War veterans, international politics, and the early Cold War, 1945–50

Abstract

Despite the importance of war veterans issues in many nation-states after World War II, Cold War historians have never examined international veteran politics. By analysing scholarship and hitherto unexamined primary sources, this article surveys the realignments taking place in veteran politics in different countries and investigates the process leading to the creation of the World Veterans Federation in 1950. It argues that the Cold War profoundly shaped international veteran politics after 1945, and that veterans’ international organisations became political instruments and spaces of Cold War tensions. By revealing how Cold War events, particularly the Korean War, created opportunities for the veterans’ international activities under American leadership, this article offers insights into the impact of the Cold War on the transnational sphere.

Keywords:

• War veterans
• early Cold War
• international organisations
• United Nations
• transatlantic relations
• Korean War
• Second World War

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 7th European Summer School on Cold War History, at the European Institute at Columbia University (New York), and at the LSE International History Research Seminar. The author thanks the conveners and participants for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ ‘Second World War’, in Noel Castree, Rob Kitchin, and Alisdair Rogers, eds., A Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

² Lisa Pinley Covert, ‘The GI Bill Abroad: A Postwar Experiment in International Relations’, Diplomatic History 40, no. 2 (2016): 244–68; Ángel Alcalde and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, eds., War Veterans and the World after 1945: Cold War Politics, Decolonization, Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

³ http://www.wvf-fmac.org/ [last consulted on 28 November 2016].

⁴ Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman, eds., The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

⁵ Stephen R. Ortiz, ed., Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Martin Crotty and Mark Edele, ‘Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 59, no. 1 (2013): 15–32.

⁶ Archives Nationales (Paris), René Cassin (382AP), box 66, ‘Projet de constitution d’une association interalliée de combattants’.

⁷ Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Washington, DC and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–13.

⁸ Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Michael D. Gambone, The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veteran in American Society (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2005).

⁹ I have examined the relations between Truman and numerous American veterans’ associations through archival materials at the Truman Library: Truman Library, Harry S. Truman – President’s Personal File (PPF), box 527, folder 1554, ‘United Spanish War Veterans’; box 555, folder 508, ‘Jewish War Veterans of the US’; box 569, folder 3298, ‘Polish Legion of American Veterans’; box 571, folder 3398, ‘Italian-American World War Veterans’; box 571, folder 3423, ‘Irish War Veterans’; box 571, folder 3436, ‘Indian War Veterans’; box 572, folder 1078, ‘Disabled American Veterans’.

¹⁰ William Pencak, For God & Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989); Roscoe Baker, The American Legion and American Foreign Policy (New York: Bookman Associates, 1954); Thomas A. Rumer, The American Legion: An Official History 1919–1989 (New York: M. Evans & Company, 1990).

¹¹ Stephen R. Ortiz, ‘Well-Armed Internationalism: American Veteran Organisations and the Crafting of an “Associated” Veterans’ Internationalism 1919–1939’, in Eichenberg and Newman, Veterans’ Internationalism, 53–74; Athan Theoharis, ‘The FBI and the American Legion Contact Programme, 1940–1966’, Political Science Quarterly 100, no. 2 (1985): 271–86.

¹² Truman Library, Harry S. Truman - PPF, box 546, folder 350. The American Legion Magazine 42, no. 3 (March 1947).

¹³ Truman’s speech and correspondence with American Legion’s commanders in: Truman Library, PPF, box 546, folder 350.

¹⁴ Proceedings of the 32nd National Convention of the American Legion. Los Angeles, Calif., October 9, 10, 11, 12, 1950 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), 67.

¹⁵ The AVC Bulletin 1, no. 1 (February 1946), 1–3.

¹⁶ Charles Bolté, The New Veteran (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945), 186–7.

¹⁷ Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, American Veterans for Peace (TAM.246), box 1, folder 4: ‘American Veterans Committee’. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was a founding member of the AVC.

¹⁸ Robert F. Saxe, Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 117–53.

¹⁹ Truman Library, PPF, box 554, folder 2585: ‘American Veterans Committee’; Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, DC, American Veterans Committee records (MS2144), box 149, folder 1: ‘State Department – Correspondence’.

²⁰ The AVC Bulletin 2, no. 11 (August 1947), 2.

²¹ The AVC Bulletin 1, no. 15 (October 1946), 3; on the AVC positions regarding the Marshall Plan see The AVC Bulletin 2, no. 11 (August 1947), 2; on the AVC reaction to the coup in Czechoslovakia see The AVC Bulletin 3, no. 4 (April 1948), 1.

²² Harrison is best known for being the owner and editor of the influential magazine The New Republic between 1953 and 1974.

²³ Gelman Library, MS2144, box 1, folder 16: ‘Atlantic Pact’.

