In a speech before the Dallas, Texas, Alumni Club of Columbia University on Armistice Day, 1950, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that as Supreme Commander in Europe he made a habit of asking American soldiers why they were fighting the Germans, and 90% of the boys said they had no idea. Very significantly, General Eisenhower did not offer members of his Alumni Group any precise answer to his own question. The high point of his speech was a statement of his hope that Columbia might become the fountain-head for widely disseminated simple and accurate information which will prevent our country from ever again “stumbling into war” at “the whim of the man who happens to be president” (notes taken by the author, who attended the Alumni Club meeting, and checked immediately with another Columbian who was also present).
The American soldier is not the only one who wondered and is still wondering about the purposes of World War II. Winston Churchill has called it “The Unnecessary War.” In view of our legacy of deaths, debt, and danger, Churchill’s term may be considered an understatement.
Before a discussion of any war, whether necessary or unnecessary, a definition of the term war is desirable. For the purposes of this book, war may be defined, simply and without elaboration, as the ultimate and violent action taken by a nation to implement its foreign policy. The results, even of a successful war, are so horrible to contemplate that a government concerned for the welfare of its people will enter the combat phase of its diplomacy only as a last resort. Every government makes strategic decisions, and no such decision is so fruitful of bitter sequels as a policy of drift or a policy of placating a faction — which has money or votes or both — and it is on just such a hybrid policy of drift and catering that our foreign policy has been built.
A commonly made and thoroughly sound observation about our foreign policy beginning with 1919 is that it creates vacuums — for a hostile power to fill. The collapsed Germany of 1923 created a power vacuum in the heart of Europe, but Britain and France made no move to fill it, perhaps because each of them was more watchful of the other than fearful of fallen Germany. The United States was far-off; its people of native stock, disillusioned by the bursting of Woodrow Wilson’s dream bubbles, were disposed to revert to their old policy of avoiding foreign entanglements; and its numerous new Eastern European citizens, hostile to Germany, were watchfully awaiting a second and final collapse of the feeble republic born of the peace treaty of 1919. The new Soviet dictatorship, finding Marxism unworkable and slowly making it over into its later phases of Leninism and Stalinism, was as yet too precariously established for a westward venture across Poland.
As a result, Germany moved along stumblingly with more than a dozen political parties and a resultant near-paralysis of government under the Socialist President Friedrich Ebert to 1925 and then, with conditions improving slightly, under the popular old Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was President from 1925 to 1933.
Meanwhile, two of Germany’s numerous political parties emerged into definite power — the Communists, many of whose leaders were of Khazar stock, and the National Socialist German Workers Party, which was popularly called Nazi from the first two syllables of the German word for “National.” Faced with harsh alternatives (testimony of many Germans to the author in Germany), the Germans chose the native party, and Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor.
The date was January 30, 1933, five weeks before Franklin Roosevelt’s first inauguration as President of the United States; but it was only after the aged President von Hindenburg’s death (on August 2) that Hitler was made both President and Chancellor (August 19). Differences between the rulers of the United States and Germany developed quickly. Hitler issued a series of tirades against Communism, which he considered a world menace, whereas Roosevelt injected life into the sinking body of world Communism (Chapter III, above) by giving full diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia on November 16, 1933, a day destined to be known as “American-Soviet Friendship Day” by official proclamation of the State of New York.
Sharing the world spotlight with his anti-Communist words and acts was Hitler’s domestic policy, which in its early stages may be epitomized as “Germany for the Germans,” of whom in 1933 there were some 62,000,000. Hitler’s opponents, more especially those of non-German stock (510,000 in 1933, according to the World Almanac, 1939), were unwilling to lose by compromise any of their position of financial and other power acquired in large degree during the economic collapse of 1923, and appealed for help to persons of prominence in the city of New York and elsewhere. Their appeal was not in vain.
In late July, 1933, an International Jewish Boycott Conference [1] was held in Amsterdam to devise means of bringing Germany to terms. Samuel Untermeyer of New York presided over the Boycott Conference and was elected President of the World Jewish Economic Federation. Returning to America, Mr. Untermeyer described the planned Jewish move against Germany as a “holy war … a war that must be waged unremittingly” [2]. The immediately feasible tactic of the “economic boycott” was described by Mr. Untermeyer as “nothing new” for “President Roosevelt, whose wise statesmanship and vision are the wonder of the civilized world, is invoking it in furtherance of his noble conception of the relations between capital and labor.” Mr. Untermeyer gave his hearers and readers specific instructions:
It is not sufficient that you buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships and shipping.
