America - The Covenant Nation - A Christian Perspective - Volume 2: From the Rise of the Dictators in the 1930s to the Present

By Miles H Hodges

This second volume takes the reader through the agonies of World War Two, the call to America to assume global responsibilities in the rising Cold War ... and with that, the rise to greatness in the 1950s and early 1960s of "Middle America" (the American Middle Class).  The narrative then turns to the effort by President Johnson and hi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miles H Hodges
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9798985107456

Miles H Hodges

Miles Hodges is a combination Georgetown "political realist" (MA, PhD) and a Princeton Seminary "evangelical" (MDiv) long-interested in America's role in the world, long serving as a secular political science professor (University of South Alabama: founder and head of the International Studies Program) while also serving at the same time as a corporate international political risk consultant. Then by the grace of God, he was called by God to street and prison ministry and to pastor three Presbyterian congregations. He then "retired" to become a social dynamics (the cause of the rise and fall of societies), history, and French teacher at a Christian high school (The King's Academy) in Pennsylvania - using the close study of America's and other cultures' histories as a "laboratory" designed to bring the broad focus of God and society to the understanding of young minds.

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THE DICTATORS …

AND THE GATHERING WAR CLOUDS

* * *

THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS¹

The attractiveness of the European dictators.  While America was thrashing around in the 1930s with different efforts to get the national economy up and moving again, American intellectuals began to challenge the country to look abroad to systems that seemed actually to be working.  American capitalism as an economic idea seemed stone dead.  Other national economic systems however seemed not to be suffering as badly as America's.  Thus among many Americans, the feeling began to grow that America needed to take a closer look at, and possibly take some economic notes on, what these dictators were doing.

Stalin's Communist command economy (or State Capitalism).  Joseph Stalin's Communist-directed industrial revolution in Russia inspired many of these intellectuals.  While America and the capitalist West found their economies stagnant with factories idle and workers unemployed in massive numbers – Stalin's Russia presented a marvelous picture of rapid industrial development:  hydroelectric dams going up across many broad Russian rivers to bring huge amounts of electricity to Russian society, steel plants rising everywhere to produce the steel needed for trucks, tractors, etc.; urban housing for the Russian worker going up everywhere, etc.  Communism seemed to be proving itself vastly superior to Capitalism, which clearly had failed in America, at least as some American intellectuals saw things.

Besides, wasn't Roosevelt's New Deal run along similar lines, with the government taking command of the national economy?

The hidden reality of Stalin's unbounded oppression.²  But what these intellectuals could not – or would not – see was that nothing like Marx's Communist utopia was going on in Stalin's Communist Russia.  The state was hardly withering away.  Under Stalin, it had expanded its powers until virtually nothing at all went on in the Soviet Union that did not come under the tight grip of Stalin's police state.

Intellectual idealists in America were unable to see the horrible price being paid by the Soviet farmer to enable this amazing industrial building program to go forward in the Soviet Union, because Stalin had terrorized the nation into silence about this part of his many achievements.  Farming families were forced to hand over their fields and herds to Soviet authorities as part of Stalin's policy of collectivizing Soviet agriculture.  At this point farmers in this Soviet workers' paradise were considered as simply fellow workers for the Soviet state, much like the workers in the factories, mines and other industrial operations.  But Stalin's treatment of the farmers was brutal in the extreme.  He intended to transfer the national wealth of Russia from the countryside to his new industrial cities. And so he simply confiscated the wealth of the countryside to finance his industrial programs.

Hoarding of food production was a crime punishable by death.  And if a farmer and his family looked moderately healthy, they did so because they were hoarding, that is, holding back part of their harvest for themselves.  That was highly illegal.  Thus many farming families simply took the route of slow starvation.  Many others were sent to Siberian work camps for actively resisting this forced collectivization – where they died either along the way or within a few years of arriving at these work camps.  In the process, possibly as many as twelve million farmers died to make way for the country's transition from agriculture to modern industry in the period 1930-1933.

What American intellectuals were not understanding was how much of Stalin's rising industrial state – such as the fabled Magnitogorsk Iron Works located in the Ural Mountains (producing iron on a massive scale) – and massive supporting community built around it – was built by and employed by masses of peasants driven from their farmlands into this new industrial life by Stalin's system of State-manipulated mass starvation.  And there was the Norilsk Mining and Manufacture Works (mining nickel, copper and palladium – and the extensive railway system reaching across a frozen north to bring all this under central command – that were built by hundreds of thousands of what were essentially slave laborers.

This was in addition to the massive and equally brutal ethnic cleansing of national minorities that Stalin ordered (a quarter of a million of such individuals).  And it was also in addition to the deadly purges of the later 1930s that Stalin forced on his own Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Red Army, because he trusted no organization that he himself had not personally built up.  Even people who had once been political allies of his he had executed.  The figures are hard to validate but they range from about 700,000 to almost two million people executed under the orders of Stalin in his purges of the later 1930s (1937-1938).

Sadly, countless idealistic American intellectuals would continue to extol the virtues of Communism – something they would come to regret later, after the end of the coming war (during the early stages of the Cold War of the late 1940s and early 1950s) when Communism was at that point viewed as the greatest threat to the existence of democratic America.  Fellow Americans would not easily overlook the earlier enthusiasm for Communism espoused by such intellectuals.  The suspicion would be that once a Communist, always a Communist – which in most cases would not be true … but in some cases would indeed be true.

Hitler's New Order (Neuordnung).³  Other American intellectuals looked to Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany (beginning in the early 1930s) with its very evident strong rise in power out of the former catastrophe of Germany's Weimar Government.  The Weimar Republic had been a democratic experiment in Germany, one that seemingly had failed to bring Germany out of the chaos of the times.  Actually, by the late 1920s things were working fairly well in Weimar Germany, despite the huge economic punishment thrust on this new German government, in compensation for the Germans having supposedly started the war.  What ultimately, however, caused Weimar's failure was the Great Depression, exported to Germany from America when American banks, facing bankruptcy, called in the huge loans they had extended to Germany.  This in turn threw the German banks – and ultimately German society itself – into bankruptcy.  It was this condition of complete bankruptcy of Weimar Germany that had provided Hitler and his Nazis the opportunity to come to power in order to save Germany.