²⁴ Vet-Times 9, no. 24 (16 July 1949), 1; The AVC Bulletin 4, no. 8 (August-September 1949), 1–2; Gelman Library, MS2144, box 149, folder 3: ‘Gilbert Harrison – Correspondence’.

²⁵ Incorporating the Amvets, American Veterans of World War II (Washington, DC, 1947); Amvets: 50 Years of Proud Service to America's Veterans (Lanham, MD: Amvets National Headquarters, 1994).

²⁶ Truman Library, PPF, box 561, folder 2902: ‘Amvets’.

²⁷ John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War 1944–49 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

²⁸ Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics, and Society, 1921–1939 (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2005); Graham Wootton, The Politics of Influence: British Ex-Servicemen, Cabinet Decisions and Cultural Change (1917–57) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

²⁹ Brian Harding, Keeping Faith: The History of The Royal British Legion (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2001), 289–90.

³⁰ Our Empire Today (London), xxiv, no. 1 (April 1948), 8–9; no. 2 (May 1948), 8; no. 3 (June 1948), 8; xxv, no. 5 (August 1949), 9.

³¹ The Times (London), 20 April 1948.

³² Our Empire Today (London): xxv, no. 7, October 1949 (October 1949), 9.

³³ Ángel Alcalde, War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

³⁴ James M. Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 54–86; Jörg Echternkamp, Soldaten im Nachkrieg. Historische Deutungskonflikte und westdeutsche Demokratisierung 1945–1955 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014), 189–327.

³⁵ Agostino Bistarelli, La storia del ritorno. I reduci italiani del secondo dopoguerra (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007).

³⁶ Reduci di ieri e di oggi (Parma), 17 May 1947.

³⁷ Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi-occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

³⁸ La Voix du Combattant (Paris), 15 June, 15 July, and 15 November 1946. Lagrou, Legacy, 42.

³⁹ Georges Doussin, ed., L’ARAC. Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants 1917–2007 (Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises, 2007), 203.

⁴⁰ Bulletin d’Information. Edité par l’Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de deux guerres (Paris), no. 36 (October 1949).

⁴¹ La Voix du Combattant, 15 March 1948.

⁴² Journal de l’Union fédérale des Associations d’Anciens Combattants, Victimes de deux Guerres et Groupes de Jeunes. Region Parisienne (Paris), no. 1, April 1948.

⁴³ Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

⁴⁴ Ibid., 153–4.

⁴⁵ Joanna Wawrzyniak, Veterans, Victims, and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015), 43–83.

⁴⁶ Heike Karge, Steinerne Erinnerung – versteinerte Erinnerung? Kriegsgedenken in Jugoslawien (1947–1970) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 44–5.

⁴⁷ Elke Reuter and Detlef Hansel, Das kurze Leben der VVN von 1947 bis 1953 (Berlin, Edition Ost, 1997); Alexander Heldring, The International Federation of Resistance Movements [FIR]. History and Background (The Hage: Interdoc, 1969), 10–21; Wawrzyniak, Veterans, 78–9.

⁴⁸ The National Archives, Kew, F[oreign] O[ffice Files], 1093/462, ‘1948–1949. FIAPP The Hague’.

⁴⁹ ‘Transnational sphere’ means ‘the space where encounters across national borders took place’; it ‘materialised in a number of forms […] international organisations, gatherings of experts, international congresses, publications and journals’; see Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jacob Vogel, eds., Shaping the Transnational Sphere. Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 2.

⁵⁰ World Veterans Federation Archive, Paris (WVFA), Assemblée Constitutive Paris 1950, ‘Conversation de Bruselles’.

⁵¹ South African veterans were not from BESL, but from the Springbok Legion, a non-racist association. See, Neil Roos, ‘The Springbok and the Skunk: War Veterans and the Politics of Whiteness in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 3, (2009): 643–61.

⁵² La Voix du Combattant, 15 October 1948; Journal de l’Union fédérale des Associations d’Anciens Combattants, Victimes de deux Guerres et Groupes de Jeunes. Region Parisienne (Paris), no. 2 (May 1949).

⁵³ Ilya V. Gaiduk, Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945–1965 (Washington, DC and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2012), 105.

⁵⁴ For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy! (Bucharest), 29 November 1949.

⁵⁵ Timothy Johnston, ‘Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for Peace in All the World”, 1948–54’’, The Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 259–82; Weston Ullrich, ‘Preventing “peace”: The British government and the Second World Peace Congress’, Cold War History 11, no. 3 (2011): 341–62; Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

⁵⁶ Trygve Lie, In the Cause of Peace: Seven Years with the United Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 388–9.

⁵⁷ National Archives (Kew) FO 1110/2117 Minutes (24 March 1948).

