Critics, fighting WWII - A Reply by Richard Sale

I see that my offhand comments about World War II got all the dogs barking.  There is a good book by Liddell Hart, the author of Strategy who also did a book, The Other Side of the Hill in which Field Marshall von Rundstedt states that he was surprised that the US didn’t invade France in 1943, not 1944, after Germany had occupied the rest of France in 1943. “I thought you would take advantage of this extensive stretching of our resources,” he said. Can anyone imagine what that invasion would have done to the future of Eastern Europe, if the invasion had been tried a year earlier? Chester Wilmont did a whole book expressing his intense disappointment that the invasion wasn’t tried earlier. At least that is my best recollection of it. Time always matters in war, especially in a war when the future of the continent was going to be decided by the movement of armies. Sale 

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[William R. Cumming]

What has always fascinated me about WWII was its relatively short duration. The factors why are not really clear to me.

[w. patrick Lang]

All

It is my understanding that Operation Roundup was scheduled for 1943 in various phases but that the British were concerned about their experiences at Dieppe and St. Nazaire and preferred to defer the cross-channeloperation until greater resources were available. This view prevailed at the Casablanca Conference. pl

[Walrus]

Mr. Sale, I take issue with your deterministic view of history. I do not believe the size and scope of Stalins beastliness was clear to anyone at the time and quoting a few memoirs doesn't change it.

A lot of highly intelligent people believed Communism was a viable option and many gave their lives in this belief during those times.

It was not until the late 1940's say 1949, that the full intent of the Russians was plainly visible and the "true believers" in the West were a political force until perhaps the late 1960's from my memory.

The definitive works on WWII are still to be written in my opinion. For example the Russians gave us a tantalising look at their archives(via Beavors book on Stalingrad) before Putin slammed the door again.

Some scholars like Lukacs make a determined effort to evaluate historic decisions on the basis of what was known at the time and the mindset at the time, not with the benefit of Seventy years of hindsight, for example, the tagging of Chamberline as a gutless "appeaser" is wrong.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Richard Sale:

Conflating the value judegements on the harsh dictatorship of Stalin with the necessity of fighting World War II is a mistake, in my opinion.

It gets one very quickly into such issues as the influence of Stalin on the Soviet State etc, which, in my opinion, cannot be settled conclusively.

I would argue that the "character of the regime" was one of a modernizing dictatorship, carrying out in earnest the Enlightement programme under Asiatic conditions.

I would further argue that it is debatable if the Soviet lines could have held without the NKVD troops behind them, shooting "deserters" (all those young men who could not take it any longer).

Which one is the superior moral choice; forcing young men to fight a brutal infantry war with 100% certainity of death (Iwo Jima Writ Large) or surrender and accept slavery of the Third Reich per the NAZI programme?

In regards to the so-called "Slave Nations" - they were satellites that USSR had gained through war, just like US gained her satellites during the same war.

1800 years ago, Sassanid Persia and Roman Empire each had their own client states and each contested the strategic space between them.

Nothing much seems to have changed since then except that the contest has become global as technology has advanced.

Business as usual.

[no one]

I think that is true re; Roundup. The British may have been correct to postpone because a) the allied strategic bombing was just barely beginning to yield positive results and b) the Soviets were just starting to badly bleed the German forces.

I also always understood that the purpose of the Italian campaign was not really to exploit a "soft underbelly", but to tie down German divisions that could otherwise be used to oppose the landing in France.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

If I recall correctly from my reading, Stalin was strongly pushing for action in France in 1943 to relieve pressure on his front. When Roosevelt and Marshall grudgingly accepted Churchill's view that such an operation was not yet feasible they felt it was necessary to do something somewhere in the west for fear that Stalin, if pressed too much, might negotiate a separate peace. Sicily and the Italian peninsula were chosen as the alternative.

[no one]

ex-PFC Chuck, I read that too. It's probably an accurate perspective as well. However, it doesn't invalidate other perspectives. The best strategies achieve multiple goals on multiple levels.

[kao_hsien_chih]

There were in fact negotiations in 1943, prior to the Battle of Kursk--at least according to some sources (I haven't been able to find good sources on the details, though). Whether the negotiations were meant to be "serious" is debatable (well, actually, not even: they almost certainly were not), but Molotov and Ribbentrop did make rounds talking to each other (apparently, not directly), with the former demanding the minimum of total evacuation from Soviet territories and the latter demanding retention of most of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states as the minimum, as I understand.