Indeed, although Hitler himself was a coarse man, or at least a leader of a very course group of Nazi German toughs, his policies seemed to have validated themselves in the way they got Germany back up and moving in strength again as a society – something that many Americans felt was becoming increasingly beyond the reach of their own government.

And Hitler knew how to put on a grand show (thanks also to the talents of Goebbels who had the skills of a major Hollywood producer), at a time when much of the rest of the Western world was languishing in economic pity and spiritual self-doubt.  All of Hitler's Fascist expansiveness was accompanied by grandiose ritual, with massive gatherings of hundreds upon hundreds of boot-stomping and singing soldiers on parade, torch-lit assemblies with Nazi banners everywhere and searchlights piercing the infinity of the night sky, and – most importantly – Hitler from his podium haranguing the masses with his frenzied boasting about German greatness.

He even knew how to validate his rule democratically, by working as Germany's Chancellor (Prime Minister) at first even through the Weimar Republic's legislative system.  For instance, as Chancellor, he was able to exploit the public reaction to the massive fire that raged through the German Bundesrat or Parliamentary building just prior to the 1933 elections.  He claimed that this fire had been started by the Communists,⁴ thus supposedly authorizing him to exclude the Communists from the elections – which in turn gave his Nazi Party the voting edge it needed to stay in power.  He would even from time to time use general votes or plebiscites in which the Germans were instructed to vote in favor (or opposition) to his programs, carefully chosen and conducted in a manner designed to produce a ridiculously high democratic affirmation of him and his policies.  For Americans in love with the idea of democracy, it was impossible to be critical of Hitler's democratic ways.

Hitler was actually a despiser of democracy – considering it simply a system by which the weak held back the natural drive of the strong toward greatness.  He was very Darwinian in his understanding that nothing should stand in the way of the strong taking control of history – to promote the rising greatness of the superior people (the Aryan Germans).  He also had problems with Christianity for much the same reason: it focused too much on the problems of the poor and weak.  In its unreformed ways (by German national standards) it was a religion fit only for the poor and weak, not the strong.  Tragically, German Christians – and most importantly Christian leaders – adjusted their gospel message as German Christians to make it conform more to the Hitlerian agenda.

To be sure, the increasingly shrill anti-Jewish ranting of Hitler disturbed many thoughtful Americans, though there was always an undercurrent of anti-Jewish sentiment that also ran through America at this time.  Thus many Americans felt inclined to look the other way when it came to what Hitler was doing to the Jews in Germany during the 1930s:  he had removed them from all positions of importance in German society and treated them – even the highly educated, even the highly decorated for their service to Germany in the Great War – as the vilest of Untermenschen (inferior people) unworthy of any sentimental concern on the part of a true Aryan German.

And as the 1930s advanced, Hitler increasingly directed his attentions to the program of demonstrating the power of Nazi ideology on the larger European stage.  He rebuilt the German state around his own personal will, rearmed Germany militarily, and began to bully his neighbors in order to make way for German expansion or Lebensraum (living space or living room), directed particularly eastward in the direction of the Slavic-speaking world (Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Russia, etc.) where he saw land available by conquest, land whose fields could feed the growing German population and whose petroleum and minerals could feed the German war machine.

Italy's Mussolini.  Benito Mussolini had easily seized national power in 1922 and then undertaken political theatrics designed supposedly to restore Italian pride, claiming that through his Fascist program the greatness of ancient Rome had been restored.  The Italians themselves were not terribly impressed.  But they played along with Mussolini and his political band of Fascists, who paraded around like professional soldiers, trying to impress the Italians with the seriousness of their Fascist agenda.

Although the Italians themselves were more motivated by family dinners and music offered in opera style (Italians were indeed great singers) than by Mussolini's military antics, Hitler was taken in by Mussolini's theatrics.  Consequently, a partnership developed between Mussolini and Hitler in which, oddly enough, Hitler seemed to be more the junior partner. 

Hitler indeed seemed to model much of his own Fascist program after Mussolini's.  Perhaps this was because by the mid-1930s, Mussolini had already undertaken a program of military expansion (in Africa) that Hitler was still only dreaming of.

In 1936 the two leaders signed a friendship treaty:  the Axis Pact.  Mussolini now could claim that Berlin and Rome formed an axis around which all of Europe would eventually revolve.  And in 1937 Germany and Italy (and Japan) signed a treaty more clearly aligning the countries politically against Stalin's rising Russia, and recognizing the right of each of the treaty powers to full dominion in their respective theaters of operation.

Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia – and the West's non-response. Hungering for imperial expansion, Mussolini gathered 300,000 Italian troops in Northeast Africa in the Italian colony of Somaliland, with the clear intent of seizing still-independent Ethiopia next door.  This matter of Italian aggression was brought before the League of Nations, which ultimately did nothing – the French and English still hoping to enlist Italy against the threat of a rising Germany and thus not wanting to alienate Mussolini.

Realizing that he would get no opposition from the Western powers, in October of 1935, Mussolini's troops crossed into Ethiopia to begin a war that would drag on for another six years.  Italian victory seemed in the making when the Ethiopian Emperor fled and the Ethiopian capital was seized in mid-1936.  But the Ethiopian tribesmen would continue to fight on guerrilla style against their Italian occupiers, until the Italians went home in 1941 (to a more serious fight going on in Europe itself).

Appearing before the League at the point of the apparent Italian victory, the Ethiopian Emperor outlined the pitfalls of failing to answer Mussolini's aggression, warning It is us today, it will be you tomorrow.

The League did respond with economic sanctions aimed at Italy, which however were really not enforced.  In fact, an effort to restrict oil sales to Italy was undercut by American oil industrialists who were quite willing to keep up oil sales to Mussolini.  And the French and English were discovered to be trying to gain Mussolini's cooperation – through another secret treaty with Italy, one recognizing the partition of Ethiopia among the three powers.

