The Super Summary of World History

by Alan Dale Daniel

  Remember, winning is relative. Setting proper end game goals enhance your chances of success. Good decisions, complete planning, and total commitment to reasonable goals can drive luck—at least partly—out of the equation.

  You can do nothing about bad luck except struggle to rise above the circumstances. That is life. The USA was on the deck after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Wake Island, and the Battle of the Java Sea, but America never gave up and came off the mat at the Coral Sea and Midway never to look back. Bad luck normally does not doom you; it only forces you to work harder to reach your goals.

  Another great lesson is Win the Peace. After a conflict learn how to bring stability to the situation without embarrassing the vanquished. The best peace wins the conquered to your side, and makes them an asset.

  Finally, the Second World War shows us how thin the veneer of civilization really is. The Nazi state quickly stripped away any semblance of being civilized. Normal everyday people adopted the Reich’s cruelty without question or opposition. Starting with the persecutions of the Jews, gypsies, slaves, mentally ill, and many others, the German state turned its citizens into soulless barbarians, willing to murder without question. Germans accepted crushing the target groups like cockroaches. Hitler made it look easy, and that is the problem. It was easy, and if Hitler could accomplish it so can others. Humanity is only a short step away from barbarism.

  Books and References:

  I have read hundreds of books on World War II. Here are a few of the best, in no particular order (* means superior):

  *Cross Channel Attack, Harrison, Gordon A., 1950, Konecky & Konecky. The best book on the D-Day landings at Normandy.

  *History of the Second World War, Hart, B.H. Liddell, 1970, Konecky & Konecky. One of the best books on WWII. Wonderful maps!

  *Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Brilliant General, von Manstein, Field Marshal Erich, 2004, Zenith Press. How the war in the east was lost, from the mouth of the man who was there.

  *Miracle at Midway, Prange, G., 1983, Penguin. A great account of the battle of Midway, easy to read, and authoritative. Considered a classic by most historians.

  *The Oxford Companion to World War II, Dear & Foot, 1995, Oxford Press. Huge reference book, probably the best general reference on WWII.

  The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans, Penguin, 2005

  The Third Reich in Power, Evans, Penguin, 2006

  *The Two Ocean War, Morison, Samuel Eliot, 1963, Back Bay Books. Morison can’t be beat on the naval war. Please recall that Morison, like many of the early authors, did not know about Ultra, and Magic, the code breakers who did so much to win the war for the allies.

  *There’s A War to be Won, Perret, Goeffrey, 1992, Ballantine books. I love this book. So much is explained so well that it is hard to overstate the importance of reading this author.

  At Dawn We Slept: the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, Prange & Goldstein, 1982, Penguin. Prange on Pearl Harbor, what more do you need to know? Gordon Prange also wrote Miracle at Midway.

  Dirty Little Secrets of World War II, Dunnigan & Nofi, 1995, Morrow. Fun!

  Eagle Against the Sun, Spector, Ronald H., 1985, Random House. Easy to read, and comprehensive when it comes to the Pacific War.

  Guadalcanal, Frank, R.B., 1992, Penguin. This is a must read book if you want to understand the Pacific War, and why everything changed after this epic campaign.

  How Great Generals Win, Alexander, Bevin, 1993, WW Norton & Co. Some coverage of WWII generals. Alexander’s thoughts are always worth reading.

  How Wars are Won, The 13 Rules of War from Ancient Greece to the War on Terror, Alexander, Bevin, 2002, Three Rivers Press.

  Miracle at Midway, Prange,G., 1983, Penguin

  Panzer Battles, von Mellenthin, FW, 1956, Konecky & Konecky

  The Gathering Storm, Churchill, W., 1986, Mariner Books

  The Pacific War Companion, From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima, ed. Marston, D., 2005, Osprey Publishing

  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer, William, 1990, Simon & Schuster. A classic, but somewhat difficult to read. None-the-less, there are few better books on the regime.

  The Rommel Papers, Rommel, Erwin, 1982, Da Capo Press

  The Second World War 1939-1945, Fuller, J.C.F., 1948, Da Capo Press. Yet another must read book on WWII by an outstanding English analyst.

  The Shattered Sward, The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Pershall and Tully, 2005, Potomac Books. Excellent book, somewhat controversial.

  The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Greenwood, 1946 (also available on line). First hand information, great statics, well written.

  The US Army in World War II, The Fall of the Philippines, The War in the Pacific, Roberts, Greenfield general editor, 1953, National Historical Society. This is a series of books on the US Army in the Pacific War. Excellent detailed analysis of each campaign, but detail on other services and their role is small, and the impact of Ultra and Magic is missing because of the date of publication.

  The World At Arms, The Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of World War II, Wright, Michael editor, 1989, The Reader’s Digest Association Limited. Excellent and pithy account of the world wide struggle.

  War Plan Orange, The US Strategy to Defeat Japan 1897-1945, Miller, Edward S., 1991, Naval Institute Press. Surprising analysis of the Pacific War, and how the US planned for the conflict.

  Wikipedia, the on line encyclopedia. Look under World War II or the various subject headings, such as: Pearl Harbor, D-Day et al.

