Brave New World
Chapter 2 (Part 2 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Empires in Retreat
Command of the U.S. Pacific fleet was turned over to Admiral Chester
W. Nimitz on December 31, 1941, and he immediately unleashed his three
aircraft carriers on whatever Japanese targets could be attacked with
good prospects for success. In April, sixteen long-range bombers took
off from the deck of the carrier
Hornet for a raid on Tokyo. These measures imposed a level of
caution on the Japanese in how widely they might disperse their
military forces without exposure to counter-attack. Everything up to
this point had gone their way. MacArthur, whose air support had been
destroyed at the very beginning, was forced to conduct a courageous
but hopeless battle for survival on the island of Corregidor. Attempts
were made to send supplies to MacArthur but most ended up on the ocean
floor. Dwight Eisenhower, appointed deputy chief in the War Plans
Division, supported General George C. Marshall's conclusion that the
Philippines could not be saved, and directed that the U.S. build-up
take place in Australia, which was certain to become the next target
for Japanese aggression. Australia was particularly vulnerable because
most of the Australian armed forces were fighting alongside the
British against Rommel in the Middle East.
Late in February, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to move his command to
Australia. He barely made it. Threatened the entire way with discovery
by Japanese air or naval forces, MacArthur made the journey from
Corregidor to Mindanao by PT boat, then by B-17 bomber to a small
airfield some fifty miles from Darwin and then on to Melbourne. The
Australians recognized their predicament and immediately yielded to
U.S. military direction. Singapore had already fallen to the Japanese
in mid-February, and Japanese bombers were conducting regular missions
against the northern port city of Darwin. One consequence was that the
combined British-Dutch-U.S. fleet was forced to operate from the
southern end of Java and could do little to slow the Japanese advance.
The low point was reached late in February, when the main ships of
this fleet were sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of the Java
Sea. Java itself then fell to the Japanese on March 9. Faced with the
imminent threat of invasion, Australian authorities recalled their
three Australian divisions in April, giving MacArthur at least some
troops with which to defend Australia. Corregidor fell on May 6 and
all formal resistance in the Philippines ended early in June. The door
now seemed wide open for a Japanese assault on Australia. Remarkably,
events then suddenly turned in favor of the Allied forces.
The U.S. Pacific fleet next met the Japanese in the Coral Sea,
between New Guinea and northern Australia, and for the first time
prevented the Japanese from achieving their invasion objective, the
capture of Port Moresby on the eastern tip of New Guinea. A decisive
blow was delivered by dive-bombers from the aircraft carriers Lexington
and Yorktown, whose pilots inadvertently came upon the
Japanese carrier Shoho and sent the ship to the bottom in only
minutes. A second carrier, the Ryukaku, was also sunk by a
U.S. bomber squadron. A third Japanese carrier, the Shokaku,
suffered significant damage in a later attack and had to retire from
the battle. In return, Japanese planes torpedoed the Lexington
(which eventually sunk) and set fire to the Yorktown. Although
the Lexington was lost, the Japanese force withdrew on May 8
to its base on the island of Rabaul for repairs, giving the Allies an
important morale boost. Japan's four largest carriers and most of the
rest of its fleet were at the same time steaming toward Midway Island,
the capture of which would provide a staging area for an eventual
invasion of the Hawaiian Islands. In the process, Yamamoto hoped to
engage and destroy the remnants of the U.S. Pacific fleet.
The Yorktown had made its way back to Pearl Harbor and been
immediately repaired, giving the U.S. commander, Rear Admiral Raymond
Spruance, a force spearheaded by three carriers. As a diversionary
tactic, a Japanese force attacked U.S. positions in the Aleutian
Islands on June 3 and landed troops on two undefended islands. The
Japanese landing force approaching Midway was discovered on June 3 and
two of the four Japanese carriers were sighted the following morning.
While over one hundred planes dispatched from the four Japanese
carriers bombed and strafed the Midway installations (suffering losses
of one-third), all three U.S. carriers had their full complement of
planes in the air in search of the Japanese fleet. The first groups to
locate the Japanese carriers were torpedo-bombers. Arriving without
fighter escort they were shot from the sky without damage to the enemy
fleet. Before the Japanese fighters could regroup, however, a new
force of U.S. dive-bombers appeared. The carrier Akagi was hit
and engulfed in flames. Moments later a second carrier, Kaga,
exploded. Both carriers were abandoned and sunk. Their attackers had
come from the U.S. carrier Enterprise. A third carrier, Soryu,
was then hit by dive-bombers from the Yorktown (which the
Japanese thought was still under repair at Pearl Harbor) and then
torpedoed by a U.S. submarine. The Japanese commander, Admiral Chuichi
Nagumo, retaliated with his remaining carrier, sending its planes
against the Yorktown, which was severely damaged and had to be
abandoned, later to be torpedoed and finally sunk by a Japanese
submarine. Planes from the Enterprise located the fourth
Japanese carrier and sent it as well to the bottom. The next day,
Yamamoto ordered the remainder of the fleet and invasion force to
withdraw. The U.S. Navy had gained for MacArthur and the Australians
the precious element of additional time to construct defenses and
train new troops. MacArthur now moved his headquarters to Brisbane, on
the northeastern coast, determined to go on the offensive as soon as
an opportunity arose.