In fact the only net result of the League's sanctions was to rally the Italians more strongly behind Mussolini.

A divided France of the 1930s.  In February of 1934 the growing antagonisms in France between the political Left and the political Right – greatly exacerbated by the Stavisky investment fraud which implicated many Leftist cabinet members – erupted in the form of Paris riots, which many thought was the prelude to an attempt at a Right-Wing political coup.  Order was restored to France.  However, Left-Wing suspicions of on-going Right-Wing Fascist plots, and similar suspicions by the Right of Communist plots of the Left to take over France, split the country into deeply hostile political groupings.

Besides the Left-Right deadlock over the basic political path the country should take, the evolution of the larger world of European politics, especially during the 1930s, made French national politics even more complex.  The French could not decide which rising power to the East, Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, posed the greater danger to Western, or at least French, civilization.  Along with this went wide disagreement on how to respond to Mussolini in Ethiopia and the civil war raging in Spain (1936-1939).

In short – France really was not able to get its act together at a time that it was supposed to be one of the two major enforcers of the post-war international status quo (the other being Great Britain).  Indeed, by the late 1930s France found itself floundering in a deep domestic political war.

The British quest for peace – at any price. The Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin dominated British politics during much of the period following the Great War.  Baldwin's governance was characterized by a policy of peace-at-any-price.  He understood that the British did not want ever to go to war again; that they expected him to keep them from diplomatic entanglements and any military buildup, viewed at that time as largely responsible for the Great War of 1914–1918; and that his first priority as Britain's leader was to get the country back on sound economic footing. 

Thus he cut back tremendously on British military spending and strength at a time that Germany was rebuilding its military power (happening even before Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933) – in well-recognized violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and the Locarno Pact of 1925.  Every effort was made by Baldwin (and most British politicians and intellectuals) to excuse Hitler's moves to remilitarize Germany – on the basis that Germany was only compensating for the horrible injustices inflicted on Germany by the now notorious Versailles Treaty.⁵

Thus Baldwin and fellow Conservative Party member Winston Churchill (himself a former party leader) found themselves constantly at odds over this issue of Great Britain's pacifism in the face of German remilitarization.  Baldwin viewed Churchill as a war-monger who wanted to drag Great Britain into an arms race and thus another war with Germany.  Churchill viewed Baldwin as one who invited German military adventurism by the obvious lack of English resolve to stop Hitler before he became so strong that there would be no way to block his military ambitions.⁶

Basically, Baldwin was working out of the spirit of the moment, of the times he lived in.  Churchill was working out of a longer sense of British history – and its long-standing role as balancer of power on the European continent (as for instance in the days of Napoleon in the early 1800s).  History would soon be the judge of which of the two had it right.

Chamberlain's appeasement policy.  Then in May of 1937 an exhausted Stanley Baldwin stepped down and the new Conservative Party leader Neville Chamberlain became English Prime Minister.  Whereas Baldwin had been a pacifist, Chamberlain was actually rather pro-German.  As the 1930s developed, it appeared that Great Britain too was facing a choice of which of the two growing military powers to the East, Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, was the greater threat to the peace of Europe (and thus also the world).  Chamberlain took the view that it was the Russian Communists that posed the greater danger, and a policy of appeasing Germany's Hitler (and Italy's Mussolini) would bring the nations of West and Central Europe into a broad anti-Communist/anti-Russian front.

But Great Britain (and Europe) were soon to discover the shortcomings of the appeasement approach to Hitler and his doings.

* * *

THE GATHERING CLOUDS OF WAR

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).⁷  Although Spain was a Constitutional Monarchy (like Great Britain and most of the rest of the European continent) the country had actually been run by a system of local bosses (caciques) with little interest in turning Spain into a modern society.  Spain itself was highly divided as to the direction it wanted to go, especially after the Great War, which Spain stayed out of but which benefitted a small group of industrial entrepreneurs who sold goods to the combatants.  The vast and highly traditional countryside (strongly Roman Catholic and even semi-feudal in mentality) was greatly alienated by this small intrusion of modernity into a society still romantically attached to the glorious past of the 1500s, a past that was very unlikely to ever return.  Then there were the new industrial workers who grudgingly took their place in Spain's factories, who felt a bit of kinship with the Russian workers who similarly had moved abruptly from feudalism to modern industrial society – led by Communist idealists (the Bolsheviks).  In short, Spain was a confused and highly divided society.

Into that confusion stepped Spanish General Primo de Rivera – who seized power in 1923, and forced economic and social discipline on Spain, settling things down a bit (and eliminating the caciques) – but whose rule gradually began to draw strong criticism from impatient modernizers who felt that his Mussolini-like grip over Spanish society (and the Spanish monarchy that supported him) was only serving to block real social progress.  Ultimately both Rivera and King Alfonso, tiring of the situation, in 1931 called for a referendum on Spain's future.  The results went in favor of a Republican government, and Rivera stepped down and the king abdicated.

But the Republican government's move to secularize Spain's Catholic culture (undercutting the Church's role in the country's schooling and cultural disciplines, such as its stand on marriage and divorce) served only to deepen the cultural division that split Spain into two hostile groups, the Republicans concentrated heavily in urban Spain – actually bitter about the slowness of the social reforms (and increasingly of a Communist or anarchist frame of mind) – and the more rural Nationalists who clung desperately to a clearly dying traditional Catholic Spain. 

Back and forth power swung in the national parliament (the Cortes) until by mid-1936 the battle had moved to the streets in the form of fighting between the two groups: the conservative Falangists (backed by a very conservative Spanish military) and the proto-Communist Republicans (supported by 200,000 Asaltos or fighters).  This was the signal for General Francisco Franco Bahamonde to leave his position in Morocco with accompanying Nationalist troops and head to Spain, to fight the Republicans. At this point the very brutal Spanish Civil War broke out.

