It is a great pleasure to be here today and I am most grateful to the
organisers for allowing me to present this paper. The pleasure is
multiplied by being back at Nottingham University from which I graduated
some thirty years ago in the hot summer of 1976. To this day I am grateful
to those who tutored me in history. It was a traditional history
concentrating on the study of state power and the importance of the proper
evaluation of source material. In my work since then a concentration on
primary sources for an analysis of contemporary events has been an exacting
and most productive exercise.
My paper today concerns the Second World War. It draws on and expands on my
recent book, The Beauty Queens Guide to World Peace.
The title of this paper: The United Nations role in World War II: How they
Helped defeat Hitler seems counterintuitive, surely the United Nations did
not exist during the war?
My contention is that a consideration of the contemporary records requires a
revaluation of the history most of us thought we knew and a reevaluation of
what we choose to present to students and the public about that war and its
meaning today.
The history told about the defeat of Nazism and the founding of the United
Nations in the 1940s has become distorted.
In this paper I will demonstrate the creation of the United Nations as a political and military reality for
winning the war and establishing a lasting peace. To do so I will show:
- The continuity between the wartime United Nations and the United Nations
Organisation created by the Charter.
- The role of the United Nations in organising military operations.
- The role of the United Nations in wartime propaganda and culture.
- The functioning of United Nations operational civilian agencies during the
second world war.
- The organising role of the United Nations in creating the postwar legal and
security organisations
- The legal role of the United Nations in accepting the surrender of enemy
states.
I will conclude with some preliminary observations on the implications of
the wartime United Nations for the study of the wartime period and the study
of contemporary politics. I will end will some speculation on the reasons
for the obscurity of this information on the wartime United Nations.
We are taught that the UN began with the signing of the Charter in 1945. In
fact, the San Francisco Conference created the United Nations Organisation
and this organisation was the culmination of a complex military and
political effort by the United Nations that began in 1942 and had its
origins in 1941.
The historical records show how Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt
created the United Nations to win the war both militarily and politically,
and to create the foundations for a lasting peace. Their first expression of
Anglo-American policy was in the Atlantic Charter of 1941; this included
freedom from want, social security, labour rights and disarmament as well as
self-determination, free trade and freedom of religion.
The United Nations became the official name for the coalition fighting the
axis powers in January 1942, when Roosevelt and Churchill led twenty-six
nations, including the Soviet Union and China, in a Declaration by United
Nations. The declaration committed the signatories not to make a separate
peace and to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The Charter provided
the political basis for countering Nazi ideology; it caught the imagination
of people around the world, including the young Nelson Mandela and other
anti-colonial activists.
The continuity from the Declaration to the Charter of the United Nations
Organisation is legally confirmed in Article 3 of the charter of the United
Nations Organisation.
Churchill explained in the House of Commons in 1942 that the term United
Nations was used to refer to more than one nation fighting together. An
article in the Times explaining the new structure of the Chiefs of Staff
published in a White Paper of 1942 explained it was the United Nations that
had decided that the word joint was to refer to the services of one nation
and combined those of several. Generals Wavell, MacArthur and Chaing Kai
Shek were formally designated United Nations commanders.
Especially in the United States, the United Nations soon featured in
propaganda posters. The Times reports of the fighting against the Japanese,
routinely quotes bulletins from Headquarters referring to United Nations
aircraft and shipping. From then on United Nations was the term used broadly
for what we now call the allies, a term used gradually to refer to the
Western combined forces.
The Times digital archive contains over 4,000 references to the United
Nations between the Declaration of January 1942 and the end of the war, an
average of more than two a day. Many of these references were to the strong
expression of the United Nations in propaganda and popular culture during
the war. The British Library holds scores of wartime publications by or
about the United Nations during the war. It was marked in postage stamps
[1]
[2]
in
the United States in 1943. The University of London created a United Nations
University Centre and anthologies were published of the exploits of Heroes
of the United Nations. Chatham Houses contemporary index of newspaper
cuttings at Colindale directs the reader who looks up Allied Forces to
properly seek United Nations: Allied Forces.
The Imperial War Museum holds a Central Office of Information Film from June
1942 marking the first United Day in Great Britain. In London, the Royal
Family is joined by the exiled heads-of-state of Norway, Yugoslavia, Poland
and Czechoslovakia on the stand to review a parade of Civilian Defence
Service contingents, workmen and women, merchant seamen, Royal Navy, RAF,
Commonwealth troops, Home Guard and British Army; in Aylesbury, the Lady
Mayoress (Mrs Olive Paterson) reads the Prime Minister's proclamation
adopting President Roosevelt's idea that June 14th (previously marked in the
USA for honouring the national flag) should be a day of honouring all of the
flags.
The following year special attention was given to the United Nations parade
in Cairo and to a mayor in New York state who declared not merely a United
Nations day, but a United Nations week. And also in music, prayer and
exhibitions. Shostakovich wrote a United Nations march that was used as the
finale of the 1943 Gene Kelly musical When Thousands Cheer.
United Nations agencies were created and operated during the war. Their work
can still be found in the records of the wartime organisations and the
earliest archives of the post-war UN. In 1942, United Nations Information
Boards with offices and organisations were established in New York and
London, producing documents on Nazi atrocities and publicity about the war
effort and plans for the peace. The New York offices mail was franked with
the slogan United Nations: in War and Peace.
In 1943, there were United Nations Food and Agriculture conferences and the
United Nations War Crimes Commission and the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration were created. By 1944, planning for the
post-war world had gathered momentum. A Times headline reported that the
economist John Maynard Keynes had flown to the US to create a United Nations
Bank. Churchill explained to the Commons that the task for the peace was
for the United Nations to create a new peace and security organisation.
