The Bankruptcy of a Policy

8 THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY by WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN America has lost the greatest of her presidents. The world has lost its greatest leader. In the face of so overwhelming a calamity, what is the use of words? . . . Do we do well to sink under the flood of sorrow, unmindful of the Providence that gave us this man in our hour of greatest need and permitted him to remain with us until victory had become inevitable? What would the world be like today if we had not had Roosevelt? Under a less resolute president, America might not have entered the war or might have entered it too late. . . . Few men have ever left behind them so much of themselves, so many forces that live on. . . . Roosevelt's figure in history will be one of unexampled splendor. He died at the zenith of his greatness, secure against the anticlimax of postwar confusions and negations. —ALVIN JOHNSON, ''In Memory of Roosevelt/' The Clock of History, pp. 241-42.

Wherever men gather to honor the architects of their happiness, they will gratefully remember the work of Franklin D. Roosevelt. •-BASIL RAUCH, Roosevelt from Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 496.

William Henry Chamberlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 17, 1897. He was educated at the Penn Charter School and Haverford College, where he was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Mr. Chamberlin has been a lifelong student of foreign affairs and international relations, giving special attention to Soviet Russia and the Far East. No contemporary journalist surpasses him for wide and precise knowledge of world affairs or ability to marshal his materials in lucid and effective fashion. Few equal him for courage and integrity in setting forth the facts as he understands them. He was Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, 1922-34, and Far Eastern correspondent for the Monitor, 1939-40. He has contributed important reports and articles to many of the leading newspapers and periodicals, and now writes a regular column for the Wall Street Journal. He has lectured on world affairs at Haverford College, Yale University, and Harvard University.

The most important books written by Mr. Chamberlin are: Soviet Russia (1930), Russia's Iron Age (1934), The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (2 vols.; 1935), Japan Over Asia (1939), The European Cockpit (1947), and America's Second Crusade (1950). The last of these is the ablest revisionist study of the background, causes, course, and results of the second World War. It will long remain the best survey of the subject for the general reader. Mr. Chamberlin's long and close contact with world conditions all over the civilized globe gives him special competence to assess the effects of the Roosevelt foreign policy upon the state of the world in our time.

I. LYING US INTO WAR According to his own official statements, repeated on many occasions, and with special emphasis when the presidential election of 1940 was at stake, Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy after the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 was dominated by one overriding thought: how to keep the United States at peace. One of the President's first actions after the beginning of hostilities was to call Congress into special session and ask for the repeal of the embargo on the sales of arms to belligerent powers, which was part of the existing neutrality legislation. He based his appeal on the argument that this move would help to keep the United States at peace. His words on the subject were: Let no group assume the exclusive label of the "peace bloc." We all belong to it. ... I give you my deep and unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today. . . . Our acts must be guided by one single, hardheaded thought— keeping America out of the war.

This statement was made after the President had opened up a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister in the British government. What has been revealed of this correspondence, even in Churchill's own memoirs, inspires considerable doubt as to whether its main purpose was keeping America out of the war. Roosevelt kept up his pose as the devoted champion of peace even after the fall of France, when Great Britain was committed to a war which, given the balance of power in manpower and in485 486 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE dustrial resources, it could not hope to win without the involvement of other great powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union. The President's pledges of pursuing a policy designed to keep the United States at peace reached a shrill crescendo during the last days of the 1940 campaign. Mr. Roosevelt said at Boston on October 30: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

The same thought was expressed in a speech at Brooklyn on November 1: "I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting." The President told his audience at Rochester, New York, on November 2: "Your national government ... is equally a government of peace—a government that intends to retain peace for the American people." On the same day the voters of Buffalo were assured: "Your President says this country is not going to war." And he declared at Cleveland on November 3: "The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war." So much for presidential words. What about presidential actions? American involvement in war with Germany was preceded by a long series of steps, not one of which could reasonably be represented as conducive to the achievement of the President's professed ideal of keeping the United States out of foreign wars. The more important of these steps may be briefly listed as follows: 1. The exchange of American destroyers for British bases in the Caribbean and in Newfoundland in September, 1940.

This was a clear departure from the requirements of neutrality and was also a violation of some specific American laws. Indeed, a conference of top government lawyers at the time decided that the destroyer deal put this country into the war, legally and morally. 2. The enactment of the LendLease Act in March, 1941. In complete contradiction of the wording and intent of the Neutrality Act, which remained on the statute books, this made the United States an unlimited partner in the economic war against the Axis Powers all over the world.

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 487 3. The secret American-British staff talks in Washington in January-March, 1941. Extraordinary care was taken to conceal not only the contents of these talks but the very fact that they were taking place from the knowledge of Congress. At the time when administration spokesmen were offering assurances that there were no warlike implications in the LendLease Act, this staff conference used the revealing phrase, "when the United States becomes involved in war with Germany." 4. The inauguration of socalled naval patrols, the purpose of which was to report the presence of German submarines to British warships, in the Atlantic in April, 1941. 5. The dispatch of American laborers to Northern Ireland to build a naval base, obviously with the needs of an American expeditionary force in mind. 6. The occupation of Iceland by American troops in July, 1941. This was going rather far afield for a government which professed as its main concern the keeping of the United States out of foreign wars.

7. The Atlantic Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill, August 9-12, 1941. Besides committing America as a partner in a virtual declaration of war aims, this conference considered the presentation of an ultimatum to Japan and the occupation of the Cape Verde Islands, a Portuguese possession, by United States troops. 8. The orders to American warships to shoot at sight at German submarines, formally announced on September 11. The beginning of actual hostilities may be dated from this time rather than from the German declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor. 9. The authorization for the arming of merchant ships and the sending of these ships into war zones in November, 1941. 10. The freezing of Japanese assets in the United States on July 25, 1941. This step, which was followed by similar action on the part of Great Britain and the Netherlands East Indies, amounted to a commercial blockade of Japan. The warmaking potentialities of this 488 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE decision had been recognized by Roosevelt himself shortly before it was taken. Addressing a delegation and explaining why oil exports to Japan had not been stopped previously, he said: It was very essential, from our own selfish point of view of defense, to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific.

So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out down there. . . . Now, if we cut the oil off, they [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Netherlands East Indies a year ago, and we would have had war.1 11. When the Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, appealed for a personal meeting with Roosevelt to discuss an amicable settlement in the Pacific, this appeal was rejected, despite the strong favorable recommendations of the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew. 12. Final step on the road to war in the Pacific was Secretary of State Hull's note to the Japanese government of November 26. Before sending this communication Hull had considered proposing a compromise formula which would have relaxed the blockade of Japan in return for Japanese withdrawal from southern Indochina and a limitation of Japanese forces in northern Indochina. However, Hull dropped this idea under pressure from British and Chinese sources. He dispatched a veritable ultimatum on November 26, which demanded unconditional Japanese withdrawal from China and from Indochina and insisted that there should be "no support of any government in China other than the National Government [Chiang Kaishek]." Hull admitted that this note took Japanese-American relations out of the realm of diplomacy and placed them in the hands of the military authorities. The negative Japanese reply to this note was delivered almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was a strange and as yet unexplained failure to prepare for this attack by giving General Short and Admiral Kimmel, commanders on the spot, a clear picture of the imminent danger. As Secretary of War Stimson explained the American policy, it was to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot, and it may have been feared that openly preTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 489 cautionary and defensive moves on the part of Kimmel and Short would scare off the impending attack by the Japanese task force which was known to be on its way to some American outpost.

Here is the factual record of the presidential words and the presidential deeds. No convinced believer in American nonintervention in wars outside this hemisphere could have given the American people more specific promises than Roosevelt gave during the campaign of 1940. And it is hard to see how any President, given the constitutional limitations of the office, could have done more to precipitate the United States into war with Germany and Japan than Roosevelt accomplished during the fifteen months between the destroyer-for-bases deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce found the right expression when she charged Roosevelt with having lied us into war. Even a sympathizer with Roosevelt's policies, Professor Thomas A. Bailey, in his book, The Man in the Street, admits the charge of deception, but tries to justify it on the following grounds: Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor. ... He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient's own good. . . . The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.2 Professor Bailey continues his apologetics with the following argument, which leaves very little indeed of the historical American conception of a government responsible to the people and morally obligated to abide by the popular will: A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy.

But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our states490 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE men are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it?3 Presidential pledges to "keep our country out of war," with which Roosevelt was so profuse in the summer and autumn of 1940, could reasonably be regarded as canceled by some new development in the international situation involving a real and urgent threat to the security of the United States and the Western Hemisphere. But there was no such new development to justify Roosevelt's moves along the road to war in 1941. The British Isles were not invaded in 1940, at the height of Hitler's military success on the Continent. They were much more secure against invasion in 1941.

Contrast the scare predictions of Secretary Stimson, Secretary Knox, and General Marshall, about the impending invasion of Britain in the first months of 1941, with the testimony of Winston Churchill, as set down in his memoirs: "I did not regard invasion as a serious danger in April, 1941, since proper preparations had been made against it." Moreover, both the American and British governments knew at this time that Hitler was contemplating an early attack upon the Soviet Union. Such an attack was bound to swallow up much the greater part of Germany's military resources. It is with this background that one must judge the sincerity and realism of Roosevelt's alarmist speech of May 27, 1941, with its assertion: 'The war is approaching the brink of the western hemisphere itself. It is coming very close to home." The President spoke of the Nazi "book of world conquest" and declared there was a Nazi plan to treat the Latin American countries as they had treated the Balkans. Then Canada and the United States would be strangled.

Not a single serious bit of evidence in proof of these sensational allegations has ever been found, not even when the archives of the Nazi government were at the disposal of the victorious powers. The threat to the security of Great Britain was less serious in 1941 than it was in 1940. There is no concrete evidence of Nazi intenTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 491 tion to invade the American hemisphere in either year, or at any predictable period. One is left, therefore, with the inescapable conclusion that the promises to "keep America out of foreign wars" were a deliberate hoax on the American people, perpetrated for the purpose of insuring Roosevelt's reelection and thereby enabling him to proceed with his plan of gradually edging the United States into war. What aim was this involvement in global war supposed to achieve? II. THE WAR AIMS PROCLAIMED BY ROOSEVELT 1. Atlantic Charter and Four Freedoms. The most detailed statement of United States war aims, the equivalent of the Fourteen Points pronounced by Woodrow Wilson during the first World War, may be found in the Atlantic Charter. This is a joint statement by Roosevelt and Churchill, issued after their meeting off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941. It was described as a "common program of purposes and principles" in the United Nations Declaration, issued in Washington on January 1, 1942.

The Atlantic Charter is composed of the following eight points: FIRST, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; SECOND, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; THIRD, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; FOURTH, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, 492 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity; FIFTH, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security; SIXTH, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want; SEVENTH, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance; EIGHTH, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.

They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peaceloving peoples the crushing burden of armaments. So, under the terms of the Atlantic Charter, the victors of World War II were pledged to respect the right of every people to selfdetermination and to observe, as between nations, the principle of economic equality of opportunity. The argument, subsequently advanced by Churchill, that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Germany, is in contradiction to two expressions used in that document. These are the references to "all states, great or small, victor or vanquished" and to "all men in all the lands." One can find in the Atlantic Charter the germ of the United Nations idea, "pending the establishment of a wider and permaTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 493 nent system of general security" and also of the belief that nations could be divided into peaceloving sheep and aggressor goats.

There is also an implied gesture of compliment to President Roosevelt in the happy vision of "all men in all the lands [living] out their lives in freedom from fear and want." The President, in his inaugural address of January, 1941, after his election to a third term, had dramatically emphasized the universal realization of the Four Freedoms as essential to world peace. These were freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear. This became the outstanding "glittering generality" in Roosevelt's war aims. A fair test of the success and effectiveness of America's participation in the war would be the degree to which the postwar world has been characterized by freedom from want and freedom from fear, freedom of speech and religion, the right of peoples to choose their own forms of government and their own national allegiances, and of the advancement toward world-wide conditions of free commercial intercourse and reduction and limitation of armaments.

2. Unconditional Surrender. This became an official American and British war aim after Roosevelt tossed off the phrase at the Casablanca conference in January, 1943. It was apparently inspired by a confusion, in Roosevelt's mind, between two episodes in the American Civil War. The demand for immediate and unconditional surrender was put forward by Grant at the siege of Fort Donelson. Roosevelt seems to have mixed this up with the capitulation of Lee's Confederate Army at Appomattox, where the expression, "unconditional surrender," was not used. Despite repeated pleas from specialists in psychological warfare and commanders in the field, Roosevelt refused to modify or even to clarify this demand as long as he lived. 3. Cooperation with the Soviet Union. To charm and appease Stalin into becoming a cooperative do-gooder on the international scene was one of Roosevelt's primary war objectives. According to William C. Bullitt, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and to France, who was at one time a favored counsellor of Roosevelt and who enjoyed opportunities to discuss Russian policy with the President during the war, Roosevelt's Russian policy was based on four principles: 494 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE (a) To give Stalin without stint or limit everything he asked for the prosecution of the war and to refrain from asking Stalin for anything in return.