[Fred]

A Reply to Mr. Sale,

Sir,
you wrote:

"I see that my offhand comments about World War II got all the dogs barking." and "A personal note. I am baffled by someone who said my criticism was “easy to make 70 years after the war.” And his reply took thought and effort?"

You are certainly right my initial comments took little thought and effort. I offer my apologies. I will comment at length.

Mr. Sale, you made an initial post of three pages, going on a page and 3/4 about Auschwitz and the horrors there before referring to Pat Lang's comments that WWII was a war that had to be fought. Auschwitz was not the only horror in WWII. Europe was not the sole theater nor even the initial one at which countries were at war. You made zero reference to the attack by the Empire of Japan upon the United States or their conquest and occupation of the Philippines - whose liberation was a moral obligation of the American Republic as pointed out by MacAurthur. But let me return to your comments on the holocaust.

You mention a visit to Dachau where a plaque explained that 8,000 Russian POWs had been killed there. That's 8,000 out of 2,500,000 soviet soldiers killed in the death camps. Further, you said: "The visitors I mixed with were not aware of this grave nor did they pay any attention to the slaughter of these troops."

Why is that? We've all heard of the 6 million, why is there no mention of the 2,500,000?

"You cannot overstate the horror what the Jews suffered."

This is true, but not a word about the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March nor any of the other atrocities committed by the forces of Imperial Japan in its war in China, Burma, India, the Phillipies and the rest of the Pacific Theatre in WWII? Don't those horrors rate remembrance alongside the horrors inflicted upon europeans? In this case it seems many adhere to the quote attributed to Stalin, "One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic".

"If we had been militarily prepared and invaded Germany earlier,…"
I for one have had a lifetime of hearing "If only America had…." It was the American and allied armies - including those of the USSR - that ENDED the holocaust. Not once have I heard anyone say "Thank you America for helping end the holocaust". Next time the tourists are doing the WWII sightseeing they should stop by one of the many American Military Cemeteries in Europe; perhaps they can even visit the graves of one of the Strack's killed in action ending the holocaust and tell him "If only America had done something sooner". Just don't tell it to me, I wasn't alive then. I did not inherit any guilt because the American people in 1939 didn't do enough to satisfy the people now living in 2013.

As to the details you give for the campaign in Europe and WWII strategy I will comment at length.

"There is a good book by Liddell Hart, the author of Strategy who also did a book, The Other Side of the Hill in which Field Marshall von Rundstedt states that he was surprised that the US didn’t invade France in 1943, not 1944, after Germany had occupied the rest of France in 1943. “I thought you would take advantage of this extensive stretching of our resources,” he said. "

Von Rundstedt apparently did not appreciate the limitations of US resources in 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats was not won until May of that year. We did not have air supremacy in the Mediterranean or over Western Europe and the Italians were still in the war. All of these were factors influencing the strategic decision.

"Time always matters in war, especially in a war when the future of the continent was going to be decided by the movement of armies."

This is absolutely true, but to go back to your first post (the one that got us dogs barking), you commented that "… at the start of the war, the American military rank 19th after Portugal, we were forced to start very late. So we fought a war that had no carefully calculated, rational limit."

How much time does it take to train, equip and field a modern army?
In 1938 when Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig ordered General Marshall to the War Department (War Plans Division) the US Army authorized strength was 225,000 and the combined strength of all National Guard units was less than 250,000. The Selective Service Act had yet to be passed and when it did it limited total draftee numbers to 900,000 with tours of duty a maximum of one year and restricted deployment to the continental United States.

Furthermore it was only in late 1940 that congress authorized an increase in the navy by 210 ships. How long does it take to build a fleet carrier? Train the crew, the pilots, etc?

The initial army draftees were slated to be discharged in September of 1941, leaving the Army back to where it started! Furthermore when an extension of the draftees term of service was asked for in August 1941 it passed the House of Representatives by exactly 1 vote.

Why? Because of the isolationist feeling dominant in US public opinion at the time. It took the defeat of France to start to shift US public opinion away from isolationism. It was the attack upon the United States by the Japan that galvanized US public opinion. Germany declared war two days later. Had they not done so things would have certainly been different.

"I think that Roosevelt, in addition to not being a great strategist, …."

