Early Cold War Research Articles

Kate Clarke Lemay. Triumph of the Dead: American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France.

In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Kate Clarke Lemay tells the story of the fourteen permanent overseas military cemeteries constructed by the U.S. government between 1948 and 1956 to honor the eighty thousand American soldiers and nurses who died during the Second World War and are now buried in Europe. Focusing on France, and primarily Normandy, Lemay links the design and construction of U.S. war cemeteries to broader themes of memory and forgetting, to soft diplomacy in the early Cold War, and to the history of architecture and design at an important moment of transition in the U.S. art world. The history that emerges from the pages of Triumph of the Dead is one marked by fascinating challenges and controversies. The first of these arises from the fact that American dead were buried and exhumed numerous times before finding their eternal rest in permanent cemeteries in Europe. Lemay...

Unfit for purpose: reassessing the development and deployment of French nuclear weapons (1956–1974)

ABSTRACT This article presents the first reassessment of the strategic rationality and credibility of French nuclear weapons policy before 1974. Building on untapped primary material from across the world as well as technical analysis, it shows that early Cold War French nuclear weapon procurement and deployment are incompatible with a precise grand design and the requirements of strategic rationality. The first generation of French nuclear forces also lacked technical credibility, despite reliance on outside help. Several French officials knew about it, as did their allies and adversaries. These findings de-exceptionalise French nuclear history and challenge conventional wisdom about Cold War nuclear history.

Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War. by Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse, eds., Boston: Brill, 2019. xvi + 356 pp. $179.00.

<i>Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War</i>. by Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse, eds., Boston: Brill, 2019. xvi + 356 pp. $179.00.

Reexamining Threat Perception in Early Cold War Japan

This article discusses whether Japanese military and political elites perceived the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) as threats during the Cold War. Realist scholars have argued that Japan's security alliance with the United States and the global balance of power were such that most Japanese officials did not perceive either of the Communist giants as a serious military threat. Reaching a similar conclusion but for starkly different reasons, constructivist scholars have argued that cultural, normative, and identity factors explain why Japanese elites did not perceive the Soviet Union or China as militarily threatening. Neither of these arguments holds up. Archival data and oral history collections from Japan's Self-Defense Force and National Diet Library reveal that Japan's defense establishment and political leaders perceived both the Soviet Union and the PRC as extremely threatening and that these perceptions fluctuated in intensity over time, across sectors, and among actors. Psychological factors, including affect, behavioral tendencies, and cognitive beliefs (the ABC model), may better explain why Japanese judged the intensity and source of perceived threats in the manner that they did. These findings underscore why threat perception in the international system is best evaluated by aggregating individual judgments and their distribution among larger groups.

Surrogate Infrastructure: The Noncommercial Circulation of Chinese Films in the Early Cold War

Abstract Recent scholarship elucidates the extent to which Chinese literary and film culture during the high socialist period (1949–1976) was engaged with the world. This article builds upon the literature by examining how Chinese films were distributed and exhibited in this period in nonsocialist countries. With Australia as my case study, I argue that China exported films to nonsocialist countries mainly noncommercially, that is, not for profit but for propaganda and diplomacy. Once there, Chinese films were disseminated and shown with the help of a variety of local communist, leftist, or otherwise People's Republic of China (PRC)—friendly individuals and organizations. The films, therefore, circulated in the world not just through the formal alliances among brother nations of the socialist bloc, but also because of what I term a “surrogate infrastructure” that bound various peoples and communities on the left at both the local and global levels. By consulting Chinese government documents as well as Australian newspapers, I demonstrate that, despite the language barrier, a didactic film art, and a Cold War geopolitical context that impeded the global flow of Chinese films, the noncommercial route nevertheless limned an alternative mapping of the 1950s.

Raymond Aron, the United States, and the Early Cold War, 1945-1953

Almost simultaneously with the advent of the Cold War in 1947, Raymond Aron postponed a promising academic career to become a front-page columnist for the influential Parisian daily, Le Figaro. His regular editorials, along with the publication of a constant stream of essays and books, made him the most influential Atlanticist voice in France. Among the 'orthodox' historians of the early Cold War Aron enjoyed a reputation as a champion of US containment policy in Europe and, more generally, as a voice sympathetic to America in a French environment increasingly hostile to both US policies and American culture. By the 1970s, with the emergence of 'revisionist' histories of the Cold War, Aron's stock had fallen precipitously, especially after it was revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom–an organization with which he had been closely associated–had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. However, a close examination of Aron's extensive writings during the early Cold War reveals that neither orthodox nor revisionist frameworks fully capture the nuances of his evolving positions regarding the early Cold War. His commentary on the emerging Cold War reveals a stubborn independence of mind that resists easy categorization.

Too responsible to run for president: Frank Church and the 1976 presidential nomination

ABSTRACT In 1975, Senator Frank Church led the first US Senate review of the conduct of the United States intelligence community, popularly known as the Church Committee. The committee identified a plethora of constitutional abuses by the intelligence community in the early Cold War that shocked the nation, and initiated wholesale reform of congressional intelligence oversight. Conservative critics used Church’s subsequent campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1976 as evidence of his use of the investigation to further his presidential aspirations. Using newly-discovered archival evidence and oral history interviews, this article establishes that such conclusions are erroneous, and that Church knowingly sacrificed his ambitions to maintain the committee’s public standing. Furthermore, it argues that contemporary and later criticism of Church’s conduct was aimed at negating the impact of the Church Committee’s report and protecting the intelligence community from unwanted reform.