(b) To persuade Stalin to adhere to statements of general aims, like the Atlantic Charter. (c) To let Stalin know that the influence of the White House was being used to encourage American public opinion to take a favorable view of the Soviet Union. (d) To meet Stalin face to face and persuade him into an acceptance of Christian ways and democratic principles. Bullitt, whose own impressions of the Soviet regime had changed very much in a negative direction as a result of his experience as ambassador, presented a memorandum outlining the reasons why such a policy would fail. Roosevelt's reaction, according to Bullitt's testimony, was as follows: Bill, I don't dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don't dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not, and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country. And I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.

A similar interpretation of Roosevelt's policy, written by Forrest Davis and published, with the President's knowledge and approval, in The Saturday Evening Post in May, 1944, contains the following statements: The core of his [Roosevelt's] policy has been the reassurance of Stalin. That was so, as we have seen, at Teheran. It has been so throughout the difficult diplomacy since Stalingrad. . . . Suppose that Stalin, in spite of all concessions, should prove unappeasable. . . .

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 495 Roosevelt, gambling for stakes as enormous as any statesman ever played for, has been betting that the Soviet Union needs peace and is willing to pay for it by collaborating with the West. This eagerness to appease the Soviet dictator, at whatever cost to the professed war aims embodied in the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms, is a thread to the understanding of the two main wartime conferences of the "Big Three" (Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill) at Teheran and Yalta. Indeed, the destruction of Germany and Japan as great powers, implicit in the "unconditional surrender" slogan, and the appeasement of the Soviet dictatorship, were opposite sides of the same coin. In setting as a goal the political destruction, economic crippling and total disarmament of Germany and Japan (and, as the first phase of occupation in Germany and Japan showed, these were the fruits of unconditional surrender), the balance of power in Europe and Asia was completely upset.

Tremendous power vacuums were created on the frontiers of the Soviet Union. What this portended was pointed out toward the end of 1943 in words of singularly prophetic quality by the late Jan Christiaan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa and one of the most experienced and thoughtful senior statesmen of the British Empire: Russia is the new colossus on the European continent. What the after-effects of that will be, nobody can say. We can but recognize that this is a new fact to reckon with, and we must reckon with it coldly and objectively. With the others [the reference was to Germany, France, and Italy] down and out and herself the mistress of the continent, her power will not only be great on that account, but will be still greater because the Japanese Empire will also have gone the way of all flesh. Therefore, any check or balance that might have arisen in the East will have disappeared. You will have Russia in a position which no country has ever occupied in the history of Europe.

496 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE 4. Far Eastern War Aims. Two war aims in the Orient were spelled out in Hull's note of November 26, 1941. These were the withdrawal of Japan from China and support only for the Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek. Others, as set forth by the Cairo Declaration, issued by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kaishek on December 1, 1943, were as follows: That Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.

5. Platitudes and Beatitudes. We here reproduce characteristic excerpts from a long statement of American war aims, covering seventeen points, issued by Secretary Hull on March 21, 1944: In determining our foreign policy we must first see clearly what our true national interests are. . . . Cooperation between nations in the spirit of good neighbors, founded on the principles of liberty, equality, justice, morality and law, is the most effective method of safeguarding and promoting the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of our nation and of all nations. International cooperative action must include eventual adjustment of national armaments in such a manner that the rule of law cannot be successfully challenged and that the burden of armaments may be reduced to a minimum. As the provisions of the four-nation declaration (of Moscow) are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY Affj happy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests. . . .

The pledge of the Atlantic Charter is of a system which will give every nation, large or small, a greater assurance of stable peace, greater opportunity for the realization of its aspirations to freedom, and greater facilities for material advancement. But that pledge implies an obligation for each nation to demonstrate its capacity for stable and progressive government, to fulfill scrupulously its established duties to other nations, to settle its international differences and disputes by none but peaceful methods, and to make its full contribution to the maintenance of enduring peace. Each sovereign nation, large or small, is in law and under law the equal of every other nation. The principle of the sovereign equality of all peaceloving states, irrespective of size and strength, as partners in a future system of general security will be the foundation stone upon which the future international organization will be created.

Each nation should be free to decide for itself the forms and details of its governmental organization—so long as it conducts its affairs in such a way as not to menace the peace and security of other nations. All nations, large and small, which respect the rights of others are entitled to freedom from outside interference in their internal affairs. This is, perhaps, the most conspicuous official example of the vapid, unrealistic moralizing which enveloped America's war aims in a haze of Utopian crusading fervor. Hull was not alone in this tendency to phrase American foreign policy in terms of beatitudes and platitudes, uttered in complete isolation from the hard fact that a war, fought with most barbarous methods, was leading with relentless logic to one of the most unjust and unworkable peace settlements in history. Wendell Willkie, whose subsequent declarations showed that in the 1940 campaign he faithfully imitated Roosevelt's technique of talking peace to get votes while contemplating measures which 498 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE could only lead to involvement in war, rivalled Hull in his ability to turn out meaningless platitudes. What specific recommendations can be read into the following typically vaporous musings in Willkie's hastily written book, One World?

To win the peace three things seem to me necessary. First, we must plan for peace now on a world basis; second, the world must be free, politically and economically, for nations and men, that peace may exist in it; third, America must play an active, constructive part in freeing it and keeping its peace. . . . When I say that peace must be planned on a world basis, I mean quite literally that it must embrace the earth. Continents and oceans are plainly only parts of a whole, seen, as I have seen them, from the air. England and America are parts. Russia and China, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Iraq and Iran are also parts and it is inescapable that there can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure through all parts of the world. Perhaps the most original formulation of war aims came from VicePresident Henry A. Wallace. The war, according to Wallace, was "a fight between a free world and a slave world." 'The peoples," he confidently predicted, "are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the world have hitherto enjoyed."

"The object of this war," Wallace declared in an unequalled flight of fancy, "is to make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day." There was a secondary object: to beat Satan. To quote further from the speech which earned Wallace the reputation of a wartime inspirational prophet: Satan is turned loose upon the world. . . . Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. . . . Satan has turned loose upon us the insane. ... The Gotterdammerung has come for Odin and his crew.' THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 499 . . . We shall cleanse the plague spot of Europe, which is Hitler's Germany, and with it the hellhole of Asia-Japan. No compromise with Satan is possible. 6. The establishment, in place of the League of Nations, ot a new international organization, to be called the United Nations. The United Nations, as its Charter clearly proves, was based on the assumption that the wartime alliance of the Western Powers, the Soviet Union, and China would be permanent. Walter Lippmann expounded this theory when he wrote in the year 1944: It is easy to say, but it is not true, that the Allies of today may be the enemies of tomorrow. . . . Our present alliance against Germany is no temporary contraption. It is an alignment of nations which, despite many disputes, much suspicion, and even short and local wars, like the Crimean, have for more than a century been natural allies.

It is not a coincidence that Britain and Russia have found themselves allied ever since the rise of German imperial aggression; that the United States and Russia, under the czars and under the Soviets, have always in vital matters been on the same side. . . . Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history could see the flaws in this argument. There have been a great many occasions during the last century when the nations that were the principal allies of World War II felt and acted toward each other very differently from "natural allies/' However, the belief in the permanence of a wartime alliance was the very cornerstone of the United Nations, as that organization was conceived at Dumbarton Oaks, perfected at San Francisco, and inaugurated at London. The Charter of the United Nations vested executive power in the Security Council, a body with five permanent and six rotating members. The five permanent members were the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China.

Except on minor matters of procedure, the Security Council, 500 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE under the Charter, is empowered to act only with the affirmative votes of the five permanent members. A single veto can paralyze action under the Charter. This veto can not only block decisions of great moment, like the use of armed force against an aggressor, but it can also prevent much less important decisions, such as the admission of new members to the United Nations. The Charter makes no effective provision for growth and change. It may be amended only with the consent of all the permanent members. When the constitution of the United Nations was framed, everything was staked on the assumption that the wartime cooperation of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, a cooperation made possible by Roosevelt's philosophy of giving Stalin everything he wanted, would continue permanently.

7. American National Security. Participation in the second World War, as in the first, was advocated on the ground that American security would be vitally endangered if the Axis Powers were not crushed. There were cruder and more sophisticated versions of this argument. A cruder version was the scare picture, often repeated in the interventionist literature of 1939-41, of a Nazi invasion and occupation of the American continent—the notorious myth of "Hitler's timetable" to invade Iowa via Dakar and Brazil. Americans were supposed to shiver at the thought of storm troopers swaggering through the streets of American cities and manhandling peaceful citizens. One interventionist poster showed American children being forced to repeat their prayers: "Adolf Hitler, hallowed be thy name." For those who found such suggestions merely ridiculous or, at least, extremely improbable, there was another line of psychological approach. It was argued that, even if no physical attack on the Western Hemisphere took place, the American way of life would be profoundly affected for the worse by an Axis victory. The American economy, so ran this argument, would be regimented; the atmosphere of an armed camp would become permanent; Americans would never know real peace and security.

One prominent advocate of intervention inquired, in the years before Pearl Harbor, whether America could resign itself to spendTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 501 ing as much as three billion dollars a year on armaments. This, he calculated, would be the cost of not "stopping" Hitler. Having stopped Hitler, the military authorities are now proposing that we spend sixty billion dollars a year to stop Stalin, and their proposals have been accepted and adopted into our Federal budget. It was widely assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that war was the road to permanent peace, that defeat of the Axis would be followed by an era of international good will and security. So, American war aims may be briefly summarized as follows: (1) the realization of the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms; (2) the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers and the obliteration of these powers from the scheme of world politics; (3) peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union on a long-term basis; (4) the dismemberment of the Japanese Empire and the support of the Nationalist government of China; (5) a miscellaneous list of desirable moral ideals, including the regulation of international conduct by rules of unimpeachable morality, the procurement for every human being in the world of a quart of milk a day, and the vanquishing of Satan; (6) the establishment of the United Nations on the basis of close cooperation with the Soviet Union; (7) the assurance of American national security and the promotion of an atmosphere of international peace and good will in which Americans and other "peaceloving" peoples could go about their affairs free from the burden of excessive armaments and of want and fear.

These were the aspirations. What about the achievements, eight years after the end of hostilities? Let us consider the realization of Roosevelt's war aims, point by point.

5O2 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE III. HOW FAR WERE ROOSEVELT'S AIMS REALIZED? i. Pledges oi the Atlantic Charter. The first three clauses of the Atlantic Charter assert, in very clear, unambiguous language, the right of every people to choose the form of government under which they desire to live. These clauses repudiate, on behalf of all the signatories, territorial aggrandizement. And territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned are denounced. Before he signed the Atlantic Charter Stalin had voluntarily renounced territorial aggrandizement in a speech which he delivered in the Soviet Union and which was widely quoted as a definition of Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet leader declared: "We shall not yield an inch of our own soil. We do not covet a foot of foreign soil." By the end of the war, however, the Soviet Union had acquired, not a foot, but 273,947 square miles of foreign soil, inhabited by 24,355,000 people. The Soviet acquisitions were as follows: Area in square miles Population Eastern Poland Finnish Karelia Lithuania Latvia Estonia Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina Moldavia Petsamo Koenigsberg area 68,290 16,173 24,058 20,056 i8,353 19,360 13,124 4,087 3>5°° 10,150,000 470,000 3,029,000 1,950,000 1,120,000 3,748,000 2,200,000 4,000 400,000 THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 503 CarpathoUkraine (Eastern Czechoslovakia) South Sakhalin Kurile Islands Tannu Tuva 4,922 14,075 3^949 64,000 800,000 415,000 4,500 65,000 In no case was there any convincing pretense of consulting "the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned" or of respecting "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." In most cases there is the strongest evidence that these Soviet annexations were intensely distasteful to the peoples affected.

For example, the Finns who live in Karelia were permitted to choose between remaining in their homes and going penniless into Finland. The option was almost unanimously for Finland. A very high proportion of Lithuanians, Letts, and Estonians preferred the bleak existence of the DP camps to the prospect of being repatriated to homelands which had fallen under Soviet rule. The enthusiasm of the people in eastern Poland for Soviet annexation may be measured by the fact that about a million and a quarter of them were deported to the Soviet Union under circumstances of such barbarous cruelty that about three hundred thousand perished. All Germans who survived the occupation were driven out of the Koenigsberg area. The outrage to the principle of national selfdetermination involved in the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union was accompanied by an even greater outrage, the arbitrary transfer to Poland of all German territory east of the line represented by the Oder and the Neisse rivers. This meant the dispossession of at least nine million Germans of the homes which they had occupied in territory which had been solidly German for centuries.

