Penguin History of the United States of America (108 page)

Russian resistance was doing him frightful, possibly mortal, damage; but it was clearly essential to engage him elsewhere, for without some relief of
pressure the Soviet Union might yet crack, and unless American soldiers were promptly set to fighting Germans, the country might lose interest in the Atlantic theatre and insist on giving priority to the war in the Pacific. For it was not only on the West Coast that Americans thought of the war as one of vengeance against Japan above all else; and in a people’s war it may be that the followers, as much as the leaders, will decide what it is all about. Europe’s claims to priority were not invariably and universally self-evident. American Jews could be content to know that they were fighting for the survival of their race and religion as well as for their own lives and happiness. A great many of their fellow-citizens were happy to go to the rescue of beleaguered Britain, whose resolute stand in 1940 had been much admired. Few, it is to be presumed, shared General Mac Arthur’s passionate personal commitment to liberate the Philippines; much more representative was the case of Willie and Joe, who had joined the National Guard in peacetime for ‘meals, clothes and a couple of bucks for Saturday drilling’,
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and then suddenly found that their division was mobilized and that they were full-time soldiers at $21 per month. Such soldiers, and their families at home, needed a lead, in strategy as well as ideals; and Roosevelt also had to consider those Americans who, as one journalist put it, ‘want the United States to win so long as England loses. Some people want the United States to win so long as Russia loses. And some people want the United States to win so long as Roosevelt loses.’ At the very least it was necessary to keep them all entertained.

So the British and American high commands, now working in double harness as the Combined Chiefs of Staff, evolved and executed (with much unhappy bickering) a triumphantly successful strategy. An American expeditionary force, commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower (soon to be universally known as ‘Ike’), landed in North Africa and helped the British to clear it of Germans (1942–3); then Sicily and Italy were invaded, drawing off fifty or so divisions from the Russian front; then, when a great armada had been assembled and the Germans, it was hoped, had been sufficiently weakened and distracted in both East and South, the Western Allies at last invaded the continent, on D-Day, 6 June 1944. The Germans fought on tenaciously and occasionally brilliantly, but they were under too much pressure: as in 1914–18, but now against infinitely higher odds, they proved unable to sustain a two-front war. The Americans, British and French, under the supreme command of Eisenhower, pushed east; the Russians pushed west; German cities, industries and oil supplies were obliterated under a hurricane of bombs; at last, when even Hitler could see that the end was near, the Nazi dictator committed suicide, and soon
afterwards the remains of the German forces surrendered unconditionally, in May 1945.

The war against Japan had not stood still meanwhile; in fact it had made wonderfully rapid progress. Nimitz and MacArthur had begun their counter-attack in New Guinea as early as July 1942: they had reconquered much of the enormous island by January 1943, and during the same time dogged heroism had captured the little island of Guadalcanal, thus giving a name of glory to America’s military annals and opening a crack in the defence perimeter of the Japanese Empire. More than that: these campaigns taught the Americans the necessary techniques for their task. At the heart of them lay the idea of ‘island-hopping’. Whereas the Japanese hoped to wage a war of defensive attrition, in which, by disputing every inch of ground, they might wear down their opponents, the Americans imposed a war of selective attack: they bypassed islands and bases of secondary importance and concentrated overwhelming force against those few points that they really had to capture. MacArthur’s variant on this was ‘leapfrogging’: he simply bypassed strong Japanese points altogether, leaving them, as it was said, to wither on the vine while he seized weak points in their rear at comparatively light cost in American casualties. The Japanese fought with extraordinary heroism and tenacity, but in vain. Air power was the crucial factor: the Americans, thanks to their immense industrial superiority, were able to overwhelm their enemy with the production of planes and bombs, sinking his ships, destroying his fighters, flattening his defences on the ground. The US navy won victories large and small: for example, the Bismarck Sea (March 1943), the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and Leyte Gulf (October 1944); the army and the Marine Corps (which particularly distinguished itself in the capture of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945) finished the job. On 1 April 1945, MacArthur returned to the Philippines, as he had promised. The next island to be captured would be Okinawa, in the Ryuku chain; beyond lay Japan herself.

By the early summer of 1945, then, the war in Europe was over, and the war in the East was nearly as good as won; but long before then a new set of problems was beginning to perplex American policy: problems which were to prove much more intractable than those of the war had been. The United States had shown itself more than capable of dealing with its enemies; but the question of how to handle its friends now began to seem too much for it, for it was bound up with the question of how, after such an experience, the Americans envisaged their country’s future place in the world.

Pearl Harbor had taught the Americans several useful lessons: that they ought anyway to look to their defences; that other nations could not be trusted to leave them alone; and that, if they wanted a stable, peaceful world order in which American values could make their way to universal acceptance while the American economy flourished, they would have to work for it. It was the old Wilsonian proposition, and the Americans (feeling, among other things, rather guilty about their rejection of the prophet in
1919–20) enthusiastically adopted the old Wilsonian programme: collective security and an international organization to keep the peace. America must always be ready to act effectively in concert with other free and peace-loving peoples to protect the good order of the world, which victory in the war was going to establish. In the years after 1945 a few solemn and eminent noodles like Senator Robert Taft (son of the twenty-sixth President) would try, in a half-hearted way, to revive the old isolationist verities; but they never made much headway. In future the crucial debate would be between schools of internationalists. This was all to the good; but although the Americans plumed themselves on their new-found strength and righteous purpose, and on having at last accepted Wilson’s teaching, they overlooked the point that this teaching was no longer entirely adequate to the world’s problems, if it ever had been. Many were as blind as ever to certain new and old and important lessons.

