by Oliver Stone
Events in Europe would soon prompt some to reconsider. First Hitler repudiated the arms limitations imposed at Versailles. Then, in October 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Hampered by recently passed neutrality legislation imposing an embargo on arms sales to all belligerents and a domestic population whose loyalties were sharply divided, with Italian Americans generally supporting Mussolini and African Americans supporting Ethiopia, the United States stayed on the sidelines. Nor did the international community strongly condemn the invasion. The League of Nations denounced the Italian aggression and looked to impose an oil embargo with potentially devastating consequences. The League’s Coordination Committee asked nonmember nations if they would comply. At the time, the United States supplied more than half the world’s oil. U.S. cooperation could have done much to deter fascist aggression. But Roosevelt, bowing to the isolationist sentiment at home, opted not to participate. Roosevelt instead announced a “moral embargo” on shipments of oil and other important resources. The “moral embargo” proved completely ineffectual as U.S. resource shipments to Italy nearly tripled over the next few months.134 The League passed limited and toothless sanctions that it watered down out of deference to British and French timidity and fear of provoking Italy.
Mussolini’s gambit succeeded. Hitler and the Japanese concluded that Great Britain, France, and the United States had no stomach for war and would rather acquiesce than face military action. In January 1936, Japan walked out of the London Naval Conference and began an ambitious militarization program. In March 1936, German troops occupied the Rhineland. It was both Hitler’s big gamble and his big bluff. But it worked. He later admitted that armed resistance would have forced him to back down. “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-wracking in my life,” he said. “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”135
The feeble international response to the Spanish Civil War was even more disheartening. Fighting broke out in July 1936 as Francisco Franco’s forces set out to topple the elected Spanish government and establish a fascist regime. The republic had made enemies among U.S. officials and corporate leaders by its progressive policies and tight regulation of business. Some alleged Communist influence and expressed fear that a republican victory would result in Communist domination. American Catholics and church officials, angered by the republic’s aggressive anticlericalism, rallied to Franco’s support, as did Hitler and Mussolini, who provided abundant aid, including aircraft, pilots, and thousands of troops. Germany would use the war to test the weapons and tactics it later deployed against Poland and the rest of Europe. Stalin sent planes and tanks to the democratic forces but couldn’t come close to matching the massive assistance from Berlin and Rome. But Roosevelt did nothing to assist the Republican forces. Nor did Great Britain or France. The United States, following the British and French lead, banned the shipment of weapons to both sides, which weakened the beleaguered and outgunned government forces. Ford, GM, Firestone, and other U.S. businesses provided the fascists with trucks, tires, and machine tools. Texaco Oil Company, headed by pro-Fascist Colonel Thorkild Rieber, promised Franco all the oil he needed—on credit. Roosevelt, furious, threatened an oil embargo and slapped Texaco with a fine. But Rieber persisted undeterred, supplying oil to Hitler and being lionized in the pages of Life magazine.136
Progressive Americans rallied to the republican cause. Surprisingly to some, it was antiwar stalwart Gerald Nye who led the Senate fight to send desperately needed arms to Republican forces. Some three thousand brave American volunteers went to Spain to battle the Fascists, traveling first to France and then sneaking across the Pyrenees into Spain. Four hundred fifty men formed the legendary Communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which suffered 120 dead and 175 wounded. Paul Robeson, the extraordinarily talented African-American athlete, intellectual, actor, and singer, went to the battlefield to entertain the troops.
The fighting dragged on for three years. The republic fell in spring 1939, burying with it not only over 100,000 republican soldiers and 5,000 foreign volunteers but the hopes and dreams of much of humanity. By 1938, Roosevelt realized how foolish his policies had been and tried to send covert aid to the republic. It was too little too late. His policy had been “a grave mistake,” Roosevelt told his cabinet. He warned that they would soon all pay the price.137
A ceremony during the first gathering of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the legendary Communist-backed group of volunteers who went to fight Franco’s Fascists in Spain. The brigade suffered 120 dead and 175 wounded.
The world did little to impede Japanese aggression in China in 1937, though many onlookers were horrified at the reports of the fighting. Beginning with the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937, fighting spread to other parts of the country. With Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) forces fleeing in retreat, Japan brutalized Chinese civilians. The atrocities, including an orgy of rape, looting, and murder, were most egregious in Shanghai and Nanjing.
With fascistic and militaristic forces on the march, the world was hurtling rapidly toward war. Motivated in some cases by sympathy for the fascists, in others by hatred of Soviet communism, and in others by fear of plunging into the same abyss that had caused such suffering in the previous world war, the Western democracies stood on the sidelines as Italy, Japan, and Germany set about to forcibly change the balance of global power.