The Soviet annexations at the expense of Poland were specifically authorized by the Yalta Conference of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in February, 1945. This same conference recognized that "Poland must receive substantial accessions of territory in the North and West." In other words, it sanctioned the brutal uprooting from their homes of many millions of people and extensive 504 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE transfers of population in complete disregard of the desires of the peoples concerned. No more complete repudiation of the selfdetermination clause of the Atlantic Charter could be imagined. Yet, with a rare mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy, the Yalta Declaration includes the following passage, affirming the Atlantic Charter in the very document which specifically authorizes the disregard of the principle of selfdetermination: The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter—the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live—the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.

If the selfdetermination clauses of the Atlantic Charter were soon proved a fraud and a hoax by the actions and decisions of the victorious powers, the other promises of that document fared no better. Points four and five are sweeping pledges of equality of economic opportunity for all nations "great or small, victor or vanquished." Equality of economic opportunity would mean maximum elimination of trade barriers, freely convertible currencies, and no discrimination against the economy of any nation. But, eight years after the end of the war, bureaucratic regulation of international trade, inconvertible currencies, barter and semi-barter deals between nations are still the rule, not the exception. And the promise of these points in the Charter was further nullified by the many discriminatory restrictions which were imposed on the postwar economic development of Germany and Japan. Under the Morgenthau Plan it was seriously proposed to turn densely populated, highly industrialized western Germany into a predominantly agricultural and pastoral country and to seal up and permanently destroy the German coal mines—an indisTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 505 pensable source of energy not only for German, but for European industry.

The full political ferocity and economic idiocy of the Morgenthau Plan, which would have involved the death by starvation of millions of Germans, was never put into practice. But under the Potsdam Agreement of the "Big Three," concluded in August, 1945, and amplified by a subsequent "level of industry" agreement, the German economy was placed in a strait-jacket of innumerable discriminatory restrictions. Germany was denied the right to manufacture or operate oceangoing vessels. A top limit of 5,800,000 tons, ridiculously low in view of German industrial capacity and needs, was set for the German steel industry. Output of machine tools was set at 11.4 per cent of the 1938 figure. German capacity to earn its national livelihood was impaired by these and scores of other arbitrary interferences with normal economic activity. All German property abroad was confiscated, making the revival of German foreign trade extremely difficult For years after the war a ruthless program of dismantling German plants continued, on the ground that they might be used to rehabilitate German militarism. But many plants were dismantled which had little relation to armament, such as soap factories, optical plants, and the like. The English were especially conscienceless in their dismantling, concentrating on plants that might provide some competition with British industry. That all this was entirely inconsistent with what might be called the welfare clauses of the Atlantic Charter was clearly pointed out by the wellknown British economist, Sir William Beveridge, who said, after a visit to Germany in 1946: In a black moment of anger and confusion at Potsdam in July, 1945, we abandoned the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which had named our goals: For all nations improved living standards, economic advancement and social security, for all states, victor and vanquished, access on equal terms to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity. From Potsdam instead we set out on a program of lowering the standard of life in Germany, of de506 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE stroying industry, of depriving her of trade. The actions of the Allies for the past fifteen months in Germany make the Atlantic Charter an hypocrisy.

Clauses 6 and 7 of the Atlantic Charter were of a somewhat vague inspirational character. They called for a peace which would afford assurance "that all men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want" and that all men should "traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance." With barbed wire immigration restrictions all over the world and with feverish preparations under way for the ultimate horror of a war fought with atomic bombs, it obviously has not been that kind of a peace. The eighth and last point of the Charter, proposing that all nations "must come to the abandonment of the use of force" is ironical to the point of travesty in 1953, when far the greatest and most expensive armaments race in history moves steadily into higher gear. 2. The Four Freedoms. In short, the score of the Atlantic Charter as a forecast and assurance of the shape of things to come is precisely zero. The same may be said of its companion, the Four Freedoms. One of th,e most unmistakable results of the second World War was an immense expansion of the power of Soviet Communism and totalitarianism.

Direct annexation added some twentyfive million new subjects to Stalin's empire. The indirect method of setting up satellite states in Eastern Europe made the lives of almost one hundred million East and Central Europeans (Poles, Rumanians, Czechs, and Hungarians, Bulgarians and Albanians, Germans and Austrians in the Soviet zones) completely dependent on the will of Moscow. Almost five hundred million Chinese are also subject to Communist, if not Russian, domination. Communism is not conducive to freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or to freedom from want and fear. Indeed, when one considers the wholesale uprooting of tens of millions of people from their homes, the starvation of tens of thousands and the impoverishment of tens of millions, the savage civil wars in Greece THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 507 and Korea, the retention of German and Japanese war prisoners as slave laborers long after the end of hostilities, it seems doubtful whether there was ever such widespread acute "want and fear" as one could find as a direct consequence of the war fought to eliminate these evils.

The failure to realize or effectively promote the Four Freedoms can be made more apparent if we consider each of them in order. It is obvious that there has been no advancement of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union as a result of the war. In all the vast areas and large populations taken over or dominated by the Soviet Union—the Baltic area, Poland, eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the satellite Balkan states—there is no freedom of speech for those who oppose the Soviet regime. Though Tito may battle against the Kremlin, there is no freedom to criticize his regime in Yugoslavia. Freedom of speech was sharply curtailed for years in western Germany by the occupation forces, and it has not yet been restored to anything like the degree which existed under the Weimar Republic. In Italy, there may be rather more freedom than existed under Mussolini, but conditions remain the same in Falangist Spain. The situation remains about the same as before the war in France and Britain. Free speech is limited in the many totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian states of Latin America. And the conquest of China by the Communists has ended freedom of speech among the five hundred million Chinese. It may, therefore, be said with considerable restraint that freedom of speech has been retarded rather than promoted by the war.

The same is true of freedom of religion. There has been no relaxation of the rigor of the Soviet opposition to Christianity. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary there has been ruthless persecution of the Catholic hierarchy, and repressive measures have also been applied in satellite countries. The Communist conquest of China means that Christian missionaries in that great country are in greater jeopardy than at any time since the Boxer revolt. The same is true of other areas in southwestern Asia which are dominated by Communists. There has been an effort to suppress the national religion of Japan on the ground that it has been closely associated with Japanese, militarism. Protestantism is curtailed in Falangist 508 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Spain. Elsewhere in the world the religious situation remains much the same as before the war. Fear of economic and physical dangers has been greatly increased by the war. In totalitarian countries, death, exile, and forced labor are ever to be feared by the whole population, save for the ruling hierarchy. As is pointed out elsewhere, economic security is threatened even in the "free countries" by increasing armament costs, higher taxes, debt, inflation, and the like. The mounting tension in the cold war threatens the peoples of the entire globe with the horrors of a third world war which may break out at any time, as well as the atrocities in the peripheral wars such as those in Korea and Indochina. The introduction of atomic warfare threatens the very existence of every civilian throughout the world and especially in the civilized nations that will bear the brunt of the third world war. The situation which atomic warfare has brought to the world may be illustrated by the following "six survival secrets" set forth recently in an official booklet, Survival Under Atomic Attack, issued by the National Security Resources Board: 1. Try to get shielded. If you have time, get in a basement or subway. If caught outdoors, seek shelter alongside a building or fall in any handy ditch or gutter.

2. Drop flat on the ground or floor. To avoid being tossed, flatten out at the base of a wall or bottom of a bank. 3. Bury your face in your arms. This will protect your face from flash burns, prevent temporary blindness and keep flying objects out of your eyes. 4. Do not rush outside right after bombing. 5. Stick to canned and bottled foods and beverages. Unprotected food and water may have radioactive poison. 6. Do not start rumors. In the confusion that follows bombing, a single rumor might touch off a panic that would cost you your life. That the fear of want has been vastly increased by the war is evident everywhere and is emphasized at other places in this secTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 509 tion of the book. In the Soviet Union, a majority of the population live below standards of decency and comfort with respect to food, clothing, and shelter. In the forced labor camps, life is truly bestial. Millions were transported from the Baltic and other areas to die of starvation in brutal slave labor camps. Prisoners of war have starved by the thousands or have met a fate worse than death in forced labor. Many displaced persons who escaped to western Germany still live on a mere subsistence level. Millions of Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe starved during the process of expulsion or now live at the margin of subsistence in an overcrowded land which has lost its food-producing areas. Many Germans starved to death after the surrender, and all of them lived below a decent subsistence level for three years or more after the war. Until restrictions are lifted from western German production, it will be necessary to provide food for the Germans of that area and most of this food will have to be furnished by the United States. Few of the millions of Germans living in the cities obliterated by bombing have been able to secure decent housing.

Many German prisoners lived in acute deprivation in France for a time after the war. Living conditions for the masses in France, Italy, and Spain remain harsh and depressed. England has existed in a state of "austerity" in which consumer goods and food are as restricted as in wartime. Many believe that Britain can escape from austerity only through wholesale emigration of Englishmen to Commonwealth countries, if this is possible. The overcrowding of Japan by millions returned there from the mainland, together with the disruption of the Japanese economy by war, have made it necessary to send in vast quantities of food to preserve the existence of the Japanese. Civil war in China after the war brought increased want and famines which led to the starvation of millions, a condition which has persisted after the Communist conquest. The mass of the people in India and southwestern Asia live on a mere subsistence level tempered by frequent famines.

Even in the United States a third of the population live at or below the poverty line. Half of the population dwell in substandard housing. All classes are menaced by inflation and rising living costs 51O PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE —the dollar being worth only fifty-two cents today in terms of 1940 purchasing power. Inflation is a special menace to those who live on fixed incomes derived from interest on bonds, bank savings, annuities and the like. Increasing armament costs mean higher taxes and the raising of our already astronomical public debt. Nowhere in Latin America has the "good life," as measured by freedom from want, been realized. And the threat of a third world war points up the danger of the universal destruction of property and resources beyond precedent in human experience. 3. Unconditional Surrender. This is the only war aim which was realized. But its effect is now generally conceded to have been devastatingly disastrous. There is abundant proof that it stiffened the German will to resist long after the war was clearly lost. It probably prolonged the war by about two years. There was, therefore, an immense increase in the bombing and other destruction which made the economic restoration of Germany, an essential part of the recovery of Europe, far more difficult and expensive for the American taxpayer. An altogether convincing indictment of the "unconditional surrender" slogan and its logical sequel, the socalled war crime trials, in which every principle of impartial justice was disregarded, is presented by an experienced British elder statesman, Lord Hankey: It embittered the war, rendered inevitable a fight to the finish, banged the door to any possibility of either side offering terms or opening up negotiations, gave the Germans and the Japanese the courage of despair, strengthened Hitler's position as Germany's "only hope," aided Goebbels's propaganda, and made inevitable the Normandy landing and the subsequent terribly exhausting and destructive advance through North France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Holland, and Germany. The lengthening of the war enabled Stalin to occupy the whole of eastern Europe, to ring down the iron curtain and to realize at one swoop a large instalment of his avowed aims against socalled capitalism, in which he includes social democracy. By disposing of all the more competent administrators in Germany and Japan this policy rendered THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 511 treaty-making impossible after the war and retarded recovery and reconstruction, not only in Germany and Japan, but everywhere else. It may also prove to have poisoned our future relations with ex-enemy countries. Not only the enemy countries, but nearly all countries were bled white by this policy, which has left us all, except the United States of America, impoverished and in dire straits. Unfortunately also, these policies, so contrary to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, did nothing to strengthen the moral position of the Allies.4 Under the exigencies of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers the political implications of unconditional surrender tended increasingly to fade out of the picture.

There was a growing tendency to adjust relations with Germany, Japan, and Italy, not by one-sided dictation but by the more reasonable method of discussion and negotiation. A curious aftermath of the unconditional surrender slogan has been the large, unprecedented outlay of American funds to restore and sustain the economies of the defeated Axis Powers. Subsidies for the benefit of Germany, Japan, and Italy have now run to a figure of many billions of dollars, about twentyfold greater than the indemnity which was exacted from France after the FrancoPrussian War. Much better results might have been achieved with a much smaller expenditure of American money if the war had not been prolonged, with the vastly increased destruction, by the unconditional surrender demand and if the Germans and Japanese had not been subjected to so many hampering restrictions in managing their own economic affairs.

4. Cooperation with the Soviet Union. This has been perhaps the most dismal fiasco among all the objectives so confidently proclaimed by Roosevelt during the war. In the hope of appeasing Stalin and winning Soviet cooperation after the war, Roosevelt and Churchill did not hesitate to renounce the principles for which they were ostensibly fighting the war, demanding great sacrifices from the American and British people, and inflicting irreparable damage on the economy and the cultural monuments of Europe.