It was Churchill who proposed in 1941 intervening in Greece, (the soft underbelly of Europe) which, according to wiki: "Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff during World War II, considered intervention in Greece to be "a definite strategic blunder", as it denied Wavell the necessary reserves to complete the conquest of Italian-held Libya, or to successfully withstand Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps March offensive. It thus prolonged the North African Campaign, which otherwise might have been successfully concluded during 1941" (see wiki on the Battle of Greece or Broad, Charlie Lewis (1958). Winston Churchill: A Biography ).

" But the defect of American strategy lay with their faulty analysis of the conditions of the world they sought to improve."
I believe the JCS, especially Marshall, were quite cognizant of the number of casualties that would have been inflicted upon the US Army in attempting to do what the USSR eventually did - defeat Germany in the Eastern European theatre and capture Berlin. (The Russian's took almost a million casualties in taking that city.) That consideration took precedence that fighting Germany so as to defeat (our ally) the USSR for a post war shaping of Europe.
"Once again, as in World War I, the aim of America in World War II was to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world, but America’s actions were undertaken with no sound, dispassionate, detailed analysis of how this was to be done."
Can you point me to some evidence that America's aim was to spread democracy throughout the world? Wasn't "freedom" the point of post WWII wars of colonial liberation movements against Imperial Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands? WWII didn't liberate India, Egypt, Angola, Burma or a dozen other countries. It didn't bring them democracy either. The argument could perhaps be made for Japan, yet that country already had democratic institutions.

In my view was the strategic aim of the post war policy was the reformation of Japan's governmental structure and of (West) Germany's so as to keep them from being enemies of the United States and eliminated the risk of war we faced from them.

"So there’s no Asia, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, no the problems in Africa?"

Government of by and for the people of Asia, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa - those are not our obligations, legally or morally. We can set an example by our conduct, we must not conduct their affairs for them.

There are always problems, that does not make them America's problems.

Additional references:
The American Way of War by Russell F. Weigley
General of the Army, George C Marshall by Ed Cray
Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower

[Babak Makkinejad]

That is fine.

Two quibbles:

I think the casualty figure of a million described Stalingrad and not Berlin - I heard the figure of 300,000.

It was the Japanese and Germans that freed the Colonial people from the European domination - they destroyed the foundations of the colonial powers by such things as sinking their war ships (which the Europeans could not afford to replace after WWII.)

[William Fitzgerald]

I would add to the comments on Mr. Sales's article that a cross-channel invasion in 1943 was an American pipedream. In the spring and early summer of '43, the German army had recovered from the defeat at Stalingrad by calling up more men, re-equipping with newer generation weapons and fighting vehicles and was preparing for a huge summer battle in Russia. The western allies were not to complete the North Africsn campaign until May. The Sicily invasion against scratch forces was an indication of how much more preparation would be needed for an invasion of France. Overlord succeeded after Kursk, the subsequent "destruction of Army Group Center", further bitter fall and winter fighting in the Ukraine, and attrition of the Luftwaffe. On the Allied side, the planning, preparation, and training for Overlord took a year and a half or more and continued right to the last days before June 6th.

I believe it was a very good thing that Churchill prevailed over Marshall and the American planners.

WPFIII

[Neil Richardson]

Mr. Sale:

The lunacy I'd mentioned refers to the idea of going up the Italian peninsula with Allied armies that were mechanized. I've seen the terrain and if my word isn't good enough, I'd refer you to numerous works on the combat history of the campaign. Salerno, Anzio, Monte Cassino, Rapido, etc haunted valiant men of the WWII generation just as much as Somme did for British veterans of WWI. As for FDR's lack of strategic insight, I'll address this at a later date as it is too broad a topic to broach given my time constraint.

You mentioned the possibility of a cross channel invasion per Rundstedt's comment. I've not seen this, but there are several factors that I'd like to point out. First, the Wehrmacht in June of 1943 was more than capable of quickly dispatching whatever foothold Roundup or Sledgehammer might've managed to gain in northern France (I'm not sure of your time frame so I'd assume the latter was just as likely to have been adopted). If it had been Calais, perhaps it would've taken the Germans a month (shorter LOC). If it had been Normandy perhaps two IMO. If the Allies had invaded France, Hitler would've shifted the bulk of his mobile reserves from Kursk. The Germans lacked operational mobility but did possess strategic mobility. Given the difficulties that Ike had faced in trying to convince the bomber barons to implement the Transportation Plan in 1944, the Germans would have been able to use the railroad system in 1943.

Second, the Allies did not achieve air superiority in 1943. The Jagdwaffe was a very capable force as bomber crew attrition rates had shown. The prerequisite of air superiority was the reason why Normandy was the limit of possible invasion areas. The USAAF destroyed the German fighter force in the spring of 1944.

