 Mankind had struggled for six long years in the black night of a savage global war. Now the guns were silent. Bombs had ceased to rain down from the skies. The light of peace returned to the world. A world devastated by war with millions of death. For other millions of war-benumbed people who lived on in the ruins, there was a bleak and uncertain future. The most monstrous of the aggressors, who had been his own people's greatest enemy, was no more, dead by his own murderous hand. Carrying to a fiery grave his dream of an all-conquering new order built to last a thousand years. The last echoes of triumphant zig-hiles had died amidst the stark silence of devastation. The Caesar demigod of the fascists was no more. Killed by his own outraged people. The last echoes of triumphant choruses of duche-duche also had died amidst war's desolate end. The Japanese military war government was no more. Those who had been responsible for the carnage and destruction were tried and executed as war criminals. The Japanese militarists' dream of conquest of all Asia was as dead as the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aggressors had launched and lost their war for world conquest. Our military forces had fought and won a war, not for conquest, but for the freedom and dignity of man. Here was the American soldier in victory. The soldier the aggressors had said was no soldier, the man who was not expected to fight. Yet here he was, returning in triumph to his homeland, to his country. The country the aggressors had declared incapable of successfully waging a major war. The country which now emerged from the greatest of all wars as the most powerful nation on earth. For the second time in 28 years the United States had fought a war against the ruthless forces of aggression that had threatened to destroy the ideals and principles of democracy. Those principles upon which the United States was founded, and upon which it continues to exist, its citizens pursuing their chosen way of life. But no war is without its tragic cost, to the victor as well as to the vanquished. The full cost of World War II can never be measured. A war involving 57 sovereign nations in a cataclysm of such magnitude that no accurate appraisal can be made of the toll in ruined lives, blasted hopes, vanished resources and treasure. For the United States, at war's end, one out of every 500 Americans alive at the beginning had been listed as killed or missing in action. For the aggressors, the price was far higher. One out of every 200 Japanese, one out of every 150 Italians, and for Germany, one out of every 25. A lesson in vital statistics for those who blindly follow ambitious dictators into rash adventures of conquest against men who would rather fight and if need be die than become the vassals of a totalitarian police state in which the individual belongs to the state and not the state to the free citizen. In World War II, we fought for democracy. Having emerged victorious, we sought to bring justice and freedom to our former enemies. To lead the peoples of defeated nations into a better life than they had known under the iron hand of their former masters. The dictators we and our allies had so recently destroyed. It was an immense task and we began by demonstrating through the behavior of our armies of occupation. And although we were there by right of victory, our reason for remaining was not for conquest. We had met the immense challenge of global war and achieved complete victory. Now we faced the challenge of ensuring the peace. That was General Douglas MacArthur's big job in Japan. He was to prove his genius in applying the arts of peace as resolutely as he had pursued the arts of war. The economy of a nation of more than 70 million people had been strained to the breaking point by years of war and then shattered completely by utter defeat. Thousands were homeless. Hunger and despair stalked the land. It would now be necessary to overcome 2,000 years of feudal tradition centuries in which the Japanese people had bowed severely to their masters and their emperor. Ritual and religious mystique were woven into their daily lives. The Shinto religion and its priests had been used by the militarists to instill a war-like spirit in its followers. At the behest of General MacArthur, the emperor now publicly told his people that he was no god, no divine being, but a purely human leader. The formerly war-like Shinto religion was divorced from the militaristic rituals and exercises, becoming merely one of many religions from among which every Japanese was free to choose. In post-war Japan, political parties now sought the support of the Japanese people. Women were given the right to vote in the democratically free elections held throughout the country. School children began to learn that the world was larger than the islands of Japan and that the nations the warlords of yesterday had sought to conquer were today prepared to be friends. Seldom in history had a victor been so magnanimous, had step by step substituted democratic sense for totalitarian nonsense, tolerance for hate, hope for despair. The brilliant feudal land system was broken up. The Japanese farmer now had an opportunity to own the land he tilled. For the first time there was freedom of the press. A new and brighter sun had risen over the land of the rising sun. A vital and more responsible nation was emerging from the Holocaust of war. In Germany, the old Teutonic pagan gods of war resurrected by Hitler from the dark forests of Teutonic mythology were laid to rest once more. Those who had perpetrated the war and who survived were brought before an international bar of justice at Nuremberg, charged in the words of one prosecutor with crimes against the conscience of mankind. They had set in motion a war which killed in battle more than 15 million men, plus an unknown and unknowable number of non-combatant civilians. The chief Nazis were condemned by their own words. Documents written in their own hand showed them guilty. Guilty of genocide, the deliberate Nazi attempt to destroy whole nations and races, races the Nazis considered inferior peoples. More than 12 million men, women and children scientifically exterminated. More than 7 million taken into the slavery of forced labor. Guilty too of the moral perversion of the German people. Said defendant Baldofont Shiroch, leader of the Hitler Youth, it is my fault that I educated German youth for a man who committed murders millionfold. Such was the nature of the court's proceedings that not one of the defendants challenged the tribunal's fairness or authority. Victory had been won, and the major criminals brought to judgment by their intended victims. And now what? The victor was now confronted with the task of rehabilitating a nation mauled, blasted and stunned by a war of conquest that had backfired to the ruin of its instigators. Through their discredited leaders, they had brought the roof of their Valhalla crashing down upon their own heads. But we were