512 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE If there was a country that was clearly entitled to benefit from the general Atlantic Charter assurances of independence and selfdetermination for all nations, that country was Poland. Hitler's attack on Poland was the excuse for the British and French declarations of war. The Poles were fighting against Nazi Germany at the time when Stalin, Molotov, and Ribbentrop were exchanging friendly toasts and arranging the partition of Poland and of all Eastern Europe between their respective governments. Yet a prominent feature of the diplomatic history of the war is the gradual abandonment by America and Great Britain, first of Poland's territorial integrity, then of Poland's independence. By the time of the Teheran Conference (November 26 to December 1, 1943), Roosevelt and Churchill had reached the point of willingness to acquiesce in Stalin's demand for the annexation of almost one half of Poland's territory, lying east of the socalled Curzon Line, inhabited by about one third of Poland's population.

By the time of the Yalta Conference (February 2-11, 1945), they were willing not only to authorize by their signatures this mutilation of Polish territory but also to throw over the government, representative of the principal Polish political parties, with which they had cooperated in London during the war. In place of this government they accepted, with a few face-saving and, as events were soon to prove, quite empty reservations, a regime that had been built up in Moscow around a nucleus of veteran Polish Communists. The Polish Communist party represented a negligibly small minority of the Polish people. It had been dissolved before the war by the Communist International on grounds of excessive factionalism, Trotskyism, and other heresies. The very name Communist was so unpopular that, even after the Red Army had occupied Poland and installed the Communist-dominated government desired by Moscow, the Communists called themselves the Workers party.

But with the acquiescence of the Western Powers, this small and unrepresentative minority group fastened its grip firmly on Poland and furnished a model for similar regimes in other countries behind the Iron Curtain. Appeasement of the Soviet Union in the immediate postwar period went to the extreme of handing THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 513 over to the Soviet authorities General Vlasov and other political refugees from Soviet rule. There were pitiful scenes of suicide and attempted suicide among DP groups threatened with repatriation to Russia against their will. The Soviet Union was also handed the keys to the Far East at the Yalta Conference. In a fatuous attempt to buy completely unneeded Soviet participation in a war against Japan, which Stalin was certain in any case to enter in its last stages, Roosevelt offered Outer Mongolia to the Soviet dictator, the barren but strategically valuable Kurile Islands, South Sakhalin, and, most important of all, political and economic concessions which assured the Soviet Union a dominent position in Manchuria.

Manchuria, because it was intensively developed by the Japanese during their period of supremacy, and because it is rich in natural resources, is, industrially, the most valuable part of China. Roosevelt signed away China's right to full restitution of Manchuria (as promised in the Cairo Declaration) without consulting or even informing the Chinese government. It was no accident that the Chinese Communists were subsequently able to use Manchuria as a base from which to overrun the whole of continental China. The appeasement of Stalin at the expense of weaker nations completely compromised the moral goals of the war. But it did not achieve its purpose: a friendly and cooperative Soviet Union after the war. On the contrary, Soviet-Western relations rapidly deteriorated. It became commonplace for Soviet and Western representatives to exchange language which, in a more restrained age, would have foreshadowed war, or at least a breach of diplomatic relations.

Militant Communist propaganda, aimed at overthrowing nonCommunist governments, had been held in abeyance during the war, except in East European and Asian countries which the Soviet Union hoped to take over quickly. It was vigorously resumed after the end of the war. A number of Communist espionage rings, operating under Soviet orders, were revealed, the best organized being in Canada. The conclusion of peace treaties with Germany and Japan was indefinitely stalled because repeated conferences between the 514 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain led to no results. There was no physical frontier between the United States and the Soviet Union. But a long, hostile, political frontier developed between the two countries, stretching from Germany to Korea. Germany, already crippled by the assignment to Poland of some sixty thousand square miles of ethnic German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, was sundered by an unnatural line of partition between the Soviet and western zones of occupation. East Germany was turned into a totalitarian state along familiar Soviet lines of political dictatorship and economic collectivism. West Germany remained an area where private property was respected (apart from acts of organized and unorganized Allied pillage which occurred during the first phase of occupation policy) and where elections were as free as is possible under foreign occupation.

From time to time the cold war was heated up. A momentous departure from America's traditional foreign policy occurred in March, 1947, when President Truman announced that the United States was bolstering Greece and Turkey with arms and subsidies against Communist attack from without and from within. At that time a Communist guerrilla revolt was in progress in the northern provinces of Greece and was receiving considerable aid from the three bordering Soviet satellite countries, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania. The revolt was finally suppressed, the secession of Tito's Yugoslavia from allegiance to Moscow contributing to this end. A still more serious crisis in American-Soviet relations occurred in the summer of 1948 when the Soviet authorities in Berlin inauguarated a rail and road blockade of the western sectors of the city. The purpose of this blockade was to force the Western Powers to quit Berlin or, as the price of remaining, to give up the formation of a West German government. The blockade was successfully counteracted by a very expensive, large-scale, airlift system of supplying food to the city. It was abandoned in the summer of 1949 and has been succeeded by minor harassments and pinpricks.

The Soviet Union concluded alliances with its East European satellite states and with China which were clearly directed against THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 515 the United States. The United States took the lead in organizing a coalition of the states of western and northern Europe under the North Atlantic Pact, which was clearly directed against the Soviet Union. At the mid-century the United States was still paying the price of the cold war (large subsidies for economic and later for military aid to nonCommunist Europe, and high defense expenditures) in billions of dollars, in high taxes, and a higher cost of living for Americans. With the attack of the Soviet satellite state of North Korea on South Korea and the American intervention, which was sanctioned by the United Nations, an additional price in many thousand human lives, intense suffering, and vast destruction was also exacted. American casualties in the Korean war up to the end of November, 1952, exceeded 127,000, among whom were about 23,000 dead and 12,000 missing. Even as of that date it was the third most costly war in American history. And a gigantic expanded armament program, calculated to strain the resources of the American economy to the utmost, was well under way.

Roosevelt, in a Christmas Eve broadcast of December 24, 1943, declared to the American people: "To use an American and ungrammatical colloquialism, I say that I got along fine with Marshal Stalin ... I believe that we are going to get on well with him and the Russian people, very well indeed." This statement belongs in a category with the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms as a prediction of the shape of things to come that went very wide of the mark. 5. Our Disastrous Far Eastern Policy. It is in the Far East, where the United States became overtly involved in the war, that the bankruptcy of all the hopes and objectives which were linked with the war is most clear and indisputable. Europe, outside the Iron Curtain, is still in the American camp, although the economic and military price of nursing and rehabilitating an organism that has been greatly enfeebled by the war is very heavy and constantly increasing.

But America has been virtually shoved off the mainland of East Asia, apart from the precarious beachhead in Korea which has been held, for the time being, by a considerable outpouring of 516 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE American blood. United States prewar and war policy in the Orient was based on two assumptions: that China would become a strong, dependable, friendly power, and that Soviet designs in the Far East were pacific and amicable. Both these assumptions have been demolished by the course of events. There is the highest authority for affirming with assurance that there would have been no war in the Pacific, no Pearl Harbor, no savage, heartbreaking struggles for Guadalcanal and I wo Jima and Okinawa, if it had not been for the American policy of supporting Chiang Kaishek's regime to the limit in its struggle with Japan. President Roosevelt asserted at a dinner of the Foreign Policy Association in 1944: "We could have compromised with Japan and bargained for a place in a Japanese-dominated Asia by selling out the heart's blood of the Chinese people. And we rejected that!"

The late Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War in Roosevelt's cabinet and an ardent advocate of a bellicose policy both in the Pacific and in Europe, confirms this viewpoint with the statement: "If at any time the United States had been willing to concede to Japan a free hand in China there would have been no war in the Pacific." This argument, of course, loses most of its force when we face the fact that peace could have been maintained with Japan without seriously sacrificing the interests of China. In the year before Pearl Harbor the Japanese were willing to abandon their expansionist program if they could be provided with some face-saving formula, but this the United States persistently refused to grant. American partiality for China found expression in the attitude of favoring, in contrast to the more lukewarm attitudes of Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the acceptance of China as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations, with the right of veto. But all these American diplomatic calculations of finding in China a friendly ally were wiped out when the Chinese Communists, with direct and indirect aid from the Soviet Union, swept over China and, by the end of 1949, were in control of the whole vast country, with its population of nearly five hundred million people.

The Chinese Communists made no secret of their antagonism THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 517 to the United States. They staged "hate America" days and weeks. They subjected American diplomatic representatives to calculated insults unprecedented since the Boxer uprising. They shut off all independent reporting from China. They devised a series of harassing regulations, designed to make business in China difficult, if not impossible, and to pillage foreign firms thoroughly before they were even allowed to close down. They made travel to and from China and in China almost impossible by imposing a vexatious system of permits. They lost no opportunity to proclaim their solidarity with the Soviet Union. They kept up a flow of munitions and supplies into Korea, thereby prolonging the fighting and the cost in American lives. In view of the vehement anti-Communist official declarations which became standard after the cold war got under way, it is supreme irony that the principal result of American involvement in war in the Far East was the establishment of a Communist regime in China, the very country it was proposed to "save." After the conquest of China by the Communists the United States became involved in a diplomatic dilemma that was both ridiculous and humiliating.

We continue to recognize formally a government, the rump Nationalist regime of Chiang Kaishek, which, at the same time, the State Department did everything in its power to disparage, discourage, and defame. Typical of the attitude of the State Department was the following passage in Secretary Acheson's letter of transmittal of the State Department White Paper on China: The decay which our observers had detected in Chungking early in the war had fatally sapped the powers of resistance of the Kuomintang. Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight and its government had lost popular support. . . . The nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle.

518 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE The Chiang Kaishek regime of postwar days was not appreciably different from the Chiang Kaishek regime of 1940. If, therefore, Mr. Acheson's analysis is correct, what is to be the verdict on the judgment of Roosevelt, Stimson, and Hull, who pushed America into war as a champion of this corrupt, inefficient, and unpopular regime? The absurdity of the situation is enhanced because Mr. Acheson, up to the last months of 1950, found it impossible to do diplomatic business with the Communist government which ousted the Nationalist government from control of China. In this same letter of transmittal one finds the following sentences: The communist leaders have forsworn their Chinese heritage and have publicly announced their subservience to a foreign power, Russia, which during the last fifty years, under tsars and communists alike, has been most assiduous in its efforts to extend its control in the Far East. . . . Should the communist regime lend itself to the aims of Soviet Russian imperialism and attempt to engage in aggression against China's neighbors, we and the other members of the United Nations would be confronted by a situation violative of the principles of the United Nations Charter and threatening international peace and security.

In other words, if the Chinese Communists act as their philosophy and their alignment with Russia would seemingly impel them to act, we shall be right back where we came in at Pearl Harbor, forced to go on another crusade against aggression, but with a different act of villains. Is it not a reasonable deduction from what has happened in the Far East that we would have been just as well off, and would have saved the lives and health of tens of thousands of Americans who perished or who were permanently maimed and wounded in the Pacific theater, if we had left the Japanese, the Chinese Nationalists, the Chinese Communists, and the Russians to settle their own affairs and arrive at a reasonable balance of power among themselves? 6. Platitudes and Beatitudes. The idea that the savage war was THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 519 being fought for high and noble purposes and would bring some kind of moral regeneration to the world has proved a ghastly fallacy. It was absurd to believe that barbarous means would lead to civilized ends.

"Liberty, equality, justice, morality and law/' to quote words which the venerable Hull liked to enunciate as a statement of American policy, are not characteristic of a world in which "saturation bombing/' with its indiscriminate extermination of men, women, and children, is considered a legitimate means of carrying on war, and the ultimate arbiter is the atomic bomb. The orgies of mass rape and looting and general destruction which marked the irruption of Soviet troops into Europe (the "bringing of Asia to the Elbe/' in Churchill's belatedly regretful phrase) were unparalleled in modern European history. One would search the records of previous settlements after war among European powers without finding anything remotely comparable with the Morgenthau Plan, the deliberate stunting of a nation's economic recovery prescribed by the Potsdam Declaration and the subsequent level of industry agreement, or the mockery of justice perpetrated under the socalled war crimes trials.

Hull's confident prediction that "there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power" has been conspicuously falsified by events during tke eight years after the end of the war. The Soviet Union has concluded a network of treaties with its East European and Chinese satellite regimes. The North Atlantic Pact is the most ambitious alliance into which the United States has ever entered. Both the United States and the Soviet Union are trying to win and use the defeated Germans and Japanese in their competitive alliances. If there is any clear purpose in American foreign policy it is to build up at tremendous expense a new balance of power in place of the one which was recklessly destroyed by pressing the war against Germany and Japan to the total destruction of the political and military power of these nations and thereby making the Soviet Union the leading power in the vast land mass of Eurasia.