Before the Boycott Conference adjourned at Amsterdam, arrangement was made to extend the boycott to “include France, Holland, Belgium, Britain, Poland and Czechoslovakia and other lands as far flung as Finland and Egypt” [3]. In connection with the boycott, the steady anti-German campaign, which had never died down in America after World War I, became suddenly violent. Germany was denounced in several influential New York papers and by radio.
The public became dazed by the propaganda, and the U. S. Government soon placed on German imports the so-called “general” tariff rates as against the “most favored” status for all other nations. This slowed down but did not stop the German manufacture of export goods, and the U. S. took a further step, described as follows in the New York Times [4]: “Already Germany is paying general tariff rates because she has been removed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull from the most favored nation list… Now she will be required to pay additional duties… It was decided that they would range from about 22 to 56 per cent.” There were protests. According to the New York Times [5]: “importers and others interested in trade with Germany insisted yesterday that commerce between the two countries will dwindle to the vanishing point within the next six months.” The prediction was correct.
An effort of certain anti-German international financial interests was also made to “call” sufficient German treasury notes to “break” Germany. The German government replied successfully to this maneuver by giving a substantial bonus above the current exchange rate for foreigners who would come to Germany, exchange their currency for marks, and spend the marks in Germany. Great preparations were made for welcoming strangers to such gatherings as the “World Conference on Recreation and Leisure Time” (Hamburg, August, 1936), one of whose programs, a historic pageant on the Auszen-Alster, was attended by the author (who was visiting northern European museums and coastal areas in the interest of his historical novel, Swords in the Dawn). Special trains brought in school children from as far as northern Norway. Whether from sincerity or from a desire to create a good impression, visitors were shown every courtesy. As a result of the German effort and the money bonus afforded by the favorable exchange, retired people, pensioners, and tourists spent enough funds in the Reich to keep the mark stable.
But this German financial victory in 1936, though it prevented an immediate currency collapse, did not solve the problem of 62,000,000 people (69,000,000 by 1939) in an area approximately the size of Texas being effectively denied export trade.
Through Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other officials President Roosevelt sponsored Mr. Untermeyer’s economic war against Germany, but he still adhered, in his public utterances, to a policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of foreign nations. In two speeches in the summer of 1937 he voiced “our entanglements” [6].
Some sinister underground deal must have been consummated within two months, however, for in a speech in Chicago on October 5 the President made an about-face, which was probably the most complete in the whole history of American foreign policy. Here are two excerpts from the famous “Quarantine” speech:
… Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked!…
When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.
This pronouncement, so inflammatory, so provocative of war, caused unprecedented consternation in the United States [7]. Most outspoken in opposition to the “quarantine” policy was the Chicago Tribune. Violently enthusiastic was the New Masses, and Mr. Earl Browder promised the administration the “100 percent unconditional support of the Communist party,” provided Roosevelt adopted a hands-off policy toward Communism. Incidentally, this Democratic-Communist collaboration was openly or covertly to be a factor in subsequent United States foreign and domestic policy to and beyond the middle of the twentieth century. “I welcome the support of Earl Browder or any one else who will help keep President Roosevelt in office,” said Harry S. Truman, candidate for Vice President, on October 17, 1944 [8].
Far more numerous than denouncers or endorsers of the “quarantine” speech of 1937 were those who called for clarification. This, however, was not vouchsafed — nor was it, apart from possible details of method and time, really necessary. It was perfectly obvious that the President referred to Japan and Germany. With the latter country we had already declared that “no quarter” economic war recommended by the President of the World Jewish Economic Federation, and now in unquestionably hostile terms our President declared a political war. In his diary, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal recorded that he was told by Joseph P. Kennedy, our Ambassador to Britain, that Prime Minister Chamberlain “stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war” [9].
