Transcript of Fall Out

The History Channel original podcast. September 1945. Germany and Japan have surrendered unconditionally. The destruction and death of the Second World War is over. There is jubilation around the world. The United States and the Soviet Union emerge from the conflict as the globe's two dominant superpowers. They fought side by side when they shared a common enemy. But now that that enemy has been defeated, an American-Soviet rivalry appears unavoidable.

This is World War II with Tom Hanks. Episode 20: Fallout.

It's official. It's all over. It's total victory. The day of days. America and her allies. Peace, it's wonderful.

The war is over. The entire world begins to breathe and live again.

The Allies won this war in the cause of freedom and the ideals of anti-fascism, the ideals of democracy.

One of the great legacies of the Second World War is that a disputatious, complicated, often wrong nation like the United States can in extremis marshal significant force to do the right thing. It took us a long time. As Churchill is alleged to have said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing once we've exhausted every other possibility." We spent blood and treasure to defeat fascism The United States had fulfilled Roosevelt's ambitions to be the arsenal of democracy to orders of magnitude no one could have predicted.

In New York, hundreds of thousands lined the docks to greet America's ships and welcome home their sons and daughters. President Harry Truman is honored with a ticker tape parade through the city's Canyon of Heroes. Speaking in Central Park, the president addresses the nation.

The world cannot afford to let the cooperative spirit of the Allies in this war disintegrate. The world simply cannot allow this to happen.

In Red Square, thousands celebrate and honor Generalissimo Joseph Stalin.

He's dressed in a white marshal's summer uniform. With shoulder boards like a Russian Romanov emperor. Stalin emerges from the Second World War with astonishing, almost religious prestige in the Soviet Union.

Stalin and the United States had made an alliance that ultimately brings Hitler and then Japan to its knees. The spirit of cooperation is so high that Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, Probably one of the future staunchest anti-communists in American history stands right next to Stalin.

The bloodshed and horror of the Second World War is unprecedented in human history. Nearly 70 million people are killed, the majority civilians. An estimated 27 million Soviets, 20 million Chinese, 10 million Germans and Japanese, 1 million British and Americans, and 6 million Jews.

Europe is destroyed. The Brits are bankrupt. The Americans and the Soviets, they're demobilizing.

What's really clear coming out of World War II is that the United States has an incredibly important role to play in the world. She hasn't been physically touched by the war other than Pearl Harbor. America is the superpower.

There's every expectation that some kind of peaceful coexistence will emerge. When the Americans talk about the way they want the international system to be, they talk about the United Nations. The United Nations, in many ways, is Franklin Roosevelt's dream come true.

During the war, it's Roosevelt who says, "We must have this international body." It's a very hopeful group, lots of ideals. The UN Charter, all of this comes into being in 1945.

Here, leaders of the United Nations, representing all but a fraction of the Earth's population, are laying the foundations of international security in the postwar world.

Out of the fires of war, they wanted for there to be an organization where we don't have 1939 again.

The United Nations, it combines two ideas. The first is the General Assembly, where equal states can meet and confer and make resolutions. There is also the wartime military alliance between the Soviets, the British, France, and the United States, as well as China, and that's the Security Council. Will be the cornerstone to ensuring peace.

Because it's not just winning the battle of the day, it's trying to prevent the next one.

One of the first challenges is to determine how Germany will fit into the postwar world.

We can't today perhaps understand just how threatening and powerful Germany seemed to the Allied leadership in 1945. They had just fought two world wars, the greatest enemy of which of theirs was Germany. Ultimately, they realized the control of Germany is going to play a huge role in determining the future of Europe.

The American view is just like the Soviet one at the beginning in the sense that we've got to divide Germany. We've got to make sure that it can never rise up again. That's the first urgent thing.

The Allies split Germany into 4 occupation zones. The British, Americans, and French will govern Western Germany. The Soviets will govern the East. Berlin, deep within the Soviet zone, is divided between all 4 nations. The wartime Allies have very different plans for the new Germany.