But this civil war did not actually remain much of a civil war.  Instead it turned itself quickly into a test run of the superpowers, especially Germany and Italy which intervened on Franco's side, to try out their new military products and strategies (dive bombers, for instance).  At the same time, Stalin sent a huge number of advisors to help the Republicans against Franco – as did also France and Britain, although only on a very small scale.  Volunteers poured in from America serving on one side or another, Hemingway, for instance, actually serving with the Republicans – building his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, on his own experience in the war.

Feelings ran very hot on both sides of the war, both sides destroying villages (and killing villagers) caught in the crossfire.  And major atrocities occurred:  Leftist Republicans killing priests and raping nuns – and the Nazi allies of Franco leveling the town of Guernica as practice in developing divebombing techniques that would later be used by Hitler in his conduct of Blitzkrieg (Lightning War).

Little by little Franco's Falangists (with a lot of help from the Germans and Italians) were able to gain ground against the Republicans, until in 1939 Madrid was finally taken by Franco, and the war came to a halt.  Spain was devastated.  And it would have presiding over it a dictator determined to shape Spain exactly as he himself determined, all the way up until his death decades later (1975).

Spain was exhausted, and in no hurry to get involved in another war (they would also sit out World War Two).  But everything that pointed to the tragedy that was about to break out in Europe was contained in those events of 1936–1939.  The Spanish Civil War, in fact, was simply a dry run on the larger war that Hitler had planned for Europe.  And the responses of all the major players to the events focused on Spain would resemble very closely how the diplomacy and military development would occur as events leading up to World War Two.  But few understood this at the time, especially the British and French who continued to hope that they somehow knew the formulas for keeping the peace in Europe.  Spain taught them nothing.

Japanese imperialism in Asia.⁸ Japan had come to consider itself one of the great world powers as the 20th century got underway, having modernized its army and navy to the point that it was able to defeat Tsarist Russia in a Siberian war fought in 1904 and 1905.  Also, although the Great War (1914–1918) was essentially a European war, Japan played a part as an Asian ally of the British and French – and were rewarded accordingly by the formal recognition on the part of those victorious powers of the Japanese takeover of German colonies in the Pacific.

America, of course, was wary of Japanese broader interests in Asia (the Philippines was an American protectorate defended by a number of American troops posted there).  But in general Japanese-American relations remained somewhat friendly, although the Japanese were insulted by America's 1924 Immigration Act, which reduced greatly the number of immigrants allowed to come to America – virtually excluding all Japanese.

But the Japanese were making an effort to move closer to the ideal of democracy – democracy supposedly having proved itself the stronger social system in the recent war with autocracy.

However with the onset of the depression, democracy was not looking so impressive, and the Japanese military group within the Japanese Imperial Cabinet began to take a scornful attitude toward the Japanese pro-democracy civilian politicians – who had agreed to internationally determined formulas of naval and military disarmament – the military party pressing instead for a military buildup of both the army and the navy.  Indeed, radicals within the Japanese military were calling for a revival of Shinto, a somewhat mystical philosophy stressing the virtue of military valor or bushido – even the glory of death in battle.  For some (especially the younger) Japanese soldiers, Shinto and its bushido ethic formed for them an intoxicating ideal.

By the early 1930s civilian leaders were being assassinated – and cabinets were being turned over with destabilizing rapidity.

Also in 1932 young officers in the Japanese occupational army in Manchuria (northeastern China) staged a fake crisis and used the event to simply take full control of the Chinese province and set up a puppet government there.  The Japanese Emperor Hirohito did not seem to object – and the civilian government seemed unable to undo the takeover (very popular with the Japanese people).

World War Two begins in China (1937).  Tensions began to mount in the Chinese North between the Japanese Imperial government and the Chinese Republican government under President Chiang Kai-shek, tensions which exploded into full battle between the two countries in July of 1937 over a minor incident at a bridge along the northern border.  Using this incident as an excuse, the Japanese invaded with full force into China – by the army from the north and by the navy along the east coast.  In short order, the Japanese overran the major cities of the Chinese coast, bombing the civilian population in Shanghai and worse, raping and pillaging the Chinese in their capital city of Nanking (Nanjing).  But the Chinese government simply retreated into the huge Chinese interior – from there to conduct an ongoing resistance movement against their Japanese occupiers.

Thus, World War Two in the East Asian theater had actually begun, as the first chapter in this very barbaric story.  Yet America, though deeply shocked by the stories of the Japanese atrocities committed against the Chinese, chose to look away rather than get involved.

But developments in Europe, plus an alliance between the Japanese and Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, would eventually change that American stance – dramatically.

Europe moves closer to another war. The logic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy soon developed a life of its own, especially as Churchill continued to challenge Chamberlain concerning the grave Nazi danger.  Churchill, once an avid anti-Communist, was taking the view (in the press and on the radio as well as in Parliamentary debates) that with Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the Nazis were quickly becoming the greater threat to Great Britain's security than even Stalin's Communist Russia.

Promises that each of Chamberlain's many concessions to Germany would be the last were constantly broken by Hitler – with each retreat by Chamberlain rationalized as necessary steps in pacifying Hitler.  Actually, each retreat only made the dictator hungrier for German expansion.  Sadly, Chamberlain (like Baldwin) talked himself into believing that what he was doing – using diplomatic Reason rather than brute Power – was protecting (rather than undermining) the peace of Europe.⁹

The German Anschluss with Austria (March 1938).  One of Hitler's major political goals was uniting German-speaking Austria with his German Nazi Reich (a move that was forbidden by the treaties of 1919).  He brought both his cabinet and his military in line with his policy (replacing leaders in both) and then pressured the Austrian government to install more Nazis in their cabinet.  Meanwhile he began pushing Chamberlain's government to allow the unification of Germany and Austria, in theory as part of a stronger defense against Communist expansion in East Europe.  When Chamberlain seemed to be yielding, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden resigned.  But Austrian Prime Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg refused to yield, finally arranging to have the Austrians determine the matter themselves with a national plebiscite.  But two days before the scheduled election Hitler threatened to send his troops into Germany if Schuschnigg did not resign (which he did) and have him replaced by the Austrian Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart (March 12, 1938).  Then Seyss-Inquart in turn invited the Nazis (already moving across the border at this point) to take over Austria to restore order.  A month later a highly manipulated national plebiscite was held in Austria, producing the highly unlikely result of a 99.7 percent approval of the Anschluss (closing together or 'connecting) of the two countries into a single Germany.

