To the Editor:

Since Henry Fairlie in “Anti-Americanism at Home and Abroad” [December 1975] quotes me, may I offer just one additional point to his article? This is that the American revisionist historians who charge that the United States and not Stalin and Molotov started the cold war have made little impression in Britain. The reason is simply that in 1945, and for a few years after, Britain (however unjustifiably) was still one of the Big Three, engaged in peacemaking and postwar policy; and the idea that Britain, at the side of the United States, was actively planning an anti-Soviet cold-war policy seems absurd. I can remember, after all, how British troops advancing from Italy to meet the Red Army in Austria tried eagerly to fraternize, only to be met with fixed bayonets; and I recall hearing tales from British officers acting as interpreters at the 1945 Potsdam Conference how, to their astonishment, they were met by absolute Soviet rigidity and icy hostility from the first preliminary conversations about the placing of the tables to the end of the conference.

T. R. Fyvel
London, England

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To the Editor:

Henry Fairlie’s excellent article on anti-Americanism mentions that the English have always been suspicious of foreigners because “after all, ‘God is an Englishman.’ . . . How else could one imagine God—as a Spaniard?” Amusingly enough, Emperor Charles V did just that: it seems he instructed his successor to learn four languages, among them Spanish, giving as a reason that “with God, one speaks Spanish.”

Erwin D. Adler
New York City

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