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Early Days in the Cold War - Page 2

© Bill Waller

I was now 16 and the chief part of the thoughts of myself and my friends was that we would all have to do our National Service at age 18, and a war was not a good time to be a soldier. We were still hearing about atom bombs (and hydrogen bombs that were thought to be able to affect the earth’s axis) and we were hearing about reds under beds. As far as I could tell, with China having become Communist and Russia and all the eastern European countries controlled by them, already Communist, we had reason to be scared. At the same time, as I had come through my senior years at school, I had been able to see that the sharing of everything communally and equally was a seductive idea, although I did not think of, nor was anyone mentioning, what if there was not enough for everyone to share equally. As time went by and my call-up got closer, due in mid-1952, the progress of the Korean War became something of personal concern and the on-again, off-again armistice talks only exacerbated the worries of me and my friends. We had all heard the expression ‘brain-washing’ and were aware that getting captured was not the least of our worries; these fiendish Orientals were also prepared to change the way you thought! Although the end of the war was officially July 1953, British troops had not been sent to the war zone for some time but I got close enough not to be comfortable, being sent to Singapore where I met many men (boys of 18 and 19) who had come back from Korea, including one or two with medals.

For me, the Korean War defines the Cold War. By that time we had come to recognize that Communism was a force to be reckoned with. We had no real idea why something that seemed to bring benefit to people, at least in theory, should be something that the rest of the world should oppose so wholeheartedly, but we learned to know Stalin as the epitome of terror. Stories were beginning to be heard of the unbelievable killing campaigns that this man had waged on his own people, but I had still a very long way to go to understand that the lust for power and to retain power, is beyond all imagining and is an obsession I am glad that I do not have! The world had become very much us and them, with them capable of every kind of monstrosity. I remember having a conversation on a train returning to camp after leave one evening in late 1952, possibly my first adult conversation with someone not family. We were talking of what it must be like, on the other side, for someone my age, being brought up under a Communist regime. We agreed that he must be brainwashed as a matter of course and what would it be like in a few years’ time when there were no longer any older people in that society, only those who had been brainwashed, probably into believing that we were all enemies that they had to kill. We agreed that this was a barbaric way to run society, little realizing that this was exactly what was being done to us, although we would not have called it brain-washing!

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