The next Japanese objective was Port Moresby, and their base on
Rabaul was being expanded to accommodate a new invasion fleet. Among
the U.S. commanders, Admiral Ernest King and General Douglas MacArthur
were convinced that control of the island of Guadalcanal was essential
to an effective Allied response. Reconnaissance in July indicated the
Japanese were constructing a new airfield on Guadalcanal. MacArthur
countered by dispatching a force of 16,000 U.S. Marines to take the
island, and they were put ashore on August 7 to drive off the Japanese
from the airfield construction. Two days later, a strong Japanese
naval force surprised the Allied fleet north of Guadalcanal, sinking
four large cruisers and one destroyer before returning to Rabaul. On
the island, the Marines secured control over the airfield and started
work on its completion. By mid-month, the first fighter planes
arrived, followed by ships laden with ammunition and provisions. The
Japanese reinforced their own force on Guadalcanal in mid-August with
another 800 men, all of whom were killed just days later in a battle
with U.S. Marines. Japanese and U.S. naval forces engaged one another
well into the Fall months with significant losses inflicted on each
other's fleets. Neither force was effective in preventing the landing
of reinforcements on the island, and by mid-October, the Japanese air
and naval forces were imposing heavy losses on the U.S. force trying
to keep Guadalcanal supplied. At this crucial juncture, Vice Admiral
William Halsey was given overall command of U.S. Naval forces in the
South Pacific, and the force under his command enlarged. Halsey, as
well as the Japanese, had at their disposal significant numbers of
surface ships and mobile air power. Each side also made some use of
submarines. They would soon engage in a number of battles that would
seal the fate of the Japanese.
On the other side of the world, the Battle of the Atlantic was of a
very different sort. Within days after U.S. entry into the war, German
submarines initiated what amounted to unopposed attacks on shipping
directly off the Atlantic coast. So little preparation had been
undertaken for the protection of shipping in the coastal waters that
only eight German U-boats were sunk during the first six months of
this stage of the Atlantic war; in fact, only twenty-one U-boats were
sunk by all Allied forces. In the meantime, German shipyards were
turning out ten new U-boats a month (although replacing experienced
crews and officers was a far more difficult task). Despite heavy
losses of merchant vessels to the U-boats, the U.S. and Canadian
fleets were under enormous pressure to keep the supply lines to
Britain open. The British, in turn, were protecting convoys destined
for the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel. Beginning in October,
the U.S. and British ships carried not only ammunition and weapons to
the Soviets, but planes and tanks as well.
Despite U.S. and British assistance, the Soviet forces seemed on the
verge of defeat. Leningrad was under constant bombardment, Kiev had
fallen and German troops were advancing on Moscow. At the outskirts of
Moscow, however, the Soviet retreat ended. The weather again turned
against the Germans. Heavy rains converted the countryside into a sea
of mud, impeding German efforts to bring up supplies. Although the
German offensives continued throughout November all along the front
from the Baltic to the Crimea, by December they were in slow retreat
from their approach to Leningrad. Half their panzer force was lost in
a desperate attempt to reach Moscow. Temperatures in the northern
theatre fell to well below zero, and all along the front the Germans
were forced to disengage. General Guderian now felt the German cause
in the East was lost.
On December 6 of 1941 the Soviets counterattacked with everything
they had. Some 100 divisions, equipped to fight in winter conditions,
advanced along a 200-mile front. Hitler removed Guderian, then
Rundstedt and every general who lost ground to the Soviet troops,
finally taking personal control of the army. In retreat, the German
troops scorched the earth and committed mass murders. Hitler now
ordered them to hold their positions at all costs. The Soviet thrusts
were, however, penetrating the German front lines and the retreat
continued despite Hitler's demands. Leningrad was reinforced in
January and its most vulnerable civilian population evacuated. By the
end of February, German casualties climbed to over one million, with
over two hundred thousand killed. Despite the arrival of
reinforcements (largely Italian, Rumanian and Hungarian troops), the
German armies no longer possessed the resources to do more than carry
out limited actions against the more numerous and heavily armed
Soviets. The Germans held on until Spring, when the rains brought a
temporary calm and allowed them to regroup for a concentrated push
toward the oil reserves in the Caucasus region.
The Spring of 1942 also brought on a renewed German offensive in
North Africa, where Rommel's Afrika Korps again threatened the British
positions in Egypt. If Egypt could be taken, this would open up the
possibility of a southern advance on the Caucasus. What Rommel now
needed most were supplies and reinforcements. The means to get them
through had been temporarily accomplished in late 1941 with the
destruction of Britain's fleet then based at Malta. The U.S. entry
into the war allowed a strengthening of the Malta defenses with new
Spitfires, and once again Rommel lost his avenue of supply. As a
result, Rommel's advance ended at El Alamein, where on July 2 the
Afrika Korps was checked by British forces under General Claude
Auchinleck. At Churchill's strong urging, Roosevelt now agreed to
commit U.S. troops to the North African campaign.
For the moment, however, the center of U.S. military action remained
the Pacific. Roosevelt ordered that Guadalcanal be strengthened and
held. Late in October, a Japanese force led by four aircraft carriers
and five battleships approached in anticipation of victory by the
reinforced ground troops. Two U.S. carriers and their escorts were in
pursuit. Each discovered the other's existence at about the same time,
although planes from the Japanese carriers struck first, attacking and
heavily damaging the carrier Hornet (which had to be abandoned
and was later sunk by Japanese destroyers). Dive-bombers from the Hornet
responded with similar damage to the carrier Shokaku. A second
Japanese carrier, the Zuiho, was also hit and put out of
action. The U.S. carrier Enterprise also received several hits
and had to withdraw. Meanwhile, the Japanese were able to intensify
their build-up on Guadalcanal. From the evening of November 12, when a
U.S. force of cruisers and destroyers engaged a somewhat more powerful
Japanese force to prevent it from shelling the U.S. Marines on the
island, through November 14, the naval battle raged on. When the
Japanese battleship Kirishima was heavily damaged, the
remainder of the strike force withdrew -- for good -- from the fight.
Now that air and naval superiority had shifted to the Allied forces,
the Japanese high command could either dig in for a fight to the death
or pull out; unlike in much of the fighting to come, they elected to
do the latter. The U.S. and Japanese forces had each lost around
twenty-five destroyers, cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers.
These were losses the U.S. was already in the process of overcoming
with new and more powerful ships. The Japanese material losses were
almost permanent. The losses in men to this point were by standards of
the Soviet-German engagements remarkably low. German and Soviet forces
repeatedly engaged in battles where the objective seemed far less the
conquest of territory than the annihilation of the other side.
