[SNIPPET FROM PERPETUAL
WAR for PERPETUAL PEACE, 1952 by Harry Barnes]
CHAPTER 8
I. Lying Us into War
According to his own official
statements, repeated on many occasions, and with special emphasis when the
presidential election of 1940 was at stake, Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy after the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 was dominated by one overriding thought: how to
keep the United States
at peace. One of the President's first actions after the beginning
of hostilities was to call Congress into special session and ask for the repeal of the embargo
on the sales of arms to belligerent powers, which was part of the existing neutrality
legislation. He based his appeal on the argument that this move would help to keep the United States
at peace. His words on the subject were:
"Let no group assume the
exclusive label of the "peace bloc." We all belong to it. ... I give you my deep and
unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international
peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace
than if the law remains as it stands today. . . . Our acts must be guided by one single,
hardheaded thought of ”keeping America
out of the war."
This statement was made after
the President had opened up a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, First
Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister in the British government. What has
been revealed of this correspondence, even in Churchill's own memoirs, inspires
considerable doubt as to whether its main purpose was keeping America out of the war.
Roosevelt kept up his pose as the devoted champion of peace
even after the fall of France, when Great
Britain was committed to a war which, given
the balance of power in manpower and industrial
resources, it could not hope to win without the involvement of other great powers, such as
the United States
and the Soviet Union. The President's pledges of pursuing a policy
designed to keep the United
States at peace reached a shrill crescendo during the last
days of the 1940 campaign.
Mr. Roosevelt said at Boston on October 30:
"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
The same thought was
expressed in a speech at Brooklyn on November
1: "I am
fighting to keep our people
out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting."
The President told his
audience at Rochester, New York, on November 2: "Your
national government ... is
equally a government of peace-a government that intends to
retain peace for the American
people."
On the same day the voters of
Buffalo were
assured: "Your President says this country
is not going to war."
And he declared at Cleveland on November 3:
"The first purpose of our foreign policy
is to keep our country out of
war."
So much for presidential
words. What about presidential actions? American
involvement in war with Germany was
preceded by a long series of steps, not one of
which could reasonably be
represented as conducive to the achievement of the
President's professed ideal
of keeping the United States
out of foreign wars. The
more important of these steps
may be briefly stated as follows:
1. The exchange of American
destroyers for British bases in the Caribbean
and in
Newfoundland in September, 1940.
This was a clear departure
from the requirements of neutrality and was also a violation
of some specific American
laws. Indeed, a conference of top government lawyers at the time decided that the
destroyer deal put this-country into the war, legally and morally.
2. The enactment of the
Lend-Lease Act in March, 1941.
In complete contradiction of
the wording and intent of the Neutrality Act, which
remained on the statute
books, this made the United
States an unlimited partner in the
economic war against the Axis
Powers all over the world.
3. The secret
American-British staff talks in Washington
in January-March, 1941.
Extraordinary care was taken
to conceal not only the contents of these talks but the
very fact that they were
taking place from the knowledge of Congress. At the time when administration spokesmen were
offering assurances that there were no warlike
implications in the
Lend-Lease Act, this staff conference used the revealing phrase,
"when the United States
becomes involved in war with Germany."
4. The inauguration of
so-called naval patrols, the purpose of which was to report the
presence of German submarines
to British warships, in the Atlantic in April,
1941
5. The dispatch of American
laborers to Northern Ireland
to build a naval base.
obviously with the needs of
an American expeditionary force in mind.
6. The occupation of Iceland by American
troops in July, 1941.
This was going rather far
afield for a government which professed as its main concern
the keeping of the United States
out of foreign wars.
7. The Atlantic Conference of
Roosevelt and Churchill, August 9-12,1941
Besides committing America as a
partner in a virtual declaration of war aims, this
conference considered the
presentation of an ultimatum to Japan
and the occupation of
the Cape Verde Islands,
a Portuguese possession, by United
States troops.
8. The orders to American
warships to shoot at sight at German submarines, formally
announced on September 1 1 .
