Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report

Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report - 1996

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EVALUATION OF SELECTED CULTURAL RESOURCES
AT FORT MONMOUTH, NEW JERSEY:
CONTEXT FOR COLD WAR ERA,
REVISION OF HISTORIC PROPERTIES DOCUMENTATION,
AND SURVEY OF EVANS AREA
AND SECTIONS OF CAMP CHARLES WOOD
by
Mary Beth Reed
Mark Swanson
NEW SOUTH ASSOCIATES
Stone Mountain, Georgia
Subcontractor for Geo-Marine, Inc.
and
Rebecca Procter
Marsha Prior

June 1996

MISCELLANEOUS REPORT OF INVESTIGATIONS
NUMBER 125
Geo-Marine, Inc.
550 East Fifteenth Street
Plano, Texas evans logo

for
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Fort Worth District
819 Taylor Street
Fort Worth, Texas

THE COLD WAR: POLITICAL CONTEXT

More than any other previous conflict, World War II demonstrated the importance of communications and electronics. The ability of the United States to decipher German and Japanese radio codes played a decisive role in the outcome of the war. By now it was well understood that the future would favor those with superior electronic capability. If a nation could increase the efficiency of its communications network, shield that network from enemies, and at the same time expose the networks of others, the advantage could prove more valuable than that of entire armies. This was part of the Allied edge in World War II and it was certainly an integral factor in the Cold War that followed.

The Cold War was a direct outgrowth of World War II. German rocket technology, the atomic bomb, and Stalin’s ambitions, all exposed in the war, laid the groundwork for future conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, a conflict that began around 1947-1948 and ended between 1989 and 1991. This conflict was multi-faceted. Although fundamental political, economic, and philosophical differences lie at the root of the Cold War, that conflict took many forms. From the beginning there was a nuclear facet, a rocket and “space-race” facet, and under-girding these, a race to perfect the best electronics. In the contest for the best electronics, Fort Monmouth played a crucial role in the American defense system.

The origin of the Cold War was clear long before the end of World War II, for its roots were in the economic and military preeminence of the United States and the opportunism of Joseph Stalin. Since the late 1920s, long before the Cold War and even World War II, Stalin had been the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. In the early 1930s, while the rest of the world was going through the Great Depression, Stalin pushed through a program of mass collectivization and industrialization that transformed Russia into an industrial power (Antonov-Ovseyenko 1981; Heller and Nekrich 1986; Ulam 1973).

During this period, Stalin also played at international politics. During the Spanish Civil War, he provided the Republican side with just enough aid to prolong the fight against the Nationalists, who finally won with the aid of Mussolini and Hitler. Changing tactics in the summer of 1939, Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler that effectively divided eastern Europe between them, paving the way for the dismemberment of Poland and the beginning of World War II. After Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941 and the Red Army moved to the offensive in 1943 following Hitler’s blunder at Stalingrad, any reasonable observer could guess, based on Stalin’s past, that he would never relinquish the windfall conquests that were going to come his way. Between 1944 and 1948, an “iron curtain” fell over every parcel of eastern Europe conquered by the Soviet Army.
As bad as this was from a Western perspective, the European situation was not unexpected. After the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stabilized the situation in Western Europe, there were no additional Soviet advances in Europe. Soon, however, there were shocks in other parts of the world that finally triggered the massive American response that brought the Cold War to a head. Most of these new shocks came from East Asia, destabilized by Japanese invasion and by the presence of a Communist regime in North Korea, set up by the Soviets at the end of World War II. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader of China since the 1920s, was still perched in power, but his rule was fragile after the horrendous eight-year struggle against Japan and the even older struggle against Communist insurgents led by Mao Tse-tung.

In September of 1949, Soviet scientists exploded their first atom bomb (Reeves 1982:215), which increased the stakes considerably in the new Cold War. On the heels of that event came the fall of Chiang Kai-chek on the mainland of China in October of 1949. Chiang had been the wartime ally of the United States against the Japanese, and there was strong sentimental attachment to the Chinese cause throughout the war, and long before. The fall of Chiang’s government to Mao Tse-tung and the Communists was a profound shock to the American public.

Ironically, Stalin had little control over Mao and was probably just as surprised by the fall, but he was quick to capitalize on the situation. When Kim Il Sung, the Communist boss of neighboring North Korea, suggested some sort of provocation, Stalin gave his consent, believing Kim would limit himself to an incursion into South Korea. Instead, it was an all-out invasion that caught the United States and the rest of the world almost completely by surprise.

Launched in June of 1950, Kim’s invasion triggered a massive response from the United States and United Nations. Failing by a thin margin, the North Korean invasion was completely reversed, with American commander General Douglas MacArthur leading U.N. forces to the Yalu River, North Korea’s border with Red China. At that point the Chinese entered the conflict, and U.N. troops were pushed back into South Korea. After yet more hard fighting, the Chinese were pushed back to a line very close to where the conflict began. By the end of 1951, Truman had to relieve MacArthur for insubordination, and a stalemate ensued lasting two years. The war was finally concluded with an armistice in July of 1953, just months after Stalin’s death.

Stalin’s death in March of 1953 removed one of the key figures of the Cold War, but it also initiated a new and more unstable phase of the conflict, which could now be considered global. Stalin’s rigid control was soon replaced by the more supple responses of Nikita Khrushchev and a number of Soviet advances in science and international politics occurred in the late 1950s. The Soviets began to make inroads into the so-called Third World, as many of the newly independent non-aligned nations began to play one power against the other for maximum gain. The greatest leap occurred when the Soviets launched the world’s first orbiting satellite in the fall of 1957, initiating the space-race at the end of the Eisenhower administration.

In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration confronted Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only did the arms race heat up under Kennedy and Johnson, but the space program accelerated as well. Caught off-guard by the first Soviet satellites, the United States surged ahead in the 1960s, finally putting a man on the moon in July of 1969.

During this same period, the Vietnam War became an enormous burden for the U.S. Army. By 1965, there were American ground troops in the war, and troop concentrations increased until the Tet Offensive of 1968 demonstrated that the conflict was nowhere near victory. The United States slowly began to disengage in the years that followed, and pulled out altogether by 1973. Two years later, all of South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam. For the rest of the decade, the United States appeared rudderless on the international scene. While the Soviets made remarkable advances in sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, the United States closed the decade totally absorbed in a feud with the new Islamic government of Iran.
The tables began to turn in the 1980s, as the United States strengthened its position, and the Soviet Union realized that their involvement with Afghanistan was comparable to the United States-Vietnam situation. The Afghan War put a huge strain on the Soviet army and economy and led to the first attempts to reform what had been a closed and tightly ordered society. Reforms, however, led to an unexpected unraveling, and in remarkably quick order, the Soviet Union lost its position in Eastern Europe in 1989. It reformed itself out of existence two years later. With the rebirth of a greatly-shrunken Russia, the Cold War, fueled by fierce ideological and economic differences that were now moot, passed into history.

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