As the battles came and went across Russia, the Ukraine, the Balkans
and North Africa, the comparative weaknesses of the German military
machine were exposed. Not only were the Germans now fighting against
Soviet armies and partisans along a thousand mile eastern front and
against the British in Northern Africa, military objectives were
wholly at the mercy of the social engineering practiced by the Nazi
regime. Essential materials were systematically diverted to the Nazi
programs of slave labor and human extermination. At the same time, the
British and Soviet armies were being strengthened with well-trained
reserve troops and by materials from the United States. By the middle
of 1942, the Allies were prepared to go on the offensive. In August,
Churchill appointed General Harold Alexander Commander in Chief of the
Middle East forces. General Bernard Montgomery took command of the
Eighth Army. They soon demonstrated that a permanent shift in
initiative had occurred. Rommel's eastward advance across northern
Africa was brought to a halt on September 3; the German field marshal
was recalled by Hitler for a rest. In his absence, the British opened
an all-out offensive, driving the Afrika Korps back across northern
Africa. Rommel's return did little more than delay defeat. The British
now commanded full control of the Mediterranean and the skies, as well
as having a much larger and better provisioned army.
On November 7, the Allied force commanded by Dwight D. Eisenhower
landed troops in North Africa and began its advance through
French-held Morocco and Algiers. The French troops at first resisted
but a cease-fire was negotiated with Admiral Jean Darlan and the
fighting ended on the 10th. Fresh German troops were airlifted across
the Mediterranean to Tunisia, where they established strong defensive
positions and waited for the Allied armies to advance. Hitler then
ordered the occupation of the southern half of France and instructed
his generals to take control of the surviving French fleet at Toulon.
The first fighting between U.S. and German ground forces occurred on
the 17th of November, some fifty miles west of Tunis. To the east, the
Germans were being pushed toward Tunisia by the British Eighth Army.
By the 20th of November, Montgomery liberated Tobruk and
Benghazi. Heavy rains then intervened, halting the Allied pursuit and
allowing the Germans time to bring in additional reinforcements and
fighter planes. Despite strong resistance, ridding North Africa of
German and Italian troops would take only a few more months. One phase
of the war was finally coming to an end.
On the morning of November 19, in the midst of a severe snowstorm,
Soviet armored divisions attacked in force through the Rumanian and
German positions near Stalingrad. Hitler refused to allow his army to
pull back, even to regroup. As a result, by the 22nd of November the
two Soviet groups met, surrounding the Germans and leaving them with
the option of fighting to the last man or surrendering to a vengeful
enemy. A relief force advancing from the south got within thirty miles
of Stalingrad, but no closer. The Rumanian and Italian positions
collapsed. The German relief column pulled back, abandoning not only
the Sixth Army at Stalingrad but their thrust toward the Caucasus oil
fields as well. The Sixth Army held on until the end of January in
1943, losing 200,000 men before finally surrendering to the Soviets.
Many more would die in Soviet prison camps.
Thoughts Of Peace Run Head First Into An Iron Curtain
Already in late 1942, the
Brave New World was taking shape. Following each Soviet
victory over the Germans came Soviet occupation and the establishment
of Stalinist-controlled provisional governments. With every day the
United States and Britain delayed bringing the ground war directly to
Germany, the greater the amount of territory destined to come under
Stalin's control at the end of the fighting. The threat to Britain of
a German invasion had disappeared. Churchill was now confident that
Germany and Italy would be defeated. What occupied his strategic
thinking was how best to strengthen Britain's hold on its own sagging
empire. The foreign policy interests of the U.S. were, as has already
been indicated, directed toward a total dismantling of all empires
(its own excepted). At a press conference held early in January of
1943, Roosevelt offered the first insights into his own thinking,
announcing the primary U.S. objective as that of bringing the Axis
governments down in the wake of military defeat:
The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power
means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean
the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but
it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries
which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.[26]
The time had finally come to make the world save for democracy.
Roosevelt had in June of 1942 provided the Soviet foreign minister,
Molotov, with the U.S. blueprint for a postwar restructuring of the
global hegemony. The Soviets were staking claims to Polish, Finnish
and Rumanian territory, as well as to the Baltic states. After the
signing of a Lend-Lease agreement with the Soviets, Secretary of State
Cordell Hull suggested to Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Ambassador, that
"an infinite number of questions would come up at the end of
the war, some of which might negate many matters of supposed
importance and even urgency"[27] then on the minds of the
Allied leaders. What Hull had on his mind was the postwar creation of
"an international security organization"[28] with
the power to enforce global peace. On July 23, Hull went on national
radio to drive home the importance of such a step to the postwar
balance of power:
Nationalism, run riot between the last war and this war,
defeated all attempts to carry out indispensable measures of
international economic and political action, encouraged and
facilitated the rise of dictators, and drove the world straight
toward the present war.[29]
Not only would the nations of the world need to come together for
mutual protection, governments had to come to terms with their
protectionist instincts. Prolonged peace and true prosperity, Hull was
convinced, required a heavy dose of free trade and cooperation between
governments. Hull was also quick to recognize that governments would
have to be pressured into adopting monetary and fiscal policies
designed to ensure stable exchange rates for national currencies. The
difficulty would be to impose stiff budgetary discipline on
spendthrift politicians. In an effort to move the discussion beyond
the conceptual stage, Hull took the first tentative step by
establishing an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy (key
members coming from the Council on Foreign Relations). Early in 1942
the Allied High Command also appointed a Joint Intelligence Board
that, although charged with developing an integrated strategy for the
war effort, in important respects paralleled the effort undertaken by
Hull. The importance of this group's work is summarized by Adolf
Berle, who participated and later wrote that they ended up "working
on a proposed international stabilization fund and bank,"
institutions he believed represented "a revolution in
international finance."[30] There was on the horizon, Berle
foresaw, another very different sort of revolution:
[T]here will be a European revolution ... as soon as the
lid is taken off. The revolution will either be on Stalinist lines
or it will be along liberal and individualist lines, depending on
how bluntly the problem is stated. Roughly speaking, most of the
west of Europe, like the United States and Britain, propose a
revolution which shall increase the stature of individuals; the
Communist position, like the Nazi position, submerges them.
