Brave New World
Chapter 2 (Part 1 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
When humans lived in small
groups, when our weapons were comparatively paltry, even an
enraged warrior could kill only a few. As our technology
improved, the means of war also improved. In the same brief
interval, we also have improved. We have tempered our anger,
frustration and despair with reason. We have ameliorated on a
planetary scale injustices that only recently were global and
endemic. But our weapons can now kill billions. Have we improved
fast enough? Are we teaching reason as effectively as we can?
Have we courageously studied the causes of war?[1] [Carl Sagan]
|
Late in November of 1939, Adolf Hitler brought his senior military
officers together to instruct them on the future conduct of the war.
The objective he set for them was to secure for the German people a
permanently enlarged living space. To gain this Lebensraum,
Hitler promised them total commitment of the nation's physical,
material and emotional resources. "I shall shrink from
nothing and shall annihilate everyone who is opposed to me,"[2]
he announced. None doubted his sincerity nor his capacity to carry out
such a threat. No such determined leadership or willingness to
exercise absolute power existed among the French or British, the two
European nations faced with the strategic responsibility of standing
firm against German and Italian aggression. Only in the person of
Josef Stalin did there exist a person capable of unleashing terror on
others, externally or at home. In the East, the Japanese determination
to expand their own empire by warfare was collective and ritualistic.
Mussolini, the ex-socialist, had come to power in Italy as the agent
of extreme conservativism and without fully dominating the will of the
Italian people. The struggling constitutional republics of the Old
World were nonetheless gravely challenged for control of the future.
Political disagreements enabled individuals to collectively resist
preparations for war, even those essential to defense against external
aggression. As one who offered warnings early and frequently,
Churchill would later write, "[t]he advantage which a
Government bound by no law or treaty has over countries which derive
their war impulse only after the criminal has struck, and have to plan
accordingly, cannot be measured. It is enormous."[3]
When the German attack on Poland finally came, the French and British
were paralyzed by dissention, unable to seize their opportunity to
drive deep into the heart of Germany while the bulk of the German
forces were engaged elsewhere. The British were totally unprepared for
a war on the continent; they could put only a handful of
poorly-trained divisions in the field. The French, holding on to
burning memories of casualties endured in the First World War, refused
to take on the Germans by themselves. The situation was further
complicated by the defensive war opened by the Finns (trained and
supplied by Germans) against the Soviets. Stalin had been pressuring
the Finns to relinquish some territory that would move the border
further to the west of Leningrad. The Finns steadfastly refused; then,
before Stalin could assemble his army to march against them, the Finns
took the initiative and opened fire on Soviet positions. Under the
direction of Marshal Carl von Mannerheim, the Finns advanced and dug
in against Soviet counterattacks. In much of Europe, the Finnish
successes were hailed as a courageous defense of sovereignty by a
small republic against the great evil of Bolshevism.
In the meantime, Poland was bombed mercilessly into a state of near
destruction, after which the systematic enslavement of its population
was initiated by the Nazi occupiers. Victorious for the moment, Hitler
floated another round of peace propaganda directed toward the French
and British, hoping his gains could be legitimized without an
immediate expansion of the war. His generals were pleading for time to
complete a full modernization of the armed forces. Ready or not,
Daladier and Chamberlain finally held their ground. Even these two
practitioners of appeasement realized there was no going back. They
now understood that Hitler was determined to bring Nazism to all of
the Old World and that he seemed to relish in the accomplishment of
this endeavor by force. Survival of their cherished socio-political
arrangements and institutions, they realized, depended on the total
destruction of Nazism. From this point on, not even Hitler would be
able to control by intrigue and bluster the course of the war. Still,
there was nothing to be done for the defeated Poles except provide
sanctuary for those who could make their way through the German lines.
Remarkably, the French and Britain contemplated a joint expeditionary
force to assist the Finns against the Soviets.
Before assistance could be mounted in Finland, a far more powerful
and better prepared Soviet army renewed its advance into Finnish
territory. Norway and Sweden suddenly became extremely important for
both sides, inasmuch as Hitler was heavily dependent on Swedish iron
ore and also needed Norwegian ports from which to mount a naval
campaign against Allied shipping. Necessity and expediency demanded
that the French and British treat the sovereignty of neutral nations
with a degree of contempt they were reluctant to use. Hitler, Stalin
and Mussolini honored such positions only so long as their own
objectives were served. The Soviet success in Finland now threatened
to upset the balance of power in Scandinavia, leading Hitler to decide
that the German war effort required the control of Denmark and Norway.
When Finnish resistance collapsed in March of 1940, the Soviets
enlarged their territorial buffer between themselves and the Germans.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, independent since 1923, were occupied
by Soviet troops. Although German intelligence greatly underestimated
Soviet military strength (an assessment bolstered by its poor initial
performance against the Finns), Hitler was only so willing to share
territorial booty with Stalin. Moreover, he was not about to wait for
the British to reach an accord with the Norwegians and block delivery
of Swedish iron ore for his munitions factories. On April 9, 1940
German troops moved into Denmark and Norway. Although the British had
earlier mined the entrance to the Norwegian port of Narvik, this
effort hardly slowed the German landings. Elsewhere, paratroops fell
on the lightly-defended Norwegian nation, took Oslo and began to move
northward. The German naval force guarding Narvik was engaged by the
British and forced to retreat with heavy losses. Although the British
followed with a landing of infantry, the Germans by this time had full
control of the air and were moving north under air protection with
tanks and artillery. The situation called for a far larger commitment
of troops than Britain could spare. The fate of Norway was sealed on
May 10, when the Germans opened their attack against France in the
west through the Netherlands and Belgium.