Re-evaluating the émigrés: intelligence collection and policy-making in the early Cold War

ABSTRACT Starting from 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Policy Coordination tried to harness and utilise the talents of recent émigrés from the Soviet Union, more specifically, to dispatch them in secret operations behind the Iron Curtain. The purpose of this article is to revise the commonly accepted narrative on two American-sponsored émigré operations, showing how they should be assessed as intelligence collection ventures rather than covert operations, and to demonstrate how these émigrés played a key role in providing intelligence on the Soviet target. The study will also investigate how this kind of covert action tied into US policy-making, and how the perceived needs of the US administration – chiefly creating an ‘early warning’ system for a Soviet attack on Europe and the need of information on the Soviet target – shaped intelligence collection in the early Cold War.

The (Science Diplomacy) Origins of the Cold War

The US monopoly of information regarding nuclear weapons was one of the distinctive features of the early Cold War. It encouraged US officials to bolster their country’s hegemonic role in post-war affairs, something that scholars have previously referred to in terms of “atomic diplomacy.” This paper shows that Cold War atomic diplomacy originated in an ancestral form of what we call today “science diplomacy,” distinctive of wartime allied relations during WW2. It first explores how science became a distinctive feature of wartime diplomacy by looking at agreements regarding exchanges of information and collaboration that shaped the relations between wartime allies (US, UK, and the Soviet Union). It then shows that their signing (and, at times, their rejection) eventually paved the way to conflicting views within allied administrations on what to share, making their officials less inclined to pool more knowledge toward the end of WW2. In conclusion, US monopolistic stances and atomic diplomacy originated in these disagreements, also marking the demise of wartime science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

The transformation of Britain-Turkey-United States relations at the advent of the Cold War (1945–1952)

This article explores the intricate dynamics of Turkey’s relations with Britain and the United States at a critical juncture during the early Cold War era (1946–1952). The article analyses the implications of a dual transformation of triangular relations in the aftermath of the Second World War. This transformation was on the one hand marked by an ongoing hegemonic transition from Pax-Britannica to Pax-Americana, and on the other hand a systemic transformation resulting in a bi-polar global order. This article utilises levels of analysis framework for a more systematic analysis of the complex web of triangular relations. While focusing on a comprehensive analysis at the international level, the implication of factors at the decision-maker and domestic levels are also examined. The article argues that in response to these drastic transformations as a strategically located regional actor Turkey struggled to strike a delicate balance between its resilient British and newly increasing US ties, while also aiming to institutionalise its Western alliance, leading to NATO membership in 1952.

“Songs of the Craft”: Newsroom Work Poetry in Twentieth-Century American Journalism

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, reporters and other news workers not only wrote about the news, they wrote about each other, their bosses, their daily grind in the newsroom, and journalism itself in the form of workplace poetry. This occupational verse was a way to relieve tension, vent about controlling editors and annoying readers. Writing the verses fulfilled a playful impulse and killed time between assignments. It helped to bond news workers with each other in the newsroom, and it allowed them to form their group identities in the face of difficult circumstances. This article briefly explores how occupational poetry, sometimes called “doggerel” by critics but even by its own creators, became part of the professionalization of American journalism and reflected changing newsroom values, priorities and a growing white-collar consciousness among news workers during and after the interwar years and during the early Cold War. Paradoxically, it echoed the blue-collar roots of many reporters, and their struggle and resistance. Ephemeral by nature, newsroom poetry survives into the present as an important commentary on the occupation.

Loyalty, hedging, or exit: How weaker alliance partners respond to the rise of new threats

ABSTRACT When new threats arise, how do weaker partners allied with great powers choose among loyalty (remaining allied to their great power patrons), hedging (improving political relations with the challenger, or – in the nuclear age – pursuing nuclear weapons), and exit (leaving the alliance by declaring neutrality or defecting to the rising challenger)? We argue that, in general, as protégés come to doubt the ability or willingness of patrons to defend them, they are likely to shift away from loyalty and towards exit. Where they end up on this alliance spectrum, however, depends on additional factors that we identify, including signals of commitment from patrons and the territorial claims of challengers against protégés. We illustrate our argument and these conditions in three cases from interwar and early Cold War Europe and draw implications for U.S. alliances today.

Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special issue stage historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era.