Their President and natural spokesman was not among them. Roosevelt has been called a ‘renegade Wilsonian’.
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This is rather unfair: FDR never wavered in his commitment to Wilson’s vision of a green and peaceful world, and the manner in which the two men exercised their leadership in war was very similar. But Roosevelt had despaired of the original Wilsonian mechanisms for achieving universal peace and freedom (he dismissed the League of Nations as ‘nothing more than a debating society and a poor one at that’) and, more significantly, saw promise in the very principles and techniques which Wilson had renounced. If he did not actually favour secret treaties, he certainly believed in Great Power hegemony. After the war, he thought, responsibility for the happiness of the world would lie with those he called ‘the Four Policemen’ – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China. He once went so far as to tell Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, that all other countries should be disarmed. And he never wavered in his belief that agreement and co-operation between the Four Policemen were essential. That was why he was prepared to go to such lengths in wooing Stalin; and in spite of bursts of irritation at Russian boorishness he never gave up, even at the very end of his life. The Yalta agreements, negotiated with Stalin and Churchill in February 1945, were the high point of his policy and the achievement by which it should be judged.

The doctrine of the Four Policemen shows that Roosevelt had, as he claimed, made a thoughtful study of Woodrow Wilson’s failure. The Versailles settlement had collapsed not, chiefly, because of its injustices, but because the victors of 1918 had lost the will to support it and each other. Roosevelt was determined to avoid this mistake. Unfortunately he overlooked the fact that, in statesmanship, too great a preoccupation to avoid the errors of the past makes it likely that you will fall into the errors of the present. Roosevelt’s policy was ultimately at the mercy of forces somewhat
outside his control, and it is perhaps the truest criticism that can be made of them that he did not take enough precautions to influence or combat these forces.

His first difficulty was with the American people. In the winter of 1940–41 he had talked, not of the Four Policemen, but of the Four Freedoms.
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In August 1941, he and Churchill, meeting at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, drew up and issued what they called the Atlantic Charter, setting out their war-aims. Their Charter lacked something of the vigour and precision of the Fourteen Points, but it committed the United Nations
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to self-determination, democratic self-government, free trade, universal peace and universal disarmament. Excellent objects: perhaps they will be attained one day. Roosevelt did not say how they could be, and carefully excluded any mention of the League of Nations or any similar body from the document (the British had wanted one inserted). All in vain: in the next few years the American people convinced themselves that the ‘wider and permanent system of general security’ which the Charter mentioned must be a reformed League of Nations; and Roosevelt had to acquiesce in the idea. Characteristically, he wove his own idea of the Four Policemen together with the popular programme of a reformed League, so that the United Nations Organization, as it eventually emerged, consisted of the Security Council, where, it was thought, the great powers, each with its veto, would make the decisions that mattered, in concert, and a debating society, the General Assembly. A contradiction, then, was built into the very structure of the UN, last of the alphabet agencies, that did not promise well for its future, and arose from the contradictions and self-deceptions of American policy. A less airy approach might at the very least have spared the world something of the slow disillusionment with the new organization that has deepened with every decade since its foundation, as tragic an occurrence as the betrayal of 1919, so great were the hopes and energies that have thereby been brought to nothing.

Roosevelt liked to think that he was a more realistic statesman than Wilson, but the gulf between aspirations and actuality in his Four Freedoms speech is larger than anything in Wilson’s utterances. Thus he promised ‘a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. This is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation…’ While his words raised hopes, his
actions ensured their disappointment. It followed, also, that he could not teach the Americans the
realpolitik
he was practising: it would have shocked them too much. It might even have revived isolationism, for the Four Policemen arrangement was strikingly like an entangling alliance. Many Americans might have objected to a proposal that they should constantly patrol and discipline the wayward globe. So Roosevelt kept his own counsel and spoke of the association with Britain and the Soviet Union as a league of right-minded, democratic peoples. This, too, was unfortunate. Not only was it a travesty of the already notorious facts about Stalinism, it initiated the tradition by which Presidents in the next few decades came to think that foreign policy is too serious a matter to entrust to the people – hence a long story of deception and disaster.

The other pillars of the projected Rooseveltian peace were almost equally rickety. Nobody could object to the proposed Atlantic Utopia, but a great many people outside America were likely to have serious objections to any particular proposals for its realization. The British, for instance, had good reason to baulk at the principle of universal free trade, since their economic recovery in the thirties had largely been brought about by protection and imperial preference. They accepted the American programme only because the United States was so strong and they needed its help so much. They were somewhat rueful about the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This set up a new framework for international financial and economic relations; a world monetary system pegged to the dollar and governed, in the last resort, by the U S Treasury. It was the last heavy financial sacrifice required of the British in the name of allied victory, and very heavy it was, providing a safety net for the British economy (through the International Monetary Fund) which was to prove invaluable in the coming decades, but at the same time saddling Britain with unduly heavy financial burdens that hindered her financial recovery. Yet Bretton Woods was a civilized arrangement, to which Britain freely consented, that had been properly and reasonably negotiated. There could be no guarantee that the United States would always behave so well. For the ghost of mercantilism walked again. It was an ancient tradition of American business that it could look to the federal and state governments for assistance when required; and now that the stricken world needed American capital as never before the pressures were naturally enormous to extend this tradition of usefulness into the foreign field. The combination of expansionist American free enterprise and the immense strength of the US government would be irresistible; and it might well lead the American people into all sorts of dangerous, undesirable or plain unjust dealings with other countries. ‘The world must be made safe for the American profit system’ was not a slogan that the world itself would find self-evidently just.