DARKENED SKIES
The first day of the German advance had not yet ended before Neville
Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in the British government. With
hardly a moment's delay Winston Churchill was invited by the King to
form a new wartime government. Responding to the call, Churchill went
before the House of Commons on May 13 to let the nation know that the
British were now engaged in a struggle for the very existence of their
way of life:
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of
suffering. You ask, What is our policy? I will say: "It is to
wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the
strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous
tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human
crime. That is our policy." You ask, What is our aim? I can
answer in one word: Victory -- victory at all costs, victory in
spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be;
for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realized; no
survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the
British Empire has stood for; no survival for the urge and impulse
of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. ...[4]
To the small number of transnationals scattered around the globe,
what the British empire stood for (what any empire stood for) was not
worthy of preservation. That admitted, after the attacks on Poland,
Denmark and Norway, the opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime
became widespread. American involvement seemed only a matter of time.
And, with the industrial might and manpower of the United States
brought into play, defeat of the Axis powers seemed only a matter of
time - if Britain could just hold on until the might of the United
States was brought into the conflict. Among those able to think of the
distant future, some realized the next peace would provide a narrow
window of opportunity to create some form of world organization - of
governments or citizens -- with sufficient power to mandate and
enforce peaceful resolution of conflicts. Clarence Streit continued to
make the case for unification of English-speaking peoples as a first
step toward a federation of the social democracies. His essays
appeared throughout the way in major periodicals, and he was
instrumental in the founding of a worldwide membership organization --
the Federal Union. Then, in 1941, Streit's second book, Union Now
with Britain, was published. As with so many other idealists,
Streit underestimated the hold that ethnic nationalism and cultural
relativism had on people. Relinquishing sovereignty even in exchange
for a much higher prospect of a peaceful future was not likely to
occur for some time, and perhaps not for a century or longer.
Streit's efforts are indicative of the fact that Americans had the
luxury of as yet being very far from the actual fighting. They could
spend at least some of their time thinking more deeply than previously
about what could have been done to prevent the rise of a Hitler, a
Mussolini or a Stalin. Some would look anew at the lessons conveyed by
Francis Neilson in How Diplomats Make War - lessons that had
gone unheeded with very serious consequences. Now, it was really too
late to secure justice by peaceful means. A generation of young men
were about to engage in combat over matters few of them understood
except at a very emotional level.
For the moment, the future from the perspective of the transnationals
looked bleak indeed. Czechoslovakia and Poland now ceased to exist as
sovereign states. The Baltic nations were under Soviet occupation.
Denmark and Norway had been invaded, their governments dissolved and
puppet regimes established under German control. And then, German
armored divisions began to pour through the Ardennes. Hundreds of
Stuka dive bombers devastated the French air force, while paratroops
hit the Anglo-French armies from the rear. The Dutch government
surrendered to the Germans on May 14, and their Queen and ministers
joined the pre-war governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark and
Norway as exiles in Britain. Ten days later a powerful armored force
under General Heinz Guderian reached Calais, and the Germans closed in
on the remaining Anglo-French troops retreating toward Dunkirk.
Goering was given the responsibility for finishing them off, and
Guderian's tanks halted to await the aerial assault. Bad weather
delayed the Luftwaffe from carrying out its mission at Dunkirk;
however, not until May 26 did Hitler finally rescind his order and
direct Guderian to advance. Additional German troops were moved to the
coast after capitulation of the Belgian army on May 28. The panzers
and the infantry resumed their advance, but the long delay had allowed
the Anglo-French forces time to prepare strong defensive positions
supported by massed artillery. More than 190,000 British and French
troops were successfully evacuated between May 27-31. In this battle,
also, Britain's R.A.F. successfully prevented the Luftwaffe from
dominating the skies. The remaining French troops held out until June
4, allowing an additional 140,000 men to make their escape across the
Channel. Although severely beaten, these troops would live to fight
again, and their escape proved to be an important stabilizing factor
in the British war effort.
All hope for continuation of an organized French resistance soon
vanished. Defeatism enveloped the French leadership. On June 16 the
French Premier, Paul Reynaud, resigned in favor of Marshal Henri
Petain, whose immediate act was to request an armistice from the
Germans. Hitler, now buoyed by his dramatic victories, fully expected
the British to come to terms as well. No plans had been developed for
an assault on the British Isles; and, only after June became July with
no signal from Churchill that Britain would discuss an end to
hostilities did Hitler order his General Staff to begin preparations
for a Channel crossing. Admiral Raeder argued strenuously against any
such operation until the following May, when weather conditions would
again be stable and sufficient landing craft constructed. Waiting,
Hitler responded, would only give the British time to strengthen their
defenses; in the meantime, the Luftwaffe would be unleashed against
British military and industrial targets.