The Dumbarton Oaks meeting convened in 1944 to turn the wartime United
Nations into the United Nations organisation. It created a United Nations
organising committee, so that the San Francisco conference was itself the
United Nations Conference on International Organisation,
which the United States postal service marked with a stamp and special
commemorative envelopes.
As the enemy states began to surrender they did so to the United Nations. In
Europe, General Eisenhower accepted the surrender of Fascist Italy in
September 1943. Declaring: Hostilities between the armed forces of the
United Nations and those of Italy terminate at once. All Italians who now
act to help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the
assistance and the support of the United Nations. The Surrender document
reads:
- Immediate cessation of all hostile activity by the Italian armed
forces.
- Italy will use its best endeavours to deny, to the Germans, facilities
that might be used against the United Nations.
- All prisoners or internees of the United Nations to be immediately turned
over to the Allied Commander-in-Chief, and none of these may now or at any
time evacuated to Germany.
In Algeria, Tunisia and Italy the United Nations were especially prominent
with United Nations radio and a prominent role of UNRRA.
Similar wording to the Italian surrender was signed by the defeated leaders
of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania as they surrendered to Soviet Generals
during 1944.
Eisenhower was as we know transferred to England to prepare for the
liberation. The description of the unit shoulder-patch of his Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force states that The heraldic chief of
azure (BLUE) above the rainbow is emblematic of a state of peace and
tranquillity the restoration of which to the enslaved people is the
objective of the United Nations.
His orders from the Chiefs of Staff to conduct the D-Day landings stated
that he was to do so in conjunction with the other United Nations.
Eisenhowers broadcast to the troops on D Day reminded them that the United
Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man
to man and his broadcast to the peoples of occupied Europe explained that
the landings were part of a United Nations plan.
The document that formalised the Nazi defeat in the war includes the
words: This Act of Military Surrender is without prejudice to, and will be
superseded by, any general instrument of surrender imposed by, or on behalf
of, the United Nations on Germany
President Truman broadcast on 8 May that: General Eisenhower informs me that
the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The broadcast
is available online at the Truman library.
It was normal to talk about the United Nations fighting the war. In August
1944, Churchill addressed troops in Italy with the words, I greet you here
this morning with feelings of pride that the honour should have fallen to me
to inspect these units of the Fifth Army, one of the great armies of the
United Nations, which are everywhere advancing victoriously upon the foe.
Major George B Woods, chaplain to a band of brothers in the 82nd Airborne
Division, gave an address for the burial of the dead at Wobbelin
concentration camp. He explained that these crimes were never clearly
brought to light until the armies of the United Nations overran Germany.
Today, the United Nations is as Adam Roberts put it, all too often regarded
as an unnecessary bauble attached to the allied victory. At the time, the UN
organisation created in San Francisco was regarded as the grand culmination
of the war effort. George W Bush and Tony Blair seek to persuade their
citizens that other nations are just too intransigent to deal with in their
campaign to make the world free and safe. They would have us believe that
Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac are tougher customers than Joseph Stalin
and Charles De Gaulle.
Roosevelt and Churchill had both experienced the first world war and seen
the failure of the League of Nations. They did not respond to fascism with a
doctrine of pre-emptive war and totalitarian neoliberalism. Quite the
opposite: just three weeks after the surprise attack upon Pearl Harbour,
they set about creating an agenda that, in modern terms, is left-wing social
democracy. In doing so, they knew that hard bargaining and unpleasant
compromise might be
necessary. They understood that cooperation was essential to survival: a
lesson learnt even before the invention of the atomic bomb. Today, that
lesson has almost been forgotten in America and Britain though not elsewhere.
Reasserting the reality that the United Nations is a realist necessity
rather than a liberal accessory
becomes much easier once we remember that it was to the United Nations that
the Nazis surrendered.
Why has this history been lost? I have no clear answer, but I can offer some
suggestions. The new UN organisation wanted a clean start unencumbered by
the wartime experience. The many new nations created as the British and
French empires collapsed regarded the UN as a new organisation, whose
wartime origins seemed of little relevance. Everyone knew the UN had
been created out of the ashes of the war; there was no need to labour the
point.
More importantly, the creation of images of competing evil empires in the
cold war meant that neither right nor left wanted to remember that they
fought the axis together. American conservatives in particular, who had
opposed US involvement in the second world war
and never supported the UN, have been keen to eradicate all reference to the
Democrat Roosevelts work. Nowadays, journalists assigned to prepare
anniversary coverage may come across the occasional reference to the United
Nations and omit it as an oddity or even a mistake.
Nevertheless, the references to the wartime United Nations were not a mistake.
- There is a clear formal continuity between the wartime United Nations and
the United Nations Organisation created by the Charter.
- The United Nations had a role in organising military operations especially
in the early campaigns in the Pacific and in the Western Mediterranean.
- The United Nations had a prominent role in wartime propaganda and
culture.
- The United Nations functioned as several important operational civilian
agencies well before the Charter was signed.
- The legal role of the United Nations in accepting the surrender of enemy
states is also clear.
- The United Nations had an organising role in creating the postwar legal and
security organisations
In 2005, as the sixtieth anniversaries of the end of the second world war
and the signing of the UN Charter are commemorated, rediscovering the role
of the United Nations in war and peace is critical to understanding the
importance given to the United Nations during the war as providing a
reevaluation of its importance today. Lord Morans diaries record that
Churchill himself remarked privately during the height of the fighting in
1944, that the United Nations is the only hope of the world.