Likewise, there will be an Asiatic revolution which will probably
be on more nationalistic lines. There, political freedom is still
the main issue.[31]
Much the same sense of the future was also emerging out of the War
and Peace Studies Project undertaken directly by the Council on
Foreign Relations. Peace in Europe would depend, the consensus opinion
argued, on the ability of the U.S. and Britain to keep the Eastern
European territories out of Stalinist control or domination -- and
upon bringing a stable and economically reinvigorated German state
within an alliance of individualist societies. Marxist historians
generally share the view expressed in 1977 by Laurence Shoup and
William Minter that "[t]he War and Peace Studies groups, in
collaboration with the American government, worked out an
imperialistic conception of the national interest and war aims of the
United States" which also "involved a conscious attempt to
organize and control a global empire."[32] The historical
record suggests, however, that CFR staffers and members were at
significant odds with the professional foreign service establishment;
and, in the minds of some department officers CFR members seemed
intent on supplanting the department. Sumner Welles, Under Secretary
of State and a CFR member, was increasingly acting without consulting
with Cordell Hull, going directly to Roosevelt or to the public with
his proposals. These tensions would eventually result in the fall of
Welles and the separation of direct CFR participation from State
Department discussions.
Clear to almost all was that the U.S. would emerge from the Second
World War as the world's dominant economic and military power. Even
more than during the First World War, large-scale production of war
goods was accelerating the development and installation of
state-of-the-art capital equipment and a seemingly endless list of new
processes and products. The infrastructure was quickly coming into
place that would allow the U.S. to become the leading exporter of
manufactured goods as well as agricultural products. The great
mistakes of the peace of 1919 -- the planners argued -- had been to
allow global purchasing power to disappear, to attempt to survive
economically behind protective barriers and to bankrupt military
preparedness in favor of isolationism. In anticipation of the new
global economy, the U.S. would require a strong military presence
around the globe, charged with maintaining political stability and
protecting the sovereignty of U.S. trading partners. Cordell Hull,
taking a far more transnational view, pressed hard the idea of
assigning the role of global enforcer of the peace to an international
agency. "Even then," Hull felt, "the
chances are only about one to two or three that a sound peace can be
carried to fruition."[34]
In January of 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca to
discuss the future conduct of the war; both leaders were at the moment
far too absorbed with the North African campaign and the Atlantic war
against the U-boats to give detailed thought to postwar concerns.
Churchill, as one would expect, remained firm in his determination to
keep the empire of Britain intact; moreover, although Churchill viewed
with great chagrin the fait accompli presented by the advance of
Soviet troops into German-occupied territory, he also understood that
territory was the price demanded by Stalin for carrying the
continental war against Germany. Back in Washington, the strategic
planning for U.S. involvement in postwar rebuilding continued, and
Hull moved to distance the State Department from CFR domination. He
appointed Harley Notter (a strong opponent of CFR interference) Chief
of a new Division of Political Studies. Leroy Steinbower assumed a
similar role over the Division of Economic Studies. Both individuals
reported to Hull through Hull's special assistant (Russian-born
economist and, ironically, a CFR member), Leo Pasvolsky. Dean Acheson
describes Pasvolsky as "Hull's principal speech writer"
and Hull's speeches as "dissertation[s] on the benefits of
unhampered international trade and the true road to it through
agreements reducing tariffs."[34] Out of these committees
came proposals for an international bill of rights, a war crimes
commission, trusteeships in place of colonial rule and what would
become the United Nations. Two ideas discussed but rejected by Hull
were "the principle of automatic membership and the idea for
a Security Council whose members would represent the entire world
instead of particular states."[35]
The picture emerging of the postwar socio-political environment was
one weighed down heavily by the same old relativistic position that
might makes right, but with the center of power moving away
from Europe's nation-states. What few in the West foresaw was the
widespread, almost immediate demand for sovereignty on the part of so
many groups of people who had suffered external domination. Nor was
there sufficient awareness of the escalating acceptance of Marxist
revolutionary doctrine by ethnic nationalists whose experiences under
imperial or colonial rule condemned market (to them, multinational
corporate) economies and multi-party political systems in their minds
as instruments of oppression and corruption.
In March of 1943, Anthony Eden arrived in Washington, D.C. for a
series of meetings with Roosevelt. Harry Hopkins, Cordell Hull and
Sumner Welles sat in as well. High on the list of Roosevelt's postwar
concerns was the perverse inclusion of China under Chiang Kai-shek as
an equal partner in an alliance with the U.S. and Britain. A year
later, Hull suggested to Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) "that
China has only a fifty-fifty chance to reestablish herself as a great
power" and doing so would require tremendous assistance from "the
other major Allies" or "the Chinese Government would
tend to dissolve."[36] In his memoirs (published before the
collapse of the Nationalist regime in 1949), Hull expressed his belief
that Chiang Kai-shek had been faithful to the vision set down by Sun
Yat-sen. In truth, the Chinese were drifting farther and farther from
whatever opportunity there had been to establish a republican form of
social democracy in Asia. U.S. military and financial assistance had
helped to forge a limited military response to the Japanese. Beneath
this veneer remained an impoverished people dominated by warlords,
landlords, corruption, ruthlessness and lawlessness. Not long after
the conference in Cairo, Roosevelt became so disillusioned with Chiang
Kai-shek that he suggested to General Stilwell that the U.S. "should
look for some other man or group of men to carry on."[37] In
China, however, there were few individuals in positions of power who
even nominally adhered to or understood the virtues of democratic
institutions. None of this was as yet apparent to Roosevelt in the
early months of 1943. Consistent with his desire to see the peoples of
Asia gain sovereignty over their own affairs, he proposed trusteeships
for Korea and Indo-China, with Manchuria and Formosa returned to
Chinese control.
Churchill favored a division of the globe into regional sphere's of
influence, dismissing as unworkable the U.S. State Department's
recommendations for a democratically structured international
organization to which national sovereignties would be subordinated.