In addition to the Luftwaffe, the British also faced the very real
possibility of having the French fleet captured by the Germans and
used against the Royal Navy. Although a number of French ships were
now under effective British control at bases in Portsmouth, Plymouth
and Alexandria, Egypt, the remainder of the fleet remained anchored at
Oran, in northwestern Algeria. Churchill and his General Staff argued
successfully that these ships had to be brought under British command
-- or destroyed, so they could not be used by the Germans or Italians
as part of an invasion fleet. While Hitler and Goering ruminated over
Churchill's foolhardy gestures of resistance, the British Prime
Minister marshaled his naval forces to neutralize the French fleet.
Afterward, he explained to the Members of Parliament (and the nation)
the necessity for doing so:
As the House will remember, we offered to give full
release to the French from their treaty obligations, although these
were designed for precisely the case which arose, on one condition,
namely, that the French Fleet should be sailed for British harbors
before the separate armistice negotiations with the enemy were
completed. This was not done, but on the contrary, in spite of every
kind of private and personal promise and assurance given ..., an
armistice was signed which was bound to place the French Fleet as
effectively in the power of Germany and its Italian following as
that portion of the French Fleet was placed in our power when many
of them, being unable to reach African ports, came into the harbors
of Portsmouth and Plymouth about ten days ago. ...
I said last week that we must now look with particular attention to
our own salvation. I have never in my experience seen discussed in a
Cabinet so grim and somber a question as what we were to do about
the French Fleet. ...Accordingly, early yesterday morning, 3rd July,
after all preparations had been made, we took the greater part of
the French Fleet under our control, or else called upon them, with
adequate force, to comply with our requirements. ...[5]
The mission was undertaken by the British fleet based at Gibraltar.
After sailing to Algeria on July 3, prolonged attempts were made to
peacefully secure control of the French ships. The French
categorically refused to relinquish control of their fleet, and open
battle ensued between the two forces. Three French battleships were
sunk or run aground, while a new battle cruiser and several other
ships escaped to the French naval base at Toulon. An attack was also
made against a French battleship at Dakar in Senegal; however, in
Alexandria and Martinique negotiations successfully neutralized the
remainder of the French fleet without the use of force. As Churchill
later wrote, this action gave a desperately needed lift to the British
war effort. "Here was this Britain which so many had counted
down and out, which strangers had supposed to be quivering on the
brink of surrender to the mighty power arrayed against her, striking
ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday and securing for a
while to herself the undisputed command of the sea. It was made plain
that the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing."[6]
Now that the Axis powers had demonstrated this would be a war without
adherence to any standards of moral conduct, the British were finding
such principles a heavy burden to carry in the face of threatened
annihilation. This was only the first of many such tests the British
were to face.
The official French reaction to the raid was one of outrage. Pierre
Laval and Admiral Jean Darlan urged a declaration of war against
Britain in defense of French pride. A confused and distraught French
citizenry at first supported the new government established at Vichy,
and Laval attempted to take advantage of this to dissolve Parliament,
abandon republican government altogether and set himself up as head of
a Fascist regime. "Parliamentary democracy lost the war,"
Laval declared. "It must give way to a new regime; audacious,
authoritarian, social and national."[7] After the war, the
Socialist leader Leon Blum attributed this attraction to totalitarian
rule to a profound fear of external (i.e., German) domination. French
socio-political institutions had not served the people very well and
had revealed France to be a nation built on contradictions, of
deeply-entrenched privilege existing in the face of tremendous want
and a people hungry for substantive reform. French political leaders
were now desperate to maintain even a modest degree of independence in
the face of the German occupation. As a measure of their desperation,
in the second week of July the deputies to the French Parliament voted
to dissolve. Marshal Petain was given dictatorial powers. A very real
possibility existed that the Fascist government of France would now
join the Axis powers in the war against Britain. With no allies left
in the Old World to fight alongside the British, Churchill fearfully
turned to the United States to join Britain in this struggle for
survival. To Churchill's chagrin, Britain would have to survive on its
own for another nine months before any material assistance was
forthcoming.
By mid-July, Goering was finally ready to unleash the Luftwaffe over
Britain. From late July through August of 1940, German fighters and
bombers relentlessly attacked British shipping in the Channel. Attacks
were also directed against coastal radar stations and R.A.F. fighter
bases. When these efforts failed to effectively diminish the
retaliatory capacity of the R.A.F., Goering changed his strategy and
initiated a campaign of massive daylight bombing designed to destroy
Britain's industrial and military production. To accomplish this
objective, on August 15 the Germans put almost 2,000 planes in the
air. Returning with heavy losses and very limited success, Goering
once again changed course and once again went after the R.A.F.
directly. This proved the right strategy; and, by September, the
Luftwaffe's superior numbers were pressing the R.A.F. to the breaking
point.
And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical
error, this one comparable in its consequences to Hitler's calling
off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered,
reeling R.A.F. and marked one of the major turning points of
history's first great battle in the air.