The reaction of the enforcing powers of the treaties forbidding such a union (principally Britain and France) was weak in the extreme.  Chamberlain, sensing the dangers of such further expansion into other German areas around Hitler's Reich (principally Czechoslovakia and Poland) did nothing, but did promise that he would support Germany's neighbors against any further expansion by Hitler and his Nazis.

Hitler overruns Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain would have the opportunity soon enough to make good on his promise – and once again back down in the face of Hitler's aggressive moves.  Hitler now set his eyes on the Germans living in the mountainous borderlands of Czechoslovakia (the region known as Sudetenland).  Hitler began to claim loudly that the Czechs were mistreating the Germans of the Sudetenland (totally untrue) and he was thus forced to have to deal with this situation.  However, Czechoslovakia's military defenses (aimed primarily against Germany, but also the new Poland) were well dug in there, and Czechoslovakia's battle-ready forty infantry divisions would have offered very effective and very embarrassing resistance to any aggressions on the part of Hitler.

But to avoid a mounting international crisis, Chamberlain agreed to meet in September (1938) with Hitler (and Mussolini) in Munich, to seek a peaceful resolution to this (non) crisis, not knowing that officers in the German high command were secretly making plans to depose Hitler before he dragged the country into an unwanted war. 

Then as a result of the discussions held in Munich concerning this Czechoslovakian crisis (to which the Czechoslovakian leadership itself was not even invited), Chamberlain was pleased to offer the world a peaceful solution, one that would avoid dragging Europe into another war.  Hitler would be allowed to take over the Sudetenland (and Czechoslovakia's mountain border defenses), with Hitler's promise that this was all of Czechoslovakia that he wanted.

So happy was the European world (except the outraged Czechs, whose beloved President Edvard Beneš resigned rather than agree to the terms forced on his country) that Chamberlain had saved Europe from another war, that talk grew of awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.  And most tragically for the world, it also forced the German High command to cancel its proposed removal of Hitler – as Hitler's acquisition of Sudetenland again made him the supreme hero of the German people.

Of course Hitler had no intention of keeping his promise to Chamberlain, and in March of 1939 – at the invitation of Czechoslovakia's new leadership (the browbeaten President Hacha) – Hitler sent his troops to take over all of Czechoslovakia.

The world was shocked, but again did nothing.  Chamberlain again repeated his promise that he would protect Germanys neighbors (Poland the next obvious target) – with the threat of a declaration of war against Germany if Hitler were to make such a move. 

But by this time few believed that Chamberlain would – or even at this point could – deliver in a meaningful way on such a threat.

Roosevelt turns his attention to foreign affairs.¹⁰  Meanwhile, with the slowing down of his New Deal programming in the latter part of the 1930s, Roosevelt had already begun to turn his attentions increasingly to foreign events in Europe and Asia.  He found himself deeply concerned about the disturbing news related to the behavior of Germany in Europe and Japan in East Asia.  War clouds were gathering.

But in America it seemed that the only person concerned about this was Roosevelt.  Congress was suspicious of the dominating will of Roosevelt – especially as it seemed that he wanted America to join him in addressing the growing war problems in Europe and Asia.  That simply was not going to happen.  Americans were still bitter about their unnecessary and costly involvement in the Great War.

The peace and social justice warriors of the Liberal Federal Council of Churches protested strongly Roosevelt's attempt to rebuild and train the American army and navy, claiming that this would undermine world peace.  Another voice of Christian Liberalism, Christian Century, was quick to oppose Roosevelt's State of the Union address in 1939 when Roosevelt warned Congress of the dangers to democracy, religion and international good will posed by the rising class of dictators in the world, and the need of America to prepare itself to defend those virtues.  Christian Century (February 1939) classed the speech as the most misleading and dangerous appeal made to the American people by a chief executive in the history of the republic.

It was very clear that Roosevelt was making no progress whatsoever in readying Americans for what surely lay ahead for the country.  An extensive Congressional investigation by the Senate's Nye Committee had just concluded that the only reason why America had become involved in the Great War in 1917 was to enrich the capitalist owners of industries manufacturing war goods – Daddy Warbucks as one cartoon characterization of such a capitalist was called.  Americans were not about to be dragged into another war – just to benefit a small group of war profiteers at the cost of the lives of young American soldiers.  Congressmen made that point very clear.¹¹

Congress thus repeatedly passed Neutrality Acts (1935, 1936, 1937 and 1939), all designed to ensure that Roosevelt understood Congress on this matter.  Roosevelt's hands were thus tied.  There was very little he could do to ready America for what he understood was awaiting the nation abroad.

And much of this isolationist pressure did not let up even when war finally broke out in Europe.  The Christian Century, for instance, attacked strongly Roosevelt's efforts to bring aid to a besieged Britain (October 1940 and January 1941 editions) and when in October of 1941 Roosevelt attempted to warn the country that Hitler was determined to destroy the West's very religious foundations, Christian Century labelled Roosevelt's statement as being childish and moronic, and accused Roosevelt of using such false claims merely to undermine the resistance of the American religious community (the Liberal part of it anyway) to being needlessly dragged into a war going on beyond its borders.

But at this point they were only a couple of months away from having to change their tune, drastically.¹²

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WORLD WAR TWO¹³

* * *

A SECOND WORLD WAR ERUPTS

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The weakness of the French and British response to Hitler's expansive moves made Stalin increasingly nervous.  Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov had been trying to reach out to these Western countries.  But other than with the shunned Churchill, there was no real receptivity to the idea of an anti-Hitler alliance in either Paris or London.  Thus it was that in May of 1939 Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov and soon Russia began a move to embrace Hitler. 

