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How Americans
Have Been Misled about World War II
By Robert Higgs
19/03/08 "Lewrockwell"
--- Whereas
historians obsessively trace every event's causal lineage
further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the
opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began
immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this
unfortunate tendency "truncating the antecedents." Among the
general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of
historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and
mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part
because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest
in propagating them.
I was
recently struck by this tendency while reading comments at a
group blog associated with the History News Network. A
commentator there had mentioned that the blame for World War II
is not as cut and dried as Americans typically assume it to be,
and hence some revisionism is long overdue. In response, another
discussant, whose previous contributions to the blog show that
he is an intelligent man, expressed bafflement: "Yes, obviously
some revisionism regarding the 'great allied leaders' of WWII is
called for. But an attempt to be revisionist about the justness
of a war where U.S. territory is attacked by one opponent and
war is declared on the U.S. by the other opponent is sort of
like justifying the War on Iraq on the basis of mythical WMD."
Like
Americans in general, this man takes the Japanese attack at
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German declaration of
war on December 11, 1941, as dispositive evidence that Japan and
Germany started the war that ensued between these nations and
the United States, and therefore he concludes that they should
be held responsible for it. In a later post, he persists in this
interpretation by saying: "Nation X attacks Nation Y. One or the
other is right. Either Nation Y is a victim or the attack was a
'justified pre-emptive attack.' Yes, the response may be
disproportionate, etc., but those really aren't reasons to
declare Nation Y 'wrong.' Or the two 'equally wrong.'" This view
represents a classic case of truncating the antecedents.
Many
people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that
the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only
after its declarations of war against these nations in December
1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long
time before making these declarations. Its warmaking took a
variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted "shoot
[Germans] on sight" convoys, which might include British ships,
in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route
from the United States to Great Britain, even though German
U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating
attacks on American shipping. The United States and Great
Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine
weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and
undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S.
military actively cooperated with the British military in combat
operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the
British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines,
which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook
in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and
assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were
fighting the Germans. The U.S. government provided military and
other supplies and assistance, including
warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with
Japan. The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the
British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East
Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most
important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of
increasingly stringent
economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a
predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably
provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the
Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that
the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had
embargoed.
Consider
these summary statements by George Victor, by no means a
Roosevelt basher, in his recently published, well-documented
book
The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable
(Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007).
Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with
Germany in the spring of 1941 – into a shooting war on a
small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S.
military participation. Japan's attack on December 7 enabled
him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration.
Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a
long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution
reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In
the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken
early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the
United State – a declaration that did not come, to their
disappointment. . . . Roosevelt told his ambassador to
France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against
Germany was certain but must wait for an "incident," which
he was "confident that the Germans would give us." . . .
Establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first
shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt's tactics. . . .
He seems [eventually] to have concluded – correctly as it
turned out – that Japan would be easier to provoke into a
major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be.
(pp. 179–80, 184, 185, emphasis added)
The
claim that Japan attacked the United States without
provocation was . . . typical rhetoric. It worked because
the public did not know that the administration had expected
Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had
taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting to lose a war with the
United States – and lose it disastrously – Japan's leaders
had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this
point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence
has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to
negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and
concessions, which the United States countered with
increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan's
decision to go to war with the United States if the talks
"break down" that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . .
According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said
he hoped for an "incident" in the Pacific to bring the
United States into the European war. (pp. 15, 202, 240)
These
facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are
for the most part anything but new; many of them have been
available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953,
anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays
on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and
early 1940s that showed the various ways in which the U.S.
government bore responsibility for the country's eventual
engagement in World War II – showed, in short, that the
Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country into the war
and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner
or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite
public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear
to have been the victim of an aggressor's unprovoked attack.
(See
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of
the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its
Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes [Caldwell, Id.:
Caxton Printers, 1953].) As Secretary of War Henry Stimson
testified after the war, "we needed the Japanese to commit the
first overt act" (qtd. in Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth, p.
105).
At
present, however, sixty-seven or more years after these events,
probably not one American in 1,000 – nay, not one in 10,000 –
has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the
pro-Roosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in
this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular
writing about U.S. engagement in the "Good War." Only a few
years ago, when an essay of mine was included in a collection
being considered for publication by the University of Chicago
Press, the press's expert outside reader expressed shock that I
had mentioned in passing Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor maneuvers
to bring the country into the war, and he declared that crackpot
statements of this sort would discredit the entire volume. (In
deference to the editor and to discourage the volume's rejection
by the press, I removed the single obnoxious sentence, which was
not central to my purposes in the essay in any event, and
eventually
the book was published, notwithstanding this "expert's"
negative appraisal of my own contributions to it.)
Observations such the foregoing ones tend to elicit angry
accusations of "Holocaust denial" and "moral equivalence," among
many others. For the record, then, let me avow that I do not
deny the Holocaust, nor do I regard the Roosevelt administration
as morally equivalent to Hitler's regime. While I am making my
innocence plain, let me also avow that I do not regard the
Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to Stalin's
regime. This latter comparison comes up surprisingly seldom,
however, given that the two regimes were close allies in the
war, and, most important, that the major outcome of the war was
to leave Stalin and his puppet regimes astride the greater part
of the European continent in an area that stretches from the
Urals to Bohemia and from Estonia to Azerbaijan. In short, if
anyone deserves to be recognized as the war's "winner," that
person is Stalin. Somehow this fact has never seemed to me to
fit comfortably into a characterization of this horrible
conflict as the "Good War." Perhaps I'm just unduly squeamish.