With the British fighter defense suffering losses in the air and on
the ground which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe
switched its attack on September 7 to massive night bombings of
London. The R.A.F. fighters were reprieved.[8]
One reason for the change in strategy was Hitler's demand that
Goering retaliate for bombing raids conducted by the British on
Berlin. British bombers were also having considerable success in
disrupting assemblage of the invasion fleet along the French, Belgian
and Dutch coasts. The Germans were showing themselves extremely
vulnerable to well-devised defensive measures that made optimum use of
even limited air and naval forces.
The price being paid by the German Luftwaffe pilots and crew over
Britain kept increasing without any prospect for either a negotiated
settlement or a British defeat. Faced with a still vibrant R.A.F and
without the means for a full-scale invasion, Hitler settled for a
temporary stalemate with Britain. The British presented no threat to
his control of the continent, and an expansion of the U-boat fleet
promised a low cost strategy for bringing Britain to her knees. Hitler
now turned his attentions back to his objective of enlarging the
German Reich at the expense of the Soviet Union -- the only remaining,
independent military power to occupy territory (Lithuania) sharing a
common border with Germany.
During August of 1940, Hitler ordered the first of many armored and
infantry divisions to Poland and Finland. Additional troops crossed
into Rumania early in October. By the end of 1940, Hitler's general
plan of attack across Soviet territory was ready for implementation.
Then, events elsewhere temporarily pulled German resources away from
the East and toward the Mediterranean. Late in October, Mussolini
(without consulting Hitler) marched into Greece, where his army met
unexpectedly stiff resistance. The Greeks received support from the
British, who earlier added an aircraft carrier and several other ships
to the British fleet anchored at Alexandria in Egypt. Crete was also
occupied and the British force on Malta strengthened. Then, on
November 11 the British launched a successful air attack on the
Italian fleet at its base at Taranto. By late November the Greeks
successfully counter-attacked against the Italians, pushing them back
through Albania. That was only part of the problem facing the
Italians. With support provided by an infantry division brought in
from India, a small British force was also in the process of driving
the Italians out of western Egypt. By February of 1941 British forces
took Libya and took some 160,000 Italian soldiers prisoner.
Admiral Raeder pressed hard on Hitler that the time had come for
German intervention in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Hitler
reluctantly responded by ordering part of his army based in Rumania
(later to be employed against the Soviets in the Ukraine) to march
through Bulgaria to support the Italians. When the Yugoslavs refused
to submit to German demands for passage, Hitler unleashed his troops
on them as well as on the Greeks. Belgrade was destroyed by aerial
bombing, and the Germans advanced on Athens. An enormous price would
eventually be paid by German soldiers for the time taken to teach the
Yugoslavs this lesson. But, at the time, there seemed to be no enemy
who could stand against the Wehrmacht. British support crumbled in the
face of the superior German force, and a Dunkirk-like evacuation from
the Balkans occurred. Left on their own, the Greeks were finally
forced to capitulate.
Not much more time passed before German paratroops took Crete from
the British. In North Africa, the British position was severely
threatened following the arrival of General Erwin Rommel to take
command of the German and Italian forces. By the beginning of April,
Rommel's panzer divisions had retaken all of Libya and were advancing
into Egypt. A concerted effort might have eliminated the British
positions in the Middle East and materially strengthened the Axis hold
over the Mediterranean. Fortunately for the British, Hitler was
already anxious because of the amount of time lost in the Balkans
campaign. His mind was now focused on the planned campaign against the
Soviet Union. Once again, therefore, at another crucial moment in the
war, Hitler foolishly gave the British a badly needed reprieve and set
the stage for his own destruction.
MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
Nationalists and Transnationalists Collide
The rapid collapse of French resistance surprised and shocked
Franklin Roosevelt and others in the U.S. government. There had been
little sentiment in the U.S. for providing assistance to the French,
whose government was considered by many to be both inept and corrupt
-- hardly a democracy in the full sense of the term. Support within
the U.S. for Britain, now alone and fighting for the survival of
democracy in the Old World, became more open and intense as the
Battle of Britain progressed. Isolationists began to lose
their hold over the Congress, and Roosevelt became more willing to act
on his own to help Britain despite the fact that a Presidential
election faced his party in November.
Another immediate dilemma faced U.S. political leaders; namely,
whether to loosen the country's highly restrictive immigration policy
in order to provide sanctuary for displaced Europeans. Where national
interest or persons of special caliber or connection were involved,
the laws were already being bent or circumvented. One result was that
the U.S. became the beneficiary of considerable Old World scientific
talent. European scientists and intellectuals, some of whom were of
Jewish heritage, were finding their way to positions at universities
in Britain, Canada and the United States. Although few in the
government had any appreciation for the special importance of nuclear
physics, the exiled scientists who practiced this discipline were to
evolve into a unique group charged with development of an atomic
weapon. Niels Bohr was Dutch; Lise Meitner, Austrian; Enrico Fermi,
Italian; Leo Szilard, German; Edward Teller, Hungarian; and, Albert
Einstein, the most famous of all physicists, German.