Censorship, governmental and other (Chapter V), was tight in America by 1937. It had blocked out the reasons for Mr. Roosevelt’s public change of policy between summer and autumn, and it blacked out the fact that the President’s threatening attitude caused Germany to make, and make a second time, an appeal for peace. These appeals did not become known to the American public for more than ten years. Here is the story, summarized from an article by Bertram D. Hulen in the New York Times of December 17, 1948:
In 1937, and again in 1938, the German government made “a sincere effort to improve relations with the United States, only to be rebuffed.” The U. S. Government’s alleged reason was “a fear of domestic political reactions in this country unfavorable to the Administration.” Germany was told that the American public would not tolerate a conference. Some officials favored exploring the German offer “after the congressional elections in the fall” (1938). The sequel, of course, is that the Roosevelt administration blocked Germany’s further efforts for peace by withdrawing our ambassador from Berlin and thus peremptorily preventing future negotiations. Germany then had to recall her Ambassador “who was personally friendly toward Americans” and, according to the New York Times, “was known in diplomatic circles here at the time to be working for international understanding in a spirit of good will”. Here, to repeat for emphasis, is the crux of the matter: The whole story of Germany’s appeal for negotiations and our curt refusal and severance of diplomatic relations was not published in 1937 or 1938, when Germany made her appeals, but was withheld from the public until ferreted out by the House Committee on Un-American Activities after World War II and by that committee released to the press more than ten years after the facts were so criminally suppressed. Parenthetically, it is because of services such as this on behalf of truth that the Committee on Un-American Activities has been so frequently maligned. In fact, in our country since the 1930’s, there seems little question that the best criterion for separating true Americans from others is a recorded attitude toward the famous Martin Dies Committee.
Economically strangled by an international boycott headed up in New York, and outlawed politically even to the extent of being denied a conference, the Germans in the late 1930’s faced the alternatives of mass unemployment from loss of world trade or working in government-sponsored projects. They accepted the latter. The workers who lost their jobs in export businesses were at once employed in Hitler’s armament industries [10], which were already more than ample for the size and resources of the country, and soon became colossal.
Thus by desperate measures, advertised to the world in the phrase “guns instead of butter,” Hitler prepared to cope with what he considered to be the British-French-American-Soviet “encirclement.” Stung by what he considered President Roosevelt’s insulting language and maddened by the contemptuous rejection of his diplomatic approaches to the United States, he made a deal (August 1939) against Poland with the Soviet Union, a power he had taught the German people to fear and hate! With the inevitability of a Sophoclean tragedy, this betrayal of his own conscience brought him to ruin — and Germany with him. Such is the danger which lurks for a people when they confide their destiny to the whims of a dictator!
The war, which resulted from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy is well remembered, especially by those American families whose sons lie beneath white crosses — at home or afar. Its pre-shooting phase, with all the weavings back and forth, is analyzed in Professor Beard’s volume, already referred to. Its causes are the subject of Frederick R. Sanborn’s Design for War [11]. Its progress is surveyed in William Henry Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade [12]. Details cannot be here presented.
This much, however, is evident. With some secret facts now revealed and with the foul picture now nearing completion, we can no longer wonder at a clean trustful young soldier or an honorable general being unable to give a satisfactory reason for our part in promoting and participating in World War II.
As the “unnecessary war” progressed, we adopted an increasingly horrible policy. Our government’s fawning embrace of the Communist dictator of Russia, and his brutal philosophy which we called “democratic,” was the most “unnecessary” act of our whole national history, and could have been motivated only by the most reprehensible political considerations — such, for instance, as holding the 100 percent Communist support at a price proposed by Mr. Browder. Among those who learned the truth and remained silent, with terrible consequences to himself and his country, was James V. Forrestal. In an article, “The Forrestal Diaries,” Life [13] reveals that in 1944 Forrestal wrote thus to a friend about the “liberals” around him:
I find that whenever any American suggests that we act in accordance with the needs of our own security he is apt to be called a [profane adjective deleted] fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe suggests that he needs the Baltic Provinces, half of Poland, all of Bessasrabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands agree that he is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful fellow who is very easy to deal with because he is so explicit in what he wants.
Among those who saw our madness, and spoke out, were Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Winston Churchill.
