The Cogs of War

Michael McMenamin from the February 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Would the century have been different had we kept our boys over here? Buchanan thinks so, and he's in good company. Here, for example, is a revisionist observation from Churchill, a 1936 quote resurrected by Frank Johnson of Britain's Spectator in response to the negative reaction to Buchanan's work: "America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the world war. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war all these isms wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over 1 million British, French, American and other lives." Buchanan makes the same point: "The war to make the world safe for democracy made the world safe for Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism. Such were the fruits of U.S. intervention, victory, and Versailles."

Why, then, does Buchanan avoid drawing the obvious conclusion that Wilson's policies were an indispensable factor in the origins of the next war? Probably because Buchanan wants to distance the U.S. from any responsibility for the onset of World War II, so as to better advance what have become his most controversial arguments. These are, first, his condemnation of the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt, which involved us in World War II, and second, his effort to resurrect what he believes to be the unfairly tarnished reputation of the leaders of America First in the 1930s.

Buchanan's arguments and those of many other World War II revisionists share the same problem: Their understandable dissatisfaction with FDR's duplicitous foreign policy leads them to conclude, erroneously, that U.S. vital interests were not threatened by Nazi Germany and that, accordingly, Roosevelt led us into an unnecessary war. But one doesn't necessarily follow from the other.

Here is Buchanan's rationale on Hitler: "If Hitler could not put a soldier into England in the fall of 1940, the notion that he could invade the Western Hemisphere-- with no surface ships to engage the United States and British fleets and U.S. air power dominant in the west Atlantic--was preposterous."

Buchanan underestimates Hitler. In September 1940, when Buchanan says we were safe, Hitler concluded a formal military alliance with Japan, an overtly hostile act. And as historian Norman Goda demonstrates in Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path Toward America (1998), in early 1940 Hitler awarded a contract for the Messerschmitt 264, known as the "Amerika Bomber." Its range enabled it to fly to the East Coast of the United States, deliver five tons of bombs, and return without refueling.

As for a navy, in January 1939 the Germans awarded contracts for six H-Class battleships of 56,000 tons each, all to be completed by 1944. Goda also shows that Germany made plans in 1940 to seize the Azores and Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic from Portugal for use as bases for their long-range aircraft and their blue-water navy. Also in 1940, German diplomats negotiated extensively with Spain and Vichy France to attain bases in Casablanca, Dakar, and the Canary Islands. Hitler didn't need the Amerika Bomber, the six battleships, or the Atlantic bases to defeat England and Russia.

Even if Buchanan is wrong when he says Hitler had no designs on the Western
Hemisphere, however, he could still argue, as did those in America First, that the U.S. simply should have spent more on military deterrence rather than go to war against Germany. Like America First, Buchanan also argues that "Stalin's Russia...was a far greater long term threat than Hitler's Germany." Republican Senator Robert Taft said as much in a speech in June 1941.

John Lukacs disagrees. A conservative and staunch anticommunist, Lukacs emigrated from Hungary in 1946 at the age of 23, a few steps ahead of the Soviet takeover. He explained in his 1992 book, The Duel: 10 May-31 July 1940: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler, why communism was a lesser threat in 1940: "In spite of its international pretensions and propaganda, Communism did not go very far outside the Soviet Union. ...Alone among the great revolutions of the world --consider only how the American and French revolutions had soon been emulated by a host of other peoples, in Latin America and in Western Europe, often without the support of American or French armies--Communism was unable to achieve power anywhere outside the Soviet Union until after the Second World War."

Lukacs then explains why, even before Hitler, authoritarian dictatorships posed a greater threat to market democracy. Specifically, in the 20 years before 1940, liberal parliamentary democracy had failed and been abandoned in scores of countries all over the world. As Lukacs writes: "These changes were not the results of external pressure. They were the results of spontaneous developments. As early as 1930 it seemed (and this was three years before Hitler's coming to power in Germany) that the rise of authoritarian dictatorships in the wake of the failure of parliamentary and capitalist democracy was a natural and worldwide phenomenon."

Lukacs' theme in The Duel was that during the summer of 1940, "Hitler came closer to winning the war than we had been accustomed to think." In Five Days in London, May 1940, he narrows his focus to May 24-28, when Churchill faced down his opponents in the British War Cabinet, primarily Foreign Secretary Halifax, and persuaded the full Cabinet that Britain should not seek peace terms from Germany through the good offices of Italy. (Hitler's terms would have been quite generous at that point.)

The War Cabinet debate was bitterly fought. A Liberal Party member for most of his career before 1924, Churchill was mistrusted by most Conservatives, and Halifax's not indefensible position was that Britain should at least ask what peace terms would be. It is for this reason, Lukacs explains, that "Hitler was never closer to his ultimate victory than during those five days in May, 1940."

Lukacs empathizes with the anticommunism that motivated many of those in America First. As he acknowledged in The Duel, "Most people who opposed the struggle against Hitler were not necessarily his sympathizers." Instead, like Taft, they had convinced themselves that communism and the Soviet Union were a greater danger than Hitler. The prime reason that Taft--a brilliant man about whom there is much to admire--advanced for this view was that communism appealed to the many, fascism to the few.

Lukacs says this is plainly wrong. The author of The Hitler of History, Lukacs modestly claims in his preface to Five Days that he has "an advantage" over others who in the past 20 years have written on Churchill, Halifax, and the politics of war: his "knowledge about Hitler--or rather my familiarity with documents and other materials relating to him." The Hitler of History supports his claim. His insight into Hitler--and the threat he posed to Western civilization beyond military aggression--is compelling. That a dedicated anticommunist like Churchill also had such an insight on Hitler goes far to explain why, to the dismay of revisionists like England's John Charmley or Americans like Buchanan, Churchill didn't do the prudent, logical thing in May 1940 and seek peace with Hitler. It also explains Churchill's agreeing to a temporary alliance with Russia.

As Lukacs writes: "At the end of May 1940 and for some time thereafter, not only the end of a European war but the end of Western civilization was near. Churchill knew that, inspired as he was by a kind of historical consciousness that entailed more than incantatory rhetoric.... If Hitler wins and we fall, he said, "then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." (The italics are mine.) Churchill, argues Lukacs, "understood something that not many people understand even now. The greatest threat to Western civilization was not communism. It was National Socialism. The greatest and most dynamic power in the world was not Soviet Russia. It was the Third Reich. The greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century was not Lenin or Stalin. It was Hitler. Hitler not only succeeded in merging nationalism and socialism into one tremendous force; he was a new kind of ruler, representing a new kind of populist nationalism...It was thus that in 1940 he represented a wave of the future."

A problem with World War II revisionists is that, as Lukacs observes, "had Hitler won the Second World War, we would be living in a different world." What kind of world? Revisionists need to answer that. Lukacs makes a good case that Hitler, as "the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century," would have inspired, if not imposed, a new populist, nationalist (and racist) paradigm for the world based on National Socialist Germany, replacing the market democracy paradigm which has prevailed throughout much of the world today. As for Churchill's "New Dark Age" protracted by "perverted science," imagine a world with a Nazi atomic bomb and no Manhattan Project.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 12:54AM|#

fyxdt