Einstein had been one of the first to leave Europe, accepting a
position with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
University. Einstein had experienced first hand the Third Reich's
anti-semitism and did what he could to sound the warning against
Nazism. Abandoning his long-standing pacifism, he became a strong
advocate of preparedness. When he learned of the advances in nuclear
fission and the potential for developing nuclear weapons, he agreed to
have a letter under his signature delivered to Franklin Roosevelt, "a
letter destined to change the course of history"[9] in a way
we have yet to experience fully. The crucial passages of the letter
read as follows:
In the course of the last four months it has been made
probable ... that it may become possible to set up nuclear chain
reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power
and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.
Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the
immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs,
and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely
powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb
of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well
destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding
territory. ...
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium
from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she
should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on
the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von
Weizsacker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin,
where some of the American work on uranium is now being
repeated.[10]
Roosevelt, though troubled by Einstein's report, had other priorities
to contend with. What he did in response to Einstein's warning was
establish a three-person Advisory Committee on Uranium and allocate
the vast sum of $6,000 toward further research. This low level
response soon prompted a second letter from the expatriate European
scientists, again signed by Einstein. The letter alerted Roosevelt
that the German research effort was being intensified and urged that
Allied scientists cease publishing the results of their own efforts.
U.S. government support in the race for nuclear weapons intensified;
not until early 1942, however, did the Manhattan Project begin
to take shape. What emerged in the process, notes historians Gerard
Clarfield and William Wiecek, was "nuclear power's intimate
ties to the national security state, and the subordination of
nonmilitary applications of nuclear power to military demands."[11]
The scientists might have suggested to Roosevelt and his military
advisers a plan to destroy Germany's research and engineering
capability. They did not. Historian Paul Johnson, noting that many of
the refugee scientists (as well as the senior U.S. scientist involved,
J. Robert Oppenheimer) were Jewish, stresses that fear of Hitler and
the Nazi program pushed them to the extreme effort. The "ideological
and moral dimensions"[12] Johnson suggests played a dominant
role in their exertions were real enough but not sufficiently well
thought out. As scientists, their commitment to the expansion of
knowledge - even knowledge with the potential use to destroy all of
life on earth - was paramount. They could justify their actions
because they would not be the final decision-makers regarding the
actual creation and use of a bomb capable of unleashing a nuclear fire
storm. Armed with a healthy fear of the Nazi willingness to make full
use of whatever weapons their own scientists and engineers developed,
the exiled community of physicists went to work determined to win the
race. As the study of history has repeatedly revealed, we seem to
possess a remarkable tolerance for wholesale destruction in the
interest of short-run military or political advantage. How else does
one explain the wanton destruction by Allied bombers of German
civilian population centers -- at a time when war was nearing an end
and the rebuilding of Europe's physical infrastructure was already
being discussed. Once the atomic bomb was ready for use, the U.S. and
British governments and military leaders gave almost no thought to the
consequences of releasing into a politically unstable world the most
extraordinarily destructive power ever possessed. The decision to use
two of these weapons on largely civilian populations -- when they
could have been just as easily dropped fifty miles away with the same
military and political result -- is, to this writer, unconscionable.
Saving the lives of Allied military personnel could have been achieved
by demonstrating to the Japanese that further resistance would result
in the wholesale destruction of their civilization - without
needlessly killing nearly two hundred thousand people and totally
destroying the infrastructure of two significant population centers.
Einstein had no direct knowledge of how far along the development of
the atomic bomb had come until he heard of its use against the
Japanese. Political scientists use a term -- disjointed
incrementalism -- that describes very well the type of
decision-making process that led to the use of the bomb. From 1942 on,
as more and more financial, intellectual and technical resources were
devoted to its construction, the inevitability of its use was
virtually certain. The only questions remained against whom and in
what fashion. Mortimer J. Adler, who was at the University of Chicago
during the war, recalls how even Robert M. Hutchins, among the leaders
of "America First," opened the University to the Manhattan
Project:
It is paradoxical that he, a zealot for peace and a
proponent of total disarmament, should have been the university
president who so crucially committed his institution to the war
effort, whereas the heads of three or four leading eastern
universities, all of whom had spoken out in favor of our fighting
Hitler, refused to accept responsibility for the Manhattan
Project.[13]
Adler accepted that fighting the war was a terrible necessity. He was
reasonably confident once the United States was fully mobilized that
the Allies would emerge victorious. He set his sights and his thoughts
on the future:
During 1944 and 1945, I took every opportunity to talk
about world government. …I argued for universal suffrage and
civil rights without any discrimination. I also made the point that
democratic institutions could not prosper in a world at war; the
future of democracy depended on the establishment of world peace
through world government.[14]
As Mortimer Adler well understood, there were enormous
socio-political and cultural obstacles in the way of achieving
consensus on the form world government might take. Even the
English-speaking peoples were seriously at odds over the appropriate
nature of government, the advantages and disadvantages of a
parliamentary system versus direct election of a President and Vice
President as occurred in the United States. Responding in 1942 to a
letter from John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lippmann told Keynes "[t]here
is no general conception among [British representatives to the United
States] which provides any political philosophy into which all of the
mighty changes now going on in the world might fit."[15]
About this same time, Wendell Willkie, leader of the Republican party
in the United States, was already raising questions about the future
role of the United States in international affairs. Senator Arthur
Vandenberg, one of the isolationist leaders prior to the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, outlined in his personal journal what he
thought were the hopes and expectations of many Americans:
I think [the] average American wants … a realistic
peace which puts an end to military aggression; …wants justice
rather than force to rule the postwar world; …is willing to
take his full share of responsibility in all of these directions;
but … is perfectly sure that no one is going to look out for us
… unless we look out for ourselves and … wants "enlightened
selfishness" mixed with "generous idealism" when our
course is chartered.[16]
Even before the entry of the United States in the war there were
already serious issues challenging Vandenberg's expressed hope for "generous
idealism." Refugees who somehow managed to escape from
German-held territory and reach Britain or the neutral countries also
brought with them the stories (and some documented evidence) of Nazi
atrocities.[17] These reports began to personalize the war for many
individuals in the U.S. Unfortunately, the level of concern was not
sufficient to pressure the government to open the door for immigration
(or even temporary asylum) for even a small fraction of the millions
of refugees uprooted and destined to die in Nazi concentration camps.