Wendell Willkie's "One World" has gone the way of many 520 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE other wartime illusions. What Willkie and his disciples overlooked is that, while science has made possible the technical possibility of much swifter communication between various parts of the world, political barriers against normal human contacts have more than offset this development. It is doubtful whether there has been another time in modern history when so large a part of the world was so effectively closed to normal travel as today. What about Henry Wallace's slogan: A quart of milk a day for every human being? When I was in Hamburg in 1946 the ration was a little over a pint of skimmed milk every week, not every day. Even this pitiful allotment was often not available to the Germans and people of German ethnic origin, some fourteen million in all, who were driven from their homes in the German territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, in the Sudetenland where their ancestors had lived for centuries, and in other countries of eastern and southeastern Europe.

The discrepancy between the figure of persons liable to deportation and the refugees later accounted for in Germany suggests that a very large number of deportees, perhaps as many as three million, perished either as a result of outright massacre or from cold, hunger, and disease. This vast human tragedy has been almost ignored outside of Germany. But occasionally a little corner of the veil that hides it rfes been lifted. The following is an extract from a cultivated German woman who was expelled from East Prussia by the Poles late in 1945. We received notice from the Poles of our evacuation from East Prussia on October 30, 1945. On November 10, the expulsion of hundreds of people started; this number later grew to thousands. To the sound of ringing church bells, we left our homeland at seven in the morning. But even before, at 6:00, young Poles with rubber clubs were upon us, shouting: "Get out! Get out!"

Then began an unspeakable journey. We were robbed even before we left Maldeuten. They took our food, and, as I lost my coat, I had to travel four weeks in open coal cars clad only THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 521 in a thin summer jacket. At times, we rode on the roofs of coaches. It was so icy, one person fell off the train in his sleep. One stretch—from East Prussia to Stargard (Pomerania) — accounted for 65 deaths. Cars were littered with corpses. One old man lay near us and no one bothered about him; the train had no attendants. The first food we received was near Sangerhausen and Freudenstadt in Thuringia. In Danzig, the car was stopped for three days; again, we had nothing to eat. In Stargard, a Russian transport stood across the track loaded with goods for the Soviet Union. At night, the Russians slipped across to our train to rob us of our last possessions. They had lots of time, and they did a thorough job. There was a regulation against plundering, however, and one man advised us all to shout "Help" whenever the Russians came. The next time they paid us a visit there was a deafening roar from hundreds of throats. Many Russians were frightened away, but some became angry, and began to shoot into the coaches.

After three days, we were told the Polish engineer had left and had taken the locomotive along. If anyone wanted to go further he could go on foot. At the central station, a train took us to Schuene, near Stettin, where we found a refugee camp teeming with thousands. We lay close to one another in an ice-cold wind. There was no shelter or cover of any kind. We no longer possessed anything.5 What these miserable expellees met when they finally reached Germany is well described in the following dispatch from the Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Herald in 1945: I saw at the Stettiner Station miserable remnants of humanity, with death already shining out of their eyes—with that awful, wide-eyed stare. Four were dead already, another five or six were lying alongside them given up as hopeless by the doctor, and just being allowed to die. The rest sat or lay about, whimpering, crying, or just waiting.

^22 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Such scenes as these, which were only representative of thousands of similar cases, were the result of Roosevelt's concessions to Stalin at Yalta, confirmed at the Potsdam Conference of the summer of 1945. Mr. Wallace's apocalyptic dream of a quart of milk per day had not come true for these victims of uprooting, who could be counted in millions, or, indeed, for any large part of the human race. And one could scarcely be sure whether Wallace's other war aim, the vanquishing of Satan, had been achieved, in view of the unprecedented inhumanity of many aspects of the postwar settlement. We simply have supplanted one Satan by another. 7. The United Nations. By 1950 the United Nations had become, for all practical purposes, the Divided Nations. The Security Council, under the terms of the Charter, is only empowered to act with the affirmative agreement of the five great powers in its membership, the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, and France. So long as this principle was observed, the capacity for action of the organization was paralyzed by the cold war. Soviet proposals were voted down regularly by the nonCommunist majority in the Security Council and in the Assembly. American and other Western proposals were just as regularly vetoed by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet boycott of the Security Council and other UN agencies, designed to bring pressure for the admission of Communist China, made it possible for the Security Council to lend UN sanction to military action in Korea. But the validity of this action was contested by regimes in control of about one third of the population of the earth. It was not United Nations action as contemplated under the Charter. The affirmative vote of the Soviet Union was lacking. And China's vote was cast by the representative of a discredited and powerless government which was no longer in effective control of any part of the Chinese mainland, of a government which had, indeed, been repeatedly rebuffed and repudiated by the American State Department. The United Nations majority has assumed more and more the character of an anti-Communist coalition. This development may THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 523 have been inevitable. But it was not in conformity with the original design of the United Nations, based on five-power unanimity.

Not only has the United Nations become a travesty and farce as a unified system of political world government, but its meetings and operations have contributed greatly to international disunity, hostility, and bellicosity. Its meetings provide an unprecedented platform and sounding board for denunciation, vituperation, and bitter accusations. Its operations have already launched upon the world a costly, bloody, and seemingly interminable war in Korea which may wind up in a third world war. 8. American National Security. Does the average American have any reason to feel more secure in 1953 than in 1940? If he is a young man, the shadow of the draft hangs over his plans for education and life work. If he has savings or investments in bonds or life insurance, they are threatened by inflation. Whatever his occupation, he faces the prospect of a tremendous and ever growing load of taxation, unprecedented in time of peace and legally unlimited.

Most important of all, perhaps, he is not given much chance to feel secure, in the most elementary physical sense. Day in and day out he is warned of the perils of atomic attack. If he looks across the Pacific he sees a solidly hostile East Asia. If he looks across the Atlantic he sees as his first line of defense in Western Europe a papier-mache coalition of powers which, when they were far stronger than they are today, went down under the first shock of attack by the German armored columns that were far inferior in numbers and armament to Stalin's armed horde. A favorite argument of interventionists from 1939 until 1941 was that, even if the American continent was in no danger of direct attack, a Nazi Germany predominant in Europe and a Japan predominant in East Asia would be uncomfortable neighbors. This point may be conceded. But what kind of a neighbor is Stalin's Russia? "Uncomfortable" would be a weak descriptive adjective.

The concentration of totalitarian striking power in a single center, Moscow, is more disadvantageous and menacing from the standpoint of American security than the distribution of this power among several centers, in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, and Rome. Moreover, Communism is more dangerous than National 524 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Socialism, Fascism, or Japanese authoritarianism because of its far more attractive and well developed international propaganda and network. A sober and realistic survey of the international scene would indicate that, despite the complete military victory in World War II, American military security is more precarious today than it was before we entered the conflict. This is equally true whether one considers security from the military, the political, the economic, or the moral angle. IV. THE COSTS OF THE WAR 1. Material Costs. The second World War was far and away the most destructive conflict ever waged by the human race. Our chief authority, C. Hartley Grattan, in his article, "What the War Cost"

(Harper's Magazine, April, 1949) estimates the cost of the war at four trillion dollars.6 This astronomical figure is difficult to grasp; it would be almost incomprehensible if stated as four thousand thousand million dollars. The direct and immediate cost of four trillion dollars is staggering enough. But Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray estimated in 1950 that the ultimate cost of modern wars is about four times the direct and immediate cost. Therefore, we may estimate the ultimate cost of the second World War as some sixteen trillion dollars, granted that we escape a third world war as a result of the second. Direct war expenditures in national budgets amounted to $1,117,000,000. Destruction, according to Mr. Grattan's computation, was double this figure. And he adds $650,000,000,000 as part of the indirect losses which may be set down to the account of the war. These include looted stocks of raw materials, manufactured goods and foodstuffs carried off by invaders, the value of kidnapped labor power, losses from reckless use of natural resources, rundown THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY $2 5 equipment, diversion of facilities from civilian to military use, and liquidated investments. As Mr. Grattan says: Of the material costs the largest by all odds came from that most appalling innovation in ruthless destruction, air bombardment—especially area raids which were indiscriminate in that no specific target was aimed at. ... The assault on dwellings ranks as one of the great horrors of the war. . . .

Terror and obliteration air raids were considered successful almost in proportion to the number of people who lost their homes; for homeless people cannot work well, and production falls almost toward zero. About twenty out of every one hundred residences in Germany were destroyed. Two and a quarter million homes were destroyed in Japan and 460,000 in Great Britain. Every fifth Greek was left homeless and 28,000 houses in Rotterdam were obliterated. Over half of the huge total tonnage of destructive bombs fell on Germany, about one fifth on France, and one eighth on Italy. Ironically, the French suffered more from bombing by their American and British "liberators" than from the air attacks from their German invaders. The vast property losses associated with the violent uprooting of tens of millions of war refugees, Poles, Letts, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, even Russians fleeing from Soviet rule, Germans expelled from their homes in eastern Germany and other European countries, can hardly be computed. In contrast to movements of this kind in the past, these uprooted people, as a rule, were unable to salvage any part of their property.

One of the many indirect losses of the war was the disruption of established patterns of trade and investment. This bore especially hard on Great Britain, and on continental Europe generally. Loss of investments and normal trade contacts furnish much of the explanation for the socalled ''dollar gap," the inability of the European countries to balance their commercial account with the United States without huge American subsidies under the Marshall Plan.

526 . PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE 2. Increased Financial Burdens in the United States. The financial costs of the second World War to the United States were astronomical—around $350,000,000,000. Lend-lease amounted to $50,000,000,000. Our public debt has risen from around $40,000,000,000 to about $260,000,000,000. Unprecedented public spending has continued since the war. Our Federal budget before the Korean war ran around forty billion dollars a year—ten times the budget in Hoover days. It is doubling as we move closer to the hot war. Lavish grants have been made to foreign nations. A Congressional Committee on Expenditures, headed by Senator Harry F. Byrd, reported that during the period from August 1, 1945, through the fiscal year 1951, the United States appropriated some forty-five billion dollars for foreign-aid projects. This is 285 dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. The sum equals the complete cost of operating the United States government for six years before the second World War.

Much higher spending wasr of course, in prospect as a result of armament increases and the extention of Marshall Plan aid beyond the date originally contemplated. No less than ninety billion dollars were available for armament expenditures in the year 1952. This amount was three times the total cost of the first World War to the United States. During the period from April, 1945, to January, 1953, President Truman spent approximately twice as much as had all the Presidents of the United States combined down to 1940. It is hard to see how a drastic cheapening of the dollar, with disastrous social and financial consequences, can be avoided. At the beginning of the year 1953, the dollar was worth fifty-two cents in terms of 1939 purchasing power. This means inflation, indeed, it is serious inflation. To a far more dangerous extent than is generally realized the American economy is being propped on two stilts—tremendous arms expenditures and subsidies to foreign countries. The danger of creating strong vested interests in vast armament projects, quite apart from the immediate political necessity of this step, is obvious.

The great increase in public expenditures has inevitably resulted in taxation on a scale that would have seemed fantastic before the first World War and even impossibly high in New Deal days. But THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 527 it is now taken for granted in our country. The fact that President Truman, in a period of formal peace, has levied more taxes since 1945 than all the previous Presidents of the United States combined has set off no popular revolt. Indeed, the fact has passed almost unnoticed. Increased local government expenses have raised property taxes. The number subjected to income taxes has greatly increased, along with the taxes which must be paid. Those who are compelled to pay income taxes rose from about 4,000,000 in 1939 to 53,000,000 in 1952. In 1929 a man with a personal income of $250,000 retained 80 per cent of his income after taxes. In 1945 he had only 17 per cent of his income after taxes. In the very highest income brackets the income tax is over 90 per cent.

Inheritance taxes are becoming confiscatory. In 1948 the estate of Mrs. Henry White was assessed at $9,750,000 and the inheritance taxes were in excess of $7,000,000. The inheritance taxes on the $35,000,000 estate of William K. Vanderbilt were $30,000,000. As expenditures and the Federal budget shoot skyward, increased taxation is unavoidable. Excise and other hidden taxes are added to income and property taxes. Liquor taxes amount to about $2,500,000,000 annually; tobacco taxes to $1,125,000,000; taxes on common carrier services to some $525,000,000; gasoline taxes to $435,000,000; telephone and telegraph taxes to $250,000,000; and jewelry taxes to $235,000,000. Supreme Court decisions have removed all normal legal limits on taxation. No tax can be regarded as illegal merely because it is too high or is a duplication of the taxation of the same income. Moreover, devices have been found to remove most objections to excessive taxation. The masses are subject to the withholding tax. After some protesting and grumbling for a few months, the residue, after the deduction of the withholding tax, comes to be regarded as the salary or wage payment received, and the taxation is all but forgotten. The objections of the rich to excessive taxation are largely nullified by raising ''Red scares" and war scares and by assuring large corporate incomes through armament production or foreign relief. Hence, there is no substantial group in the country to battle against the ever-rising tide of taxation.