Chapter 3
WORLD WAR II:
Who Really Defeated Germany?
Most Americans view World War II nostalgically as the “good war,” in which the United States and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism. The rest of the world remembers it as the bloodiest war in human history. By the time it was over, more than 60 million people lay dead, including 27 million Russians, between 10 million and 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, 5.5 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese, and 1.5 million Yugoslavs. Austria, Great Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and the United States each counted between 250,000 and 333,000 dead.
Unlike World War I, World War II began slowly and incrementally. The opening shots were fired in 1931, when Japan’s Kwantung Army overwhelmed Chinese forces in Manchuria.
While the Western powers expanded their colonial empires in the late nineteenth century, the rapidly modernizing and industrializing Japan sought its proper place among the world’s leading nations. Japan demonstrated its new military prowess by defeating China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and then delivering a stunning defeat to Russia in the Russo-Japanese War exactly a decade later. It was the first time in almost seven hundred years—since the days of Genghis Khan—that an Eastern power had defeated a Western one. The loss devastated the Russian regime, sparking a revolutionary upsurge in 1905. This radical ferment, fueled by tsarist injustice and heavy losses to Germany in World War I, would culminate in the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Russo-Japanese War also created a bitterness between Russia and Japan that would fester for decades.
Meanwhile, Germany, thirsting to avenge its own devastating defeat in World War I, was on the march in the West. Hitler and Mussolini formed the Axis in 1936 and began assisting General Francisco Franco’s overthrow of the Spanish Republic. The Western democracies’ spineless response to Fascist aggression in Ethiopia and Spain emboldened Hitler to believe that he could pursue his plans to conquer the rest of Europe. It also convinced Stalin that Great Britain, France, and the United States had no interest in taking collective action to slow the Nazi advance.
In 1937, full-scale war erupted in China as the powerful Japanese army captured city after city. In December 1937, Japanese soldiers brutalized the citizens of Nanjing, killing 200,000 to 300,000 civilians and raping perhaps 80,000 women. Japan soon controlled the east coast of China, with its popula
tion of 200 million.
The international situation deteriorated further in 1938 when the Germans annexed Austria and the Allies capitulated to Hitler at Munich, giving Germany the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously proclaimed that the settlement had brought “peace in our time.”1 Roosevelt knew better. The British and French, he insisted, had abandoned the helpless Czechs and would “wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands.”2 But Roosevelt also knew that the United States itself was offering little support to those who wanted to stand up to the Nazi dictator. Nor did the United States do enough to help Germany and Austria’s desperate Jewish communities. In 1939 the United States admitted its full quota of 27,300 German and Austrian immigrants—the only year in which it did so. But with hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking refuge, U.S. assistance proved woefully inadequate. And Roosevelt made no effort to raise the low quota established by discriminatory immigration legislation in 1924.3
Hitler struck again in March 1939, invading Czechoslovakia. Stalin understood that the Soviet Union’s turn was coming soon. For years the Soviet dictator had implored the West to unite against Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviet Union even joined the League of Nations in 1934. But Soviet pleas for collective security against the fascist aggressors were repeatedly ignored. Following Hitler’s assault on Czechoslovakia, Stalin again urged England and France to join in defense of Eastern Europe. His entreaties fell on deaf ears.
Fearing a German-Polish alliance to attack the USSR, he decided to buy time. In August, he struck an unsavory deal with his mortal enemy. Hitler and Stalin shocked the world by signing a nonaggression pact with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe between them. In fact, the Soviet dictator had proposed a similar alliance with Britain and France, but neither would accept Stalin’s demand to place Soviet troops on Polish soil as a way of maximizing the deterrent effect. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1. The Allies declared war on Germany. The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17. The Soviets soon thereafter asserted control over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and invaded Finland.
After a brief respite, in April 1940, Hitler unleashed his furious blitzkrieg. In rapid succession, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium all fell. On June 22, France, its younger generation having been decimated in World War I and its conservative ruling class anti-Semitic to the core, surrendered after only six weeks of fighting, leaving Great Britain isolated. During the Battle of Britain in summer 1940, prospects looked bleak. But Germany’s failure to destroy Great Britain’s Royal Air Force made the cross-channel invasion of Great Britain planned for September 1940 impossible. Still, the German Luftwaffe’s pummeling of British cities continued.
Hitler and Mussolini formed the Axis in 1936 and began a campaign of aggression in Ethiopia and Spain. Initially, the Western democracies did little to stop them.