Senator Taft’s radio address of June 29, 1941, a few days after Hitler invaded Russia, included the following passage:
How can anyone swallow the idea that Russia is battling for democratic principles? Yet the President on Monday announced that the United States would give all possible aid to Russia, the character and quantity of the aid to await only a disclosure of Russian needs… To spread the four freedoms throughout the world we will ship airplanes and tanks and guns to Communist Russia. But no country was more responsible for the present war and Germany’s aggression than Russia itself. Except for the Russian pact with Germany there would have been no invasion of Poland. Then Russia proved to be as much of an aggressor as Germany. In the name of democracy we are to make a Communist alliance with the most ruthless dictator in the world…
But the victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the United States than the victory of Fascism. There has never been the slightest danger that the people of this country would ever embrace Bundism or Nazism… But Communism masquerades, often successfully, under the guise of democracy. [14]
The Prime Minister of Britain, the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, was alarmed at President Roosevelt’s silly infatuation for Stalin and the accompanying mania for serving the interests of world Communism. “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe,” he wrote on Oct. 21, 1942, to the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. Churchill also wanted an invasion of the Balkans, which Roosevelt and Marshall opposed apparently to please Stalin [15]. This is no place and the author assumes no competence for analyzing the strategy of individual campaigns; but according to Helen Lombard’s While They Fought [16], General Marshall stated to a Congressional Committee that the “purpose” of the Italian campaign was to draw “German forces away from the Russian front,” and according to the same source, General Mark Clark when questioned “about American political aims” found himself “obliged to state that his country was seeking nothing except ground in which to bury her dead.” Such being true, one may wonder why — except for the furtherance of Stalin’s aims — the forces devoted to strategically unimportant Italy, the winning of which left the Alps between our armies and Germany, were not landed, for instance, in the Salonika area for the historic Vardar Valley invasion route which leads without major obstacles to the heart of Europe and would have helped Stalin defeat Hitler without giving the Red dictator all of Christian Eastern Europe as a recompense.
It is widely realized now that Churchill had to put up with much indignity and had to agree to many strategically unsound policies to prevent the clique around Roosevelt from prompting him to injure even more decisively Britain’s world position vis-a-vis with the Soviet Union. Sufficient documentation is afforded by General Elliott Roosevelt’s frank and useful As He Saw It [17], referred to above. Determined apparently to present the truth irrespective of its bearing on reputations, the general [18] quotes his father’s anti-British attitude as expressed at Casablanca: “I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan … that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.” This was the day before Roosevelt’s “Unconditional Surrender” proclamation (Saturday, January 23, 1943). The next day Roosevelt again broached the subject to his son, telling him the British “must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to the archaic, medieval Empire ideas.”
This attitude toward Britain, along with a probably pathological delight in making Churchill squirm, explains the superficial reason for Roosevelt’s siding with the Stalinites on the choice of a strategically insignificant area for the Mediterranean front. As implied above, the deeper reason, beyond question, was that in his frail and fading condition he was a parrot for the ideas which the clique about him whispered into his ears, with the same type of flattery that Mr. Untermeyer had used so successfully in initiating the Jewish boycott. No reason more valid can be found for the feeble President’s interest in weakening the British Empire while strengthening the Soviet Empire — either in the gross or in such specific instances as the Roosevelt-Eisenhower policy in Germany. This policy, initiated by Roosevelt and implemented by Eisenhower, was well summarized in a speech, “It Is Just Common Sense to Ask Why We Arrived at Our Present Position,” by Congressman B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee in the House of Representatives on March 19, 1951 [19]:
… We could have easily gotten to Berlin first. But our troops were first halted at the Elbe. They were then withdrawn from that river in a wide circle — far enough westward to make Stalin a present of the great Zeiss optical and precision instrument works at Jena, the most important V-1 and V-2 rocket laboratory and production plant in Nordhausen, and the vital underground jet plant in Kahla. Everywhere we surrendered to the Soviets intact thousands of German planes, including great masses of jet fighters ready for assembly, as well as research centers, rocket developments, scientific personnel, and other military treasures.
When it was all over, a large part of the formidable Russian militarism of today was clearly marked “Made in America” or “donated by America from Germany.” But where Roosevelt left off, President Truman resumed.
At Potsdam, Truman maintaining intact Roosevelt’s iron curtain of secret diplomacy, played fast and loose with American honor and security. He agreed to an enlargement of the boundaries of a Poland already delivered by Roosevelt and Churchill to Russian control through addition of areas that had for centuries been occupied by Germans or people of German origin. Some 14,000,000 persons were brutally expelled from their homes with the confiscation of virtually all their property. Only 10,000,000 finally reached the American, French, and British zones of Germany. Four million mysteriously disappeared, though the finger points toward Russian atrocities. Thus Truman approved one of the greatest mass deportations in history, which for sheer cruelty is a dark page in the annals of history.
At Potsdam, Truman also sanctioned Russian acquisition of Eastern Germany, the food bin of that nation before the war. It then became impossible for the remaining German economy in British, French, and American hands to feed its people. Germany, like Japan, also went on our bounty rolls.