The enormous increase of public expenditures and the crushing 528 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE burden of taxation, which we have just described above in relation to the United States, are not limited to our own country. The condition is universal in the postwar world. In some countries, like England, the tax is even more appalling than in the United States. Astronomical public debts, vastly greater public expenditures, and even more formidable tax burdens have been the result, almost exclusively, of the second World War. If the war had brought great benefits in the way of increased human happiness, greater freedom, assurance of peace, lessening of armaments, and the like, even the staggering financial costs, direct and indirect, might not have been too great a price to pay. But, when we find ourselves and the world further from peace and well-being than in 1939, this increasingly menacing financial picture is shocking indeed.

3. Loss of Life. The second World War was not only the most destructive conflict of which there is any historical record; it was also the most costly in human lives and the most inhuman in methods of warfare. Mr. Grattan estimates that about forty million human beings lost their lives during the war, and that of this enormous number only ten million were soldiers. Such a slaughter of noncombatant civilians is without any precedent, and it shows how completely the socalled rules of civilized warfare were cast aside by both sides. One thinks with envy of the infinitely more humane spirit of the eighteenth century when Gibbon could observe, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The laws and manners of modern nations protect the safety and freedom of the vanquished soldier; and the peaceful citizen has seldom reason to complain that his life or even his fortune is exposed to the rage of war.

The rest of the country and community (apart from professional soldiers) enjoys in the midst of war the tranquility of peace, and is only made sensible of the change by the aggravation or decrease of the public taxes. There were four main causes that led to this appalling toll of noncombatant victims, which include many women and children. First, there was the indiscriminate use of air bombing against THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 529 large city areas. As it became possible to pour down greater loads of ever more destructive explosives and incendiary bombs, these air raids were accompanied by increasingly heavy loss of life. Particularly terrible were the "suffocation bombings" of Hamburg, where fires kindled by phosphorus bombs sucked out the air and led many people to drown themselves in canals; the slaughter of several hundred thousand persons, including many refugees, in Dresden, a nonmilitary objective, in February, 1945; the tremendous fire raids on Tokyo; and the mass extermination inflicted by the needless dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is popularly supposed that the foremost horrors of bombing in the second World War were those brought about by the atom bombing of the two Japanese cities. But far more persons were killed in the bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945. It is estimated that the total casualties in this bombing during a single night were in excess of two hundred thousand. The following is an authentic, firsthand description of the horrors of that night: On that evening about one million people may have lived within the walls of this town. Besides its more than 600,000 inhabitants there were some hundreds of thousands of raid victims and evacuees, as well as refugees from the Silesian districts. Many human beings died a quick death through suffocation in a raging hurricane of fire, while conflagration spread relentlessly through narrow streets which showed no gap before this disaster. Tens of thousands who escaped, they do not know how, made their way to the wide park area outside the inner city, mainly to the great garden in the east and the area on the left bank of the Elbe.

About midnight, a second British air fleet appeared in the fiery red skies over the Elbe Valley and massacred those in the garden by attacking the crowds with high explosive bombs and guns, a massacre which perhaps the imagination of an Ilya Ehrenburg (Russian war correspondent) might have conceived.

530 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Twelve hours later—the siren failed to work—a third attack laid a new wreath of perdition around the town, following the belt in which the bulk of the homeless people who had fled to the periphery and its surroundings was supposed to be.7 About three hundred people lost their lives in the bombing of the second World War for every one who perished by the same means in the first. Contrary to the war propaganda version of responsibility for this peculiarly terrible type of warfare, as undiscriminating in its selection of victims as a raid by primitive savages, it was a British decision that led to this type of slaughter and destruction. This is made clear by Mr. J. M. Spaight, Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, who affirms: Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That, surely was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia's decision to adopt her policy of "scorched earth/'8 What was this "great decision?" It was an attack by British bombers on railway installations in western Germany on May 11, 1940. This was a departure from previous practice, when both sides had restricted the use of airplanes to areas of military operations or to specifically military targets, such as airdromes and naval bases.

According to Mr. Spaight, the decision "to bomb Germany should she be our enemy" was taken in 1936, when the Bomber Command was organized. Among his surprisingly candid revelations, which have attracted much less attention than they deserve in this country and in Great Britain, is the statement that Hitler's first bombing of civilian targets in Britain followed three months after the British air force was bombing indiscriminately in Germany, and that "Hitler assuredly did not want the mutual bombing to go on."

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 531 It is often suggested that the tremendous American and British raids on German cities were a justified reprisal for German bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Both Mr. Spaight and the wellknown British military expert, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, reject this view. Captain Hart writes: "Bombing did not take place until the German troops were fighting their way into these cities and thus conformed to the old rules of siege bombardment."9 In an article in Harper's Magazine, March, 1946, Hart clearly proved that Hitler had tried to induce the British to agree to bomb only military objectives and that the British decisively rebuffed this proposal. In the British decision to ignore the distinction between military and civilian targets may be found the seeds of the destruction of many continental cities, and also of the devastation which overtook London, Coventry, and Bristol. Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on September 21, 1943: "To achieve this [the extirpation of Nazi tyranny] there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go."

The indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets not only produced unprecedented human mortality, but it also destroyed precious historical monuments, wonderful old cathedrals, and art museums and treasures whose loss cannot be computed in terms of money. A conspicuous example was the devastation of the historic monastery of Monte Cassino after it was known that the Germans were not using it for any military purpose. This destruction of historic monuments and art treasures exceeded anything known in previous history. The devastation wrought by such invading barbarians as the Vandals, or Attila and his Huns in the later Roman Empire, was as nothing compared to the destruction caused by bombing in the second World War. That historians have not since risen to condemn it is evidence of the moral deterioration and cowardice of our era. Even the unlettered historians of the early Middle Ages bitterly criticized the devastation wrought by the barbarians of their era and the preceding generations.

Second among the causes of the tremendous civilian mortality was the totalitarian ruthlessness in "liquidating" or exterminating 532 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE whole categories of human beings on racial or class grounds. Millions of Jews perished at the hands of Nazi extermination squads. There was a systematic liquidation, by executions, prisons, and concentration camps, of all suspected anti-Communists in countries occupied by the Red Army. The number who perished in this way also probably ran into the millions. More than ten thousand Polish officers, taken to the Soviet Union as war prisoners in 1939, disappeared without a trace until the Germans announced the discovery of several thousand bodies of these men, with bullets in the backs of their heads, in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, in 1943. The Soviet government, which had hitherto claimed to know nothing about the fate of these prisoners, hastily improvised the story that the prison camps in which they had been held had been seized by the Germans. However, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that the Polish officers were slaughtered by the Russians. The attempt to include this item as a German "war crime" in the Nuremberg indictment ended in a fiasco. The Tribunal failed to find the Germans guilty, but cautiously refused to listen to the evidence of witnesses like the Polish General Anders and the Swiss Professor Naville, whose testimony would have been unfavorable to the Soviet version of this dark incident and would have convicted Soviet officials of war crimes.

A third cause of human butchery was the savage guerrilla war which raged in many occupied countries. This led to an endless series of "atrocities" on both sides, in which would-be innocent bystanders were often the victims of the guerrillas and of the occupation troops. Fourth, as a cause of great loss of life, we may place the vast uprooting of people in Eastern Europe and the maltreatment of war prisoners, by both Germans and Russians, on the Eastern Front. Many war prisoners starved to death. It has been reasonably estimated that at least five million Baltic and Germanic peoples perished as a result of murder, exposure, and starvation when they were expelled from their homes during and after the war. There was a tremendous discrepancy between the number of German soldiers reported as being captured in Russia and the number who were repatriated up to the time when the Soviet government announced THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 533 that all war prisoners had been released. Perhaps a million of these prisoners perished in Russia. Of about 60,000 Italians captured in Russia, only about 12,000 ever returned to Italy.

4. Moral Losses. Perhaps the greatest moral loss caused by the war is the immense amount of conscious and unconscious hypocrisy which it has generated. The growth of unconscious hypocrisy is perhaps even more dangerous than the practice of the conscious moralistic deception that has always been the stockin-trade of politicians and demagogues. The prevalence of public hypocrisy reveals a most dangerous mood of susceptibility to totalitarianism, of conditioning for the kind of society which George Orwell depicted in his mordant and farsighted satire, Nineteen EightyFour, where the War Department is called the "Ministry of Peace," the agencies for public lying and propaganda, the "Ministry of Truth," and the torture chambers, the "Ministry of Love." Two of the principal slogans of that society, "War is Peace" and "Ignorance is Strength," are receiving an ominous amount of acceptance in the Western world today.

A good example of hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, is the very general refusal to face up to the implications of the complete failure to apply the principles of the Atlantic Charter in the peace settlement. It is seriously suggested that it was a major achievement for Roosevelt to enunciate such noble principles as one finds in the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. That he made no visible effort to translate these principles into practice is passed over as a matter of little or no consequence. Another illustration of this kind of warped thinking is the argument of the late ex-Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, and others, that Yalta was really a success for American diplomacy because Stalin signed his name to some nice-sounding promises about "free unfettered elections," "democratic institutions of their own choice," etc. This would seem to be on a par with praising the financial genius of a man who would accept at face value a large assortment of worthless checks.

International hypocrisy probably reached its highest point in the trials of thousands of Germans and Japanese for alleged war crimes. That some German and Japanese actions, and some actions 534 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE of the victorious powers as well, went far beyond the somewhat elastic conception of the rules of civilized warfare cannot be denied. There would be a case for the impartial trial of all persons charged with such actions before a neutral tribunal. But the International Tribunal, composed of American, British, French, and Soviet judges, which sat in judgment at Nuremberg and Tokyo, and the subsequent tribunals set up by the occupying powers in their respective zones, lacked the most elementary sanctions of a court of law. The prosecutors were also both judge and jury. There was no semblance of impartiality in these trials of the vanquished by the victors. Nor was there any pretense of punishment being meted out evenhandedly for all infractions of law and humanity. Only Germans and Japanese were brought to trial.

Most of the major offenses against the Nazis—plotting and waging aggressive war, forcible seizure of alien territory, impressment for slave labor, looting and undernourishment of the population in occupied countries, and mass murder of both soldiers and civilians —could be charged just as convincingly against one or all of the victorious powers. For example, it was a matter of common knowledge at the time, and has since been proved by documentary evidence, that the Soviet invasion of Poland and the later occupation of the Baltic States were acts of premeditated aggression, concerted between Stalin and Hitler before they were put into effect. As Montgomery Belgion says: Altogether, it is clear that the "war crimes" of "murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilians of occupied territory" is a "war crime" with which the victors may be reproached. The international military tribunal at Nuremberg pronounced sixteen of the former German leaders guilty of a "war crime" of which the victorious powers—by whom the tribunial was set up and whom the judges represented—might likewise have been pronounced guilty.

American judges and publicists who participated in the postwar trials reluctantly revealed the fact that American officials and agents, in trying to force Germans to confess or proTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 535 duce damaging evidence, were guilty of all manner of ruthless brutalities which matched the worst of which the Nazis were accused.10 The hypocrisy of the war-crimes trials is well illustrated by the case of the German, Admiral Erich Raeder, who was given a life sentence for plotting aggressive war, namely, helping to plan the Nazi invasion of Norway. Lord Hankey revealed some years back that the British were making identical plans at the same time. Winston Churchill admitted this to be a fact in his book, The Gathering Storm. Final confirmation has recently been offered by the publication of the first volume of the British Official History oi the Second World War. This sets forth in detail the plan approved by the British War Council as early as February 6, 1940.

It embraced the seizure of Narvik and the occupation by force of northern Norway and Sweden, even including the Swedish port of Lulea on the Baltic. Yet, despite the fact that the official British version admits that, on this matter, the British war leaders were as "guilty" as the Nazis', no one has raised his voice publicly in Britain or the United States to demand that Admiral Raeder be released. He continues to languish in the grim Spandau fortress prison, subjected one week out of every four to at least minor tortures and brutalities at the hands of Russian guards. Justice Robert Jackson and others associated with the Nuremberg trial have tried to present it as a high point in the development of international law and justice. But it was actually an all-time low point in the prostitution of the forms of law to purposes of political revenge. Aside from the affront to equity, in that the accusers were guilty of the same war crimes as the accused, the legal aspects of the postwar trials constituted an affront to the basic principles of jurisprudence and accepted legal practice. They were based on ex post facto law, a procedure which challenged the most sacred legal principles. Just as bad was the policy allowing the accusing nations also to provide the judges and juries. Hence, the trials were legal travesties. There were additional absurdities. Officers were punished for the deeds of soldiers, though they had no knowledge or 536 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE responsibility for their actions. The reverse of this was also truesoldiers were punished merely for obeying orders. Especially preposterous was the trial and punishment of industrialists who were merely serving their government in a period of intense national emergency. This ridiculous extention of guilt and responsibility was recently protested in the United Nations meetings. Its dire implications for the future were tardily discerned.