⁵⁸ ‘Record of Round-Table Discussion by Twenty-Four Consultants with the Department of State on “Strengthening International Organisations” November 17, 18 and 19, 1949’, Truman Library, CF, box 40, folder 2 State Department Correspondence 1949.

⁵⁹ British Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Office (14 October 1949), FO 1110/271.

⁶⁰ Bulletin d’Information. Edité par l’Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de deux guerres, no. 30 (March 1949), no. 31 (April 1949).

⁶¹ Heldring, International Federation, 16–26.

⁶² Robbie Lieberman, Strangest Dream, 73–80; The Progressive Veteran (Forest Hills, NY) 1, no. 8 (September 1949).

⁶³ The Progressive Veteran, 1, no. 4 (April 1949); 1, no. 11 (December 1949).

⁶⁴ Truman Library, PPF, box 161, folder 2585 ‘Veterans’.

⁶⁵ The AVC Bulletin 4, no. 10 (November 1949); Gilbert A. Harrison, Parts of a Past (New York: iUniverse, 2009), 131.

⁶⁶ Harrison, Parts of a Past, 131; The New York Times, 16 December 1951, reported that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provided Harrison with funds.

⁶⁷ WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁶⁸ Harrison to Newcomb (Paris, 16 June 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁶⁹ Harrison to Newcomb (no place, undated, but probably Paris, late April 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁷⁰ Harrison to Newcomb (Paris, 27 June 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁷¹ Newcomb to Harrison (27 June 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁷² See the Foreign Office’s secret report: ‘Action to combat the Communist Peace Offensive’ (16 March 1950), FO 1110/346. In August 1950, the US State Department defined: ‘the foreign policy of the United States is designed to maintain and to defend the peace’; see Truman Library, CF, box 41, folder 4 ‘State Department Correspondence’.

⁷³ Unis comme au front. Organe de l’Union Nationale des Combattants (Rennes), no. 130 (April 1950); Journal de l’Union fédérale des Associations d’Anciens Combattants, Victimes de deux Guerres et Groupes de Jeunes. Region Parisienne, no. 10 (May 1950).

⁷⁴ American left-wing veterans also transmitted the Stockholm Appeal, see Vet’s Voice (New York), 2, no. 6 (July-August 1950).

⁷⁵ WVFA, Assemblée Constitutive Paris 1950, ‘Conférence preparatoire’; Harrison to Newcomb (11 and 12 July 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁷⁶ Newcomb to Harrison (20 October 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁷⁷ Proceedings, resolutions, and other documents in WVFA, Assemblée Constitutive Paris 1950. See also, The AVC Bulletin, 5, no. 11 (December 1950).

⁷⁸ United Nations Archives, New York (UNA), AG-025 UN Registry Section, S-0441, box 27, folder 9 ‘Non-Governmental Organisations-World Veterans Federation [Part A]’.

⁷⁹ Harrison, Parts of a Past, 1936; Truman Library, PPF, box 561, folder 2902 ‘Amvets’.

⁸⁰ Stanley E. Hilton, ‘The United States, Brazil, and the Cold War, 1945–1960: End of the Special Relationship’, The Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (1981): 599–24.

⁸¹ In the fall of 1950 Finns were concerned about the possibility of Soviet aggression; see Jussi Hahnimäki, Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the ‘Finnish Solution’ (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1997), 100–10.

⁸² Lorraine M. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 92.

⁸³ The first IFWVO General Assembly indeed took place in Belgrade in November 1951, featuring an inaugural speech by Tito.

⁸⁴ Memorandum for Elliot Newcomb (6 December 1950), WVFA, Dossier 58, folder ‘Foundation’.

⁸⁵ Harrison, Parts of a Past, 136.

⁸⁶ The New York Times, 2 December 1950.

⁸⁷ Sunday Herald (Bridgeport, Conn.), 31 December 1950; Toledo Blade (Toledo, OH), 26 December 1950.

⁸⁸ Gaiduk, Divided Together, 117; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert Barnes, The US, the UN and the Korean War: Communism in the Far East and the American Struggle for Hegemony in America’s Cold War (London: IB Tauris, 2014).

⁸⁹ WVFA, Assemblée Constitutive Paris 1950, ‘Procès-verbal. Réunion du Comité Executif du Lundi 27 Novembre 1950)’.

⁹⁰ UNA, AG-025 UN Registry Section, S-0441, box 27, folder 9 ‘Non-Governmental Organisations-World Veterans Federation [Part A]’.

⁹¹ The AVC Bulletin 6, no. 1 (January 1951).

⁹² Newcomb to Eisenhower and Eisenhower to Newcomb (23 January 1951), WVFA, Docs 500 to 794; F.I.O.A.C. Bulletin d’Information, no. 1 (January 1951); The AVC Bulletin 5, no. 11 (December 1950).

⁹³ Cf. Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

⁹⁴ Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 65.

⁹⁵ Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World after 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).