Like Roosevelt, Truman did not neglect to build up Russian military strength when this opportunity came at Potsdam. He provided her with more factories, machines, and military equipment, though at the time he attended Potsdam Truman knew that through lend-lease we had already dangerously expanded Russia’s military might and that, in addition, we had given the Soviets some 15,000 planes — many of them our latest type — and 7,000 tanks.
But at Potsdam Truman gave to Russia the entire zone embracing the Elbe and Oder Rivers, excepting Hamburg, which lies within the British zone. Naval experts had known from the early days of World War II that it was along these rivers and their tributaries that the Germans had set up their submarine production line. The menace which the Nazi underwater fleet constituted during World War II is still remembered by residents along the Atlantic coast who saw oil tankers, merchant ships, and even a troop transport sunk within sight of our shores. Convoy losses during the early years of the war were tremendous. And special defensive methods had to be devised by our Navy to get our supplies across the Atlantic.
But in spite of this, the President agreed at Potsdam to deliver to Russia the parts [of Germany containing] plants sufficient for her to fabricate hundreds of submarines. In addition to this, he agreed to give to Russia 10 of the latest snorkel-tube long-range German submarines for experimental purposes.
Why did Churchill consent to the initiation of such a program? Why did he allow Roosevelt to give an ideologically hostile power a foothold as far West as the Elbe River, which flows into the North Sea?
Since Churchill was characteristically no weak-kneed yes-man (witness his “blood and tears” speech which rallied his people in one of their darkest hours), Roosevelt and his clique must have confronted him with terrible alternatives to secure his consent to the unnatural U. S. decisions in the last months of the war. Wrote George Sokolsky in his syndicated column of March 22, 1951, “The pressure on him (Churchill) from Roosevelt, who was appeasing Stalin, must have been enormous… But why was Roosevelt so anxious to appease Stalin?” And also at Potsdam, why was Truman so ready to adopt the same vicious policy, which, as a former field grade officer of the army, he must have known to be wrong?
A study of our Presidential “policies” from 1933, and especially from 1937, on down to Potsdam, leads to a horrible answer.
To one who knows something of the facts of the world and knows also the main details of the American surrender of security and principles at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and other conferences, three ghastly purposes come into clear focus:
(1) As early as 1937, our government determined upon war against Germany for no formulated purpose beyond pleasing the dominant Eastern European element and allied elements in the National Democratic Party, and holding “those votes,” as Roosevelt II put it (Chapter III, above).
The President’s determination to get into war to gratify his vanity of having a third term of office is touched on by Jesse H. Jones, former Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in his book, Fifty Billion Dollars [20]. In this comprehensive and carefully documented volume, which is obligatory background reading on U. S. politics in the years 1932-1945, Mr. Jones throws much light on Roosevelt, the “Total Politician.” On Roosevelt’s desire for getting into World War II, these [21] are Mr. Jones’s words: “Regardless of his oft repeated statement ‘I hate war,’ he was eager to get into the fighting since that would insure a third term.” The most notorious instance of the President’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character was his unblushing promise, as he prepared for intervention, that there would be no war. The third-term candidate’s “again and again and again” speech (Boston, October 30, 1940) is invariably quoted, but even more inclusive was his broadcast statement of October 26 that no person in a responsible position in his government had “ever suggested in any shape, manner, or form the remotest possibility of sending the boys of American mothers to fight on the battlefields of Europe.” We are thus confronted by a dilemma. Was Roosevelt the scheming ruiner of his country or was he a helpless puppet pulled by strings from hands which wielded him beyond any power of his to resist?
