The Necessity of Fighting World War II - Sale

"I was astonished to find out recently that the population of Auschwitz in 1944 was 80 percent gentiles. Of course, as I stared at the page, the horror gradually dawned me – that by then almost all of the Jews from Europe had been gassed, leaving only the gentiles.

You cannot overstate the horror what the Jews suffered. Most of the Jews carted off by the Nazis were highly educated: they were lawyers, doctors, teachers, technicians, scholars who were used to a high degree of civilization, schooled in courtesy, politeness, tolerance, generosity, and earnest and sincere in giving of sympathy to those who most needed it."  Sale

Download Necessity of Fighting World War II

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks Mr. Sale! A useful post and analysis. I am currently reading Tom Fleming's book called "The WAR within WWII" discussing the currents and cross currents in the public at large and the FDR Administration and FDR himself. Not uncomplicated. He reports the Gallup Plling Organization as late as fall 1941 opposing entry into the war against Germany by 63%! I assume this is accurate
historically. Also discusses the release on December 4th of Plan Rainbow [a US plan to fight Germany] and how that may have helped trigger Hitler's Declaration of War against
the USA after Pearl Harbor.

[John Adamson]

Couldn't you make the same "necessary war" argument against Stalin? It's my understanding that he killed more people than Hitler. When the "Iron Curtain" descended after the war, those peoples' standard of living went down as well under a system of tyranny.

One of the most hypocritical acts in history was the Soviets sitting in judgement at the Nuremberg trials on the charge that Germany conducted aggressive war. Conveniently forgotten is that they invaded Poland as well.

I have no doubt that the a holocaust happened. If Hitler has won, he would have killed every Jew on the planet. It would have been a natural extension of his ideology.

However, I get tired of the trademarked Holocaust with a capital "H" that is used as a device to give a blank check to Israel and Zionist interests. I also find repugnant the fact that the holocaust narrative is protected by criminal sanctions in many countries. Truth doesn't need state power to survive.

[Neil Richardson]

"If we had been militarily prepared and invaded Germany earlier, if we had taken Berlin instead of being ordered not to -- would it have acted to keep Soviet armies from Eastern and Central Europe? The aim of Churchill’s campaign in Italy was designed to do just that yet America assigned few resources there. It is clear that America did not calculate what the movement of Soviet armies might mean to the fate of Eastern and Central Europe."

This is utter fantasy. Berlin would've been the first atomic target had Marshall and JCS not resisted idiotic proposals from Churchill.

[Fred]

"But the defect of American strategy lay with their faulty analysis of the conditions of the world they sought to improve."

This is an easy complaint to make 70 years later.

"If we had been militarily prepared and invaded Germany earlier..."

Invade where, with what and to what purpose? To keep Stalin in the East - after defeating Germany? That at the very least means thousands of more US casualties. Churchill would have been quite happy as it would have been the US doing the dying to achieve his political aims.

[euclidcreek]

Interesting article, but WWII is long over. The deaths of "other" civilians in WWII is consistently ignored or forgotten: USSR 13-15 million, Poland 5.6 million, China 7 to 16 million, Dutch East Indies 3 to 4 million, Germany 1.5 to 3.5 million, etc. Over 60 million killed. Some good war.
Curtis Lemay said "Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."

[Neil Richardson]

Fred:

This argument also contradicts the "soft underbelly of Europe" argument which is just sheer lunacy to anyone who'd seen the terrain in Italy. The point of Torch and Husky were to have the US Army blooded before Overlord which was the argument presented by the British chiefs. An untried US Army would've been bled dry after ramming against successive defensive lines in Italy. A skilled force like the Heer would've used every river, crest, defile and key hole to inflict heavy losses. The Army proved what a skilled force can do in Korea in 1951-53 as the PLA could certain attest.

[Babak Makkinejad]

The War was not necessary; Stalin tried to prevent it through a Tripartite Alliance with UK and France.

The English wanted the war one against USSR & Germany.

After the Germans, they are the country that bears the most significant responsibility for World War II.

[Tyler]

70 years later and its still about the Jews nonstop.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

Although your comments deal with different aspects of Richard Sale’s post, I would like if I may to take them together, as I see them as raising related issues. In the hope of frustrating the spam filter, I will split some rather long observations into sections.

On the ‘soft underbelly’ argument, the British military historian Sir Michael Howard, who landed at Salerno as an infantry platoon commander in September 1943, would certainly agree with Neil Richardson. The short study he published in 1968, under the title ‘The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War’, is prefaced by recollections of fighting through extremely unfriendly terrain in Italy. He concludes his remarks by noting quite how unpromising the idea of approaching Germany through Italy seemed to those on the ground at the time, noting that ‘even the most phlegmatic among us occasionally wondered who had devised it and why.’