The beginning of actual
hostilities may be dated from this time rather than from the
German declaration of war,
which followed Pearl Harbor.
9. The authorization for the
arming of merchant ships and the sending of these ships
into war zones in November,
1941.
10. The freezing of Japanese
assets in the United States
on July 25,1941.
This step, which was followed
by similar action on the part of Great Britain and the
Netherlands East Indies,
amounted to a commercial blockade of Japan. The war-making potentialities of this
decision had been recognized by Roosevelt himself shortly before it was taken. Addressing a
delegation and explaining why oil exports to Japan had not been stopped previously, he said:
"It was very essential,
from our own selfish point of view of defense, to prevent a war
from starting in the South
Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from
breaking out down there. . .
. Now, if we cut the oil off, they [the Japanese] probably
would have gone down to the
Netherlands East Indies a year ago, and we would have had war."(l)
11. When the Japanese Prime
Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, appealed for a
personal meeting with Roosevelt to discuss an amicable settlement in the
Pacific, this
appeal was rejected, despite
the strong favorable recommendations of the American
ambassador to Japan, Joseph
C. Grew.
12. Final step on the road to
war in the Pacific was Secretary of State Hull's note to the
Japanese government of
November 26. Before sending this communication Hull had
considered proposing a
compromise formula which would have relaxed the blockade of Japan in return for Japanese withdrawal from southern Indochina and a limitation of
Japanese forces in northern Indochina.
However, Hull dropped this idea under pressure from
British and Chinese sources. He
dispatched a veritable
ultimatum on November 26, which demanded unconditional
Japanese withdrawal from China and from Indochina and insisted that there should be
"no support of any
government in China
other than the National Government [Chiang
Kai-shek]." Hull admitted that this
note took Japanese- American relations out of the
realm of diplomacy and placed
them in the hands of the military authorities. The negative Japanese reply to this note
was delivered almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was a strange
and as yet unexplained failure to prepare for this attack by giving General Short and
Admiral Kimmel, commanders on the spot, a clear picture of the imminent danger. As
Secretary of War Stimson explained the American policy, it was to maneuver the Japanese into
firing the first shot, and it may have been feared that openly precautionary and
defensive moves on the part of Kimmel and Short would scare off the impending attack by
the Japanese task force which was known to be on its way to some American outpost.
Here is the factual record of
the presidential words and the presidential deeds. No
convinced believer in
American nonintervention in wars outside this hemisphere could
have given the American
people more specific promises than Roosevelt
gave during the campaign of 1940. And it is
hard to see how any President, given the constitutional
limitations of the office,
could have done more to precipitate the United States into war
with Germany and Japan than Roosevelt accomplished during the fifteen months
between, the
destroyer-for-bases deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Former Congresswoman Clare
Boothe Luce found the right expression when she
charged Roosevelt
with having lied us into war. Even a sympathizer with Roosevelt's
policies, Professor Thomas A.
Bailey, in his book The Man in the Street,
admits the
charge of deception, but
tries to justify it on the following grounds:
"Franklin Roosevelt
repeatedly deceived the American people during the period
before Pearl
Harbor. ... He was like the physician who must tell the patient
lies for the
patient's own good. . . . The
country was overwhelmingly ' non-interventionist to the very day of Pearl
Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would
have resulted in certain failure and an
almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940,
with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.
"(2)
Professor Bailey continues
his apologetics with the following argument, which leaves
very little indeed of the
historical American conception of a government responsible to
the people and morally
obligated to abide by the popular will:
"A president who cannot
entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of
faith in the basic tenets of
democracy. But because the masses are notoriously
shortsighted and generally
cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into
an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt
had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it? (3)
Presidential pledges to
"keep our country out of war," with which Roosevelt
was so
profuse in the summer and
autumn of 1940, could reasonably be regarded as canceled by some new development in the
international situation involving a real and urgent threat to the security of the United States
and the Western Hemisphere.
But there was no such new
development to justify Roosevelt's moves along
the road to
war in 1941. The British Isles were not invaded in 1940, at the height of
Hitler's military success on the Continent.