In an extension of the traditional isolationist policies followed by
U.S. Presidents, Roosevelt merely promised to turn the U.S. into Fortress
America; that is, a nation so strong that no foreign power would
dare to challenge its sovereignty or hegemony in the western
hemisphere.
As a short-run solution to the economic consequences of
socio-political problems in the United States, Fortress America
proved to be a most effective program. Spending for defense would
create employment, and an invigorated and working population might
soon forget the hardship of the 1930s. Already, a portion of the
nation was reawakening to the American sense of manifest destiny --
and self-centered moral responsibility -- characteristic of the
Progressive generations. Walter Lippmann, speaking to those assembled
for the thirtieth reunion of the Harvard Class of 1910, gave voice to
the sentiment increasingly held by the silent majority:
For twenty years the free people of the Western world
have taken the easy way, ourselves more light-heartedly than any
others. That is why we are stricken. That is why the defenses of
Western civilization have crumbled. That is why we find ourselves
... knowing that we here in America may soon be the last stronghold
of our civilization -- the isolated and beleaguered citadel of law
and of liberty, of mercy and of charity, of justice among men and of
love and of good will.
We mean to defend that citadel; we mean, I believe, to make it the
center of the ultimate resistance to the evil which is devastating
the world, and more than that, more than the center of resistance,
we mean to make it the center of the resurrection, the source of the
energies by which the men who believe as we do may be liberated, and
the lands that are subjugated redeemed, and the world we live in
purified and pacified once more. This is the American destiny, and
unless we fulfill that destiny we shall have betrayed our own past
and we shall make our own future meaningless, chaotic, and low.[18]
Lippmann was only one of many in a position to know who somehow
failed to see that none of the nation's recent and severe economic
problems had been structurally addressed. Not that everyone who now
had a job no longer worried about the future. Socialists,
libertarians, (the handful of) cooperative individualists, even some
of the tenured economics professors of the new generation, warned that
the legal and institutional reforms pushed through by
Roosevelt were, for reasons each critic attempted to support, too
little or wrongly directed. Economist Harry Scherman stepped out of
the bounds of his profession to explore the degree to which privilege
caused societal problems, writing that the "thoughtless
blocking of exchanges, in the supposed interest of a predominating
group or groups within the population, is still, as it has always
been, the immemorial device of amoral and unintelligent rulers to
bulwark themselves in their transitory power."[19]
Protectionism might not have been the sole cause of global depression
but without doubt was an important factor. Scherman joined other
critics of industrial landlordism by pointing to the tendency of large
corporations to enter into monopolistic agreements and form cartels.
Whereas Scherman described corporate leaders and public officials as
too frequently engaged in conspiracies to fulfill their economic
promises, writers of a very different persuasion were arguing against
the reliance on markets, advocating that the State limit and in some
cases prevent competition in order to harness the material, financial
and intellectual resources of the nation for specific purposes. An
important spokesperson for this view was economist Joseph Schumpeter,
who argued the case for powers such as eminent domain and condemnation
as "methods for removing obstacles that the institution of
private property puts in the path of progress."[20]
As the debate continued over the powers to be extended to government,
taxation was also becoming recognized as an instrument of public
policy and not merely a means of paying for government. From within
the mainstream community of economists, Harvard professor Alvin Hansen
was producing a cadre of disciples who would press for, refine and
introduce mathematical equations to evaluate measures destined to
carry the Keynesian label. For Roosevelt the challenge was neither
theoretical nor ideological; at the outbreak of the Second World War
some nine and a half million people were still unemployed. Only the
largest corporations in the U.S. were, as a group, reasonably
profitable, and the financial resources required for investment in new
capital goods were just not forthcoming from that small portion of the
public that held most of the nation's financial reserves. Yet, the
republic had stood its greatest test since the attempted secession by
the southern states; and, as Lippmann's Harvard speech suggested, a
degree of optimism and commitment had returned. Government contracts
were generating investment in plant and equipment, even if the actual
output did not consist of goods destined for the peaceful pursuit of
private pleasures.