Even more important than the travesties with respect to law and equity was the assurance that these trials make wars far more brutal and ruthless in the future. In all wars to come the losers will be regarded as the aggressors, no matter what the facts, and will be punished accordingly. Hence, no methods of wartime destruction, however horrible, can be spared to produce victory, at whatever human and material cost. The trials will, therefore, produce exactly the reverse of the results which were represented as their main justification.11 International hypocrisy is surely serious enough. But what even more directly concerns the American public is the ever-increasing growth of political hypocrisy in the control of our own public affairs. This can be fairly attributed to the disastrous impact of the second World War upon our public morality. It is obvious that hypocrisy in politics is nothing new, but it has developed to an alarming degree since 1933. The recent trend began with Mr. Roosevelt's vigorous denunciation of excessive spending on the part of the Hoover administration and his promise of greater economy if he were elected President. There was plenty of comparable hypocrisy in many of his statements in regard to the New Deal program, but far more shocking were his statements on public policy from 1937 to Pearl Harbor, during which he "lied us into war." The hypocrisy connected with the promises made to us during the war regarding the aims of the second crusade have already been pointed out. Wendell Willkie also enthroned public hypocrisy by his confession during the LendLease hearings that his earnest statements against our involvement in war during the preceding presidential campaign were only "campaign oratory."

This trend toward hypocrisy as the more or less universal procedure of politicians, even in the highest branches of our government, has THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 537 grown apace since the second World War. It is forcefully disclosed by Fulton Oursler in an article on 'The Twilight of Honor" in The Reader's Digest, July, 1950: Today's curse upon political life is not so much what is unlawful, as what is unscrupulous. At the root of our decay is a sickness of conscience. Moral obtuseness is a plague over free government. This decline in national character is a serious danger because, if we lose our standards, all our liberties may also be lost through abuses, corruption and chaos. A people can be only as strong as their resistance to breaches of public and private morality. The American people are finding it increasingly difficult to be shocked, no matter what happens. Instead of resisting breaches of public morality, we tend more and more to condone them, and dishonesty along with them.

"That's politics," we say. As if politics need always to be a sink-hole. Without a vision, the people are perishing; they are even finding something to admire in the slickness, the tricky deceitfulness, by which the taxpayers are bilked. They smile at scoundrels in office as if they were amusing scalawags. Moral lassitude seems constantly to deepen in a world situation of the greatest seriousness. One has only to watch the headlines to realize the Democrats and Republicans alike have led us into a twilight of honor. We shall be lucky if it is not also the doom-time of democracy. When special excise levies, from theater tickets to babies' talcum powder, were imposed during the war, magniloquent speeches were made in which Congress was pledged to remove those expensive nuisances when the emergency was over. The emergency has long since passed, but we still pay. Broken promises, of course, are not illegal; they are simply faithless and dishonorable. But even lip service to a code of honor now excites open derision.

Some months ago the President of the United States delivered in person his annual advice to Congress. Once during his message he mentioned the need for saving money. From 538 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE all over the Capitol chamber came the sound of laughter. Startled at the guffaws, the President looked around him with a smile. In this mockery of economy, this assumption that the President himself had tongue in cheek when he spoke of saving, there was nothing illicit. But the incident was brutally cynical; it was symptomatic and frightening. Never before in America has official conscience fallen so low, or official impudence grown so brash; and never before has public apathy seemed more profound. Unlawful acts can be punished by the courts. But only public opinion can deal with dishonor. The Government of the United States was formed on the concept that honor was a holy thing. In the Declaration of Independence, the signers finished up their revolutionary document with the declaration: ". . . we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and"—most important of all—"our sacred honor."

A child can grasp the simple fact that men who hold their honor as something sacred will not betray the trust of voters who put them in positions of authority. When, however, we elect men whose honor weighs only lightly on their conscience, and when their dishonorable behavior seems of no moment to the citizens, democracy comes to a sorry pass. Similar in implications is the following editorial by Raymond Moley in Newsweek, November 6, 1950, commenting on the frequency of hypocrisy in campaign methods and promises: Little Joe Ferguson, the negative token figure used by the political arms of the unions to beat Taft, quite naively said when I asked him how he stood on the Brannan plan: "I am for what the farmers want." On labor he is for what labor wants. On civil rights he is for what Negroes want. On everything he is for what everyone wants. A serious moral issue is raised by this kind of appeal. Joe Ferguson is merely aping a strategy that has become more and more characteristic of our American politics. It won for THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 539 Truman two years ago. It will win for many of his candidates this year. And if it wins for the enemies of Taft in Ohio, it will be a grim and bitter reminder of the deterioration of a once self-reliant and self-respecting people.

It is, among other things, an appeal which is completely false. We can't all have all we want. No government, especially one which is manned by Joe Fergusons, can make such promises. The tricky people who make them do not expect to make them good. They will as always cover their failure by blaming someone else. The Truman promises of 1948 have not been realized. They stand out like the bare branches of a tree in winter. But his people who are running for reelection are saying that bad people in Congress frustrated their efforts. Send us back and we will make good next year, they say. Always next year the pie will come down from the sky. And so on, year after year. The wind of public hypocrisy and political cynicism, sown in the Roosevelt era, has reaped the whirlwind of political corruption in the Truman administration, which far exceeds in extent and venality anything known in the days of President Harding.

5. Inroads on Liberty and Freedom. The first World War was supposed to make the world safe for democracy. Actually, it was the main cause of the two leading threats to the democratic way of life, the totalitarianism of Communism and Fascism. The second World War was supposed to vindicate the rights of man against the threat of extinction at the hands of the totalitarian state. Its real effects, however, have been immensely to extend the scope of the oldest and most perfected form of totalitarianism, Communism, and constantly to extend the power of the state over the individual in Western countries. Both the Americans and Britons, for instance, have lost their freedom from military conscription in peacetime. Under a socialistic administration in Great Britain many administrative agencies can set aside the right of habeas corpus. The individual Briton has lost many rights which he could have taken for granted in prewar days: the right to build, or even, in some cases, to repair his own 540 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE house; the right to travel abroad freely (due to foreign-exchange control); and the right, or possibility, to save adequately for his old age.

The inroads upon civil liberties in the United States since 1945, and especially since 1947, have been without precedent in our history. The right of freedom from search without warrant, supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, has been destroyed by two Supreme Court decisions—in 1947 and 1950. There has been an epidemic of loyalty-oath demands. Excessive concern with security has led to extensive thought-policing. Public servants with good records have been turned out of their positions on completely unsupported anonymous evidence. Leading Federal judges with a previous stalwart liberal record have succumbed to the prevalent hysteria. The McCarran Internal Security Act was vetoed by President Truman on the ground that it made a travesty of our Bill of Rights. Only an alarmist would anticipate the speedy development in the United States of the full-fledged brutality of Nazi or Soviet totalitarianism. But when the executive department of the government assumes unprecedented and enormous power and is far and away the greatest spending agency in the country, the political party in control of that branch possesses tremendous power in the way of maintaining itself in power without violating the formal rules of democracy.

The emergence from the war of a tremendous Eurasian-Soviet empire, committed by the philosophy of its rulers to the goal of world conquest through world revolution, was a most disastrous by-product of Roosevelt's foreign policy. This development posed real and difficult problems for American security. Many of the methods which have been employed in the name of anti-Communism are not only futile and even absurd in themselves; they have set dangerous totalitarian precedents. There has been an epidemic of special oath requirements, of which the one at the University of California has attracted most attention. Passports for foreign travel have been withheld from prominent Americans or cancelled on the ground that the trip was "not in the national interest."

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 541 Now freedom of travel is, or should be, one of the favorable distinctions between free and totalitarian societies. If foreign travel is treated as a privilege, not a right, a precedent has been set that in the future may be used against all critics of the administration that may be in power. The immigration provisions of the McCarran Act for "control of subversives" have led to most undesirable results. No actual Communists seem to have been inconvenienced by the act, just as no spies were detected by the socalled Espionage Act of World War I, which led to very grave infringements of civil liberties. But hundreds, if not thousands of Europeans, the great majority certainly vigorous anti-Communists, have been held up and subjected to a long inquisition at Ellis Island on the suspicion that they might at some time have belonged to Nazi or Fascist youth or student organizations, membership in which was almost compulsory. The bad will that has been aroused for the United States in potentially friendly European countries by this stupid and highhanded procedure can scarcely be overestimated.

V. THE STARK BANKRUPTCY OF ROOSEVELTIAN FOREIGN POLICY The legacy of the second World War for America has been not peace but an ever hotter cold war. As a sequel to the destruction of the balance of power throughout the world we find ourselves committed to interventionist enterprises in the most remote marches of the world. Instead of the philosophy of regional commitments which served America well for more than a century, we are now embracing the doctrine of global collective security, which has been aptly and wittily, if ominously, described as "perpetual war for perpetual peace." There would seem to be only one sound historical verdict for a 542 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE policy that promised peace and led to war, that promised justice and liberty and enthroned injustice and tyranny, that professed to assure friendship among nations and an atmosphere of international security and "freedom from want and fear" and brought as its consequence the chill blasts of the cold war, that set out to destroy Germany and Japan and led to the necessity, under very difficult conditions, of trying to reconstruct these countries as effective allies. This verdict is intellectual, moral, political, and economic bankruptcy, complete and irretrievable.

POSTSCRIPT SOME NOTES FOR FUTURE HISTORIANS ON THE TRUMAN FOREIGN POLICIES by WILLIAM L. NEUMANN [EDITOR'S NOTE.—The immediate results of the Roosevelt foreign policy can already be rather fully and fairly assessed, and they are competently analyzed in the preceding pages by Mr. Chamberlin. The foreign policies of President Truman, who took over the Roosevelt heritage and continued in much the same pattern, are still in the crucible. But the nature and results of some of the most important of them, along with the methods followed, can now be appraised. This is done in the following pages by Dr. Neumann, whose observations constitute an appropriate postscript to Mr. Chamberlin's trenchant chapter.] The promises of politicians nearly always exceed their ability to perform. Similarly, their threats are usually more dire than circumTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 543 stances warrant. But, during the past fifteen years, this technique of threat and promise has become an almost stereotyped political formula in the United States. According to the basic precept of the Machiavelli of George Orwell's world of "1984": "If one is to rule and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality/' By creating a world of illusion, based on the statements of high officials, reality is obscured while the voter and legislator are moved to actions deemed desirable by the creators of the illusions.

The use of this technique in the passage of foreign policy legislation in the post World War II years offers an interesting field of study for both the observer of today and the historian of the future. The raw data which follow are presented as examples of the now popular promise-and-threat device for obscuring reality. As a reminder of the actualities of the present situation, supplementary data is offered from sources less suspect of special pleading. The contrast between the picture of Europe and its future as it is presented by official American sources and as it is revealed by other sources strikingly illustrates the confusion which has been created by politically useful illusion. To PASS THE BRETTON WOODS AGREEMENT (1945) The Promise The Threat . . . this means real peace-In a nutshell the Fund time employment for those agreement spells the differwho will be returning from ence between a world caught the war and for those at again in the maelstrom of home whose wartime work panic and economic warfare has ended. It also means culminating in war—as in the orders and profits to our in-1930^—or a world in which dustries and fair prices to our the members strive for a betfarmers, ter life through mutual trust, —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, cooperation and assistance.

February 12, 1945. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, February 12, 1945.

544 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE They involve jobs and profits. They help determine the fate of both new and old enterprises. They govern the amount of food on the family table, the money for a new radio, schoolbooks for the children. —HENRY MORGENTHAU, JR., March 7, 1945. . . . this fund is the greatest chance that you have in the world to preserve free enterprise. —DEAN ACHESON, March 8, 1945. . . . they present a very simple issue—stability and order instead of insecurity and chaos. —HENRY MORGENTHAU, JR., March 7, 1945. The Bretton Woods proposals present us with a chance to avoid this disaster. ... If we do nothing . . . we will find a disintegration of the world system into a state of economic warfare. —DEAN ACHESON, March 8, 1945. THE REALITY The threatened disasters arising from a failure to bring into being the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were premised on the possible restoration of the devices of prewar trade competition: exchange restrictions, blocked currencies, and other nationalistic economic techniques. Similarly, the promises were premised on the efficacy of the Bretton Woods agreements in removing the impediments to international trade and solving the problems of balance of payments. Yet, after six years of operation, the economic situation of the world appears as follows: . . . there has been little secure or sustained progress toward the [International Monetary] Fund objectives of unimpeded multilateral trade and the general convertibility of currencies.