They were much more secure against invasion in 1941.
Contrast the scare
predictions of Secretary Stimson, Secretary Knox, and General
Marshall, about the impending invasion of Britain in the
first months of 1941, with the
testimony of Winston
Churchill, as set down in his memoirs: "I did not regard invasion as a serious danger in April,
1941, since proper preparations had been made against it."
Moreover, both the American
and British governments knew at this time that Hitler
was contemplating an early
attack upon the Soviet Union. Such an attack
was bound to
swallow up much the greater
part of Germany's
military resources.
It is with this background
that one must judge the sincerity and realism of Roosevelt's
alarmist speech of May 27, 1941, with its
assertion: "The war is approaching the brink of the western hemisphere
itself. It is coming very close to home." The President spoke of the Nazi "book of world
conquest" and declared there was a Nazi plan to treat the Latin American countries as they
had treated the Balkans. Then Canada
and the United States would be strangled.
Not a single serious bit of
evidence in proof of these sensational allegations has ever
been found, not even when the
archives of the Nazi government were at the disposal of
the victorious powers. The
threat to the security of Great
Britain was less serious in 1941 than it was in 1940. There is
no concrete evidence of Nazi intention to invade the
American hemisphere in either
year, or at any predictable period.
One is left, therefore, with
the inescapable conclusion that the promises to "keep
America out of foreign wars" was a deliberate hoax on
the American people, perpetrated for the purpose of insuring Roosevelt's re-election and thereby enabling him to
proceed with his plan of gradually
edging the United States
into war. What aim was this involvement in global war
supposed to achieve?
II. The War Aims Proclaimed
by Roosevelt
1 . Atlantic Charter and Four
Freedoms. The most detailed statement of United States
war aims, the equivalent of the
Fourteen Points pronounced by Woodrow Wilson during the first World War, may be
found in the. Atlantic Charter. This is a joint statement by Roosevelt and Churchill,
issued after their meeting off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941- It was described
as a "common program of purposes and principles" in the United Nations Declaration,
issued in Washington
on January 1, 1942.
The Atlantic Charter is composed of the
following eight points:
"First, their countries
seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
"Second, they desire to
see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely
expressed wishes of the
peoples concerned;
"Third, they respect the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under
which they will live; and
they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been
forcibly deprived of them;
"Fourth, they will
endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further
the enjoyment by all States,
great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal
terms, to the trade and to
the raw materials of the world which are needed for their
economic prosperity;
"Fifth, they desire to
bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the
economic field with the
object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic
advancement, and social
security;
"Sixth, after the final
destruction of the Nazi tyranny they hope to see established a
peace which will afford to
all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own
boundaries, and which will
afford assurance that all men in all the lands may live out
their lives in freedom from
fear and want;
"Seventh, such a peace
should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans
without hindrance;
"Eighth, they believe
that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as
spiritual reasons, must come
to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future
peace can be maintained if
land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may
threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of
a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations
is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which
will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
So, under the terms of the
Atlantic Charter, the victors of World War 1 1 were pledged
to respect the right of every
people to self-determination and to observe, as between
nations, the principle of
economic equality of opportunity. The argument, subsequently
advanced by Churchill, that
the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Germany, is in
contradiction to two
expressions used in that document. These are the references to "all
states, great or small,
victor or vanquished" and to "all men in all the lands."
One can find in the Atlantic
Charter the germ of the United Nations idea, "pending the
establishment of a wider and
permanent system of general security" and also of the belief that nations could be divided
into peace-loving sheep and aggressor goats.
There is also an implied
gesture of compliment to President Roosevelt in the happy
vision of "all men in
all the lands [living] out their lives in freedom from fear and want."
The President, in his
inaugural address of January, 1941, after his election to a third term, had dramatically emphasized
the universal realization of the Four Freedoms as essential to world peace. These were
freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear. This became the
outstanding "glittering generality" in Roosevelt's
war aims.