left with the debris. Whole towns and cities were in ruins. We had the responsibility of providing the people with food to sustain them through post-war re-adjustment. We were responsible for the restoration and maintenance of civil order. Public health was assured so that the scourge of war would not be followed by the scourge of disease. Responsible democratic local, state and national government was established and made to function. Now the German people could choose their leaders through free elections. Gone was the era of the stormtrooper, the suppression of civil and human liberties, the endless propaganda and the mad dreams of fanatical leaders. The German people were quick to respond to their new freedom. With the aid and guidance of their one-time enemies, Germany began its amazing recovery. Insignificant contrast was the bleak atmosphere of Russian-occupied Berlin. Here democracy and freedom were not at work. Here was the bleak face of another kind of totalitarianism, the communist variety. Here the iron hand of Soviet Russia ruled a conquered people. World War II had seen the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military power second only to the United States. Her contributions to the defeat of Nazism and fascism, once she had been attacked by the Nazi aggressor, were prodigious. But Russia too was a totalitarian power and she was behaving like one. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became Soviet controlled satellites. So did Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. These acts of annexation were not the result of free choice. The people accepted what was told to them. There was no voice of opposition. In Manchuria, by agreement with Russia, Soviet troops that had entered to liberate Manchuria from the Japanese were replaced by a Chinese communist People's Army, which would soon start a drive southward to conquer all China and bring it under communist rule. In Korea, newly liberated from Japan, a totalitarian communist regime assumed tight control over the northern portion of the country. The return of French military forces to Indochina was met by communist directed guerrilla warfare. In Greece, communist insurgents had begun open civil warfare for control of the country. Throughout the world, the designs of the new aggressor were becoming very clear. The West was warned of this growing danger by one of its great wartime leaders, Winston Churchill, at Bolton, Missouri in 1946, he said. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, our own Secretary of State, Winston Churchill, proposed his program for combating the growing threat to Western Europe's economic stability. Within its own resources, Europe cannot achieve, within a reasonable time, economic stability. The solution would be much easier, of course, if all the nations of Europe were cooperating. But they are not. Far from cooperating, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, if all the nations of Europe were cooperating, but they are not. Far from cooperating, the Soviet Union and the Communist Party have proclaimed their determined opposition to a plan for European economic recovery. Economic distress is to be employed to further political ends. There are many who accept the picture that I have just drawn, but who raise a further question. Why must the United States carry so great a load in helping Europe? The answer is simple. The United States is the only country in the world today which has the economic power and productivity to furnish the needed decisions. The 6th and 8th billion proposed for the first 15 months is less than a single month's charge of the war. To be quite clear, this unprecedented endeavor of the New World to help the old is neither sure nor easy. It is a calculated risk. It is a difficult program. And you know far better than I do, the political difficulties involved in this program. But there's no doubt, whatever in my mind, that if we decide to do this thing, we can do it successfully. His program became known as the Marshall Plan, which provided vast economic aid to the devastated countries. Soviet Russia's growing truculence in her dealings with the free world were danger signs which could not be ignored. Another great wartime leader, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, assumed command of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which became a formidable alliance of 15 free nations joining their military forces for the first time in peace in an effort to prevent war which in the past had been their first call to unity. Since the end of hostilities, West Berlin had become an island in a communist sea. General Lucius D. Clay, our military governor in West Berlin, sent a message to Washington on March 5th, 1948, stating that, for many months, I have felt and held that war was unlikely. Within the last few weeks I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude, which I cannot define, but which gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness. Three weeks later, the world discovered what General Clay had sensed. Suddenly, on the 1st of April, 1948, all traffic into West Berlin was stopped by communist border guards. Not a truck or train carrying supplies to the beleaguered citizens of West Berlin was allowed to cross Soviet-controlled East Germany. It was the beginning of the Berlin blockade. With the Soviets attempting to starve the people of West Berlin into submission, American, British, and French Air Forces immediately began an unprecedented airlift to save the city. The Allies were determined to provide the citizens of West Berlin with food and supplies needed to sustain life. For 20 months, from April 1948 to September 1949, more than 2 million tons of supplies were airlifted into West Berlin. This around-of-the-clock airborne operation kept West Berlin alive and caused the communists to abandon their attempt to starve the city. The determination shown by the United States and our Allies in Berlin caused the Soviets to call off the blockade. Some 2 million people had been saved from communist tyranny. But we had little time in which to congratulate ourselves, for in the same month that saw the lifting of the Berlin blockade, came news that the Soviet Union had exploded her first atomic bomb. The military strength of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still existed largely on paper. The American divisions in West Germany were scattered in occupational and constabulary duties, as were our forces in Japan. And it was also in mid-1949 that the last American troops were withdrawn from an almost forgotten place called Korea, our entire active army stood at 658,000 men. A noted philosopher once said that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We were learning that lesson fast, but there was still a lot more to learn. In the next episode of this special Big Picture series, we will see what happened a few months after the events you've just witnessed on that then little-known Asian peninsula of Korea.