At the end of the study Sir Michael commented that ‘an effective case has still to be made out’ that there could have any more rapid or economical way of winning the war than the strategy actually adopted. Obviously, as I am not a military historian, I cannot judge, and do not know whether recent research has given any reason to question Sir Michael’s judgement. But I am certainly sceptical about the notion that Churchill offered a better alternative to the strategy Roosevelt adopted.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

As regards British policy before the war, the belief that Britain was trying to push Germany into a war with the Soviet Union was certainly widely held among the Soviet leadership. It was not, however, the view of Maxim Litvinov, who as Foreign Commissar for most of the Thirties had been the most significant champion of the ‘collective security’ strategy.

In June 1942, Litvinov’s successor in the post, Vyacheslav Molotov, visited Washington, where Litvinov was then Ambassador. In his memoirs, published in 1989, Andrei Gromyko recalls the two disagreeing violently on just this issue on a drive down to the Appalachians:

“We were talking about the French and the British, and Molotov sharply criticised their pre-war policies, which were aimed at pushing Hitler into war against the USSR. In other words, he voiced the official party line. Litvinov disagreed. This had been the prime reason for his removal from the post of Foreign Commissar in 1939, yet here he was, still stubbornly defending Britain and France’s refusal to join the Soviet Union and give Hitler a firm rebuff before he could make his fateful attack on the USSR. Despite having been relieved of his post for such views, Litvinov continued to defend them in front of Molotov, and consequently in front of Stalin.”

Litvinov had lived in England, and had an English wife, the redoubtable – and quite fearless – Ivy. Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, and the world, there were few left in the higher reaches of Soviet policy-making who had the kind of ‘feel’ for the complexities of Western policy he had. The kind of intellectual Bolsheviks who were familiar with Western languages and culture – and had sometimes lived in the West – were a prime target of the terror: a large number of officials of the Foreign Commissariat were purged.

[CSP]

While I don't disagree with the thrust of Mr. Sales' comments, I don't believe that the majority of European Jews killed by the Nazis were highly educated doctors, lawyers, teachers etc. Many certainly were, but not most. I imagine the vast majority were farmers and peasants from Eastern Europe along with many small shopkeepers.

I do agree with the comment regarding E. Sledge's memoirs. His story of returning from the war and attempting to hunt with his father is one of the more emotionally touching things I've ever read.

In any event, thanks for taking the time to write the article.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

There is no doubt that there were people in Britain – as also the United States – who were hoping for a war between Germany and the USSR. Far from believing that Hitler’s aspirations to eastward expansion could provide means of making it possible to destroy Soviet Communism at minimum cost and risk to themselves, however, Chamberlain and his associates simply did not take them seriously.

The strategy of ‘appeasement’ as he conceived it was premised upon the belief that, because he was a nationalist, Hitler’s essential agenda was to bring ethnic Germans into a Greater German Reich. A natural corollary of the view that German objectives were limited – well brought out in chapter 3 of the first volume of the memoirs of George Kennan, a yet more committed ‘appeaser’ than Chamberlain – was that Soviet professions to fear Germany were certainly unjustified and probably insincere.

Accordingly, the view of Soviet policy taken by many of the ‘appeasers’ – and fundamental to Kennan’s thinking, from the mid-Thirties until the end of his life – was a kind of mirror image of the view of British policy adopted by Stalin and Molotov. Critically, they believed that Soviet offers to collaborate in guaranteeing and defending the Versailles settlement in Eastern Europe were a baited hook.

Although I think this view was wrong, it is hardly so surprising, if one looks at the situation at the time without the 20/20 vision of hindsight. In Germany in the early Thirties, the Communist strategy had been that of all-out attack on the Social Democrats – described as ‘social fascists’ – rather than one of attempting to collaborate with other opponents of Nazism.

It was thus hardly so surprising that someone like Kennan – who had studied in Germany in 1929-31 – interpreted the Soviet volte-face towards advocating ‘Popular Fronts’ with virtually anyone prepared to collaborate against Hitler as a strategy of deception. In this view, both the ‘Popular Front’, and the ‘collective security’ strategy advocated by Litvinov, were cunning ploys designed to exploit the gullibility of naïve Western liberals to inveigle Britain and France into confronting German ‘revisionist’ aspirations.

