128 - The Cold War and the Berlin Wall

Ok, yes, I know, I’ve already talked about the Cold War, just a few episodes ago, but I feel like I need to spend another episode talking about all the important things that happen in the late 1950’s and 1960’s as a part of the cold war, that I didn’t get to talk about in the previous episode.  A lot of things are about to happen, and they are all important to our modern world, and they are all related to the ongoing cold war between the west and the communists. In fact, the polarization of the world between the communists and the west is going to be the dominant factor in all that happens in the 1950s, 60s, 70, and 80s.  Everything that we’re going to talk about that happens in these 40 years will be happening against the backdrop of this ongoing cold war.  

We talked last episode about the Communist Revolution in China, and apparently there was a two for one special on revolutions, because this episode also has a revolution, but this one is VERY different than what happened in China.  Part of the reason that the revolutions were so different was that what is about to happen in India is not a communist revolution.  Communist revolutions are usually destructive, as the old order of things is being aggressively done away with, and so communism is expecting to do away with the old order by using force and violence.   The Indian revolution is going to be done exactly the opposite, using peace and non-violence.  And that is largely due to the person who is going to lead the revolution in India - Mohandas Gandhi.  

We were talking last episode about how the western allies tried to contain the spread of communism in Europe, but I mentioned that Communism was spreading in Asia as well.  This is about to be a problem in China, which, on the face of it, seems an unlikely hotbed for communism.  Back in 1912, before both world wars, the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty, collapsed.  The Qing had ruled China since the 1600’s, but the dynasty had fallen into disarray, and China was really being ruled by a loose system of sort of feudal warlords.  When the dynasty collapsed in 1912, it was replaced by the Chinese Republic, but the republic’s hold on power wasn’t very strong, and in many places, the warlords still ruled.  In 1921, the Chinese Communist party was created, and in 1927, a civil war broke out between the communists and the nationalists, who were strongly anti-communists.  

As you might remember from episode 124, which was about the Allied victory in Europe, Germany was basically cut in half by the invading Soviets in the East, and the Allies in the West.  The Soviets had captured Berlin, and they had also occupied the eastern part of Germany.  But they also had occupied all of eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.  And they had no intention of giving those countries up.  

Ok, WWII is over, and so I’m done talking about famous battles and cool fighter planes for a while.  But I do feel that I need to go back and talk about a really important and horrific story of WWII, and how that affects our modern world.  And that is the story of the Holocaust.  It’s not a pleasant thing to talk about, but it’s really important, and has a big impact on the world after WWII, and on our modern world as well.  And just a bit of a warning here, this episode is a bit longer than most, because I feel like I needed to re-cover some history that we’ve already talked about in older episodes.  

Well, here we are, finally.  The Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan have been defeated.   Hitler has committed suicide, at least that’s the official story, Mussolini was captured and hanged, and the Japanese emperor had to go on a nationwide broadcast and admit that he was not a deity.  The Allies were firmly in control of all the Axis lands, and the countries that they had conquered.  If you look at a map of the high-tide mark of the Axis control, which was probably mid-1942, they controlled all of Europe, except the UK and the remnant of the European part of the USSR.  They controlled much of North Africa.  The Axis controlled all of the western Pacific Ocean, and in mid-1942, they had inflicted huge damage on the existing militaries of the Allies.  Website:  shortwalkthroughhistory.comemail:  [email protected]

Well, here we are.  Humans are about to devise the technology that could realistically end the world.  For the first time, humans have the ability to basically eradicate all of life on earth, and it’s only restrained by, well humans.  Yikes.  The war in Europe ended in May of 1945, but the war in the Pacific was still going on.  We talked about the turning point in the Pacific, the Battle of Midway, a couple of episodes ago, but since then we’ve only talked about the war in Europe.   So we need to go back a couple of years and catch up with what was going on in the Pacific.  

Well, VE Day is the sort of nickname that the world press gave to the day when victory in Europe was achieved.  So VE stands for victory in Europe, which obviously is where we are going with this episode, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.  And the eventually victory over Japan is going to be called VJ Day, but that one doesn’t get all that much traction, for some reasons that we’ll go into next episode.  But lots of newspapers and countries around the western world were very excited about VE Day, and the name kind of stuck.At the end of the last episode, we left about 150,000 Allied troops holding a small but solid beachhead in Normandy.  The D-Day invasion was a huge Allied victory, but it was only the start of a long and difficult road to the defeat of Nazi Germany.  But it was, indeed, the beginning of the end.  

Well, here we are.  This episode is about one of the most massive, high-risk and pivotal events of the last 100 years.  Seriously, if you had to pick one day that was the most important or consequential days of the last 100 years, I think you might have to pick June 6th, 1944.  It wasn’t quite the same ‘turning of the tide’ event that Midway and Stalingrad were, but in some ways, June 6th 1944 was an even bigger deal than either of them.  Website:  shortwalkthroughhistory.comemail:  [email protected]

As the Soviets were fighting the Germans all along a 1000 mile long front, they were demanding that the Allies in the west do something to open a second front against the Germans.  We’ll get to the Allies eventual response to this in a couple of episodes, but the western allies had the same problem invading Europe that the Germans had had when they were thinking about invading Britain.  That problem was the English Channel.  In order to send an invasion fleet across the channel to land in France, the Allies had to have complete control of the air above the channel, to protect the invasion fleet from German planes.  So before the sea-borne invasion could take place, the Allies needed to defeat the Luftwaffe, or at least drive them back from their bases in France where they could attack an invasion fleet.  So the Allies started building up their air forces in Great Britain. The Royal Air Force, which had done such a heroic job of defeating the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, had continued to build up its fighter and bomber forces.  But early 1942, they were joined by the newly formed American group, the Eighth Air Force.  The Americans began to ship men, planes, bombs and ammo, and fuel to Great Britain.  By the end of the war, the Americans are going to have over 200 airbases in Great Britain, with over half a million men on those bases, and over 50,000 planes.