A fair test of the success
and effectiveness of America's
participation in the war would
be the degree to which the
postwar world has been characterized by freedom from want and freedom from fear,
freedom of speech and religion, the right of peoples to choose their own forms of government
and their own national allegiances, and of the
advancement toward world-wide
conditions of free commercial intercourse and reduction and limitation of armaments.
2. Unconditional Surrender.
This became an official American and British war aim
after Roosevelt
tossed off the phrase at the Casablanca
conference in January, 1943. It
was apparently inspired by a
confusion, in Roosevelt's mind, between two
episodes in the American Civil War.
The demand for immediate and
unconditional surrender was put forward by Grant at
the siege of Fort Donelson.
Roosevelt seems to have mixed this up with the
capitulation of Lee's Confederate Army at Appomattox, where the
expression, "unconditional surrender," was not
used. Despite repeated pleas from specialists in psychological warfare and commanders in the
field, Roosevelt refused to modify or even to
clarify this demand as long as he lived.
3. Co-operation with the Soviet Union. To charm and appease Stalin into becoming a
co-operative do-gooder on the
international scene was one of Roosevelt's
primary war
objectives. According to
William C. Bullitt, a former ambassador to the Soviet
Union and to France, who was at one time a
favored counselor of Roosevelt and who enjoyed
opportunities to discuss
Russian policy with the President during the war, Roosevelt's
Russian policy was based on
four principles:
(a) To give Stalin without
stint or limit everything he asked for the prosecution of the
war and to refrain from
asking Stalin for anything in return.
(b) To persuade Stalin to
adhere to statements of general aims, like the Atlantic
Charter.
(c) To let Stalin know that
the influence of the White House was being used to
encourage American public
opinion to take a favorable view of the Soviet Union.
(d) To meet Stalin face to
face and persuade him into an acceptance of Christian ways
and democratic principles.
Bullitt, whose own
impressions of the Soviet regime had changed very much in a
negative direction as a
result of his experience as ambassador, presented a memorandum outlining the reasons why
such a policy would fail. Roosevelt's
reaction, according to Bullitt's testimony, was as
follows:
"Bill, I don't dispute
your facts; they are accurate. I don't dispute the logic of your
reasoning. I just have a
hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not, and that he doesn't
want anything but security for his country. And I think that if I give him everything I
possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex
anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."
A similar interpretation of Roosevelt's policy, written by Forrest Davis and
published,
with the President's
knowledge and approval, in The Saturday Evening Post in May,
1944, contains the following
statements:
"The core of his [Roosevelt's] policy has been the reassurance of Stalin.
That was so,
as we have seen, at Teheran.
It has been so throughout the difficult diplomacy since
Stalingrad. . . .
"Suppose that Stalin, in
spite of all concessions, should prove unappeasable. . . .
"Roosevelt,
gambling for stakes as enormous as any statesman ever played for, has
been betting that the Soviet Union needs peace and is willing to pay for it by
collaborating with the West.
This eagerness to appease the
Soviet dictator, at whatever cost to the professed war
aims embodied in the Atlantic
Charter and the Four Freedoms, is a thread to the
understanding of the two main
wartime conferences of the "Big Three" (Roosevelt,
Stalin, and Churchill) at
Teheran and Yalta.
Indeed, the destruction of Germany and Japan as great
powers, implicit in the
"unconditional
surrender" slogan, and the appeasement of the Soviet dictatorship, were
opposite sides of the same
coin. In setting as a goal the political destruction, economic
crippling and total
disarmament of Germany
and Japan
(and, as the first phase of
occupation in Germany and Japan showed,
these were the fruits of unconditional
surrender), the balance of
power in Europe and Asia
was completely upset.
Tremendous power vacuums were
created on the frontiers of the Soviet Union.
