Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War

by Hugh Thomas

With the ending of the Second World War in 1945, there ended also the great alliance of nations that had defeated Germany and Japan. Within a year relationships between Russia and the West were being described in terms of The Cold War and The Iron Curtain. Aformer Soviet Foreign Minister was using the expression 'Armed Truce' to explain the best that could now be hoped for.But how and why did this happen?Hugh Thomas, combining the historian's overall view with a novelist's eye for the telling detail, describes the personalities, the ideology and geography, the military and economic factors that interacted to produce the Cold War.Scholarship, vision and sheer readability combine in this superb work of history.

Genres: History

667 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, was a British historian and Hispanist.

Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His 1961 book The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1962. A significantly revised and enlarged third edition was published in 1977. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971) is a book of over 1,500 pages tracing the history of Cuba from Spanish colonial rule until the Cuban Revolution. Thomas spent 10 years researching the contents of this book.

Thomas was married to the former Vanessa Jebb, daughter of the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General Gladwyn Jebb.

From 1966 to 1975 Thomas was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, as an ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, of Notting Hill in Greater London in letters patent dated 16 June 1981. He has written pro-European political works, as well as histories. He is also the author of three novels.

Thomas's The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 "begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil, twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation," according to the summary on the book jacket.

Thomas should not be confused with two other historical writers: W. Hugh Thomas writes about Nazi Germany and Hugh M. Thomas is an American who writes on English history.

Reviews

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of how WWII morphed into the Cold War so is very political in nature. It's pretty heavy going at times but it does throw light on why the USA became so 'Commie' paranoid in the 1950s, because the Comintern spent huge effort and resources infiltrating political movements, trade unions and governments all over Europe, as well as running disinformation campaigns on a huge scale. It also discusses the West's responses to this silent infiltration the creation of NATO and the UN, or at least the germs of those concepts (from memory – it's a while since I read it).
The book was very extensively researched. It has 761 pages of narrative, 28 pages of appendices, 115 pages of notes and a further 45 pages of index!

If you're interested in how and why politics and conflicts in the second half of the 20th century developed, this goes a long way to explaining it.

[gargamelscat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This deserves a better rating than the one garnered by others on this site.

OK it won't win awards for style (or organisation, the forward references are a bit hard to take) but it does get across the ruthless and implacable nature of the Soviet regime and the delusions and incapacity of the West's leaders for recognizing and meeting that nature.

Very interesting in spots. I would like to see this period (1945-1946) done by a decent writer with access to the Soviet archives as by its timing it is unavoidably one-sided in this regard.

At least the Cold War had a happy ending.

[V. Subhash · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely well-documented book on the origins of the bleeding-without-fighting war. In one place however Thomas goes off track and pulls a conspiracy theory on the reader. The author claims the early MIG aircraft engines were based on original Rolls Royce designs. In the references section, this bull is filed as "private information." The author is also unable to come to terms with the fact that leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill had sought Stalin's help to defeat Hitler. Like a typical Western historian, Thomas quotes some racist views Churchill had about Slavic people in a vain attempt to exorcise historical fact.