What Stalin is doing is taking as much of the wealth as much of the factories, as much of the productive capacity and stockpiles from occupied Germany back to the Soviet Union. Stalin would say he was only taking what the Germans owed him for the horrible suffering during the war. Conversely, the Western Allies want Germany rehabilitated.

The Western idea is not to devastate Germany economically through reparations, but bring them into global markets Connect Germany to the world, and through that, you'll get German people who are incentivized to do things that are constructive instead of destructive. So it's going to need industrialists, middle managers, local governance, and many of these people would have been members of the Nazi Party.

The crimes of the Nazi Third Reich are so horrific that the wartime Allies determine there must be an attempt to achieve justice.

Nuremberg is highly symbolic as the spiritual heart of Nazi Germany and as the place where hopefully the demons of Nazism can be purged.

Everyone in court stands up as the tribunal enters. Four judges and alternate members: French, American, British, and Russian. The defendants are to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges against them. Rudolf Hess.

Nein.

Not guilty.

22 Nazi leaders are put on trial.

The next defendant called was Ribbentrop. Nicht schuldig.

Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Tribunals, announces that history will judge the fairness of the trial not by the convictions and the executions it obtains, but by the acquittals. But the Soviets are expecting these to be good old-fashioned show trials.

Wilhelm Keitel.

Ich bekenne mich nicht schuldig.

I plead not guilty.

Stalin had seen how effective show trials could be in his own consolidation of power in the 1930s.

Nicht schuldig.

Not guilty.

And was happy to give the Germans a trial.

Hermann Wilhelm Göring. Ich bekenne mich nicht schuldig.

Not guilty.

And then hang them.

12 of the defendants receive the death sentence. Hermann Göring avoids the gallows by committing suicide. 7 are given lengthy prison terms. Although the Soviets object, 3 are acquitted.

From '45 onwards, you just have this constant growing tension between the United States and Britain on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. And Stalin has to play quite a careful game. He wants to keep what he has, but he doesn't want to directly antagonize the United States. Because the United States is still much more powerful economically. It has complete air and sea control, and it has the atom bomb.

World War II devastated the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin must rebuild his country, ensure its security, and consolidate his power. But some of Stalin's ambitions will conflict with the postwar plans of his Western allies.

Stalin saw the wartime alliance as a way to defeat Nazi Germany, but never something that would permanently reshape the globe or that would make capitalism and communism friends. Stalin is an ideologue. That can never be forgotten. He believes that communism and capitalism are incompatible, that they will actually at some point wage a great fight for the future, and he believes communism will win.

Stalin is in an extraordinary position. There's a moment when he reviews what they've conquered in World War II, and he looks at the map of Europe and Russia, and he says, "We really haven't done badly," and it's an understatement.

The Red Army is in Berlin and most countries to the east— Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, The Soviet wave broke right around Berlin, and they just never receded.

Stalin has done better than any of the greatest czars in Russian history— Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. He's created the biggest Russian empire in history.

Stalin intends to create a buffer against the West, militarily and ideologically.

He would say, "We have now had two world wars where first Imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union have been invaded through Eastern and Central Europe." I am going to make sure that they are never a threat to the Soviet Union again.

For Stalin, the key thing for Eastern and Central Europe is that it must be loyal to the Soviet Union. That's non-negotiable. And the recipe for doing that is communism.

He starts to create a new economic centralized system in Central and Eastern Europe. Controlled governments, armies, secret police, factories, agricultural systems. With all of the decisions effectively for the economies of those countries being made in Moscow.

The Europe that the United States wants to build does not look very much like the Europe that the Soviets want to build.

The United States has an enormous advantage over the Soviet Union: the atomic bomb. The Soviets construct numerous sites across the USSR in order to accomplish Task number one.

Task number one is to create a nuclear weapon at breakneck speed. No resources are too much.