A continuing lack of any policy beyond the corralling of minority votes blighted the entire world effort of our devoted and self-sacrificing soldiers, and frustrated the hopes of those of our lower echelon policy-makers who were trying to salvage something useful to civilization from our costly world-wide war. Our diplomatic personnel, military attachés, and other representatives abroad were confused by what they took to be rudderless drifting. In one foreign country diametrically opposed statements were issued simultaneously by heads of different U. S. missions. In Washington, the Office of War Information issued under the same date line completely conflicting instructions to two sets of its representatives in another Asiatic country. A United States military attaché with the high rank of brigadier general made an impassioned plea (in the author’s hearing) for a statement of our purposes in the war; but, asking the bread of positive strategic policy, he got the stone of continued confusion. Some of the confusion was due to the fact that officials from the three principal kinds of Democrats (Chapter III) were actuated by and gave voice to different purposes; most of it, however, resulted from the actual lack of any genuine policy except to commit our troops and write off casualties with the smoke of the President’s rhetoric. Yes, we were fighting a war, not to protect our type of civilization or to repel an actual or threatened invasion, but for Communist and anti-German votes. Thus when our ailing President went to Yalta, he is said to have carried no American demands, to have presented no positive plans to counter the proposals of Stalin. In his feebleness, with Alger Hiss nearby, he yielded with scarcely a qualm to the strong and determined Communist leader. For fuller details see the carefully documented article, “America Betrayed at Yalta,” by Hon. Lawrence H. Smith, U. S. Representative from Wisconsin [22].
(2) The powerful Eastern European element dominant in the inner circles of the Democratic Party regarded with complete equanimity, perhaps even with enthusiasm, the killing of as many as possible of the world-ruling and Khazar-hated race of “Aryans” (Chapter II); that is, native stock Americans of English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Latin, and Slavic descent. This non-Aryan power bloc therefore indorsed “Unconditional Surrender” and produced the Morgenthau Plan (see below), both of which were certain to stiffen and prolong the German resistance at the cost of many more American lives, much more desolation in Germany, and many more German lives — also “Aryan.” The plans of the prolongers of the war were sustained by those high Democratic politicians who saw nothing wrong in the spilling of blood in the interest of votes. Unfortunately, President Roosevelt became obsessed with the idea of killing Germans [23] rather than defeating Hitler, and reportedly set himself against any support of anti-Hitler elements in Germany. Perhaps taking his cue from his Commander-in-Chief — a term Roosevelt loved — General Mark Clark told American soldiers of the Fifth Army that German “assaults” were “welcome,” since “it gives you additional opportunity to kill your hated enemy in large numbers.” The general drove the point home. “It is open season on the Anzio bridgehead,” he continued, “and there is no limit to the number of Germans you can kill” [24].
Such a sentiment for men about to make the supreme sacrifice of their lives has — in the author’s opinion — an unnatural ring to ears attuned to the teachings of Christianity. Such a stress on “killing” or “kill” rather than on a “cause” or on “victory” is definitely at variance with the traditions of Western Christian civilization. It is also costly in the life blood of America, for “killing” is a two-edged sword. An enemy who would surrender in the face of certain defeat will fight on to the end when truculently promised a “killing” — and more Americans will die with him.
The underlying philosophy of “killing” was incidentally hostile to the second largest racial strain in America. Germans have from the beginning been second only to the English and Scotch in the make-up of our population. “In 1775 the Germans constituted about 10 percent of the white population of the colonies” [25]. The total of Dutch, Irish, French “and all others” was slightly less than the Germans, the great bulk of the population being, of course, the English-speaking people from England, Scotland, and Wales. In the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, “German immigration outdistanced all other immigration,” and as of 1950 “the Germans have contributed over 25 per cent of the present white population of the United States. The English element — including Scots, North Irish, and Welsh — alone exceeds them with about 33 percent of the present white population. The Irish come third with about 15 percent” [26].
Thus in his desire for shedding German blood, apart from military objectives, Roosevelt set himself not against an enemy government but against the race which next to the English gave America most of its life-blood. The general merely copied his “commander-in-chief.” Another tragic factor in any announced stress on “killing” was, of course, that the Germans whom we were to “kill” rather than merely “defeat” had exactly as much to do with Hitler’s policies as our soldiers in Korea have to do with Acheson’s policies.
Why did the thirty-four million Americans of German blood make no loud protest? The answer is this: in physical appearance, in culture, and in religion, Protestant or Catholic, they were so identical with the majority that their amalgamation had been almost immediate. In 1945 there was a great strain of German blood in America, but there was no significant vote-delivering body of political “German-Americans.”
Meanwhile, the ships which took American soldiers to kill Germans and meet their own death in Europe brought home “refugees” in numbers running in many estimates well into seven figures. According to Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long [27], the number of officially admitted aliens fleeing “Hitler’s persecution” had reached 580,000 as early as November, 1943. Those refugees above quotas were admitted on “visitors’ visas.” These facts were released by Congressman Sol Bloom, Democrat of New York, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, on December 10, 1943 [28]. On December 11, Congressman Emanuel Celler, Democrat of New York, complained that Mr. Long was, in all the State Department, the man “least sympathetic to refugees,” and added indignantly that United States ships had returned from overseas ports “void of passengers” [29]. Incidentally, in 1944 Mr. Long ceased to be Assistant Secretary of State.