What
this portended was pointed
out toward the end of 1943
in words of singularly prophetic
quality by the late Jan
Christiaan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa and one of the
most experienced and
thoughtful senior statesmen of the British Empire:
"Russia is the
new colossus on the European continent. What the after-effects of that
will be, nobody can say. We
can but recognize that this is a new fact to reckon with, and we must reckon with it coldly
and objectively. With the others [the reference was to Germany, France,
and Italy]
down and out and herself the mistress of the continent, her power will not only be great
on that account, but will be still greater because the Japanese Empire will also have gone
the way of all flesh. Therefore, any check or balance that might have arisen in the East
will have disappeared. You will have Russia in a position which no country has ever
occupied in the history of Europe."
4. Far Eastern War Aims. Two
war aims in the Orient were spelled out in Hull's note
of November 26, 1941. These were the
withdrawal of Japan
from China
and support only for the Nationalist
government of Chiang Kai-shek. Others, as set forth by the Cairo Declaration, issued by
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kaishek on December 1, 1943, were as follows:
"That Japan shall be
stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or
occupied since the beginning
of the First World War in 1914, and that all the territories
Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa
and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic
of China. Japan
will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by
violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people
of Korea,
are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and
independent."
5 . Platitudes and
Beatitudes. We here reproduce characteristic excerpts from a long
statement of American war aims,
covering seventeen points, issued by Secretary Hull on March 21, 1944:
"In determining our
foreign policy we must first see clearly what our true national
interests are. . . .
"Co-operation between
nations in the spirit of good neighbors, founded on the
principles of liberty,
equality, justice, morality and law, is the most effective method of
safeguarding and promoting
the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of our nation and of
all nations.
"International co-operative
action must include eventual adjustment of national
armaments in such a manner
that the rule of law cannot be successfully challenged and
that the burden of armaments
may be reduced to a minimum.
"As the provisions of
the four-nation declaration (of Moscow)
are carried into effect,
there will no longer be need
for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special
arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their
security or to promote their interests. . . .
"The Pledge of the
Atlantic Charter is of a system which will give every nation, large
or small, a greater assurance
of stable peace, greater opportunity for the realization of its aspirations to freedom, and
greater facilities for material advancement. But that pledge implies an obligation for
each nation to demonstrate its capacity for stable and
progressive government, to
fulfill scrupulously its established duties to other nations, to settle its international
differences and disputes by none but peaceful methods, and to
make its full contribution to
the maintenance of enduring peace.
"Each sovereign nation,
large or small, is in law and under law the equal of every
other nation.
"The principle of the sovereign
equality of all peace-loving states, irrespective of size
and strength, as partners in
a future system of general security will be the foundation
stone upon which the future
international organization will be created.
"Each nation should be
free to decide for itself the forms and details of its
governmental organization and
so long as it conducts its affairs in such a way as not to
menace the peace and security
of other nations.
"All nations, large and
small, which respect the rights of others are entitled to freedom
from outside interference in
their internal affairs."
This is, perhaps, the most
conspicuous official example of the vapid, unrealistic
moralizing which enveloped America's war
aims in a haze of Utopian crusading fervor.
Hull was not alone in this tendency to phrase American
foreign policy in terns of
beatitudes and platitudes,
uttered in complete isolation from the hard fact that a war,
fought with most barbarous
methods, was leading with relentless logic to one of the most unjust and unworkable peace
settlements in history.
Wendell Willkie, whose
subsequent declarations showed that in the 1940 campaign he
faithfully imitated Roosevelt's technique of talking peace to get votes while
contemplating measures which
could only lead to involvement in war, rivaled Hull in his ability to turn out
meaningless platitudes. What specific recommendations can be read into the following, typically
vaporous musings in Willkie's hastily written book. One World!
"To win the peace three
things seem to me necessary. First, we must plan for peace
now on a world basis; second,
the world must be free, politically and economically, for
nations and men, that peace
may exist in it; third, America
must play an active,
constructive part in freeing
it and keeping its peace. . . . When I say that peace must be
planned on a World basis, I
mean quite literally that it must embrace the earth.
Continents and oceans are plainly only parts of a whole, seen, as I have seen them, from the air.
Continents and oceans are plainly only parts of a whole, seen, as I have seen them, from the air.