Roosevelt wanted to help, but with neutrality legislation on the books, military preparedness at a low level, and isolationist sentiment running high, there was little he could do. He also encountered resistance from cabinet members and military leaders who thought that Great Britain was lost and resources should be concentrated on defending the homeland. He maneuvered to get Great Britain as much military aid as he could. Opening himself up to attacks that he was acting illegally, he bypassed the Senate and unilaterally decided to provide Great Britain with fifty old naval destroyers in exchange for ninety-nine-year leases of air and naval bases on eight British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. As the Battle of Britain raged on, Roosevelt was willing to absorb such attacks to bolster British resolve.4
World leaders condemned Japanese aggression but did little to help China as Japan relentlessly bombed Chinese cities. In July 1939, the United States tightened the noose around the Japanese economy by terminating its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan, which cut off the flow of vital raw materials, and banning U.S. exports critical to the Japanese war machine. Meanwhile, in Manchuria, Soviet and Japanese armies battled over the disputed border, leading to Soviet General Georgi Zhukov’s first victory and heightening tensions in the East.
In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan formally concluded the Tripartite Pact, establishing the “Axis powers” alliance. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria joined soon thereafter.
Seeing the war clouds gathering on the horizon, Roosevelt decided to break with precedent and run for a third term. The Republicans nominated a corporate attorney from Indiana, Wendell Willkie, a political moderate who supported much of the New Deal legislation and advocated military aid to Great Britain. The fact that Willkie, a recent convert to the Republican Party, had garnered the nomination angered party diehards like former Senator James Watson, who commented, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But, by the Eternal, I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.”5
Roosevelt gave serious thought to choosing a running mate. The stakes were high. The nation might soon be at war. He weighed his options and chose his Secretary of Agriculture: Henry A. Wallace. He knew that there would be strong opposition to Wallace, who came from a line of prominent Iowa Republicans. His grandfather had founded Wallaces’ Farmer, a leading farm journal dedicated to scientific agriculture. His father served as secretary of agriculture under Harding and Coolidge until his death in 1924. Although he supported Smith in 1928 and Roosevelt in 1932, Wallace didn’t officially switch parties until 1936, leading some party officials to question his loyalty, much as Republicans were questioning Willkie’s.
Roosevelt had no such doubts. He knew where Wallace stood on the issues. Wallace had been a stalwart as secretary of agriculture, overseeing an extraordinary return to agricultural prosperity. Farmers, who still constituted a quarter of the population in 1933, were in miserable shape when Wallace became secretary. Production of farm commodities had flooded the markets, driving down prices. The problem, which persisted throughout the 1920s, reached crisis proportions after 1929. Total farm income in 1932 stood at one-third of what it had been in 1929. By 1933, desperation stalked rural America. Roosevelt understood that the overall success of the New Deal depended on the restoration of farm prosperity. Wallace’s solution proved extremely controversial. He proposed paying farmers to reduce agricultural production on the assumption that lowered supply would increase demand and thereby raise prices. But in 1933, he was forced to take even more drastic action. The price of cotton had dropped to 5 cents per pound. Warehouses were bursting. Export markets had evaporated. And another large crop was sprouting. Wallace decided to pay farmers to destroy 25 percent of the crop that was then in the ground. For Wallace, who had spent years perfecting a strain of hybrid corn and who believed that abundant food supplies were essential for a peaceful world, the thought was almost inconceivable. “To have to destroy a growing crop,” he lamented, “is a shocking commentary on our civilization.” That August, more than 10 million acres of cotton were plowed under.
But what came next was even more difficult. Wallace still had to deal with an abundance of hogs. On the advice of hog farmers, Wallace supported a program of slaughtering 6 million baby pigs weighing under one hundred pounds, approximately half the normal two-hundred-pound market weight of adults. Critics lambasted Wallace’s “pig infanticide” and “pig birth control.” Wallace retorted, “Doubtless it is just as inhumane to kill a big hog as a little one. . . . To hear them talk, you would have thought that pigs are raised for pets.” Wallace made sure that some good came of this program. He distributed one hundred million pounds of pork, lard, and soap to needy Americans. “Not many people realized how radical it was—,” he reflected, “this idea of having the Government buy from those who had too much, in order to give to those who had too little.”
Wallace’s much-maligned policies produced the desired effect. The price of cotton doubled. Farm income jumped by 30 percent in one year. Still, Wallace regretted the unfortunate message
such policies sent: “The plowing under of 10 million acres of cotton in August 1933, and the slaughter of 6 million little pigs in September, 1933, were not acts of idealism in any sane society. They were emergency acts made necessary by the almost insane lack of world statesmanship during the period from 1920 to 1932.”6 Wallace’s clarifications notwithstanding, the seemingly wanton destruction of crops and livestock in the midst of hunger and poverty turned people’s empty stomachs and saddled the New Deal with an image of callousness and a reputation of espousing a philosophy of recovery through scarcity.