The influx of refugees continued. So great was the number of these people that even with the closing of thousands of American homes by our casualties, the housing shortage after the war was phenomenal. For the lack of homes available to veterans, some writers blamed capital, some blamed labor, and some found other causes; but none, to the knowledge of the author, counted the homes which had been preempted by “refugees,” while our soldiers were fighting beyond the seas. By 1951 the situation showed no amelioration, for on August 20, Senator Pat McCarran, chairman of a Senate sub-committee on internal security, said that “possibly 5,000,000 aliens had poured into the country illegally, creating a situation ‘potentially more dangerous’ than an armed invasion” [30]. This statement should be pondered thoughtfully by every true American.
And there are more aliens to come. On September 7, 1951, a “five-year program for shifting 1,750,000 of Europe’s ‘surplus’ population to new homes and opportunities in the Americas and Australia was disclosed” by David A. Morse, head of the International Labor Office of the UN [31]. Needless to say, few of those 1,750,000 persons are likely to be accepted elsewhere than in the United States [32]. Congressman Jacob K. Javits of New York’s Twenty-first District, known to some as the Fourth Reich from the number of its “refugees” from Germany, also wishes still more immigrants. In an article, “Let Us Open the Gates” [33], he asked for ten million immigrants in the next twenty years.
(3) Our alien-dominated government fought the war for the annihilation of Germany, the historic bulwark of Christian Europe (Chapter I, above). The final phase of this strategically unsound purpose sprouted with the cocky phrase “Unconditional Surrender,” already mentioned. It was “thrown out at a press conference by President Roosevelt at Casablanca on January 24, 1943 … President Roosevelt went into the press conference in which he ‘ad-libbed’ the historic phrase” [34]. According to General Elliott Roosevelt, the President repeated the phrase, “thoughtfully sucking a tooth” [35], and added that “Uncle Joe might have made it up himself.”
Our foul purpose of liquidating Germany flowered with the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, an implementation, which allowed “widespread looting and violence” by “displaced persons” and brought Germans to the verge of starvation, according to Prof. Harold Zink, who served as American Editor of the Handbook for Military Government in Germany in 1944 and was subsequently Consultant on U.S. Reorganization of German Government, U.S. Troop Control Council for Germany, 1944-1945 [36]. In his book, American Military Government in Germany [37], Prof. Zink writes as follows:
The Germans were forced to furnish food for the displaced persons at the rate of 2,000 calories per day when they themselves could have only 900-1100 calories… The amount available for German use hardly equalled the food supplied by the Nazis at such notorious concentration camps as Dachau … most of the urban German population suffered severely from lack of food.
The hunger at Dachau was war-time inhumanity by people who were themselves desperately hungry because their food stocks and transportation systems had been largely destroyed by American air bombardment; but the quotation from Professor Zink refers to peace-time inhumanity, motivated by vengeance partly in its conception and even more so in its implementation [38].
Why did inhumanity in Germany go on? Because “a little dove,” according to President Roosevelt, flew in the President’s window and roused him against a “too ‘easy’ treatment of the Germans,” the “little dove” being “actually Secretary Morgenthau’s personal representative in the ETO” [39]! Further testimony to the President’s desire for an inhuman treatment of “German people” is found in former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes’s book, Speaking Frankly [40]. The President stated to his Secretary of State that the Germans “for a long time should have only soup for breakfast, soup for lunch, and soup for dinner” [41].
The fruits of the Morgenthau Plan were not all harvested at once. The persistence of our mania for destroying the historic heart of Germany was shown vividly in 1947. With Prussia already being digested in the maw of the Soviet, the Allied Control Council in Berlin (March 1) added a gratuitous insult to an already fatal injury when it “formally abolished” Prussia, the old homeland of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. This could have had no other motive than offending Germans unnecessarily for the applause of certain elements in New York. It was also a shock to all Christians, Catholic or Protestant, who have in their hearts the elementary instincts of Christ-like mercy (St. Matthew, V, 7), or know in spite of censorship the great facts of the history of Europe (Chapter I).