England and America are parts. Russia and China, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Iraq and Iran are also parts and it is inescapable that there can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure through all parts of the world."
Perhaps the most original
formulation of war aims came from Vice-President Henry
A. Wallace. The war,
according to Wallace, was "a fight between a free world and a slave world." "The
peoples," he confidently predicted, "are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most
fortunate peoples of the world have hitherto enjoyed."
"The object of this
war," Wallace declared in an unequaled flight of fancy, "is to make
sure that everybody in the
world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day."
There was a secondary object:
to beat Satan. To quote further from the speech which
earned Wallace the reputation
of a wartime inspirational prophet:
"Satan is turned loose
upon the world. . . . Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution
Satan now is trying to lead
the common man of the whole world back into slavery and
darkness. . . . Satan has
turned loose upon us the insane. . . . The Gotterdammerung has
come for Odin and his crew.
". . . We shall cleanse
the plague spot of Europe, which is Hitler's Germany, and
with
it the hell-hole of
Asia-Japan. No, compromise with Satan is possible.
6. The establishment, in
place of the League of Nations, of a new
international
organization, to be called
the United Nations. The United Nations, as its Charter clearly proves, was based, on the
assumption that the wartime alliance of the Western Powers, the Soviet
Union, and China
would be permanent. Walter Lippmann expounded this theory when he wrote in the
year 1944:
"It is easy to say, but
it is not true, that the Allies of today maybe the enemies of
tomorrow.... Our present
alliance against Germany
is no temporary contraption. It is an
alignment of nations which,
despite many disputes, much suspicion, and even short and local wars, like the Crimean,
have for more than a century been natural allies.
"It is not a coincidence
that Britain
and Russia
have found themselves allied ever
since the rise of German
imperial aggression; that the United
States and Russia, under the czars and under the-Soviets,
have always in vital matters been on the same side. . ."
Anyone with a reasonable
knowledge of history could see the flaws in this argument.
There have been a great many
occasions during the last century when the nations that
were the principal allies of
World War II felt and acted toward each other very differently from "natural
allies."
However, the belief in the
permanence of a wartime alliance was the very cornerstone
of the United Nations, as
that organization was conceived at Dumbarton Oaks, perfected at San Francisco, and inaugurated at London. The Charter of
the United Nations vested executive power in the
Security Council, a body with five permanent and six rotating members. The five permanent
members were the United
States, the Soviet
Union, Great Britain, France,
and China.
Except on minor matters of
procedure, the Security Council, under the Charter, is
empowered to act only with
the affirmative votes of the five permanent members. A
single veto can paralyze
action under the Charter. This veto can not only block decisions of great moment, like the use
of armed force against an aggressor, but it can also prevent much less important
decisions, such as the admission of new members to the United Nations.
The Charter makes no
effective provision for growth and change. It may be amended
only with the consent of all
the permanent members. When the constitution of the United Nations was framed,
everything was staked on the assumption that the wartime co-operation of the United States, Great Britain,
and the Soviet Union, a co-operation made possible by Roosevelt's
philosophy of giving Stalin everything he wanted, would
continue permanently.
7. American National
Security. Participation in the second World War, as in the first,
was advocated on the ground
that American security would be vitally endangered if the
Axis Powers were not crushed.
There were cruder and more sophisticated versions of this argument.
A cruder version was the
scare picture, often repeated in the interventionist literature
of 1939-41, of a Nazi
invasion and occupation of the American continent-the notorious
myth of "Hitler's
timetable" to invade Iowa
via Dakar and Brazil.
Americans were
supposed to shiver at the
thought of storm troopers swaggering through the streets of
American cities and
manhandling peaceful citizens. One interventionist poster showed
American children being
forced to repeat their prayers: "Adolf Hitler, hallowed be thy
name."
For those who found such
suggestions merely ridiculous or, at least, extremely
improbable, there was another
line of psychological approach. It was argued that, even if no physical attack on the Western Hemisphere took place, the American way of life
would be profoundly affected
for the worse by an Axis victory. The American economy, so ran this argument, would
be regimented; the atmosphere of an armed camp would become permanent; Americans
would never know real peace and security.