If, in particular, resistance to German demands for the incorporation of the – predominantly German – Sudetenland into the Reich led to war, the Soviets, it was believed, intended to take advantage of the fact that they had no direct land borders with Czechoslovakia. Just about the last thing either the Poles or the Romanians wanted, for eminently understandable reasons, was to have the Red Army enter their territory.

Accordingly, the Soviets would be in a position to weep crocodile tears as they watched Germany and the Western powers destroy each other, creating favourable conditions for the expansion of Soviet power and communism. When the time was ripe, the ‘Popular Front’ façade could be abandoned, and communist parties instructed to revert to the strategy pursued in Germany at the start of the Thirties.

The fact that Chamberlain was not attempting to finesse Germany and the Soviet Union into war was made amply apparent by the fact that he was taken completely off guard by the German occupation of the – unambiguously non-German – rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. This dramatically undermined the credibility of the Chamberlain/Kennan approach. Elements both in Romania and among the German resistance to Hitler then tried to panic the British into action, by painting the prospect of further German action as more imminent than it actually was. Taken together with Chamberlain’s view of Soviet intentions, the result was the unilateral guarantee of Poland given on 31 March.

The predictable – and predicted – result was that Hitler made advances to the Soviets. Accordingly, Stalin was left with a choice. He could attempt to buy both space and time by accepting Hitler’s overtures. However, as he could not be sure that the Germans would simply carry on eastwards, there was an argument for continuing with the attempt to secure ‘collective security’, which involved tying the British and French down to definite and credible commitments to act.

Whether a different approach by the British could have persuaded him against accepting Hitler’s overtures, or whether they simply were not in a position to offer the kind of commitments he would have required, is an imponderable question. What can said however is that given that he was not attempting to push Germany west at this point, it was hardly surprising that the failure to take Soviet concerns seriously reinforced Stalin’s suspicions that the British government was only pretending to discourage Hitler from moving east.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

Although this is not a subject I have studied closely, I think people are commonly too dismissive about Roosevelt’s handling of the Soviet Union. The horrendous devastation involved in breaking the power of the Wehrmacht was very largely born by the Russians – which is why, in general, the entries on British war memorials for the Second World War are in general much shorter than those for its predecessor.

At the same time, despite the postponement of the opening of the ‘Second Front’, Stalin did not suspect Roosevelt in the way he clearly continued to suspect the British. Meanwhile, Roosevelt had a lot of cards to play – including the truly massive superiority of the American economy and the emerging possibility of atomic weapons. It was after all Stalin who described modern war as a ‘war of engines’, and given time to reconvert to a war footing, the U.S. economy could outproduce the Soviet many times over. Moreover, the division of Germany left the Western powers in control of by far the larger share of the territory, and productive potential, of that country.

An interesting paper published in 2001 by the late Eduard Mark, an official historian for the USAF, under the title ‘Revolution by Degrees: Stalin’s National Front Strategy for Europe, 1941-7’ discusses Stalin’s strategy at the end of the Second World War.

(See http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB11.pdf )

This paper is illuminating in many ways, but it is particularly so if one puts it together with the changes in Kennan’s thinking in the immediate post-war years.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

It is a problem with ‘murderous Machiavellians’ – of whom Stalin is one of the more extreme examples – that even when there is hard information about what they are doing at a given time, questions about their ultimate intentions can be very hard, if not impossible, to elucidate. The difference between Mark’s reading of Stalin’s strategy and Kennan’s brings this out.

As Mark demonstrates, what can be established with reasonable confidence is that as the Second World War ended Stalin’s preferred approach was to maintain the ‘Popular Front’, both in Western and Eastern Europe. Moreover, one of the principal reasons for this, according to Mark, was that he wanted to maintain reasonable relations with the Western powers – particularly the United States.

The so-called ‘Long Telegram’ which Kennan sent from Moscow on 22 February 1946 was in fact a response to a request for clarification as to the meaning of the restatement of familiar Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy on the inevitability of war in a capitalist world in a speech by Stalin on 9 February of that year. Unsurprisingly, Kennan’s interpretation was underpinned by the view of Stalin’s policy in the Thirties held by the ‘appeasers’ – that Stalin had pursued a long-term strategy aimed at finessing the Western democracies and Germany into war.

However, because Kennan could not be fully candid, he produced an analysis which was inherently liable to be misunderstood. By the time that Clark Clifford and George Elsey presented their memorandum to Truman in September 1946, it had become a consensus within the American policy elite that the war which Stalin supposedly thought inevitable was with the United States and its allies. This was quite wrong, both as an account of what Stalin had said, and of Kennan’s interpretation of what Stalin had said.