Third, the U-Boat menace had not been eradicated in 1943 (e.g., February and March shipping losses). Concurrently there wasn't enough shipping available in terms of landing crafts. On April 1, 1943 there were 27 assault transports and 13 attack cargo ships available. (Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943-1945, USACMH http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/001/1-6/CMH_Pub_1-6.pdf, p.16) In forcible entry amphibious operations, there are many variables that could go wrong (e.g., weather conditions, faulty combat loading, inadequate fire control of shore bombardment, etc. and the usual fog of war). Even if the Allies were able to land three full divisions by D+3, the landing crafts would've been attrited which would've slowed the rate of buildup, i.e. the fighting in the bocage might've been unavoidable.

Fourth, US Army in 1943 was mostly an untrained and untried force. If an invasion had failed in 1943, what would've been the possibility that the British chiefs would've gone along with another try in 1944? Understandably, the British chiefs drew lessons from Gallipoli, Dieppe and enormous dificulties in Salerno and Anzio. We know that by July 1944 Britain was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel as they were inactivating units to provide replacements to units in the line.

[Bill H]

"Not once have I heard anyone say 'Thank you America for helping end the holocaust'."

Then you have not been listening, because it is said in Europe every day, and it is said with considerable volumne. There are monuments to the American saviors everywhere, and the American graves in Normandy are tended as carefully and lovingly as are those at Arlington, perhaps even more so, and by the French.

[Richard Sale]