Churchill, already pressed at home by political opponents, had been
working to impress upon his electorate the need to maintain realistic
expectations -- both for the time required to defeat the Axis powers
and for whatever dividends might accrue to Britain following the
realization of peace. A stable future demanded, Churchill stated, the
unification of all European states in a Council of Europe, "with
a High Court to adjust disputes, and with forces, armed forces,
national or international or both, held ready to impose these
decisions and prevent renewed aggression and the preparation of future
wars."[38] Churchill also promised his people an expansion of
social democracy and equality of opportunity, warning that Britain
could not "have a band of drones in our midst, whether they
come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy or the
ordinary type of pub-crawler."[39] He joined Hull in the
advocacy of free trade practices, called upon government to provide
scientific and technical assistance to farmers, opened the door for a
national health care system and called for an expansion of
publicly-funded education. "It is in our power,"
Churchill declared, "to secure equal opportunity for all."[40]
Never did he waiver, however, in his commitment to empire as the
channel by which British culture and the influence of the British form
of social democracy would continue and expand. Ironically, he failed
to use his wartime prestige to advance the full cause of individual
liberty by challenging his own people to end the monopolistic system
of land tenure that prevented the achievement of the very goals he
gave voice to. This, I believe, was his great political
miscalculation; had he been willing to attack what earlier in his life
he had identified as the mother of all monopolies, he would
have presented a realistic and effective alternative to the Labour
Party's program of industrial nationalization.
What Churchill counted on during the war was the continued loyalty of
the people who populated Britain's dominions. What he did not clearly
understand was that the war, while effectively uniting the empire for
one last time, also raised expectations among those doing the
fighting. Historian James Morris summarized just how widespread was
the participation of the dominions in the war:
More than 5 million fighting troops were raised by the
British Empire, and there was hardly a campaign in which imperial
troops did not play a part, sometimes a predominant part.
Australians and New Zealanders fought in North Africa, Italy, the
Far East, the Pacific. South Africans fought in North and East
Africa and Italy. Canadians provided half the front-line defense of
England in 1940, a quarter of the pilots of the RAF, and a sizeable
proportion of the invasion force that went back to the European
continent in 1943. Indians, forming the largest volunteer army in
history, fought almost everywhere, and volunteers from the remotest
and most insignificant of the imperial possessions ... somehow found
their way across the oceans to the British forces ...[41]
For the moment, at least, Churchill saw that the British empire
possessed sufficient strength to participate with the United States
and the Soviet Union as an equal partner in the formation of the
postwar structure. He advanced the idea of creating three regional
councils -- under the umbrella of a world council -- charged to deal
with any problems arising between member states. After some
reflection, Hull agreed to support this type of balance between
associations of peoples who shared common borders and participation in
an organization of global proportions. Roosevelt, on the other hand,
continued to naively cling to the idea that the U.S., Britain and
Russia could work together to police the postwar peace, with China
added as the representative Asian power. Now that French armed forces
were once more fighting against Germans and Italians, provision also
had to be made for the eventual return of France to the hegemony of
postwar power.
Roosevelt's plan to secure the peace included a proposal that would
have left all but the four great victorious powers disarmed.
Germany, Japan and Italy could certainly be prevented from rearmament
for a number of years. The question was whether any other nations
would voluntarily rely upon the Big Four to protect what they
perceived to be their national interests. At any rate, the issue was
made more complex by the fact that Eisenhower was rushing weapons and
ammunition to the French in Algiers in anticipation of the coming
invasion of southern Europe. One wonders how Roosevelt could imagine
that nations such as Australia, Norway, Finland or even Spain could be
cajoled into demilitarization -- or how he could ever have considered
Stalin as a potential partner in the pursuit of postwar global peace.
Henry Stimson, the war secretary, provides at least part of the
answer, observing at the time that Roosevelt "has an
impulsive nature and a mind which revolts against the dry facts
involved in logistics," characteristics which made Stimson "nervous
for fear of the effect of some sudden impulse on his part."[42]
George Kennan, who came to know Stalin well enough, writes that "[a]n
unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of
calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly
vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade."[43]
In the early months of U.S. involvement in the war, Roosevelt's
confidence in his ability to carry on diplomacy by personal
relationship was revealed to Churchill in a rather arrogant letter:
I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I
tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than
either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the
guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I
hope he will continue to do so.[44]
In fairness to Roosevelt, he was not the only high ranking U.S.
public official who mistakenly believed a rapprochement with Stalin
was possible. Churchill, as well as Roosevelt, was more than willing
to divert supplies and weapons to Soviet troops fighting Germans;
neither Allied leader was morally or politically ready to expose
British or U.S. forces to the kind of losses Hitler and Stalin
accepted without a second thought. Materials could always be replaced.
The individual, all important in the socio-political philosophies of
Churchill and Roosevelt, was wholly subordinate under totalitarianism
to the whim of the dictator. There is no need to recount the utter
contempt with which Hitler held any who resisted or failed to carry
out his orders. Stalin, outwardly more rational, not only imposed a
relentless tyranny on his subjects, but millions were slaughtered by
Germans because of his intransigence in the face of overwhelming facts
or logic. Khrushchev records, for example, that although warned of a
trap being set by the Germans for Soviet forces advancing from Kharkov
in May of 1942, Stalin refused to permit a change in strategy. The
result had been foreseen by Khrushchev, who made desperate but wholly
unsuccessful attempts to change Stalin's mind:
Catastrophe struck a few days later, exactly as we
expected. There was nothing we could do to avert it. Many generals,
colonels, junior officers, and troops perished. The staff of the
Fifty-seventh Army was wiped out completely. Almost nobody managed
to escape. The army had advanced deep into enemy territory, and when
our men were encircled, they didn't even have enough fuel to escape.
...
Naturally Stalin would never admit his mistake. ...For Stalin to
have agreed that we had been right when we halted the operation
would have meant admitting his own mistake. And that sort of
nobility was not for him. He would stop at nothing to avoid taking
the responsibility for something that had gone wrong.[45]
Fate had brought the Soviet Union into the war on the same side as
Britain and, later, the United States. In no sense did the Soviets
under the direction of the Stalinist regime become true allies of
Britain and the U.S. Realistically, Churchill could not afford to give
much thought in 1940 or 1941 to the problem of Soviet expansionism.