  The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans, Prange, Gordon W. (1999), Brassey’s, ISBN 1574882228

  Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Buchanan Crown Publisher, 2009.

  Chapter 16

  The Cold War 1945 to 1989

  The Cold War dominated the time between the end of World War II and 1990. The USSR and the United States of America held the trump cards, nuclear bombs and missiles. The two nations controlled the fate of the world in the sense that they controlled whether the world would come to an abrupt end. While the Cold War progressed so did society which went on as if the threat of nuclear obliteration was just an apparition. The Space Race, computer development, superhighway construction, jet airliner development, the creation of an international phone system, the advent of television, enormous progress in medicine, and the creation of mass consumerism—among many other things—all played a part in the world that developed after World War II. However, much of the world progressed poorly compared to the Western Democracies. In Africa, India, Asia, and the Middle East, colonialism was in its last throws and transitioning to new ways of governance was rough. Hundreds of wars accompanied by mass killing marred the world emerging from eighteenth century colonialism. Nothing has been easy in this ongoing birth of a modern world.

  The Cold War began immediately after World War II concluded, or perhaps even before, and ended when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. There is little doubt that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a world based on a sizeable level of trust between the United States and the Soviet Union. For reasons that are hard to determine, he trusted the dictator and murderer of millions, Joseph Stalin. Winston Churchill tried to warm up to Stalin, but quickly discerned Stalin was not trustworthy. He saw that Roosevelt was falling for the duplicitous Stalin’s words of compromise and attempted to warn Roosevelt, but to no avail.

  At war’s end, Roosevelt was no longer the president of the United States, and Churchill was no longer the prime minister of Great Britain. Roosevelt died in the last months of the war and Churchill was voted out of office. The new men, Truman as president of the United States and Atlee as prime minister of Great Britain, took over where their predecessors left off. As for Truman, he was in the dark about everything. The atomic bomb was news to him. Roosevelt had told him nothing; as a result, Truman was on his own when confronting the problems of a new world filled with massive armies and atomic weapons.

  One of Truman’s first decis
ions was to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in an attempt to end the war. Some have said it was the first act of the Cold War, designed to show Stalin the power possessed by the United States, and to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Truman, however, said he used the atomic bomb to end World War II.

  The Cold War was going to be something entirely new for planet Earth. Actions in the international arena were not what they might seem to be. Some event may have a hundred starting points, no real end point, and what actually occurred might be foggy at best and denied by everyone in every government everywhere. It is very hard to tell the history of something so close in time when a lot of emotional baggage is still around and documents are all but impossible to come by in some cases. The Cold War was fought with technology, spies, and nerves. Clandestine operations were often the key to everything, and secret operations are not disclosed by most governments until many years have passed—if ever.

  Economics played a large part in the Cold War. In Europe, with US help, a recovery without precedent took place between the end of the war and 1970. The recovery rate in the output of goods exceeded 200 percent. In 1957 France, Italy, and Germany led the way in starting a customs union, the European Economic Community. This union was the precursor of the European Union. In Asia, Japan’s economy boomed with the Korean War era, and with American help Japan grew to a superpower, in economic terms anyway. The economic gap between the Soviet and American systems consistently widened during the entire Cold War period.

  Soon after World War II, Winston Churchill, always good with a phrase, said that an iron curtain had fallen across Eastern Europe. He was more right than he may have imagined. Once the Soviets were in control of an area, no one and no information came out of that area again. Stalin, the so-called man of steel, had placed an iron curtain over his empire and that curtain would hang about until 1989.

  Before and during World War II the Soviet Union developed clandestine cells and placed them throughout the world with the idea of spreading the communist revolution through subversion and violence. If these revolutions took control of many small nations, and perhaps a few large ones, the communists would control the world de facto if not directly. They also placed spies at the highest levels of governments all over the world. The Soviets were masters of the game and managed to insert spies into the uppermost levels of the Nazi, Japanese, British, and American governments. In the case of the American and British governments they penetrated to the heart of the espionage communities and even the counterespionage units of these democracies.

  Communist spies in the American nuclear development program stole the secrets of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and gave them to the Soviets. The Soviets recruited many spies from the ranks of Britain’s top universities, mainly on ideological grounds, and simply waited until they entered the premier levels of government or technological work to extract secrets from them. The USSR placed spies at high levels of US Policy determination, in the US Treasury, and in many other important positions in the military and government bureaucracy. They even penetrated the American CIA and FBI, thereafter using these human resources to track what America knew about Soviet spies and to uncover American spies in the USSR. One spy was in the US Nuclear Submarine program and delivered to the Soviets complete details on how the US Navy was building super quiet submarines that were following the Soviet subs effectively. After these details were absorbed by the Soviets the United States could no longer track Soviet submarines, and many of these were nuclear missile submarines—also copied from American technological plans.