The nuclear program is what the Soviet Union was almost designed to do. It's a big country with lots of natural resources. It can marshal and mobilize for the nuclear project. It's not completely unlike the Manhattan Project, which was also top-down, secretive, and resource-heavy. And the Soviet Union puts the full weight of its coercive power behind this project.

Stalin puts one of his most ruthless lieutenants in charge, the chief of his secret police.

Lavrentiy Beria is a man of brutal ruthlessness and sadism, one of the great monsters of the Soviet story. He rapes women, he tortures victims himself, but he's also as efficient as a Swiss clock, and he uses everything. He happily turns off power in several cities just to power a project. He gives scientists villas, dachas, cars, shooting rifles, holidays. But at the same time, he threatens to kill them and their whole families if they ever deceive him. And he drives on the project.

It's not going to be quick for Stalin. There's no way that he can flip a switch and acquire nuclear weapons. But the Soviet Union simply can't sit on its laurels in 1946. It has to ready itself for a new phase of conflict.

After the turmoil of the Second World War, the people of Great Britain and the United States hope to return to a normal, prosperous life with peaceful coexistence among nations, including with the Soviet Union.

For the past 5 years, Stalin had been your friend. He had been Uncle Joe.

But once again, a familiar voice sounds a warning.

Winston Churchill's in a pretty bad mood. He was thrown out by the British public in a dramatic election defeat in 1945. His wife said it might be a blessing in disguise. He said, "Well, I think it's a pretty good disguise." He feels he won the Second World War, he saved Britain, and here he is on the speaking circuit.

Winston Churchill receives an invitation to give a speech at a small college in President Truman's home state.

This is an opportunity for Churchill to say some things that he's got on his mind. It's also an opportunity to spend some time with the President of the United States of America. And then he's going to stand on that stage and he's going to tell the American people some home truths.

The famous Iron Curtain speech, where he very clearly lays out what is happening in Europe. One side free, the other side not.

Behind that line, all are subject to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Churchill sees Soviet communism and Stalinism as greater threat, really, as Nazism was the generation before.

This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up.

It's dynamite, because what Churchill is doing is reframing the wartime alliance.

The Soviet Empire was a malign force in the world.

Truman, by the way, is absolutely on board with this speech. But to Stalin, this is just proof that Churchill is a warmonger.

The alliance that defeated Nazi fascism is beginning to fray. In late 1946, the French vote to elect a new government. The Communist Party does well, winning a plurality of seats in the French legislature.

With the politics of Europe in a state of extraordinary upheaval because of the catastrophe of the war, you do have a high degree of concern in Washington about countries in Western Europe turning in a communist direction.

There's a lot of unrest. There are strikes starting to take place in France. There's a huge pro-communist movement in Italy. And Stalin thinks maybe he'll win some of these countries without even having to send an army in.

To the south, Stalin attempts to pressure Turkey into giving him control of the Turkish Straits, which would allow access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. And in Greece, communist guerrillas and government forces are fighting an ongoing civil war.

These are countries that have never been viewed as essential to American security. The United States does not have a history of backing the governments of Turkey or Greece.

The British have been funding the Greek army and sending weapons to Turkey.

But early in 1947, in the White House, this document arrives, and it's a shocker. It's from the British government, and it says, "For a long time, we've been supporting Greece and Turkey." But we are broke.

This is a really important moment, the winding down of the British Empire. Early 1947, they do not wish to be this sort of great force in the eastern Mediterranean, which they had been for a long time.

It becomes clear to Truman and the American State Department that this issue in Greece and Turkey is actually a threat to national security. They believe that if Greece and Turkey become Stalinized, these are dominoes and the rest of Western Europe could possibly fall.

And the British say to the Americans, "If you want to make sure these places remain pro-Western, you as the United States are going to have to use military force." Now, that is a real put-up-or-shut-up moment for Truman.