Roosevelt simply did not. George Kennan later charged there was "an
inexcusable body of ignorance about the nature of the Russian
Communist movement, about the history of its diplomacy, about what
happened in the purges, and about what had been going on in Poland and
the Baltic States."[46] Because of Stalin's failings,
however, the people of the Soviet republics were paying an enormous
price to prevent the Germans from carrying out their program of mass
genocide. They had long ago, burdened by Stalin's insatiable appetite
for power, relinquished any semblance of individual liberty. Whatever
ideals of the cooperative, classless society Marx offered in the
complex web of his writings were reduced to hollow rhetoric. Millions
had been murdered or starved to death during Stalin's drive to
industrialize and to rid the Soviet Union of private ownership of
anything substantive. Collectivization of agricultural production --
turning producers from serfs tied to a landed aristocracy into
comrades enslaved by the State -- assured that any remnant adherents
to individualism would survive only by going deep into the
intellectual underground, waiting for some opportunity to strike back.
Even during the height of the war, Stalin continued to display what
Khrushchev described as his "compulsive urge to arrest people
and have them eliminated."[47]
Khrushchev and many other Soviet leaders worried that the conduct of
the war against the Germans was proceeding in a way that promised to
leave the Soviet Union victorious on the battlefield but otherwise
prostrate. To his credit, Khrushchev acknowledged the crucial
difference British and U.S. material aid made to the Soviet war
effort. Argument persists among historians over whether the manpower,
equipment and supplies could simultaneously have been amassed for a
1943 channel crossing and an all-out push across the Netherlands and
France. As far as Churchill was concerned, "[i]t was clear
that the most effective aid which we could offer the Russians was the
speedy clearing of the Axis forces from North Africa and the stepping
up of the air war against Germany."[48] Stalin's frustration
might have been lessened had the U.S. and British air strikes also
included as targets the munitions factories in occupied France. With
the benefit of hindsight, one is able to safely conclude that Stalin's
territorial ambitions were hardly global in nature. Had the grabbing
of territory in the West been paramount in Stalin's thinking, the
delay of Allied landings on the Eurasian continent would have worked
to support long-run Soviet interests. Soviet representatives had, of
course, already raised questions about the postwar status of eastern
Poland, the Baltics and Finland (although Khrushchev would later write
that Finland offered the Soviets little strategic advantage and the
imposing task of subduing a troublesome and highly nationalistic
population) -- sensitive issues for Roosevelt, who would have to deal
with the political pressure generated by U.S. citizens of Polish,
Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian heritage.
By the Fall of 1943 victory for the Allied powers had become largely
a question of time. Sonar had turned the tide in the Atlantic against
the U-boats, which were now being destroyed in numbers that German
shipyards -- under constant attack themselves -- could not hope to
replace. Bombing raids by the British and U.S. air forces were turning
German cities into rubble. U.S., British and Free French
forces finally drove Rommel from North Africa in May. Sicily was
invaded and cleared of Fascist troops in July, and by the third week
of the month the last German offensive undertaken in the Soviet Union
-- "some 500,000 men with no less than seventeen panzer
divisions outfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks"[49] --
had ended in a devastating defeat and systematic withdrawal of the
German army. Fascism in Italy was also facing an unceremonious end.
Mussolini was removed from office by the Italian monarch and placed
under arrest. The Italian Fascist Party was outlawed and a new
government was formed under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who weeks later
signed an armistice with the Allied powers. In response to this new
threat, Hitler ordered his commander in Italy, Albert Kesselring, to
take possession of Rome and secure the alpine passes between Italy and
Germany. The Italian divisions in the north surrendered their
positions to the Germans and were demobilized. On the 13th of
September, German commandos managed to rescue Mussolini from
imprisonment, and with Hitler's support he set up a puppet regime in
the north. Taking the rest of Italy from the Germans would now become
an arduous task assigned to Field Marshal Montgomery coming up the
peninsula, along with other Allied forces soon to be landed at
Salerno. Stiff German resistance was to produce a considerable amount
of second-guessing within the U.S. and British political
establishments.
Significant disagreement existed between the U.S. and British
military strategists as well over the wisdom of invading Italy in the
first place. Nor did U.S. tacticians think much of Churchill's
proposal to attack Germany through the Balkans, the so-called soft
underbelly of Europe. While a Balkan operation would have imposed
limits on the future domination of Central Europe by the Soviets, the
mountainous terrain dictated a slow, costly advance against strong
defensive positions. And yet, that is exactly what the Allied forces
ran into when they moved up the Italian peninsula. As one U.S.
general, Albert C. Wedemeyer, later recalled of the decisions reached
at Casablanca and subsequent conferences:
Two of the keenest planners in the Joint War Plan
Committees ... maintained that the United States had been
outmaneuvered at all of the world conferences because British
political aims were clearly enunciated and their representatives in
uniform or in civilian government positions acted as one team in
support of the realization of those aims.[50]
Wedemeyer, for one, also recognized the postwar problems to be
expected as a consequence of the dominant role played by the Soviet
Union in the fighting against Germany. Wedemeyer recalled that prior
to the invasion of Italy, he warned a British counterpart that "we
should realize that the Russians might soon be moving westward and
could be well into Western Europe and the Balkans before we could get
there."[51] Failing to take advantage of Hitler's
concentration of forces against the Soviets was, Wedemeyer, argued,
both a political and a military blunder that ended up costing tens of
thousands of lives.
In November the Cairo meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt took
place, during which they were joined by Chiang Kai-shek. Churchill
continued to argue against a channel crossing and against diversion of
resources to Burma or the Chinese theatre. The British strategy
continued to emphasize control of the Mediterranean until sufficient
reserves could be built-up in Britain for the Channel crossing. Far in
advance of Roosevelt, Churchill and most British political and
military leaders already viewed Chiang Kai-shek as little more than
another opportunistic warlord and China as on the verge of prolonged
civil war. Arms and supplies diverted to the Chinese were more likely
to be used in the future to dislodge British, French and Dutch
imperial regimes from Southeast Asia than to fight the Japanese.