Then in late August (the 23rd) the world was surprised to hear that Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact, known popularly as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  It sounded like a wonderful idea: Hitler finally agreeing to peace in Eastern Europe.

But what the world did not know, but was soon to find out, was that secretly this was simply a deal between the two dictators to divide up Eastern Europe into two distinct spheres of Russian and German control – with Poland split down the middle.  The idea was that having settled this matter (for the time being), Hitler could then turn his aggressions westward towards France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia and ultimately to Britain – taking the pressure off of Stalin in the East.

The attack on Poland begins World War Two in Europe. Without any formal warning, on September 1st Hitler unleashed Blitzkrieg on an unsuspecting Poland as thousands of heavy tanks accompanied by a similar number of planes crushed an unprepared Polish army – and people.  An outraged Chamberlain immediately declared war.  But Britain was in no position to do anything to help Poland.  Within two weeks Hitler's troops had taken over their (Western) half of the Polish territorial division with Russia.  And then at that point Russia invaded from the East, the Poles at first believing that their Slavic brothers were coming to their aid. They would soon discover to their horror that the Russians were no friendlier than their German enemies – actually far worse when the Russians secretly rounded up thousands of Polish officers and political officials and had them slaughtered and dumped in mass graves in the Katyn Forest. 

In the face of the Russian aggression Chamberlain did nothing – probably because at this point he realized he could do nothing.  The situation had become immensely bigger than anything he had planned for.  Thus the British made no move to expand the war they were now once again drawn into also to include Russia. Other than offer sanctuary in England to those of the Polish government and military able to make their escape from the German-Russian aggression, Chamberlain did nothing.

The Sitzkrieg or Phony War (September 1939-April 1940). In fact the French also did nothing … when they had a grand opportunity to strike hard at Hitler's Germany from the West while he was absorbed in the task of overrunning Poland in the East.  But the conquest of Poland had happened so quickly and the French armies were so unprepared for action that there probably was little they could have done anyway.  By the time that both the British and French could get organized, the fighting was over in Poland and Germany was then in a strong position to fend off any British or French attack.  Thus the British and French both did nothing.  As the Germans mockingly termed the matter, the French and British did not offer Blitzkrieg, they offered only Sitzkrieg (a Sitting War!) – or as it even came to be termed in Britain, a Phony War.

Actually there was action on other fronts at the time.  In October Stalin sent Soviet troops into neighboring Finland when that country refused to give over to the Russians Finnish borderlands just to the north of the Soviet city of Leningrad (former Petrograd and prior to that St. Petersburg).  The Finns fought back bravely and held off the Russians for a while.  But ultimately it was a battle between a dwarf and a giant … and the giant won (February 1940).  The League of Nations did what it could to bring justice to this aggression in denouncing Stalin's attack on Finland.  But all that succeeded in doing was to bring Soviet Russia to join the ranks of the various powers who had simply resigned in disgust when the League tried to intervene in its power politics.

On the high seas the Battle of the Atlantic actually got underway almost immediately.  The Germans wasted no time in attacking the British  with a submarine assault on the British naval harbor at Scapa Flow.  And Churchill, now head of the British navy as its First Lord of the Admiralty, struck back in sending ships to attack the German battleship Graf Spee even in the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay.

And despite Roosevelt's cautious efforts to get America to wake up to the dangers that events in Europe posed even to America on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Congress's response was to reconfirm its Neutrality Act, making it very clear to everyone at home and abroad that America had no intentions whatsoever of getting involved in another European feud.  Any such American involvement was depicted as some kind of conspiracy of evil industrial capitalism once again seeking to gain huge financial profits in sending young American soldiers to die in Europe.  That simply was not going to happen. 

The war in the European West finally gets underway (April 1940).  Again without warning, in early April of the next year, Hitler struck northward, completely overwhelming Denmark in a single day's action and attacking coastal Norway at the same time.  There in Norway the action ground down as the Norwegians fought back fiercely (Hitler would never gain complete mastery over Norway), Hitler's objective being to gain control over Norwegian access to the Swedish iron ore that was needed so badly by the German war machine.¹⁴

Then in May, Hitler struck west from Germany, attacking both Belgium and the Netherlands (the Netherlands had remained neutral in the First World War). giving the German war machine opportunity to swing around the well-defended French Maginot Line facing Germany along the Rhine River.  The French were not prepared for Blitzkrieg, believing that they had time (as in the First World War) to assemble French forces (again, assisted by British forces sent to France) along a broad front running along France's northern border.  But Hitler's mobile army quickly got itself through the dense Ardennes Forest in Belgium and smashed through the center of the French line, dividing it and trapping one half of the French army behind the Maginot line. By mid-May German forces were already at the Marne River (the point of furthest German advance in World War One) and Paris was in no position to defend itself. But then Hitler instead turned his troops west to chase down the other half of the French and British armies – who however were able in late May to make their escape to Britain by way of a massive evacuation at Dunkirk. 

In mid-June a new French government was formed under the leadership of World War One French hero, Marshall Philippe Pétain.  But at this point it was clear that all was lost for the French.  Sadly, Pétain found himself forced to sign a humiliating armistice.  Under the terms of the armistice, Hitler did allow the French to continue to self-govern from the town of Vichy – but only the southern half of the country.  The northern half (Paris, plus France's industrial lands) would come under direct German rule.  But at least the war was over – for the French anyway.

The Battle of Britain begins.¹⁵  By this time Britain had finally come fully under the tough leadership of Churchill, who on June 4th (after having ordered the rescue of the troops at Dunkirk and Cherbourg) reported to Parliament and the British nation itself that Britain would fight on – no matter what the situation, in France, on the seas, on the beaches, in its fields or in its streets.  Churchill was letting Hitler know that Britain would never quit.

And again on the 18th of June he dug even deeper – reminding the British that they had an even larger responsibility facing them than mere national self-defense.  They not only had an Empire plus their allies in Europe to defend but literally Christian civilization itself.  Failure in this duty was unthinkable because it would bring on the world (the United States included) a very evil Dark Age.  Therefore Britain would not fail in its duty  but would take up the challenge in such a way that even a thousand years into the future the world would still remember that this was Britain's finest hour.