In response to a post of pat Lang’s site, Shortsighted Wars, I received this reply.
Mr. Sale, I take issue with your deterministic view of history. I do not believe the size and scope of Stalins beastliness was clear to anyone at the time and quoting a few memoirs doesn't change it.” (My emphasis.)
The tone of this is reader is extremely hostile. He apparently doesn’t grasp that there are errors of tone that matter as much as errors of fact, but he continues: “A lot of highly intelligent people believed Communism was a viable option and many gave their lives in this belief during those times.” Then he adds,
“It was not until the late 1940's say 1949, that the full intent of the Russians was plainly visible and the "true believers" in the West were a political force until perhaps the late 1960's from my memory.”
This observation is not accurate. The misgivings about the Soviet system were being discussed by senior U.S. officials in 1944 when we signed the surrenders of Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia. The anti-communist attitudes of senior U.S. policy makers were in place mainly by 1947, but it did “not make much of a dent in the massive surface of congealed ideas and interests” in the greater public, the words being Lukacs .
But let’s address the first criticism first. First of all, there is nothing “deterministic” in my view of History. My view of history is that it mainly a mainly a record of hasty improvisation. The reader quoted seems not to have read my earlier posting “Shortsighted Wars,” that outlines the nearsighted strategy, the emotional dubiousness, and the momentary popularity of mood that has acted to lead us into international wars, most of which have proved disastrous in the long term. As a people, we Americans lack the insight require to grasp the consequences of the use of force in the world.
It has been abundantly proven that history should try and deal mainly with matters of historical fact -- the events that have been established as true and whose dissemination and elucidation by those who know those matters best, acts to improve the mind. This does not mean that the interpretation of those facts will agree in the least. Everybody will see a happening in the light of his or her own character and knowledge. But to imply that people who write memoirs can be marginalized by “a lot of highly intelligent people” is the opinion of a virulent populist snob -- “and quoting a few memoirs doesn't change it.”
To say such a thing implies that professional diplomats are authors of flimsy opinions formed by popular hearsay, opinionated prejudice, the tyranny of the ill-informed, (and they can be found everywhere on all levels of life), rather than relying on first-hand experience or observations. The argument of the reader is an argument that undermines any effort of detachment, any effort to acquire solid knowledge. It negates any truthful effort to respect the historical fact whether or not it fits in with your momentary and unsound views. But the man or woman who writes a memoir is not supposed to a kind of walking Gallup Poll. The historian/diplomat is not supposed to be the prey of the fads of the moment or the prey of unsound fashions, popular crazes and superficial, popular predilections. Such things are seldom insightful or enduring. In fact, the experience of diplomats abroad is meant to inform and enlighten his views and personality, not the opposite.
As to the aims of Stalin.
The intent of the Russians in Europe was clear to British and U.S. policymakers by the fall of 1944. The reader should look in the history of the Foreign Policy Documents of the United States and read the Soviet surrenders signed by Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albanian, all initialed by Averill Harriman, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who the reader attempts to marginalize. Reading them is a stifling experience. Their provisions falls on our heads like small, bitter stones: there will be no public assembly unless organized and approved by the Soviet Army. There will be no newspapers, no movies, no telephones, no communications, no political party, and no economic or social program unless it is first approved by the Soviet Army, and the dreary, horrifying list goes on. After reading these, I phoned Philip Stoddard, at that time head of the State Departments’ INS group. He was soon to become part of the CIA National Intelligence Council, a group that used to do the President’s Daily Brief. When I told him of what I found, he said “Ah—so you found the great give-away.” We acquiesced in Stalin's demands because we had no force to resist them and because FDR wanted the Polish vote in America, and because we wanted Stalin’s help in Japan. Of course, just After the Japanese surrender, it was fashionable for a while not to speak of any nation as a potential enemy. America was undergoing, “We Want to Come Home riots,” on U.S. troop ships, and we were demobilizing at a disheartening rate. Ye at that same time, Stalin and 10 million soldiers in Europe, and they were staying there and least for a time.
Pat’s argumentative reader says, "True believers" in the West were a viable political force until “perhaps the late 1960's from my memory.” This statement is astounding. I guess the reader is not aware of the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the NATO Treaty of 1949, the limited U.S. response in the Korean War for fear of a war suddenly breaking out in Western Europe at the same time, etc. Yet the facts of history can readily warrant our saying that most of us didn’t have to wait until the 1960s to grasp the aims of Stalin or the Soviet Union were not longer viable, in spite of this group of “highly intelligent people.”
Up until April of 1945, when Truman blew up at Soviet Ambassador Molotov, Stalin was insatiable – asking for control of the Dardanelles, a slice of Turkish territory, Caspian territory to shield his Baku oil fields, a Titoist Trieste, an Austrian Carinthia, a physical presence in the Ruhr and Japan. Most of these facts were given me in lengthy conversations back in the late 1970s with Martin Herz, who was the former U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria and who was then teaching the Hitler Stalin Pact at Georgetown. Of course, he also wrote a memoir and books and probably should be marginalized by Walrus because his views were not subordinated to “a circle of highly intelligent people” who only grasped Stalin’s’ aims “in the late 1960s. However, it is a fact that at the end of WW II, the only senior official of the FDR administration who thought highly of Stalin was Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, and he, thankfully, was fired. In one of his last utterances he said that America had no business interfering with Russia’s interests in Eastern Europe. If had had lived longer, he might have become one of Walrus’s troop of “highly intelligent people” who were only aware of Soviet design in the late1960s.
Most Soviet sympathizers in America in the 1940s were artists like the composer Jerry Fielding, the playwright Lillian Hellman, (who was a true Stalinist who flew into a rage when points of fact were raised,) James Agee, the wonderful Time Magazine writer who did such a splendid book on the Depression poor in “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men,” and the like. They were artists, not political analysts nor were they in any sense historians. I respect their hearts and their art, but not their views of historical events.
When it comes to policy, it seems to me that American policymakers lack the knowledge to think things through. That is the chief point I was making in “Shortsighted Wars.” In the case of Vietnam, the policy makers around President Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and especially President Johnson, lacked vital knowledge of Vietnam’s history and its most significant actors in the region. Unfortunately, the Cold War became the lens through which America and the West began to view events and their meaning. The ideal of President Wilson, who argued for the rights of self-determination for small countries, was quickly undermined by that struggle. Clearly the Russians were the imperial power, imposing their will by force and inflicting their cruel little police states on their unhappy satellites, but where we as American used to respect nationalism, that admiration replaced by a policy to curb Communism throughout the world.
Thus, we saw Vietnam through the lens of Cold War. We discounted Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism, even thought he was popular figure in America in 1945and was on the record as an admirer of our Declaration of Independent. When the Cold War got colder, Ho is suddenly seen as a mere Soviet tool. As we learned later, Moscow was NOT calling the shots there at all. China had long been a ferocious enemy of Vietnam - they had feuded for centuries, but China became a supplier to Hoi to bleed us, and yet we still insisted on seeing Communism as a huge monolith. In spite of the fact that Vietnam was a Buddhist country, yet we undermined the 1954 elections won by the North Vietnamese and began to support a Catholic government, a government which had not wide support from the Vietnamese people because Catholicism were viewed as collaborators with the defeated French oppressors. “The Americans are walking in the same footsteps as the French,” said journalist-historian Bernard Fall, who was killed there.
While the remarks of Pat Lang’s reader are not simply so aggressively and unbecomingly certain, they are quaintly irrelevant. They remind me of the town of Greenwich Connecticut which, in 1945, refused to recognize the UN. One is left wondering why it bothered.