Despite British resistance, Roosevelt continued to press for a
stronger British commitment in Southeast Asia. Churchill later
recalled the negotiations:
We anticipated ... difficulties in reaching agreement
with our American friends over the ... operations from India.
...Some increase had been made in the air transport available for
the China route, but the full development of the air route and the
requirements for a land advance towards Central Burma had proved
utterly beyond our resources. It therefore seemed clear beyond
argument that the full [Burma] operation could not be attempted in
the winter of 1943-44.
I was sure that these conclusions would be very disappointing to
the Americans. The President and his circle still cherished
exaggerated ideas of the military power which China could exert if
given sufficient arms and equipment. They also feared unduly the
imminence of a Chinese collapse if support were not forthcoming.
...[52]
What Churchill had not considered was the sympathy gained for the
Chinese Nationalist cause by Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, who had spent the
previous six months on a fund-raising and speaking tour in the United
States. Neither Roosevelt nor his key advisers were in any sense
operating under an illusion that she or her husband offered an
immediate democratic future for the Chinese. Other than Roosevelt
himself, there were few who believed Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang
party could unite the Chinese people and prevent the outbreak of civil
war. Nonetheless, as Walter Lippmann observed that year, "with
Asia," there seemed to be among Americans an
inexplicable "active participation in all its remote, exotic
politics."[53] Roosevelt, who had every opportunity to keep
informed and to alter the U.S. position toward China accordingly, "preferred
not to look at the weaknesses of the regime to which he was committed,"
concluded Barbara Tuchman, "because he was intent on China as
the fourth corner of a stable world order."[54] Others were
certain China would play an altogether different role.
At Quebec, in August, U.S. and British representatives agreed to
establish a new Southeast Asia Command, with Louis Mountbatten
appointed Supreme Commander. That seemed to satisfy Chiang Kai-shek,
whose relationship with General Stilwell had become one of mutual
mistrust. Stilwell had little respect for either the Chinese leader's
military or political capabilities. For one thing, graft and
corruption permeated the Kuomintang bureaucracy. Stillwell was also
troubled by the widespread involvement in these activities of his own
troops and other Americans. "Smuggling of gold, sulfa drugs,
foreign currency, cigarettes, gems and PX supplies," notes
Barbara Tuchman, "was carried on by American Air Force, Army,
Red Cross and civilian personnel for an estimated take of over
$4,000,000 by the end of 1944."[55] As a result, Stilwell was
becoming increasingly sickened by the situation he faced in China. His
frustration at this juncture was all the more intense because
Roosevelt possessed what he saw as a "total misapprehension
of the character, intentions, authority and ability of Chiang Kai-shek."[56]
Here was a case where the military commander in the field had gained a
far more penetrating insight into the political situation of his
theatre of operations than the civilian authorities. To no avail,
George C. Marshall supported Stilwell's assessment. All that was
really expected of the Chinese was to prevent the Japanese from
mounting an invasion of India or reinforcing their island positions in
the Pacific. Finally, however, Roosevelt was beginning to realize that
China -- with or without Chiang Kai-shek -- was in a precarious state
and hardly dependable as a potential participant in the postwar
reconstruction. He nonetheless continued to devote considerable
attention to the Chinese leader's concerns. Stilwell, who made the
journey to Cairo and met privately with Roosevelt, recorded later that
the President seemed not to have been paying much attention. The
extent to which conditions in China were hidden from the general
public in the U.S. is suggested by a 1943 review given to the
publication of Chiang Kai-shek's wartime speeches:
A good long while from now, when time has blurred the
memory of its sorrows and sufferings, this war will almost certainly
be described by China's historians as a redeeming ordeal. When the
time comes for such a detached reckoning, China's historians will
also be ready to say that it was largely because of Chiang
Kai-shek's response to the emergency, or rather the emergencies,
because of his consistent display of honesty with the people and of
the same splendid obstinacy that distinguished Washington during the
dark years of the Revolution that the ghastly test of moral staying
power was regenerative and not lastingly destructive.[57]
Some of the truth was beginning to appear in the U.S. press and
causing unsettling questions to be raised. Stilwell was all too candid
with anyone who cared enough to listen to his views, although he
continued to see China as key to the overall campaign against the
Japanese. Analysts in the War Department were not so sure and now
recommended that vital resources go elsewhere.
In October, the Foreign Ministers of the U.S., Britain, the Soviet
Union and China met in Moscow. From this meeting came a declaration of
postwar unity and backing for a new international organization. After
Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill moved on to meet with Stalin in Tehran.
Churchill wanted badly to capture the islands of Rhodes and Leros in
the Aegean Sea, keys to absolute control of the air in the eastern
Mediterranean. U.S. strategists pressed hard to accelerate the
build-up for the Channel invasion force. Churchill would later write
that "Eisenhower and his Staff seemed unaware of what lay at
our finger-tips,"[58] although Hitler did and strengthened
the German air forces holding Crete and Rhodes.
The German decision to hotly contest Italy pressed upon Eisenhower
the decision not to divert crucial men and materials from the Italian
front. As a consequence, by late November German troops successfully
captured or forced the evacuation of the British troops from the
Aegean. Yet, when Churchill met with Roosevelt and Stalin he once
again argued his case for driving the Germans from these islands.
Stalin had no intentions of encouraging actions that might jeopardize
his strategic interests in the Balkans or Eastern Europe. Only
Roosevelt seemed to act with disinterest on questions of which
territories came under whose control as the war progressed. He was
highly encouraged by Stalin's commitment to enter the war against
Japan once Germany surrendered and agreed with Stalin that with the
war's end both the French and British empires ought to be dissolved.