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 54$ During the last seven years, balance of payments difficulties have been continuous or recurrent, and most countries have either been unable to make substantial progress toward freer international trade, or have had to reverse from time to time some of the steps taken in that direction. It is a melancholy fact that seven years after the end of the war the fund has to report that international payments are still far from having attained a state of balance and that exchange difficulties and exchange restrictions are again, over large parts of the trading world, the order of the day. —INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, Annual Report, 1952 Alongside this official statement must be placed the reaction of the European nations meeting in the European Consultative Assembly in September of 1952: The Assembly adopted by a show of hands a report of its Economic Affairs Committee which expressed grave doubt that the Bretton Woods agreement "any longer can be applied." . . . Delegates said it now seemed unlikely that the world would see multilateral trade and free convertibility of currencies "in our lifetimes" and therefore some alternative arrangement should be adopted.

—NEW YORK TIMES, September 25, 1952 To PASS THE BRITISH LOAN (1946) The Promise The Threat ... it will have a decisive in- ... failure to approve the fluence on the international loan will result in continued trade of the whole world . . . limitation of business beit will keep open a market for tween this country and those those surpluses of the United countries who are forced to States which are customarily sell for blocked sterling.

546 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE exported to the United Kingdom. —HARRY S. TRUMAN, January 30, 1946. . . . this agreement is in the interest of this country, of Great Britain and of the entire world. It is not charity. . . . The loan will make possible expanded world trade and thus is to our interest. —HENRY A. WALLACE, March 12, 1946. I regard it as essential to the whole future of the free world, the world that engaged freely in international trade. —DEAN ACHESON, March 13, 1946. There is no doubt that our export of commodities like cotton and tobacco would suffer. —HENRY A. WALLACE, March 12, 1946. . . . failure to approve the loan will reduce our exports below the prewar level with farreaching consequences for our economy as a whole, and in particular for those fields of production like cotton and tobacco where large numbers of people gain their employment by producing for export.

—HENRY A. WALLACE, May 27, 1946. . . . new apple orchards established in Australia and Canada, the British taste in tobacco shifted to Empire types, Brazil's cotton fields extended over some of her vast territories, the Empire cotton growths improved and expanded. —DEAN ACHESON, March 13, 1946. THE REALITY Great Britain received an American loan of $3,750,000,000 in 1946. A year later, Britain's economy was unable to carry the finanTHE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 547 cial burden of the maintenance of troops and economic aid in Greece, and the United States assumed that responsibility. Another year later, 1948, and new appeals were made for American financial aid. Thus the Marshall Plan program began. Almost half of the contributions made under that program went to Britain. And yet, in the fall of 1952, the English economic situation was in the most precarious position since the war: The British government is planning to make what is described as an entirely new approach to the United States.

. . . such measures as ... large American investment, government and private, in underdeveloped areas of the British Commonwealth. . . . Monetary help, possibly from the International Monetary Fund or possibly directly from the American and Canadian governments. —WASHINGTON (D.C.) POST, August 25, 1952 To PASS THE GREEK-TURKISH AID PROGRAM (1947) The Promise The Threat This [World War II] is an The foreign policy and nainvestment in world freedom tional security of this country and world peace. . . . The are involved . . . assistance assistance that I am recomis imperative if Greece is to mending . . . should safe-survive as a free nation. . . . guard this investment and Turkey now needs our supmake sure that it was not in port ... for the maintenance vain. of its national integrity. —HARRY S. TRUMAN, . . . Confusion and disorder March 12, 1947. might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN, March 12, 1947. . . . the United States, in ... the economic stakes are undertaking aid to Greece enormous. If these countries and Turkey, is not assuming and other countries should 548 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE British obligations or under-adopt closed economies, you writing British policy there can just imagine the effect or elsewhere. We propose, that it would have on our rather, a program designed by foreign trade, and I think this government to promote that [effect] should not be stability in Greece, Turkey, lost sight of in considering and the Middle East gen-this matter, erally, and thereby to pave —WILLIAM L. CLAYTON, the way for peaceful and March 25,1947. democratic development. —DEAN ACHESON, March 24, 1947. THE REALITY The Truman spokesmen gave the impression that the problem of Greece was one of temporary relief to avoid any suspicions that the United States was taking on a permanent public charge. Actually, the United States, through the Export-Import Bank, had already loaned Greece $25,000,000 in January, 1946, without any substantial results for the Greek economy. At the end of a year of aid, and the expenditure of over $150,000,000, Greece was still unable to secure a loan from the International Bank. To keep Greece relatively solvent the United States, to date, has been forced to send more than an additional billion dollars of aid. Greece in 1952 was still unable to operate without assistance from America.

Another major argument for Greek aid was the problem of Communist guerrillas. In March of 1947, before American money began to reach Greece, the State Department estimated the number of guerrillas at 13,000. But by March of 1948, after almost a year of American aid, the guerrillas were officially reported at 26,000. The decrease in guerrilla activity came, finally, not from American aid, but as a result of the Titoist break between Moscow and Yugoslavia. This break meant the closing of the Yugoslav and Albanian borders to Communist volunteers and supplies. The control of the Communist problem in Greece was a product of Yugoslav action THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 549 rather than of the Truman program. Politically, Greece still remains a highly unstable country. To PASS THE MARSHALL PLAN (1948) The Promise The Threat Our decision will deter-Considered in terms of our mine in large part the future own economy, European reof the people of that conti-covery is essential ... no nent [Europe]. It will also economy, not even one so determine in large part strong as our own, can rewhether the free nations of main healthy and prosperous the world can look forward in a world of poverty and with hope to a peaceful and want.

prosperous future as independent states or whether they must live in poverty and in fear of selfish totalitarian aggression. —HARRY S. TRUMAN, December 19, 1947. It will require sacrifices today in order that we may enjoy security and peace tomorrow ... the establishment of enduring peace and the maintenance of true freedom for the individual . . . I ask that the European recovery program be judged in these terms and on this basis. . . . The program is not one of a series of piecemeal relief measures. —GEORGE C. MARSHALL, January 8, 1948. —HARRY S. TRUMAN, December 19, 1947. Left to their own [European] resources there will be, I believe, no escape from economic distress so intense, social discontents so violent, political confusion so widespread, and hopes of the future so shattered that the historic base of western civilization . . . will take on a new form in the image of the tyranny we fought to destroy in Germany.

. . . Our national security will be seriously threatened.

55° PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE ... a recovery program for Europe of the size and nature proposed by the President will serve the cause of peace. ... I feel that this is an opportunity for the first time in history to get real economic cooperation in Europe through peaceful means. . . . this program is one of the most farreaching undertakings for peace and for human progress ever undertaken by this or any other country. —W. AVERELL HARRIMAN, January 12, 1948. We shall in effect live in an armed camp, regulated and controlled. —GEORGE C. MARSHALL, January 8, 1948. ... we must face the reality that dire consequences are almost certain if we fail to move decisively at this critical juncture in world affairs. . . . The decline of Europe would require farreaching readjustments of agricultural and industrial production and distribution in this country and in other areas. It might well affect our ability to obtain needed imports and, particularly, essential raw materials.

—W. AVERELL HARRIMAN, January 12, 1948. After a year of operation, the Marshall Plan again came before Congress for new appropriations. New promises were not only made for the future but the achievements of the program were presented in heartening terms: Events have proved that the hopes reposed in this program, both here and abroad, have not been misplaced. . . . There has been no advance in totalitarianism on the continent of Europe . . . the free community of Europe has not only held its own, but it has, during this period, made great strides forward. . . . There have been definite advances made in Europe in the field of collective security. . . . The results of the first year of its operation definitely establish THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 551 that the measure was sound. There have . . . been significant steps toward the eventual development of a closer political union. —DEAN ACHESON, February 8, 1949.

... we are winning this struggle for freedom and peace. In my opinion, the pressures in Europe are beginning to reverse. They had been strongly from the east to the west. With economic recovery gaining momentum, with new hope and growing confidence in the hearts of men in western Europe, pressures are beginning to move from west to east. —W. AVERELL HARRIMAN, February 8, 1949. THE REALITY Four years after the inception of the Marshall Plan, some estimate can be made of its success in solving the economic problems of Europe. It was not intended, as General Marshall pointed out in 1948, to be one of a series of piecemeal relief measures. The serious limitations of the Marshall Plan's accomplishments are pointed out by the able economists of the Economic Commission for Europe: The first quarter of 1952 was in all too many countries a fairly close replica of its predecessor. Industrial employment and production as a whole stagnated or fell, even after allowance for the normal seasonal drop, in all the big western European industrial countries except France. . . .

Exports marked time and these countries—the United Kingdom and France-—which were already in balance-of-payments difficulties continued to experience an alarming drain on their reserves of foreign exchange.

552 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE In transactions with the United States, western Europe as a whole lost gold and dollars to the tune of $800 million in the second half of 1951 and the drain continued unabated during the first quarter of 1952. * * * The first quarter of 1952, like its two predecessors, was a period of stagnation in nearly all branches of retail trade and of actual depression in some. In spite of attempts by traders to work up a mood of optimism in the press, there seems to have been little improvement since. —ECONOMIC BULLETIN FOR EUROPE, IV (August, 1952), 1. The history of our times abounds in further examples of this relatively novel technique of our government in its foreign policy. The North Atlantic Pact, the Military Assistance Program, the renewal of Selective Service, and the Mutual Security Program were all presented to the public and to Congress with a wealth of promises and threats. Amidst this whirl of words the future historian of the Truman administration must pursue his search for reality, slashing through the illusions of our time.

FOOTNOTES-CHAPTER VIII 1. Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley, How War Came (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), p. 258. 2. Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact oi American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), p. 13. 3. Ibid. 4. Maurice P. A. Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950), pp. 126-27. 5. Roger N. Baldwin (and others), The Land oi the Dead (New York: Committee Against Mass Expulsion, 1946), pp. 23-24. See also Juergen Thorwald, Flight in the Winter, London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1953.

THE BANKRUPTCY OF A POLICY 553 6. Now confirmed by an official government estimate. 7. Peace Action (March, 1945), pp. 2-3. 8. J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1944), p. 74. 9. Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1946), p. 72. 10. Montgomery Belgion, Victor's Justice (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), p. 61. 11. For a devastating exposure of the moral sham, legal fantasies, and disastrous results of these war-crime trials, see F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (London: Thompson and Smith, 1948). A greatly expanded American edition of this book has been published (1953) by the C. C. Nelson Publishing Company of Appleton, Wisconsin. SELECTED REFERENCES Material substantiating and elaborating the statements in this chapter will be found in such books as the following: Belgion, Montgomery. Victor's Justice; A Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Friend Recently in Germany. ("Humanist Library," No. 10.) Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949.

Biddle, Francis M. The Fear of Freedom; introduction by Harold L. Ickes. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1951. Bullitt, William C. The Great Globe Itself; a Preface to World Affairs. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946. Byrnes, James F. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947. Chamberlin, William H. America's Second Crusade. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950. Dallin, David J. Soviet Russia and the Far East. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948. Dulles, Allen W. Germany's Underground. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947. Flynn, John T. As We Go Marching. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., J944-. The Roosevelt Myth. New York: DevinAdair Company, 1948. . While You Slept,: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It. New York: DevinAdair Company, 1951. Hankey, Maurice P. A., Lord. Politics, Trials and Errors. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950. Hughes, Emrys. Winston Churchill in War and Peace. Glasgow: Unity Publishing Company, 1949.

554 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Lane, Arthur Bliss. I Saw Poland Betrayed. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1948. Mears, Helen. Mirror for Americans: Japan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948. Neumann, William L. Making the Peace, 1941-1945; The Diplomacy of the Wartime Conferences. Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Foreign Affairs, 1950. Orwell, George. Nineteen EightyFour. New York: Ilarcourt, Brace & Company, 1949. Reel, A. Frank. The Case of General Yamashita. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Roosevelt, Elliott. As He Saw It; with a foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, Inc., 1946. Rothfels, Hans. The German Opposition to Hitler; An Appraisal. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1948. St. George, Maximilian John, and Dennis, Lawrence. A Trial on Trial; The Great Sedition Trial of 1944. Chicago: National Civil Rights Committee, 1946.

Spaight, J. M. Bombing Vindicated. London: Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1944. Thorwald, Juergen, Flight in the Winter. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., Utley, Freda. China Story. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951. . The High Cost of Vengeance. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949. Veale, F. J. P. Advance to Barbarism. Appleton, Wis.: C. C. Nelson Publishing Company, 1953. Zink, Harold. American Military Government in Germany. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947.