The time was not yet at hand, however, when U.S. political leaders
were willing to commit the nation and its young men to the Old World
struggle. Even as the Eurasian continent west of the Soviet Union was
falling under Fascist control, a vocal minority continued to oppose
intervention. A last-minute plea by French Premier Paul Reynaud for
U.S. intervention could not have been acted upon by Roosevelt had he
wanted to. Time seemed to be running out for Churchill and his
countrymen as well.
As the story goes, Britain now stood very much alone, separated from
her dominions and her sources of raw materials by the oceans that for
so long represented the might of the empire. Even more important now
was Britain's dependence on the U.S. for weapons and ammunition. "Britain's
Chiefs of Staff left Ministers in no doubt that there was a good
chance of resisting ... an invasion," writes historian Roy
Douglas, "so long as the navy and air force were not gravely
weakened, and supplies continued to pour in from the United States."[21]
Remarkably, the level of preparedness in the United States, even at
this late date, remained unbelievably poor. Even had the isolationist
voices suddenly fallen silent, there was little in the way of an
effective U.S. army to put into the field or modern equipment being
produced. A first step toward realizing Roosevelt's vision of Fortress
America was, therefore, to organize a credible ground force. U.S.
military leaders intensified their efforts to institute mandatory
military service and lobbied the Congress and the Executive for
meaningful expansion of military spending. Whether or not Britain held
out, they argued, the U.S. had to arm in order to honor U.S.
obligations and protect the nation from possible invasion. In
practical terms, this had to be accomplished while simultaneously
providing huge quantities of war goods to the British (and despite the
fact that the financial reserves of the British government were nearly
spent).
No longer was Churchill in a position to deliver gold in exchange for
the materials Britain needed. Nor was there the political will to
capture the rent fund controlled by Britain's landed. Unable
to tax producers any more than was already occurring, Churchill could
only hope the United States would choose not to collect on the debt
incurred. Roosevelt responded, first, by agreeing to barter fifty
reconditioned destroyers in return for long-term leases to British
bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda. With this as the precedent, the
policy of Lend-Lease was initiated. In the process, Roosevelt and his
advisers knew they were risking German retaliation and the certainty
of direct U.S. involvement in the war. A similar risk already existed
in Asia.
Over the protests of Harold Ickes and others in his cabinet,
Roosevelt had allowed the flow to Japan of crude oil, gasoline and
scrap metals to continue. The Japanese desperately needed these raw
materials to keep their war machine operating, and any threat of
interruption deepened their determination to displace the U.S. and
European powers from Asia. The Japanese military leaders saw the
expanding war in the Atlantic as providing their best opportunity to
expand southward out of Manchuria without effective interference. They
would simultaneously protect themselves from U.S. intervention by
taking control of the Philippines and key islands in the Malaysian
archipelago. To accomplish these moves, the Japanese had built a
modern and efficient navy that included ten aircraft carriers.
Exaggerating the point somewhat, historian Samuel Eliot Morison
compares the level of U.S. preparedness by making the analogy that the
U.S. Navy "was like a city police force equipped only with
high-powered rifles, but with no weapons to meet thugs jumping
patrolmen at night with automatic pistols and blackjacks."[22]
A prolonged absence of new construction had decimated the U.S.
shipbuilding industry; and, although the fleet had grown during the
1930s by two aircraft carriers, a handful of submarines, light
cruisers and destroyers, there were not enough personnel in uniform to
operate these ships with real efficiency. Despite these immediate
advantages, the window of opportunity available to the
Japanese navy would remain open for only a very brief period. Japan's
fleet commander, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, fully recognized that once
war began the U.S. would be able to mobilize its industrial capacity
without interference. Time would work against the Japanese, who would
have to occupy and supply a far-flung chain of islands against a
rapidly expanding and well-supplied U.S. military machine.
Within Japan, none but the very brave or the very foolish spoke
against the Japanese militarists and their determination to drive all
Europeans and the U.S. from Asia. The extremists had come to power
after orchestrating a decade of violence and assassinations. Agrarian
landlords were attacked by tenant farmers. Industrial strikes became
commonplace. Land speculators, financiers and political leaders
attached to Western socio-political ideas were particular targets. In
1936 both the Prime Minister and Finance Minister were murdered.
Militarists then took the nation to war against the Chinese in 1937
and in 1940 entered into an alliance with Germany and Italy. Still,
there were limits to Japanese ambitions.
Early in 1941 (with the German offensives in Russia and other parts
of the Soviet Union stalled by winter weather), the Japanese Foreign
Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, entered into a neutrality accord with
Stalin in order to forestall the kind of land war Hitler relished. The
Japanese respected the potential power of the Soviet Union's military
and were already familiar with the difficulties of fighting in the
coldness of a Siberian winter. Matsuoka also hoped to reach an accord
with Roosevelt that would give Japan permanent control over Manchuria
and bring the Asian war to a conclusion. The militarists would have
none of it. Matsuoka was recalled, and plans went forward under
Admiral Yamamoto for the surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl
Harbor. In the ensuing months tensions increased. The U.S. froze
Japanese assets and placed an embargo on oil and gasoline exports.