The Tehran conference, then, represented a key turning point in
determining how the postwar global hegemony would look. War was
enabling the Soviet Union to systematically apply force to expand its
territorial borders at the expense of other peoples. The United States
was by some of Roosevelt's decisions making this possible. Realpolitik
and the prerogative of the victorious, had overcome principle as an
accepted basis for reaching compromise. For the United States, what
was lost was the higher moral ground from which to argue for a postwar
world built on at least some degree of just principles and
participatory governance. Along these lines, Ted Morgan writes:
[T]he Allies would never again be in as favorable a
position to extract concessions from Stalin, for they still held the
biggest bargaining chip -- Overlord. But because there was no united
British-American position on Overlord, the chance was lost to use it
effectively to check Stalin in Eastern Europe. Instead, FDR had to
align himself with Stalin to impose Overlord on the British, which
made it impossible for him to ask for anything in return for the
launching of the invasion.[59]
Churchill later denied any intention on the part of the British
either to delay (unnecessarily) or thwart the Channel invasion. His
view and that of the British strategists was that a strengthened
Italian and eastern Mediterranean campaign would pull larger numbers
of Germans away from northern France, while simultaneously putting
Allied bombers within reach of targets in southern Germany. Churchill
was also eager to bring Turkey into the war or at least gain access to
its airfields; pulling Turkey toward the Allied cause would, he added,
also open a new and more convenient route for delivering supplies to
the Soviets. At the same time, as Stalin well understood, these
actions would serve to limit the western advance of Soviet forces to
well outside of the heart of Europe. In a 1978 biography of Churchill,
Moscow University professor Vladimir Trukhanovsky linked Roosevelt as
well to this global Churchillian strategy, writing:
As the Soviet troops moved westwards, politicians in
London and Washington gradually saw that they needed to speed up the
formation of a second front -- not in order to help their Soviet
allies, but so as to land their forces in Western Europe before it
was liberated by the Red Army.[60]
Roosevelt and most of the political elite in the United States had
come to accept that the peoples living in Soviet-controlled
territories were beyond the reach of democratic processes and
institutions now being espoused for the postwar world. The United
Nations charter being drafted under the direction of Leo Pasvolsky and
Cordell Hull nonetheless challenged the sphere of influence formula so
appealing to the Big Three. Hull's working document, which
Roosevelt finally came to support, was presented to the British and
Russians early in 1944 and called for the creation of rather strong
institutions for enforcement of international laws. The full plan was
presented in London by Under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr.
to Churchill and Eden. Over the course of several months, Hull also
nurtured support for the plan among key U.S. legislators. The most
controversial characteristic of the new international organization was
to be the granting of veto power to the four charter member nations --
the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China.
By the time Hull arranged for a full-scale meeting to hammer out the
final agreement, the war situation had changed considerably. Massive
bombing raids over Germany and France during the first five months of
1944 decimated the Luftwaffe's fighter strength, severed rail lines
and disrupted the delivery of materials to German troops. Albert Speer
later pointed to a particular attack on May 12 by nearly a thousand
bombers "upon several fuel plants in central and eastern
Germany" as the beginning of "the end of German
armaments production."[61] A second attack later in May,
accompanied by the destruction of oil refineries in Rumania, cut
German oil production in half. On the morning of June 6, the combined
U.S.-British-Canadian invasion force arrived off the Normandy coast,
achieving total surprise, and opening the long-awaited western front.
Resistance was light at Utah beach, at the western tip of the
landings, and 20,000 troops came rapidly ashore with few casualties.
For those landing at Omaha beach, writes Samuel Eliot Morison, "the
Germans had provided the best imitation of hell for an invading force
that American troops had encountered anywhere."[62] More
recently, another writer put the fighting on Omaha beach into even
more graphic context:
The American assault on Omaha beach came as close as the
experience of any western Allied soldiers in the Second World War to
the kind of headlong encounters between flesh and fire that were a
dreadful commonplace in the battles of 30 years before, and which
were so grimly familiar on the eastern front.[63]
Heavy naval bombardment finally silenced most of the German gun
positions, allowing tanks and artillery to strengthen the beachhead.
British and Canadian troops came ashore at three other points and
rather quickly moved inland. By July 4, the Allied force in France
numbered more than one million. The port of Cherbourg fell late in
June and was cleared of debris for Allied use by mid-July. Rommel,
only days before he would be seriously wounded by strafing fire from
an Allied fighter plane, warned Hitler that the war was now clearly
lost.
Within a few days after the Allied landings in northern France, the
Soviets opened new major offensives in the east and were pressing hard
against the retreating Germans. On the 20th of July Colonel Klaus von
Stauffenberg made his failed attempt on Hitler's life; in retaliation,
Hitler unleashed the Gestapo upon all those suspected of involvement.
The executions began in August and continued almost to the end of the
war. Also during August a second Allied invasion force dislodged the
Germans from the southern coast of France, putting nearly 400,000
additional Allied troops into battle by the end of September.
Soviet troops reached eastern Prussia by mid-August. The Finns and
Bulgarians withdrew from the war, and Rumania was overrun and
occupied. Before the month ended, the Germans had withdrawn from Paris
(the German commandant ignoring Hitler's orders to destroy the city).
Brussels and Antwerp were liberated early in September, and the Allied
armies were everywhere gaining on the retreating Germans. As the
Allies approached German territory, the Germans regrouped sufficiently
to stop the advance of forces commanded by Gen. George Patton. And,
despite the pressing nature of the war, the German people paused
momentarily to pay tribute to the deceased Erwin Rommel, who had been
linked by the Gestapo to the July coup attempt but allowed (unlike
most of his fellow conspirators) to take poison instead of being tried
and hanged. Late in October, the city of Aachen became the first in
Germany to surrender to the Allies. By this time in the East, the
Germans had also withdrawn from Belorussia, Lithuania, Estonia, most
of Latvia, the Ukraine and eastern Poland -- leaving behind more than
400,000 troops dead and nearly 200,000 taken prisoner. Soviet troops
crossed the frontiers into Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and
Hungary. In Yugoslavia, Belgrade was also liberated late in
October by Soviet and partisan troops. Virtually all the combatants
expected the war to be over within weeks; Hitler, however, had one
more explosive card to play before the year would end.
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