One prominent advocate of
intervention inquired, in the years before Pearl Harbor,
whether America could
resign itself to spending as much as three billion dollars a year on armaments. This, he
calculated, would be the cost of not "stopping" Hitler. Having
stopped Hitler, the military
authorities are now proposing that we spend sixty billion
dollars a year to stop
Stalin, and their proposals have been accepted and adopted into our Federal budget.
It was widely assumed,
explicitly or implicitly, that war was the road to permanent
peace, that defeat of the
Axis would be followed by an era of international good will and security.
So, American war aims may be
briefly summarized as follows: (1) the realization of
the principles of the
Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms; (2) the unconditional
surrender of the Axis Powers
and the obliteration of these powers from the scheme of
world politics; (3) peaceful
co-operation with the Soviet Union on a
long-term basis; (4) the dismemberment of the
Japanese Empire and the support of the Nationalist
government of China; (5) a
miscellaneous list of desirable moral ideals, including the
regulation of international
conduct by rules of unimpeachable morality, the procurement for every human being in the
world of a quart of milk a day, and the vanquishing of Satan; (6) the establishment
of the United Nations on the basis of close co-operation with the Soviet
Union; (7) the assurance of American national security and the
promotion of an atmosphere of
international peace and good will in which Americans and other "peace-loving"
peoples could go about their affairs free from the burden of excessive armaments and of want and
fear.
These were the aspirations.
What about the achievements, eight years after the end of
hostilities? Let us consider
the realization of Roosevelt's war aims, point
by point.
III. How Far Were Roosevelt's Aims Realized?
1. Pledges of the Atlantic
Charter. The first three clauses of the Atlantic Charter
assert, in very clear,
unambiguous language, the right of every people to choose the form of government under which
they desire to live. These clauses repudiate, on behalf of all the signatories, territorial
aggrandizement. And territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes
of the peoples concerned are denounced.
Before he signed the Atlantic
Charter Stalin had voluntarily renounced territorial
aggrandizement in a speech
which he delivered in the Soviet Union and
which was
widely quoted as a definition
of Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet leader declared: "We
shall not yield an inch of
our own soil. We do not covet a foot of foreign soil."
By the end of the war,
however, the Soviet Union had acquired, not a
foot, but
273,947 square miles of
foreign soil, inhabited by 24,355,000 people. The Soviet
acquisitions were as follows:
Area in square miles
Population
Eastern Poland 68,290 10,150,000
Finnish Karelia 16,173 470,000
Lithuania 24,058 3,029,000
Latvia 20,056 1,950,000
Estonia 18,353 1,120,000
Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina
19,360 3,748,000
Moldavia 13,124 2,200,000
Petsamo 4,087 4,000
Koenigsberg area 3,500
400,000
C arp atho -Ukraine
(Eastern
Czechoslovakia) 4,922 800,000
South
Sakhalin 14,075 415,000
Kurile
Islands 3,949 4,500
Tannu Tuva 64,000 65,000
In no case was there any convincing
pretense of consulting "the freely expressed
wishes of the peoples
concerned" or of respecting "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under
which they will live." In most cases there is the strongest evidence that these Soviet
annexations were intensely distasteful to the peoples affected.
For example, the Finns who
live in Karelia were permitted to choose
between
remaining in their homes and
going penniless into Finland.
The option was almost
unanimously for. Finland. A very
high proportion of Lithuanians, Letts, and Estonians - preferred the bleak existence
of the DP camps to the prospect of being repatriated to
homelands which had fallen
under Soviet rule.
The enthusiasm of the people
in eastern Poland
for Soviet annexation may be
measured by the fact that
about a million and a quarter of them were deported to the
Soviet
Union under circumstances of
such barbarous cruelty that about three
hundred.thousand perished.