With this, Hitler realized that his hope of gaining an understanding (basically capitulation) from Britain was not going to happen.  And thus he ordered his Luftwaffe to begin attacking British military installations in preparation for an invasion of England.  But the British Royal Air Force (RAF) fought back – and then had the audacity to fly bombers all the way to Germany to do some bombing of their own.  This so infuriated Hitler that he switched his bombing from military sites to civilian cities – actually a waste of military power.  The RAF did not break, and in September, after a huge Luftwaffe attack ended in failure, Hitler had to call off his plans (Operation Sea Lion) to invade England.  German bombings of England would continue, but at a reduced rate that actually had no result except to further steel the will of the British people.

The Tripartite or Axis Pact (September 1940).  When Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty in 1939 this seemed to overturn the provisions of Germany's earlier Anti-Comintern (anti-Communist or actually anti-Soviet) Pact¹⁶ with Italy.  Hitler resolved this issue with a new Tripartite Pact signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, by Germany, Italy and Japan. This not only gave considerable encouragement to Japan's imperial ambitions in Asia (at the expense of the English, French and Dutch and to the great irritation of America), it put Germany on record as willing to come to war as a Japanese ally if war should occur between Japan and America.  With the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Rome-Berlin Axis of power now officially included also Tokyo – and the world now acknowledged those belonging to this military alliance as the Axis Powers.

American neutrality.¹⁷  After France's surrender in June of 1940 America began to take events developing in Europe much more seriously, and finally began to gear up for the possibility of war.  The defense budget jumped from $2 billion to $10 billion in that year, and America's first peacetime draft was instituted.  But still, America remained officially neutral.

Britain meanwhile was struggling to keep vital supply lines open from overseas.  But by early 1940 German U-boats were taking a huge toll on Atlantic shipping, sinking ships faster than Britain could replace them.  Step by step America began to increase its sales to Britain of vitally needed supplies – including in June millions of rounds of surplus ammunition sold to Britain, and in September including 50 mothballed destroyers given to Britain in exchange for land on which to build American airbases within the British Empire.  By December of 1940, with Roosevelt's announcement that America was to become the Arsenal for Democracy, those supplies being sold to Britain openly included all varieties of war materials.

However, there was still a strong spirit of isolationism in sections of America society, although in general the American population was beginning to swing to the idea that it was the country's responsibility to help Britain save Christian civilization from the Nazi scourge.  The idea of Lend-Lease was put before Congress, and hotly debated.  A majority of Democrats favored the idea of helping Britain in any way possible, and a majority of Republicans were opposed.  Finally by March of 1941 the bill authorizing Lend-Lease was approved by both Houses of Congress thanks to the Democrat vote.  The new law permitted the president to sell, transfer title, exchange, lend, or lease anything to any government whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States.  Such partner governments included immediately Britain, but soon also China and then that autumn Russia as well.

With the sinking of an American destroyer by a German submarine at the end of October (1941), the last of the Neutrality Acts passed and reconfirmed nearly every year in the second half of the 1930s were finally repealed and American merchant ships were allowed to be armed – and permitted to transport war material (to Britain).  At this point America's claim to be a neutral in the war was clearly a fiction, a fiction which Hitler chose (mostly) still to observe.

Hitler attacks Russia (Operation Barbarossa, June 1941). Then again without warning (although Churchill had tried to warn a disbelieving Stalin), Hitler launched Blitzkrieg against his former ally, Soviet Russia.  Hitler's Empire needed Lebensraum:  the huge wheat-fields of Ukraine and Southern Russia to feed his people and the oil fields of Azerbaijan along the Caspian Sea to feed his war machine.  And though he needed also to crush the Russian heart at Moscow, his focus was primarily on these southern objectives. 

But he had delayed the start of Barbarossa because of the need he personally felt to punish an irritating Serbian society.  And this delay meant that he fell well short of this goal of seizing Stalingrad, sited at a key crossing of the Volga River (the last truly defensive position available to the Russians) before a typically horrible Russian winter set in.  This failure shut down the possibility of any further progress until the following spring.

In the meantime, Stalin, in seeing how desperate the situation was for his country, was wise enough to drop talk about saving the Socialist homeland … and instead changed dramatically the language by which he called on the people for the country's defense.  It was now Mother Russia that they needed to defend.  And this was something that the people well understood and were ready to serve in its defense, sacrificially – in fact, very sacrificially.

* * *

AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR¹⁸

The Roosevelt-Churchill conference and the Atlantic Charter (August 1941).¹⁹  Whereas America was still a country at peace,  it had also become clear that the mood in the country was slowly shifting to the idea of giving support (exemplified in Lend Lease) to the countries struggling to hold off the aggressions of Fascism.  Roosevelt decided that it was time to discuss diplomatic goals (if not actual war goals) that America might hold in common with Great Britain.

Thus in mid-August of 1941, Roosevelt met with Churchill on a battleship anchored just off the Canadian coast to discuss broad principles or goals that they both wanted to see pursued in the struggles of the democracies against the dictatorships.  A week later Roosevelt sent a message to Congress in which he outlined the basic principles agreed on at this meeting with Churchill:  no territorial gain or adjustments that did not accord with the wishes of the people involved; self-government of all people; equal access to world trade; economic cooperation for social advancement; the rebuilding of Europe following the destruction of the Nazi Empire; freedom of travel on the high seas; and a general disarmament.

This Roosevelt-Churchill agreement was issued at first simply as a Joint Declaration on August 14, 1941.  This was an amazing document, considering the fact that America was not officially at war with anyone at that point.  Yet it clearly laid out war aims – in many ways resembling Wilson's Fourteen Points, which he had hoped a generation earlier would direct warring parties to a new and just global peace.