Truman is a very practical, plain-spoken, linear thinker. He doesn't come into office with some big vision of what the world should be. He sort of picks up the mantle of FDR and tries to build a postwar order according to what he thought FDR would have done. But really, from the moment of meeting Stalin at Potsdam onward, he's starting to formulate his own views.

And now Truman recognizes that this is a turning point. In this new postwar world, what's happening on another side of the globe can be critical to America's national security.

After deliberating with his diplomatic and military advisors, President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies In their own way.

The United States is shifting away from isolationism. The Truman Doctrine is now U.S. policy.

The Truman Doctrine is the culmination, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, of setting out these American ideals, setting out these American principles, but this time backing them with more power, more force, because Truman's vision is that the U.S. will support any country that is resisting communist aggression. Any country.

It is difficult to overstate what a dramatic departure the Truman Doctrine is for the United States.

In 1941, the United States had to be dragged into war. But what Truman is saying is now we're ready to take the fight wherever democracy requires us.

We must take immediate and resolute action.

Truman asks Congress and he receives $400 million of military aid For Greece and Turkey, this is only the beginning.

This is a radical shift, not only in the way that America had thought about its place in the world, but a radical shift in where Harry Truman's own mind was. It's actually putting American power behind a global ideological contest with the Soviet Union.

As the American-Soviet alliance fades, a contest between superpowers emerges. Europe is in the grip of one of the coldest winters in memory. People have little to eat and struggle to stay warm. They begin to despair at the slow pace of postwar recovery.

Western governments have not been able to rebuild their economies. Agriculture has been destroyed. Transportation has been destroyed. Manufacturing has been destroyed. And there's an enormous refugee crisis that is ongoing.

During the war, there was a deliberate forced movement of populations, so there are millions and millions of refugees on the roads, in camps, in towns and cities and villages that are not their own.

Truman and his advisors fear that Europe is on the verge of collapse. General George Marshall, one of the chief architects of American victory in World War II, believes The whole world hangs in the balance.

What Truman and George Marshall, his Secretary of State, realize is you need to rebuild the European economy. It has to be not just the militarized Truman Doctrine, but there needs to be a way of getting money to support Western European or capitalist states.

The Marshall Plan is a $13.3 billion essentially handout to foreign governments to help these countries rebuild themselves, westernize, and stabilize politically.

And it would be keeping people alive in places where starvation was an actual real thing. So it's done for altruistic reasons, but also geopolitical ones.

President Truman and George Marshall believed that the best guarantee against communism are well-fed bellies, good schools, orderly societies. The kind of things that can only happen in a prosperous economy.

Stalin recognizes how Marshall's plan threatens his objectives.

To him, it's another trick. It's another American way to try to undermine the Soviet Union and pull Europe into the American orbit.

It's presented as Stalin's typical paranoia. Actually, he's got every reason to distrust the West. He was right.

Today, our aid to the free nations of Europe is helping them to resist dictatorship.

Stalin understands that Western goods with Western money would lead to Western values of liberal democracy, of open society, and also would spread the attractions of capitalism. And it would undermine Stalin's own rule.

So for him, the Marshall Plan has to be stomped out.

Stalin directs the countries under his command to reject the American offer.

Very clearly, Stalin has drawn a line and said, "This is my turf, this is your turf, and that's that." Stalin expects to maintain complete control of the East European countries liberated from Germany by the Red Army.

But one nation will test him.

Czechoslovakia is deeply connected to the Western European economy. The Czechs have advanced industry. They could become wealthy with access to Western capital in the form of the Marshall Plan.

The democratically elected government in Prague is led by President Edvard Beneš. Several of its ministers are members of the Czech Communist Party. Stalin pressures Beneš to reject American aid and compels the Czech communists to seize control. Over the next few months, local communists stir up unrest throughout the country.

The citizens of Czechoslovakia haven't quite gotten the memo that they're really the subordinates of Soviet power.

