The Lessons of Potsdam - 18 April 2003

In the middle of July 1945 the European war was over and at Potsdam outside a ruined Berlin, Marshall Stalin, the new President Truman and the old, 70-year-old, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, met to discuss mainly the future occupation of Germany.

First the limits and responsibilities of the so-called big four - the Soviets, the British, the Americans and the French - in the coming occupation of the totally-ruined capital city, even as today the United States and over 20 of its allies, mostly passive during the combat, are discussing the separate responsibilities and the methods of occupying the partially ruined city of Baghdad.

For many months, for years, after the Potsdam meeting feeling ran high and each nation's claim to manage its Berlin zone was challenged and fought over.

Indeed three years after Potsdam the Russians, who occupied all Eastern Berlin, decided that the occupation agreement was null and void.

They instituted a total blockade of all goods and foodstuffs entering the American-British West Berlin.

The long-feared war with the Soviet Union was avoided when a sustained American-British airlift of food into the besieged city convinced Stalin to abandon the blockade.

So you see the occupation of a conquered country is not, as my lawyer used to say, not a Jewish picnic. Nor is the occupation of Baghdad and Iraq likely to be.

But I want to go back to the Potsdam meeting when Prime Minister Churchill and his delegation had settled into their quarters.

One day Churchill's doctor and an accompanying famous general - Alexander - went to look at the site of Berlin which had been totally destroyed - far beyond the damage to Baghdad - by massive day and night Anglo-American bombing from the air, not to mention the huge artillery pounding of the city from the east by the Russians.

The two men, both of whom had been in the First World War, saw a disaster whose enormity shocked them.

Rarely a whole building standing, ruins and skeletons of thousands of houses in which people were seen trying to live. They had no other place to pretend.

People of every sort and class, old men and children shuffling along the streets, holding out the only means of buying and selling - barter. Swapping a pair of old shoes for two loaves, stockings, cigarettes, watches - every personal or household article for a flashlight, a box of candles.

General Alexander thought it was humiliating to see a great nation so miserably brought to its knees.

The doctor wrote in his diary: "As I watched this evisceration of their homes I felt a sense of nausea. it was like the first time I saw a surgeon open a belly and the intestines gushed out."

Next day the doctor urged Mr Churchill to go and see Berlin for himself.

He went and traipsed through the same streets and the wrecked government buildings.

He was plainly annoyed that he, who'd been recognised and cheered in every little French town and Greek village, suddenly was, as his doctor put it, brought down to earth by not being recognised - except by one little old man who looked back twice and shook his fist.

Churchill said nothing until he got back to his Potsdam house, when the doctor asked him what he was thinking. I quote: "He answered with a smile: 'There was a reasonable amount of destruction'."

I have to say though that later that evening Churchill sat on the end of his bed and shook his head: "Poor people," he said. "Poor people."

I quoted the alarming first reaction because it was that of a soldier who once in combat very soon has to learn to maintain a surgeon's placidity in the face of humans in grisly shape.

Remember, Churchill had been a soldier in an actual cavalry charge 50 years before and in at least six wars had seen lots of dead and dying men and women and children. The mask of indifference has to be put on and maintained.

Now what has this to do with you and me?

Everything. Most of us, I do believe, are seeing for the first time the helpless sight of wounded, dead or dying children, and huge populations to whom this is new and dreadful are appalled.

And if this sounds heartless to repeat that the casualties in this war were miraculously tiny and were due to precision bombs, remind yourself again of Berlin, where the civilian casualties outnumbered by many, many thousands the dead soldiers.

Or remember earlier in 1945 - here is a diary entry of a young foreign office official in London:

"Ash Wednesday and St Valentine's Day. Blue skies and sunshine which enabled the airforces to destroy Dresden."

There is no further mention of Dresden, the northern capital of baroque architecture, in this diary and none of the six volumes of Churchill's history of the second war.

I have this week looked through half dozen almanacs, encyclopaedias, pocket histories of the war, which run to exhaustive detail on other battles, other bombings. Dresden is unmentioned.

The only recognition of it, by a war leader, I could find was this.

Sometime later, in the month of March, somebody asked Britain's Air Marshal Harris - later nicknamed Bomber Harris - "By the way how did Dresden survive?"

"Dresden?" Harris replied. "There is no such city."

He was almost right. British and American bombers over two days and nights of firebombing sent 85,000, mostly civilians, to their deaths by burning or drowning in the river.

Two days after St Valentine's Day the papers around the world reported, with no clinical details, the successful bombing of Dresden.

And ever since we, old enough to remember it and the subsequent revelations about it, are ashamed and prefer in written histories or indeed in the normal gossip of life not to have it brought up.

Can you begin to guess at the effect on the populations of a hundred nations if there had been television at the time and we had seen it?

I'm stressing again the point I made in a talk of three weeks ago. The invention of television has made possible and inevitable for the first time in human history for an ordinary person a mile away from a battle - or a thousand or 10,000 miles away - to see as if he were a yard away the sight of wounded or dying children, frightened babies, as well as the various forms of broken or mutilated bodies.

During the Vietnam War correspondents were allowed up front, so to speak, but rarely if ever filmed for television consumption the dead or dying.

Day after day they did ask the fighting men what they thought they were fighting for.

Now it takes very few close-ups of wounded children to make the soldiers and the governments they represent seem monstrously cruel.

I feared a long war with many thousand casualties and a disastrous slump in support for the war.

It didn't happen that way and anger against the invaders must, to most people, have been offset by the hideous sight of Iraqis themselves looting 39 out of 40 hospitals, taking not only beds and chairs and blankets and kitchen food but respirators and loads of life-saving medicines.

The administration, the Pentagon, had of course prepared for a measure of looting - all wars in every invaded town inspire looting - but nobody was prepared for the staggering scale of it. It reflected, I think, the iron fist that Saddam had held on his people for 23 years.

I had a college room mate at Cambridge, just 70 years ago, he was going into the consular service. He did so and in 1932 he went off to his first posting.

It was a place I'd never heard of in what we called Mesopotamia - Basra was the name.

It was, he wrote to me, a very poor sort of second capital. Every Thursday, once a month, the consuls representing several nations were invited to a regular ceremony in the public square, to observe the punishments handed out to different criminals - thieves had a hand cut off.

I thought of this when the other day an American marine stopped a car carrying a load of looted stuff - fancy furniture mainly - they did not seem the sort of objects a poor man yearned for.

But the poor man driving his car said gleefully "This was Saddam's now it's mine."

And he went on his way. Why? Because the Americans had been ordered to try and stop the looting but not to shoot.

In all previous wars looters were warned the first day of an invasion that they would be shot.

In the south of Iraq some British soldiers did shoot four looters. But in Baghdad the Americans - told to avoid at all costs every appearance of conquerors - stood cocking their weapons but remaining helpless onlookers.

As I talk the general situation is best summed up in one sentence in the New York Times.

"As much as American troops were striving to re-establish order Baghdad today remains a shattered city still groping for normal life, still in thrall to looters and arsonists and full of weary and confused people with much hostility toward the Americans."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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