‘We Have the Equipment But You Have the Know-How’: Anglo-American Antisubmarine Training, 1946–1953

Despite possessing overwhelming naval power at the end of World War II, British and American admirals worried about a potential war with the Soviet Union. In such a conflict, Soviet submarines, buttressed by advanced German submarine technology, could threaten the critical North Atlantic convoy routes. These shared concerns led the US Navy to pursue close relations with Britain’s antisubmarine community, especially the Joint AntiSubmarine School (JASS) in Northern Ireland. This School offered advanced training in antisubmarine warfare (ASW) using techniques honed by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during World War II. The US Navy created links with the school by sending American ships and aircraft there for training due to the Navy’s belief that it could benefit from British expertise in ASW. In contrast to the US Navy’s preparations for war with Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, American preparations for a third Battle of the Atlantic have received far less attention. Soviet submarines were seen in the early Cold War as the primary Soviet naval threat. The story of the US Navy’s growing relationship with JASS illustrates how concerns about Soviet submarines led to close Anglo-American naval cooperation.

“The Ruhr Remains our Nightmare”: The International Metalworkers’ Federation and European Integration in the Early Cold War

AbstractThe aim of this article is to study discussions within the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) about the early postwar process of European integration at the intersection of international cooperation and nationally defined interests. The central question is the future of the Ruhr. This article argues that the developing Cold War, and the conflict between social democrats and communists, limited the reach of international trade-union cooperation but simultaneously strengthened the perceived need among social-democratic trade unionists in Western Europe to coordinate their policies in relation to supposed enemies. European integration in combination with the Cold War also highlighted a need to coordinate the resources of European and anti-communist trade unions in North America. The article shows that the IMF generally supported European integration as a defence against the hypothetical threat from the East, but made attempts to sway the process to include a pronounced social dimension.

In Search of Order: Portrayal of Communists in Cold War Italy

This article analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War. Without denying the critical role of high politics or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the article places the home front at the center of its analysis, using a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on the rhetoric, remembrances, and visual propaganda produced by Communists and anti-Communists alike, the article shifts the focus of attention away from governments and diplomacy and toward imagination and culture as agents of historical change. Looking beyond the institutional-administrative sphere of politics, the article explores the aspirations, emotions, expectations, and hopes formulated by Italians under conditions of existential uncertainty. The article concludes that the Cold War in Italy was, above all else, an internal contest between two parties over what the recent past meant and what would ensure a just and stable order for society.

CIA-MI6 psychological warfare and the subversion of communist Albania in the early Cold War

ABSTRACT The west’s prototype covert action of the Cold War against Albania, codenamed BGFIEND/Valuable, is often characterized as a failure of the rollback policy against the Soviet bloc. This article argues that, from late 1949, the CIA and MI6 did not attempt to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s communist regime as historians have assumed, but to subvert and harass it primarily through psychological – not paramilitary – warfare. On one hand, western intelligence enjoyed some modest propaganda achievements, and valuable organizational and tradecraft experience was acquired for future operations. Nevertheless, BGFIEND/Valuable also faced innumerable challenges and setbacks, illustrating the difficulty of waging subversive psychological warfare against a hostile authoritarian state in the early Cold War.

“There’s Something Rotten in Denmark:” Frank Olson and the Macabre Fate of a CIA Whistleblower in the Early Cold War

“There’s Something Rotten in Denmark:” Frank Olson and the Macabre Fate of a CIA Whistleblower in the Early Cold War

Islam and existentialism in Turkey during the Cold War in the works of Sezai Karakoç

ABSTRACT Existentialist thought has influenced arts and literature movements in Turkey starting from the early Cold War years. The Second New movement in Turkish poetry was able to distinguish itself as a literary movement by focusing on the constrained individual who lost their voice and autonomy in the repressive and polarized conditions of the Cold War. Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933) is a prominent Turkish and conservative-Muslim intellectual, and a poet of the Second New whose work shows the effects of existentialist philosophy and he uses existential notions to formulate a doctrine. With this doctrine and his unique perspective of what this article construes to be a part of the Islamic existentialism, Karakoç remains a pivotal figure in explaining existentialism’s influence in Turkish literature and politics from a religious standpoint. Although affected by the existentialist thought, Karakoç refuses Sartrean atheism or Camusian absurdism to understand the laws of existence, and ties both nature’s and human’s reason of existence to Allah with a fundamental belief maintains that everything is linked to Him. In doing so, he uses the notion of death as a transcendental experience for the human beings, which enriches life with an experiment that exceeds the boundaries of the physical rules.

Searching for Allies in America’s Backyard: Yugoslav Endeavors in Latin America in the Early Cold War

In this paper, I analyze Yugoslavia’s endeavors to create stronger connections with Latin American governments and left-wing organizations from the early 1950s until the early 1960s. My central claim is that during those years Belgrade pursued a systematic policy that made it that by the early 1960s the Yugoslavs had become a serious factor in the region. I also contend that the Yugoslav policy of non-alignment proved to be a double-edged sword: Belgrade’s neutralism and its prestige as an alternative to the Soviet model paved the way for it to garner influence in Latin America, but its less militant stance and its refusal to take part in bloc divisions became a limitation in the 1960s, when the region became a hotbed of Cold War conflict and many of Yugoslavia’s local partners came to see non-alignment as impracticable. Drawing mainly from Yugoslav archival sources, my analysis focuses on the activities of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, an organization charged with establishing connections with left-wing political movements abroad. More succinctly, I also account for the growing diplomatic importance of international cultural cooperation and for the part played by Yugoslav experts specialized on Latin American affairs.