In 1948, there is a communist-led coup in Prague that topples the Beneš government and places another East European country firmly in Moscow's orbit.

Now Stalin decides to take fewer risks in in Eastern Europe.

No risks at all.

He doesn't believe that ultimately communism will flower politically and economically and that working peoples around the world will just embrace it because it is the true and scientific approach to human civilization. He believes in power.

Across Eastern Europe, he crushes any hint of liberalism, free speech. He doubles down on his Soviet system. He arrests tens of thousands of people. More people are sent to the gulags after the war than before the war in the 1930s during the Great Terror.

Marshall aid is an essential component in the American postwar recovery plan for Europe. But its success widens the increasing divide economically and politically between East and West.

We are now in a bipolar world.

America emerged from the war enriched. They want to see us weaken for many years and impose their will on us.

It's a world of rivalry like the world had never seen.

The Soviet Union has proved again and again that it cannot be trusted.

And it's a race. It's a competition for preeminence, and it's ultimately going to be a competition for security.

And Berlin, the former capital of the Third Reich, is at the center of the conflict. In the summer of 1948, billions of Marshall aid dollars flow into the countries of Western Europe.

Europe is slowly but surely edging back towards economic health. Careful planning for the use of the $324 million allotted has helped Western Germany temporarily to its feet.

Great Britain and the United States merge their German occupation zones. The French will soon join them. A common currency is introduced, the Deutschmark. Stalin understands that the Western powers intend to establish a strong and independent West Germany. Since the end of the war, Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union have occupied Berlin. It lies deep within Soviet-dominated Eastern Germany.

Now imagine for someone as paranoid as Stalin having these Western militaries going back and forth between Berlin and the Western occupation zones. This is a source of instability, disruption. It's dangerous.

Stalin wants to sever direct contact between Berlin and the western half of Germany.

He doesn't want to invade West Berlin because that's an act of war. But what he believes he can do is he can blockade Berlin.

At this time, Berlin is still a pile of rubble. It has very little tactical significance for the United States government.

So it really made no sense to keep West Berlin, and Stalin believed that in the end the West would blink and withdraw.

On June 24th, the Soviets cut all road, rail, and water routes linking West Berlin to Western Germany.

Suddenly the trains stopped. Traffic between Berlin and the Western zones was banned. The famous autobahns were deserted, and even canal traffic was at a standstill. The blockade even cut electric power and put out 75% of the lights.

Truman is a pragmatic person. This could be a moment where he says, "It's not worth saving this city because I don't know what Stalin's gonna do. I don't know how dangerous this is gonna be." Instead, he says, "We're not going anywhere." The US and Britain realize that this is Stalin testing the wire.

It'll be Berlin first, then it'll be elsewhere. And the Allies choose to make it a red line.

Keep in mind, it's 1948. For Truman, it's an election year. It's the first postwar election. It's the first election in the nuclear age, the first election in the television age. He's aware that all eyes are on him.

The British and Americans ask, "What can we do short of war?" And the answer is they can keep Berlin supplied. Not by road, not by rail, not by canal, but by air.

The British and the Americans construct an air bridge into West Berlin.

The plan is to deliver on airplanes everything that a modern city needs to survive. Food, got coal, you got fuel, you've got medical supplies. It's a superb example of an operation that's pulled together very quickly. Huge numbers of aircraft. Planes flying round the clock. These British and American officers, the same officers that have organized the triumphs of logistics that you see during the Second World War.

A continuous stream of cargo planes land in West Berlin every few minutes. But to reach the city, they must fly over hundreds of miles of Soviet-controlled territory.

They're choosing to defy Stalin. And if you fill the airspace with military aircraft, even though they're unarmed, you have to assume that Stalin might strike back.

So you have all this military capacity, you have the paranoia and fear in Washington and in Moscow, you have this hall of mirrors quality. The two countries are involved in a kind of escalatory spiral.