Thus, faced with the eventuality of their military machine coming to a
grinding halt, the Japanese committed to war with the U.S. There was
no turning back. Japan's survival, the militarists believed, demanded
they take direct control of the oil fields in Indonesia and secure
access to other vital natural resources. In November of 1941 a war
cabinet was formed with General Hideki Tojo as Prime Minister. More
than ever, the new leaders were united in their willingness to risk
all to achieve the Japanese version of manifest destiny:
Her population was nearly half that of America and yet
it was crammed into a tiny land bereft of important natural
resources; moreover, that population was expanding at the rate of
one million a year. Despite that, the United States had locked her
doors to Japanese immigration. Most of Asia was divided up under
colonial rule by Western nations and, consequently, closed to the
Japanese. What, then, was wrong in her seeking room on the nearby
Chinese continent? Hadn't the European powers done the same, with
far less justification? Had not each nation the obligation to its
own people of self-preservation and self-defense? So went the
Japanese arguments.[23]
There are, of course, many ironies to be found in the conduct and
outcome of the war between the U.S. and Japan. One is the way in which
the Japanese have since the 1950s demonstrated that a society
dependent upon the importation of raw materials can still produce
enormous quantities of goods and services -- if there is a strong
cooperative spirit and efficient systems of production; if there is a
reasonable degree of individual liberty guaranteed under the system of
law; if the opportunities for education and training are widespread
and of high quality; and, if there is no military establishment to
divert labor and capital goods from the production of wealth that more
appropriately serves human needs. At the same time, the Japanese
productivity miracle has not eliminated the condition of comparative
scarcity for Japanese households. Protectionism and the private
appropriation of nearly the entire rent fund attributable to
locations has burdened the Japanese with very high prices for consumer
goods and some of the highest location prices in the world. One result
is that the Japanese as a whole remain among the poorest housed people
in the industrialized world. Another has been the difficulty of
recovering from the real estate (i.e., land market) crash and
resulting bank insolvencies that finally (and inevitably) occurred in
the late 1980s.
What the Second World War did for Japan was to accelerate the
Great Cleansing and thrust the Japanese people into the Brave
New World of global markets. Unconditional surrender also made
possible a dependence on the United States for protection of Japanese
sovereignty at little direct cost to Japanese producers. In this
respect, and admittedly at a tremendous price in terms of human
suffering, the Japanese were prevented from making the mistakes of
imperial empires that had come into being during the nineteenth
century and were about to collapse under the strain of military
expenditures in the twentieth. Japan probably could have succeeded
with an incremental program of moving Japanese settlers into
sparsely-populated areas of Manchuria, using its military to defend
those outposts of Japanese migration until they were able to function
on their own. They were well-established there already. The lesson to
be learned from history -- one the Japanese militarists ignored -- was
the futility of attempting indefinitely to maintain a police state in
order to control indigenous peoples. No external power had over the
long haul successfully prevented a much larger population from
forcibly regaining their independence. Foreign imperialists were
increasingly facing very determined resistance by guerrilla forces
able to live and operate under very difficult conditions.
In response to Japanese adventurism, the military leaders in the U.S.
secured Roosevelt's support for a significant expansion of the naval
fleet. Little was done to improve the defensive strength of the army
based in the Philippines, however, and the navy was reluctant to
expose many of its ships to Japanese attack by sending them to
Manilla. For the time being, while the construction of modern fighting
ships was underway, the best that could be done in the Pacific was to
move the bulk of the fleet to Pearl Harbor and hope this would be a
sufficient deterrent to Japanese aggression. Roosevelt ordered that
the rest of the fleet remain in the Atlantic for convoy escort duty.
With this in mind, some of the Japanese naval commanders became
convinced they could deliver a knock-out blow against the U.S. fleet
and in so doing give themselves enough of a free hand to build a
strong chain of island bases from which they could repulse any U.S.
force sent against them. Their plan was put into action on the morning
of December 7, 1941 against the ships anchored at Pearl Harbor. The
following day, Franklin Roosevelt went before the U.S. Congress,
informing the people of the United States that the fleet had been
attacked in Hawaii and that the nation was now at war with the
Japanese empire. The British immediately declared war on Japan. Three
days later Germany, along with Italy, honored their commitments to the
Japanese and declared war on the U.S.
The Japanese attack sunk a large number of surface ships but missed
the U.S. fleet's three aircraft carriers, which were out to sea.
Equally important to the immediate U.S. war effort, the base itself
and the supplies of fuel remained undamaged. The U.S. force in the
Philippines was not so fortunate. There, the Japanese caught General
Douglas MacArthur's B-17 bombers and most of the fighter planes still
on the ground. The U.S. naval installation on Luzon was almost
completely destroyed and its ships forced to withdraw to the south.
Japanese troops quickly gained control of the Malay Peninsula, Hong
Kong and the island of Guam. Two of Britain's most modern fighting
ships, the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by
Japanese torpedo bombers. On December 11, 1941, Winston Churchill
admitted to the House of Commons he could "not remember any
naval blow so heavy or so painful as the sinking of" those "two
vast, powerful ships."[24] Within only days of Pearl Harbor,
therefore, the British, Dutch and U.S. positions lay prostrate in the
face of the combined Japanese air, sea and land forces.
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