The broader impact of the Atlantic Charter. The following month (September) this document was put forward and unanimously adopted at a meeting in London of Great Britain and her wartime allies – the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland, plus representatives from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the non-Vichy Free French (representing General de Gaulle) as a basis of a common set of wartime goals. Thus this agreement proved to be one of the first steps towards the formation of the United Nations (at that time describing only a grand military alliance).  Also, by this time the document was being referred to as the Atlantic Charter.²⁰

The Axis Powers interpreted these diplomatic agreements as a potential alliance against them.  Adolf Hitler saw it as evidence of collusion between the UK and the USA, even as an international Jewish conspiracy.  In the Japanese Empire, the Atlantic Charter rallied support for the militarists in the government, who pushed for a more aggressive approach to the UK and US.

Growing tensions with Japan.²¹ With France's fall to Germany in June of 1940 and the creation of the Vichy Government in southern France, the French colony of Indochina was only weakly held by the French.  The Japanese took advantage of this weakness, demanding of the Vichy government access to Indochina in order to have a base from which to move against the Chinese enemies in the South of China.

America was alarmed by this expansion of Japanese power into Indochina and in July decided to place an embargo on the sale of strategic goods (aircraft parts, key minerals, oil and scrap iron) to Japan, irritating Japan immensely.  This, plus anti-Japanese racial attitudes reflected in American limits on Japanese immigration, infuriated the Japanese military leaders, who were suffering from some of the same racial illusions of greatness that had infected the Nazis.

The Japanese military leaders, who dominated all Japanese politics, were themselves divided on what to do about the American problem.  Eventually General Hideki Tojo and his group won the day (with the help of the Emperor Hirohito) and readied Japan to deliver a huge crippling blow that they were certain would force America to have to sue for peace – entirely on Japanese terms.  The Japanese would take out the American naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, destroying all American capabilities in the Pacific and Asia.  At the same time, they would seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies – and all the lands along the way, principally the American-protected Philippines, independent Thailand, British Malaya and the British naval base at Singapore.  The French government at Vichy, forcibly allied with Hitler's Nazi Germany, had already given its permission to the Japanese to occupy French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). 

Not all the Japanese were certain that this plan would work, notably Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese navy, Isoroku Yamamoto, who had studied for two years at Harvard and who offered the opinion that if this strike did not work as planned, the endeavor would succeed only in awakening a sleeping lion, with dire results for Japan.  Nonetheless he submitted himself to the majority of his military colleagues and went along with the plan.

A date which will live in infamy.²²  Thus at dawn on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, without a declaration of war or any warning²³ to the Americans, Japanese carrier-based airplanes attacked the Pearl Harbor naval station, sinking all the battleships anchored there and wiping out nearly all of the airplanes still parked at the air station.  But the attack had an effect quite opposite what the Japanese had intended.  Instead of forcing America to cringe before Japanese power, the attack pushed America overnight to a willingness to become a dedicated fighting nation.

On the following day, December 8th, Roosevelt stood before Congress to request a declaration of war against Japan.  His speech was unlike Wilson's 1917 speech with Wilson's lofty rhetoric of high ideals (which Americans by this time were highly suspicious of) but instead a simple reference to the criminality of Japan's behavior, begun simply with the statement,

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

He mentioned the treachery of the Japanese in pretending to be negotiating for peace when in fact Japan had already decided days before to attack America.  He did not gloss over the huge loss of life and military equipment, and pointed out that this was part of a wider Japanese aggression, timed with an attack in the Philippines and other areas in the Pacific.  His appeal was strictly to the sense of national outrage, and to the American spirit that would never let Japan get away with such treachery.  Thus:

As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.  No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist.  There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounded determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God.

There it was, plainly said.  We Americans would fight – not to save the world for some kind of high ideal, but rather to defend ourselves from the treachery that threatened us, our territory, our interests.  It was a hard and precise piece of political realism.  And we were ready to back that declaration – with our lives – so help us God.

Congress's vote for war was unanimous in the Senate and only one vote short (Liberal feminist Jeanette Rankin opposed) of being unanimous in the House.  At 4:00 p.m. on the 8th of December America was formally at war, though at this point only against the Japanese.

Hitler declares war on America. Several days later Hitler, puffed up with his growing sense of military genius, announced that he was respecting the Tripartite Pact with Japan in declaring that a state of war now existed between Germany and the United States.  So whatever America's hesitant feelings had been previously about the war in Europe, they no longer mattered.  By Hitler's own bizarre decision, America was at war not only with the Japanese but also with the Germans.

With God's help, we will triumph. This was not a good time for America to be getting into a war against two successful empires, with few proven allies for America to count on (France had been knocked out; Great Britain and Russia were not looking very good at this point) and America's own military was in a deplorable state of unpreparedness.  But the spirit of America in 1941 was such that Americans chose not to look at the situation as worldly eyes would see things (very bad indeed) but as the higher vision of God might see things:  the need to take a stand against evil – and trust in God to support us in our struggle.  When Roosevelt added the words so help us God at the end of his address requesting of Congress a declaration of war, that was not merely religious cant, that was an important call to connect the unbounding determination of our people with the vital aid and guidance of God.  America was determined to gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.

The Atlantic Charter as the moral foundation of the new United Nations.  On January 1st, 1942, the United Nations of twenty-two countries around the world were formed into an alliance in order to oppose the Fascist or Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan.  These United Nations – led by the Big Four of America, Great Britain, Russia and China – signed the Atlantic Charter as a joint Declaration by United Nations and committed themselves to pursue the war with the aim of a total victory against the Fascist enemy.  Over the next few years an even greater number would sign on as members of the United Nations.

The major guiding principles of this new military alliance, the United Nations, were to be those of the Atlantic Charter.  This document would also become a foundational document for the organization of that same name that would be formed at war's end.

The Atlantic Charter and Declaration outlined how an anti-Fascist military alliance was to operate – and how a post-war world would be shaped and also operate.  The later part would be particularly important in the way in which after the war much of the world would indeed take shape, especially economically.

However, politically the Atlantic Charter would ultimately prove to be much more Idealistic than any of the great