It was a consequential error for many reasons – among them that it implied that there was nothing to be gained by a strategy which sought to persuade the Soviets that their security concerns could perhaps be satisfied by means other than brutal repression in Eastern Europe. But then, as is made quite evident in the chapter of his memoirs to which I have referred, Kennan had never been persuaded that ‘Operation Barbarossa’ demonstrated that there had been anything significantly wrong with his reading of German and Soviet policy in the Thirties.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

By February 1947, however, Kennan was already subverting the interpretation others has put on his argument, by suggesting that, far from seeing Soviet security as dependent on elimination of capitalism, Stalin might never have wanted a united communist Germany. This was an argument he would continue to make at intervals over the subsequent decades. Such statements have been widely misinterpreted as indicating a fundamental change in Kennan’s view, towards a more sanguine conception of Stalin’s policy.

What in fact happened was that, confronted by the failure of the Soviets to revert to the strategy pursued in Germany in 1931, Kennan did not abandon the ‘appeasement’ view of Stalin’s strategy in the mid- to late- Thirties.

He was, however, very well aware of the crypto-theological aspect of the Soviet system, and of Stalin’s intense fear of heresy within the communist movement – both in Russia and abroad. (After all, like the staff of the Foreign Commissariat, European communists who took refuge in Moscow in the Thirties ended up being butchered or sent to the Gulag in large numbers.) Rather than, as Mark does, attributing Stalin’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for seeing communist parties take power to a desire to maintain relations with the United States providing a temporary counterweight to his ideological aspirations, Kennan attributed it to fear of the disruptive potentialities of heresy.

Moreover, he went on to ask himself whether Stalin’s policy towards Germany, rather than being an unsuccessful attempt to communise Germany, had been the initial move in a strategy designed to get actual and potential adversaries to destroy each other. The German communists attack the Social Democrats, facilitating the rise of Hitler, who destroys both Communists and Social Democrats, and is probably the only German leader who would have got involved in a war with the Western democracies. So Stalin’s strategy over the past two decades read off as a series of triumphantly successful Machiavellian manoeuvres – a view which I am inclined to think is questionable.

Be that as it may, on the basis of this interpretation Kennan then set out to, as he saw it, play Stalin at his own game. So the Marshall Plan, in Kennan’s conception, had both a defensive and an offensive agenda. Part of the latter was to push the Soviets into the position where they would be left with the choice of either letting the Eastern European countries be drawn out of the Soviet orbit by the promise of very greatly needed economic assistance, or abandoning the attempt to maintain the ‘Popular Front’ strategy.

Predictably, Stalin took the latter course, both in relation to Eastern and Western Europe – responding with characteristic savagery. What however Kennan had not bargained for was the ‘war scare’ which this Soviet strategy set off in Western Europe and the United States alike. This led many people to fear that the Soviets might attempt to take over Western Europe by military means – or, at the least, use such means, of the threat of the use, in support of subversion by Moscow-controlled communist parties.

[David Habakkuk]

Neil Richardson and Babak Makkinejad,

Moreover, I tend to think that Michael MccGwire, who before turning academic was the Royal Navy’s most significant analyst of its Soviet counterpart, is right in thinking that the developments associated with the Marshall Plan also provoked a kind of ‘war scare’ in the Kremlin. However, what was at issue would not have been a sense of immediate threat. Rather it was a shift from an earlier – and correct – interpretation of the Marshall Plan as involving political offensives to undermine Soviet control over Eastern Europe, to the – incorrect – belief that it was also intended to create the capabilities required for ‘rollback’ by military means in the longer term.

In MccGwire’s reading, the account of Western strategy given by Andrei Zhdanov at the meeting which led to the formation of the Cominform in September 1947 corresponded to what the Soviets had come to think. As MccGwire puts it, having earlier been concerned simply with a political threat:

“By the early months of 1948 they came to believe that the long-term military implications were more ominous and that the real aim of the Marshall Plan was to arm Western Europe to the point where American client states would be capable of taking on the Soviet ones. Russia would then be faced with a choice of either allowing the frontiers of socialism to be pushed back, or of intervening and risking an American nuclear attack.”

(See Michael MccGwire, ‘National Security and Soviet Foreign Policy’, in the 1994 symposium ‘Origins of the Cold War’, edited by Melvyn Leffler and David Painter.)