The fate
of the European Jews also requires mention, inasmuch as after
the war many people professed to believe that saving the Jews
was the war's prime justification. Aside from the fact that none
of the Allied leaders held that view – Roosevelt himself was a
genteel anti-Semite of the sort typical in his time, place, and
class – the undeniable truth is that the Jews were not saved:
approximately 80 percent of them had perished by the end of the
war. Little wonder, too, because U.S. and British war plans did
not give high priority to saving them; as a rule, those plans
completely disregarded the urgent need to rescue the surviving
Jews.
Few
Americans have ever entertained the idea that their country
ought not to have entered World War II. They persist in
believing that they – the ordinary people of the country, as
distinct from its political leaders and their foreign
legionnaires – were genuinely threatened by the Japanese and the
Germans and therefore that the war "had to be fought." Even
George Victor, from whose honest and useful book The Pearl
Harbor Myth I quoted earlier, has brought himself to believe
that Roosevelt had excellent motives for his persistent
provocation of Germany and Japan. Thus, he writes: "As Germany
began to prepare for conquest, genocide, and destruction of
civilization, the leader of only one major nation saw what was
coming and made plans to stop it. As a result of Roosevelt's
leadership, a planned sequence of events carried out in the
Atlantic and more decisively in the Pacific brought the United
States into one of the world's greatest cataclysms. The American
contribution helped turn the war's tide and saved the world from
a destructive tyranny unparalleled in modern history" (p. 16).
Unparalleled? What about Stalin's tyranny or Mao's? Regardless
of one's answer to this question, however, another question
remains – whether Nazi Germany, as evil as it certainly was, had
the ability to defeat the United States, much less to "destroy
civilization." Americans love to speculate about German
acquisition of atomic weapons, intercontinental ballistic
missiles, and other military capabilities the Nazis, in fact,
never came close to acquiring. As things actually stood, Germany
lacked the capability to invade and conquer even Great Britain.
Conquering the United States, thousands of miles across the
Atlantic, was realistically inconceivable. Whatever else one may
take U.S. leaders' motives for war to have been in the early
1940's, national self-preservation could not have been among
them, unless they were shockingly ill-advised as to the
economic, logistical, and technological constraints on the
German war machine. In reality, that machine had its hands more
than full in dealing with the Soviets on the eastern front, not
to mention the British and others who were pestering it on other
fronts.
Thirty-six years ago, Bruce M. Russett's little book
No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S.
Entry into World War II (New York: Harper & Row,
1972) was published. Russett noted at the outset that "[p]articipation
in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct,
nearly in the realm of theology" (p. 12). In this regard,
nothing has changed since 1972. Yet Russett argued forcefully,
with logic and evidence, that this orthodoxy rests on shaky
grounds. He concluded that World War II "may well have been an
unnecessary war that did little for us and that we need not have
fought" (p. 20). Nor did he concede that although the war may
have been imprudent on instrumental grounds, it was well
justified on moral grounds: "it is precisely moral
considerations that demand a reexamination of our World War II
myths," he insisted (p. 21). Although much has been added to the
corpus of World War II scholarship since the publication of
Russett's book, this little volume remains unjustly neglected,
and its argument deserves serious consideration even now.
Of
course, many other great events in American history might be
examined as I have suggested U.S. participation in World War II
ought to be examined – by taking the relevant antecedents fully
into account. For historians, this advice should be unnecessary;
if they know anything, they know that history did not begin
yesterday. The American people at large, however, remain
extremely vulnerable to misleading descriptions of the
government's actions, especially its plunges into foreign wars –
accounts of which generally disregard many relevant antecedents,
particularly those that cast blame on the United States for
stirring up enmities abroad. Yet, any
honest account of U.S. foreign policy reveals that this
country's government has engaged again and again in foreign
interventions whose official justifications cannot withstand
critical scrutiny. Many of these interventions amounted to
little more than
armed errand-running for privileged American business
interests seeking to beat foreigners into line and, not
coincidentally, to line their own pockets. This aspect of U.S.
foreign policy famously led General Smedley Butler to declare
that
war is a racket.
Time,
some wit has said, is God's way of keeping everything from
happening at once. Taking this idea to heart, we may remind
ourselves and others that whenever the U.S. government launches
a new war abroad, we would be well advised to look into what
happened in that part of the world previously, perhaps over the
course of several decades. We may well discover that the locals
have legitimate grievances against our government or some of its
corporate cronies. Or we may simply discover that the situation
is more complicated than it has been made out to be. We know one
thing for certain at the outset, however: we cannot rely on the
government to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth. Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water
is to vampires.
Robert Higgs [send
him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the
Independent Institute and editor of
The Independent Review. His most recent book is
Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of
Government. He is also the author of
Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy,
Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11
and
Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.
Copyright ©
2008 Robert Higgs
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