  Throughout the Cold War the Americans were at a significant disadvantage in clandestine operations; and the Soviets easily matched the West’s technological miracles by simply stealing the technology. This saved the Soviets billions of dollars in development costs. It also kept the Soviets at par with the West militarily. Not only did the Soviets steal plans, they stole many of the actual technological units. As the Cold War progressed into the 1980s, President Reagan used this Soviet ability against the USSR by allowing them to steal purposely planted defective parts and computer chips used for operating complex equipment. Because the parts were designed to be defective and for the defect to be nearly impossible to unearth, tremendous damage was done to critical Soviet operations, such as their Siberian oil pipeline, by component failures. It was one of the very few American espionage successes during the Cold War.

  The Cold War brought the United States and the Soviet Union into a dangerous and deadly arms race. Each nation constructed more and larger nuclear warheads, better missile delivery systems, better jet bombers and fighters, and a lot more. Submarines showed dramatic improvements, which included the ability for one ship to launch up to sixteen nuclear-armed missiles while submerged. These missiles were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) carrying multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads. Each ICBM could carry up to ten warheads and each were capable of being sent to a different target. One missile could annihilate up to ten objectives. The Soviets constructed larger warheads, up to twenty megatons (twenty million tons of TNT), which was far more than the ten-kiloton bomb (ten thousand tons of TNT) that leveled Hiroshima. These multiple warhead ICBMs were installed on missile submarines thereby enabling one submarine to bring nuclear devastation to 160 targets.

  As the Soviet warheads grew in power, the United States constructed hardened underground missile silos with the capability to withstand an atomic blast and still fire back. America maintained a number of B-52 bombers aloft at all times to enable them to attack the Soviet Union after an atomic attack on the United States and its airfields. The United States also placed missiles into mobile launchers and constantly drove them around the nation to make targeting them all but impossible. Another tool in the arsenal of second strike capability was the so-called doomsday tapes. It is said the hardened missile silos had computers which, once enabled, would fire their missiles at some predetermined future date even if everyone in the silo (or even the United States) was dead. As eerie as it may sound, everyone on earth could be dead from the nuclear war and months or years later the computers would still be launching continued atomic attacks on smoldering enemy landscapes.

  The entire point to all of this military expenditure on the American side was to ensure the ability to strike back at the USSR after a surprise atomic attack on the United States. Much of this fear of a surprise attack was left over from Pearl Harbor and the resolve of the United States to never allow that kind of attack to happen again. In addition, the United States did not trust the Soviets or Stalin. They equated Stalin to Hitler, and the United States was determined to avoid any hint of appeasement. The name for this fantastic deterrent capability held by the Soviets and the United States was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). [335]A fitting name, but what was amazing about the entire philosophy is—it worked. War itself was not banned by the atomic bomb; however, no nuclear exchange has taken place (yet) so a crazy sounding policy has worked for sixty-five plus years.

  From 1945 to 2010, the United States of America exercised a strong stabilizing force on the world. For over fifty years the USA held the line against communism, aggression, and instability. In 2010, forces within the nation are eroding its ability to stand firm against new threats. As the United States shrinks from its former position of insuring stability the world will go through many changes akin to the withdrawal of Great Britain from the world stage after 1945, but with no nation to step into the void as a replacement. Instability and chaos may well result from the resulting world realignment.

  Truman: Neophyte Cold Warrior

  1945 to 1952

  Truman adopted a policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union and the communist threat. George Kennan, a State Department analyst, outlined this policy in 1947. Kennan assumed the Soviet Union would do everything in its power to spread communism. The purpose of the containment policy was to stop the USSR from spreading communism through invasion or subversion. To forward this policy, Truman ga
ve aid to Greece in its war against communist insurgents, instituted the Marshall Plan to revitalize Western Europe, helped reconstruct West Germany to offset Soviet power, and fought the Korean War to repel a communist invasion. His problems included the loss of China to the Reds, large numbers of Soviet spies in the US Government and military, and his failure to remain ready to fight conventional wars.

  During the Truman administration an American senator, Joe McCarthy, started a well publicized “commie hunt” within the US Government. Many of his accusations were challenged at the time, but a short window of opportunity opened for US intelligence when they broke the Soviet codes and began uncovering information about Soviet spies in the United States. The Verona decrypts proved many communist spies were operating at high levels of the US Government and intelligence services. This window was closed when a Soviet spy operating within this most secret unit discovered the decrypts and the Soviets changed their codes. The press and the liberal establishment vilified McCarthy, and his name is still used as a weapon against anyone wanting to throw a wide net in search of traitors or spies. For some reason he is often associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, but McCarthy was a US Senator and was not part of the House committee.

  In 1949, Truman failed to prevent the communist takeover of China. One of the greatest political, diplomatic, military, and strategic failures in modern history was the loss of China to Mao Zedong and the communists. The Kuomintang Army of General Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt to the core and a poor fighting unit by any measure; however, General Chiang Kai-shek was far better than any communist regime. At one point, the Kuomintang Army was about to crush Mao Zedong and his communists in spite of Soviet aid, but the United States stepped in and prevented what should have been the final assault on Mao. This American cease-fire let the communists regroup and then survive the attacks of Chiang. All of this was orchestrated by General George Marshall, famous for leading the US military throughout World War II, and the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from economic collapse after WWII. Somehow, his key role in the communist’s victory in China is ignored by history. (The Korean War is covered in another section.)