[walrus]

With the greatest respect Mr. Sale, I stand by my opinion and your piece represents a peculiarly American view of World War Two and completely ignores the opinions and history of the rest of the world - making the same error that Francis Fukuyama made in declaring "the end of history" some years ago - assuming that the world was on a known trajectory in 1940 - 1950, and then making the assumption that we can today not only view that trajectory for what it was but make final judgements about the motives of the participants and there errors.

There is nothing hostile to you in my comments, and Four members of mmy extended family died in the holocaust, so lets put that insinuation to bed.

You pour scorn on my statements to the effect that Communism had a strong attraction to intelligencias and a great many other people at least until the early 1960's among what I call "the true believers" - those who discounted even eye witness accounts of the Hungarian uprising. In doing so you are demonstrating your warped perspective.

It is true that Communism "in the United States" (I would underline that if I could) never had much appeal and what it did have was beaten out of the true believers by McCarthy, but America is not the world. Australian, British, European and for all I know South American, Indian and Asian labor unions were extremely strong and massively pro communist before the war to the extent in Australia that the dock workers refused to load and unload ships destined for war theatres until Hiter attacked the Soviet union.

These organisations had massive memberships and were in bed with Russia to the hilt and stayed that way until the Hungarian uprising, but you wouldn't know that. You also wouldn't know because American law at the time prevented you from being exposed to the propaganda, that after the war a simply massive British, American and to a lesser extent Australian and probably Canadian campaign was launched at the intelligencias of the world to promote the benefits of Western Democracy and contrast it with the dead hand of Russian and by that time Chinese Communism and at the same time combat Soviet efforts to do the reverse. That is one facet of the Cold War you never saw, but as a child I lived right through it. I remember the simply endless succession of labor strikes. I remember being cold because the miners had cut coal supplies. I remember an election fought over the issue of "faceless men" who controlled political parties. I remember my fathers participation in "The New Guard" - veterans organisation who were preparing a counter coup if the communists moved - and that was in Australia! The battles for the hearts and minds of Europe, Asia and South America was at least as intense and it went on at least until the 1960's. So yes "a lot of highly intelligent people" did think that Communism was a viable organising principle long after the war and despite the mounting evidence of Stalins cruelty, and just because those highly intelligent people weren't in the USA doesn't make them disappear. To put that another way, what do you think that Pol Pot and his genocidal Khmer Rouge followers believed in 1969 in Cambodia? To put that yet another way, why do you think American and Britain spent billions of dollars on winning hearts and minds around the world? For the fun of it? Communism had a strong attraction to lots of people!

As for history and historiography, I prefer to follow Sir Michael Howards views on the subject. We need to be extremely cautious about making judgements as to motives, outcomes and historical fact especially for relatively "recent" events like WWII.

For example all the German histories of WWII written up to 1975 ended in some confusion about the cause of their nations demise. They correctly concluded that the Allies "Blind Luck" was unnatural and advanced a number of theories, including the existence of a high level source, to explain it. Then Enigma was unvielled in 1975 by Prof R.V. Jones in his book "The Ultra Secret" and everything written for thirty years had to be rewritten. Fast forward to today and we STILL don't have access to much of the Russian archives of the period, so how can we make any binding assessments of what happened and why? Then of course there are the masses of family documents that won't be available until you and I and perhaps our own children are safely dead.

At best we can make some tentative statements about WWII, Communism and the Holocaust but I respectfully submit that you were asking for trouble when you penned your original article.

To put that another way, what happens if a new trove of documents on the Wannsee conference is discovered?

[Fred]

Bill H,

A point well taken. I should have clarified my comment, or at least restricted it to those for whom the holocaust is a political weight thrown around to gain their political ends; rather than using such a broad brush.

[William R. Cumming]

Is Marxism/Leninism taught at the University level anywhere in the USA?

If there is such a thing as Communism how many nation-state purport to follow that political/economic system?

Are any nation-states in MENA avowedly Communist?

[Abu Sinan]

Imagine if the Allied powers had stepped in when the Germans re-occupied the Rheinland. If we are going to imagine, lets go to the begining before the war started.