good peace or a bad peace, but between a bad peace and no peace at all. And no peace is dangerously close to war.’1

The intensity of the negotiations took a physical toll on Bevin, an unfit man in his sixties. His physician, Dr Alec McCall, said that he didn’t have a sound organ in his body, with the exception of his feet. He was suffering from angina pectoris, cardiac failure, arteriosclerosis, an enlarged liver, damaged kidneys and high blood pressure. He was also overweight and smoked heavily. His heart – ‘the old ticker’, as Bevin called it – was so weak that he could no longer cross the Atlantic by plane.2

In July 1946, Bevin returned to the French capital for a further two months in order to attend the Paris Peace Conference, at which the four foreign ministers were to negotiate peace treaties with Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Once the treaties were ratified, those nations that had been formerly aligned with the Axis were to be allowed to join the nascent United Nations.

The Peace Conference soon descended into a heated confrontation between the western Allies and the Soviets. Molotov opened the attack on 9 July when he accused the British and Americans of failing to disarm the German armed forces, as agreed at Potsdam. When he made further mischief at an alcohol-fuelled dinner that night, Bevin exploded in rage. According to Charles Bohlen, ‘he rose to his feet, his hands knotted into fists, and started toward Molotov saying, “I’ve had enough of this, I ’ave.”’ Everyone present was astonished. ‘For one glorious moment it looked as if the Foreign Minister of Great Britain and the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union were about to come to blows.’ Just in time, the security people closed in on Bevin ‘and the incident was over’.3

On the following day, Molotov made a speech that was less confrontational but no less contentious. He said that the Soviet Union no longer wanted Germany split into two halves: rather, it sought a unified German state under a central administration. But this policy came with an unmentioned price tag – the envisaged administration was to be unabashedly pro-Moscow.

Bevin countered this proposal by arguing that rebuilding the German economy should be given priority over reparations. ‘Nyet,’ was Molotov’s curt response. This left the American secretary of state to spell out the agreed-upon response of the western powers.4 The Americans

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