Hence the reversal of the Soviet post-war demobilisation in 1948, and the moves towards contingency planning to eliminate the bridgeheads on which American power could be deployed in Europe, which is apparent by 1950. The effect was to make Eastern Europe a springboard as well as glacis, thus increasing the incentives for the Soviets to maintain their forward positions.

Given that Kennan had never understood Stalin’s perception of British strategy in the Thirties, he was of course incapable of understanding that, seen against the background of this reading and of the Marxist-Leninist blinkers of the Soviet leadership, the Marshall Plan could be interpreted as another Anglo-Saxon project to get other people to do the dirty work of destroying Soviet Communism for them.

It is not my purpose to underestimate the difficulties of dealing with the Soviet regime, then or later. Whether things would have been different, had Roosevelt lived, is, like the question of whether a different approach by the Chamberlain government could have averted war in 1939, unanswerable. However, I do not think what has emerged about Soviet thinking at the end of the war justifies an outright condemnation of the strategy Roosevelt pursued. Particularly given the problems involved in alternative strategies to defeat Germany, it was not necessarily foolish to try to avoid prejudging the question of whether an all-out collapse in relations with the Soviet Union in the post-war world was inevitable.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you for your comments.

In regards to Litvinov's mission: France was enthusiastic but Britain, over many months, dragged her feet; sending low level officials to Trip[artie meetings.

Perhpas Litvinov, with his English wife, could not admit even to himself that the English were not interested in constraining Germany in any way, shape or form.

When Germans went back into Saarland, or when they began re-arming, nary a peep came out of the collective mouths of French and English leaders.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you fr your comments.

Very interesting and I will think about them.

Stalin was in many ways quite prescient; Russians sometimes discuss him in that manner.

[William R. Cumming]

Are Soviet archives from WWII now fully available? Are those of the USA and Britain? Germany?

[Charles I]

In a word, no. And even if they are open many many secrets lie filed and indexed under unassuming covers of unassuming files in no way specifically referring to the secret buried or sought.

A great example aired on PBS last night.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/episodes/bugging-hitler%E2%80%99s-soldiers-watch-the-full-episode/947/

A show about the bugging, recording and transcribing "private" conversations of very high ranking German POW officers quartered in a completely wired British country house revealed primary first hand evidence of broadly known, phlegmatically accepted massive war crimes participation by regular German forces - much verbatim from the mouths of the perpetrators.

Concentration/death camps were discussed many mnay months before first public word of the horror leaked out. Churchill read the transcripts, which also contained revealing disputes about the Nazis and the war amongst the German Generals. He was dissuaded from revelation by M19, the buggers, to suppress on intelligence technical sources and methods grounds in contemplation of the Cold War.

So the entire mass of transcripts was filed away for 70 years as "POW Reports" or some such rather than German high Staff intel or War Crimes material. An academic researching something war related but completely different came across the box of files and started reading about "The M Room" and its fruits.

Partially narrated by I think a Judy Fry who has written a book, pardon me, Helen Fry, The M Room.

http://www.helen-fry.com/books/the-m-room/

It was too cool.

[fanto]

Sir, it was Gen. Eisenhower who has in a personal message to Stalin informed him of asking/informing/letting Soviets take Berlin; Churchill considered this a collossal blunder, because he full well knew what to expect from Stalin in terms of breaking Yalta agreements and other promises (ref. John Toland - The Last 100 Days).

[Fred]

WRC,

Here's a good start with the records of the JCS:
http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/218.html

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks Charles I! I wonder how WWII will look from the perspective of passage of a century say 2045?

[Neil Richardson]

Fanto:

Indeed Ike had consulted Bradley on casualty estimates in late March. The question one has to ask is what do you do after the capture of Berlin. 21st Army Group was 200 miles away from Berlin. The Red Army was 40 miles east with over a million men ready to assault the Oder. When asked about the cost to break out of the Elbe, Bradley estimated 100,000 casualties just to reach Berlin (remember this is even before cutting off Berlin and then reducing the city block by block. The Soviets suffered 300,000 and they knew how to fight in built-up areas). What happens after the Allied forces capture Berlin (US Army would've paid the bulk of the cost as Market Garden and Plunder again demonstrated what Montgomery was incapable of in operations)? Do you risk war against the Soviet Union in June of 1945 when they ask for their zone of control? We still had a war in the Pacific.

[MS2]

Thank you, this is really interesting. Am I accurate in summarizing part of it as "The appeasement party's overarching fear was a western-front-only war, partly engineered by Stalin, that would leave a vacuum for him/communism."? And if so, do you have primary sources to support it? I suppose if not, then we just have to wait for the archives.