All Germans who survived the occupation were driven out of the Koenigsberg area. The
outrage to the principle of national self-determination involved in the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union was accompanied by an even greater outrage, the
arbitrary transfer to Poland
of all German, territory cast of the line represented by the Oder and the Neisse
rivers. This meant the dispossession of at least nine million Germans of the
homes which they had occupied in territory which had been solidly German for centuries.
The Soviet annexations at the
expense of Poland
were specifically authorized by the
Yalta Conference of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in
February, 1945. This same
conference recognized that
"Poland
must receive substantial accessions of territory in the North and West." In
other words, it sanctioned the brutal uprooting from their homes of many millions of people and
extensive transfers of population in complete disregard of the desires of the peoples
concerned. No more complete repudiation of the self-determination clause of the
Atlantic Charter could be imagined.
Yet, with a rare mixture of
cynicism and hypocrisy, the Yalta
. Declaration includes
the following passage,
affirming the Atlantic Charter in the very document which
specifically authorizes the
disregard of the principle of self-determination:
"The establishment of
order in Europe and the rebuilding of national
economic life
must be achieved by processes
which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the, last vestiges of Nazism and
Fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the
Atlantic Charter — the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they
will live — the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples
who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations."
If the self-determination
clauses of the Atlantic Charter were soon proved a fraud and
a hoax by the actions and
decisions of the victorious -powers, the other promises of that
document fared no better.
Points four and five are sweeping pledges of equality of.
economic opportunity for all
nations "great or small, victor or vanquished."
Equality of economic
opportunity would mean maximum elimination of trade barriers,
freely convertible
currencies, and no discrimination against the economy of any nation.
But, eight years after the
end of the war, bureaucratic regulation of international trade,
inconvertible currencies,
barter and semi-barter deals between nations are still the rule,
not the exception.
And the promise of these
points in the Charter was further nullified by the many
discriminatory restrictions
which were imposed on the postwar economic development of Germany and Japan.
Under the Morgenthau Plan it was seriously proposed to turn
densely populated, highly
industrialized western Germany
into a predominantly
agricultural and pastoral
country and to seal up and permanently destroy the German coal mines an indispensable source
of energy not only for German, but for European
industry.
The full political ferocity
and economic idiocy of the Morgenthau Plan, which would
have involved the death by
starvation of millions of Germans, was never put into
practice. But under the
Potsdam Agreement of the "Big Three," concluded in August,
1945, and amplified by a
subsequent "level of industry" agreement, the German economy was placed in a strait-jacket
of innumerable discriminatory restrictions.
Germany was denied the right to manufacture or operate
oceangoing vessels. A top
limit of 5,800,000 tons,
ridiculously low in view of German industrial capacity and
needs, was set for the German
steel industry. Output of machine tools was set at 11.4 per cent of the 1938 figure.
German capacity to earn its national livelihood was impaired by these and scores of other
arbitrary interferences with normal economic activity. All German property abroad was
confiscated, making the revival of German foreign trade extremely difficult. For
years after the war a ruthless program of dismantling German plants continued, on the
ground that they might be used to rehabilitate German militarism. But many plants
were dismantled which had little relation to armament, such as soap factories, optical
plants, and the like. The English were especially conscienceless in their dismantling,
concentrating on plants that might provide some competition with British industry. That all
this was entirely inconsistent with what might be called the wel-fare clauses of the Atlantic
Charter was clearly pointed out by the well-known British economist, Sir William
Beveridge, who said, after a visit to Germany in 1946:
"In a black moment of
anger and confusion at Potsdam
in July, 1945, we abandoned
the Atlantic Charter of 1941,
which had named our goals: For all nations improved living standards, economic
advancement and social security, for all states, victor and
vanquished, access on equal
terms to the trade and to the raw materials of the world
which are needed for their
economic prosperity. From Potsdam
instead we set out on a
program of lowering the
standard of life in Germany,
of destroying industry, of depriving her of trade. The actions of
the Allies for the past-fifteen months in Germany make the Atlantic Charter an
hypocrisy." [END SNIPPET CHAPTER
VIII]