Our policy of terrifying the Germans spiritually, and ruining them economically, is understandable only to one who holds his eye in focus upon the nature of the High Command of the National Democratic Party. Vengeance and votes were the sire and dam of the foul monster of American cruelty to the Germans. In the accomplishment of our base purpose there was also a strange pagan self-immolation, for we would not let the West Germans all the way die and spent approximately a billion dollars a year (high as our debt was — and is) to provide for our captives the subsistence they begged to be allowed to earn for themselves! Our wanton dismantling of German industrial plants in favor of the Soviet as late as 1950 and our hanging of Germans as late as 1951 (Chapter V, c), more than six years after the German surrender, had no other apparent motive than the alienation of the German people. Moreover, as the years pass, there has been no abandonment of our policy of keeping in Germany a number of representatives who, whatever their personal virtues, are personae non gratae to the Germans (Chapters III and VI). Our many-facetted policy of deliberately alienating a potentially friendly people violates a cardinal principle of diplomacy and strategy and weakens us immensely to the advantage of Soviet Communism.
The facts and conclusions thus far outlined in this chapter establish fully the validity of Churchill’s phrase, “The Unnecessary War.” The war was unnecessary in its origin, unnecessarily cruel in its prolongation, indefensible in the double-crossing of our ally Britain, criminal in our surrender of our own strategic security in the world, and all of this the more monstrous because it was accomplished in foul obeisance before the altar of anti-Christian power in America.
The facts and conclusions outlined in this chapter raise the inevitable question: “How were such things possible?” The answer is the subject of the next chapter.
footnotes
[1] The New York Times, August 7, 1933.
[2] Speech over WABC, as printed in New York Times of August 7, 1933.
[3] The New York Times, August 1, 1933.
[4] The New York Times, June 5, 1936.
[5] The New York Times, July 12, 1936.
[6] Charles A. Beard. American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940. Yale University Press, 1946, p. 183.
[7] Charles A. Beard. American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940. Yale University Press, 1946, pp. 186 ff.
[8] National Republic, May, 1951, p. 8.
[9] The Forrestal Diaries. Ed. by Walter Millis. New York: The Viking Press, 1951, pp. 121-122.
[10] See the special edition of the Illustrirte Zeitung for November 25, 1936.
[11] Frederick R. Sanborn. Design for War. New York: Devin-Adair, 1951.
[12] William Henry Chamberlin. America’s Second Crusade. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950.
[13] “The Forrestal Diaries, Life, October 15, 1951.
[14] Human Events, March 28, 1951.
[15] Elliott Roosevelt. As He Saw It. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946, passim.
[16] Helen Lombard. While They Fought. Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 148.
[17] Elliott Roosevelt. As He Saw It. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946.
[18] Elliott Roosevelt. As He Saw It. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946, p. 116.
[19] Congressional Record, pp. A1564 to A1568.
[20] Jesse H. Jones. Fifty Billion Dollars. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951.
[21] Jesse H. Jones. Fifty Billion Dollars. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951, p. 260.
[22] “America Betrayed at Yalta,” by Lawrence H. Smith. National Republic, July, 1951.
[23] Elliott Roosevelt. As He Saw It. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946, pp. 185-186.
[24] The New York Times, February 13, 1944.
[25] The Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United States. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., p. 233.
[26] The Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United States. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., p. 233.
[27] Testimony before House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Nov. 26, 1943.
[28] Article by Frederick Barkley, New York Times, December 11, 1943.
[29] The New York Times, December 12, 1943.
[30] AP dispatch in New York Times, August 20, 1951.
[31] The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1951.
[32] For data on Mr. Morse, see Economic Council Letter, No. 200, October 1, 1948, or Who’s Who in America, 1950-1951.
[33] “Let Us Open the Gates,” by Jacob K. Javits. New York Times Magazine, July 8, 1951.
[34] Raymond Gram Swing in “Unconditional Surrender.” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1947.
[35] Elliott Roosevelt. As He Saw It. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946, p. 117.
[36] Who’s Who in America, Vol. 25, 1948-1949, p. 2783.
[37] Harold Zink. American Military Government in Germany. Macmillan, 1947, pp. 106 and 111.
[38] See “Potsdam Agreement,” Part III, paragraph 156, in: Ratchford and Ross. Berlin Reparations Assignment. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, p. 206.
[39] Harold Zink. American Military Government in Germany. Macmillan, 1947, pp. 131-132.
[40] James F. Byrnes. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947.
[41] James F. Byrnes. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947, p. 182.