Truman now deploys dozens of B-29s to air bases in England, the same plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear weapons go from being a secret weapon to a public strategic weapon.

The pressure on Truman at this point is incalculable. He knows that this move could be provocative enough to start World War III.

But the Americans are hoping that this strong show of resolve will encourage Stalin to back off. They are gambling that Stalin does not want World War III.

After nearly a year of daily international tension, Stalin halts the blockade.

Here's a glimpse of Berlin itself. —As the first trains and vehicles got going at night.

All routes that connect Berlin to the West are reopened. Restrictions within Berlin between the Soviet Zone and American, British, and French zones are lifted as well.

Stalin set up a challenge for the West. He was probing the West. He needed to know how far he could go. But in fact, Truman rose to the challenge. The challenge. And in the end, it's Stalin who blinks.

As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union continue to deteriorate, Western government its plan to provide collective security against possible Soviet aggression.

When the United States and the Soviet Union look like they can be on the verge of war, it became obvious that the United States couldn't continue to ad hoc this, to lurch from crisis to crisis to crisis.

The postwar path that FDR anticipated was one in which the United Nations would help adjudicate disputes, and rule the peace. What he was not able to fully anticipate was that a struggle against his former ally, the Soviet Union, would become the defining force of the era.

Representatives from Europe, Canada, and the United States meet in Washington to discuss the formation of a new military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

The idea is to create what military strategists call deterrence. It's an alliance that is created to make sure that the Russians know that if they attack one state in the alliance, they could theoretically face a war against all of the states in that alliance. NATO is created to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.

What Harry Truman does what the U.S. does with the Marshall Plan, with the Truman Doctrine, with NATO, is establish an infrastructure of deterrence to try to contain the communistic influence.

If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.

The world is about to cross a threshold from which there is no return. In an appropriately desolate landscape, the Soviet Union prepares to test its first atomic bomb.

Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's kind of mega-manager, arrives to supervise in a little hut in the middle of nowhere. He's incredibly nervous. If it doesn't work, his downfall is quite likely. He watches from a safe distance.

The test is a success.

Stalin's overjoyed and relieved. Now he's got an equal footing with the West, and they cannot push him around anymore.

After this period when Stalin's struggling to catch up with the America. He's back in the game.

Truman's a poker player, and for these years after the war, he always had an ace in the hole. He had the bomb. Soviets didn't. That surety was gone. There was no turning back.

And you've got two superpowers, two nuclear powers, that are facing each other across the world, and all of a sudden the world is much less stable.

An 18th or 19th century Scholar would say, oh, you're going to have a war between those two powers, it's inevitable, right? Because they're the two great superpowers. But the atomic weapons change things. If the Soviets and the United States can't compete in the military sense directly because it's too dangerous, well, then you compete indirectly.

After 1949, there'll be one war after the other. Big wars, small wars, guerrilla wars, proxy wars between the two superpowers. But what hasn't happened is the big one. There has not been a World War III, a general war involving the globe that involves nuclear weapons.

World War II began in a universe that would have been recognizable 50 years before. It ends in a world that wouldn't have been recognizable to anyone because of the splitting of the atom. The moral and philosophical underpinnings that enabled the Allies to triumph in World War II—an appreciation for the individual, support for the dignity of all peoples, a bias for democracy, have, for almost a century now, enabled us to live and thrive in a world where Armageddon is always at hand. But it hasn't come, not least because we've done the right thing.

The Second World War alters everything—national, political, even moral. Moral boundaries are redrawn. What was inconceivable before the war is now part of the fabric of life. The conflict that follows, the Cold War, poses even graver consequence because now, for the first time in human history, the world could literally destroy itself. One war replaced by another, and the world remains on edge. As President Dwight D.

Eisenhower observed, "The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it." World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by A&E Factual Studios, Newtopia Limited, Playtone Productions, and Backpocket Studios. In association with Motion Entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd. Additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman. For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.