Tgk1946's Blog

From The Long Shadow (David Reynolds, 2013) pp274-8

By 1944 America’s GDP was equivalent to those of Britain, Russia, Germany and Japan combined.

Britain’s more limited resources, plus the mental constraints of the Great War, made a war of annihilation inconceivable – hence Churchill’s indirect strategy – whereas the United States had not only the capacity but also the intent. Reading 1914-18 differently from the British and, like the US military, in the light of the American Civil War, Roosevelt proclaimed in January 1943 that the ‘elimination’ of German ‘war power’ required nothing less than the enemy’s ‘unconditional surrender’ – explicitly adopting the phrase popularized by Grant in 1862. In using it FDR was, in part, seeking to address Russian suspicions that the British and American failure to mount a Second Front in France in 1942 reflected a readiness to sign a separate peace with Germany. But the President’s deeper motive in issuing the ‘unconditional surrender’ statement was to avoid a repetition of the ‘stab in the back’ legends peddled by Hitler and extreme German nationalists after 1918. This time Germany had to be totally and unequivocally defeated. Roosevelt had developed an idee fixe about innate German militarism and aggression. ‘There are two schools of thought,’ he wrote in 1944: ‘those who would be altruistic in regard to the Germans’ (a view exemplified, he believed, in Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace) and ‘those who would adopt a much “tougher” attitude’, as advocated at the time by Clemenceau and his own relative Teddy Roosevelt. ‘Most decidedly’, FDR went on, ‘I belong to the latter school.’ In his view ‘unconditional surrender’ was only the first step to a full and lasting ‘elimination’ of German ‘war power’. He flirted with the idea of erasing German industry, fundamental to war-making power, and he certainly wanted the country dismembered into a number of smaller states, as in the days before Bismarck. The important thing, he insisted, was ‘not to leave in the German mind the concept of the Reich’ – that word ‘should be stricken from the language’.

The other big lesson Roosevelt drew from the previous war was the need to ensure a more effective peace. Never, as we have seen, a wholehearted supporter of Wilson’s conception of the League of Nations, he concluded the the League had become ‘nothing more than a debating society’ and, he added, ‘a poor one at that’. As early as 1923 FDR proposed an ‘Executive Council’ of the league, with a mix of permanent and rotating members, to give weight and direction to the league’s deliberations, and this was the idea he developed during the war. When he and Churchill drafted the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, it was the Prime Minister who wanted to include a clear Commitment to an ‘effective international organization’ to placate what he called ‘extreme internationalists’ back home. The President was completely against such wording because of the ‘suspicions and opposition’ that would be aroused in America. In any case he felt that ‘nothing could be more futile than the reconstitution of a body such as the Assembly of the League of Nations’. Effective peacekeeping after the war would depend on what he quaintly called ‘the policemen, – initially envisaged as America and Britain but gradually expanded during the war to include the Soviet Union, China and France. Smaller Allied powers such as Norway or the Netherlands could, he conceded, be allowed an ‘ostensible’ role in global policing but nothing more than that because none of these nations ‘would have the practical means of taking any effective or, at least, considerable part in the task involved.’ Roosevelt’s conception of international security was embodied in the structure of the eventual United Nations in 1945, with the General Assembly balanced by a Security Council in which the Big Five were permanent members – echoing, as FDR liked to point out, his proposal of 1923.

In 1944-5 the US State Department made a huge effort, working with internationalist groups, to promote the United Nations to the American public as the country’s ‘Second Chance’. ‘Today in 1944, we are living through experiences that parallel 1918,’ wrote Charlotte B. Mahon, director of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. ‘Never before has one generation had the privilege of looking back and profiting by its own tragic mistakes. We are that generation.’ The Wilson Foundation, almost moribund in the 1930s, was rejuvenated by the War, doubling its staff in 1944. And the Great War president was now resurrected as the self-sacrificial pioneer of American internationalism – canonized in a series of simplistic biographies and especially in the Twentieth Century Fox movie Wilson, which premiered in August 1944 (plate18).

Wilson was the obsession of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who spec1alized in biographical epics such as Young Mr. Lincoln and now wanted to bring to the big screen what he called ‘the tragic story of one man who literally gave his life to the cause of world peace.’ With lavish sets and massive casts, production costs alone were an unprecedented $5.2 million – $1 million more than even Gone with the Wind but box office returns, especially in America’s hinterland, were not good and the studio ended up making a massive $2.2 million loss. Zanuck’s refusal to cast a matinee idol such as William Powell or Ronald Colman as Wilson – rather than an unknown Canadian lookalike Alexander Knox – was cited as one reason for the financial disaster. Another was Zanuck’s obstinate insistence on Wilson as the title, rather than more evocative alternatives such as In Time to Come or Goodbye Dolly Gray (the 1914-18 marching song). But the root problem was probably the personality of Wilson himself who, despite strenuous efforts to play him up as a family man who loved sport and songs, was always going to come over as an earnest professor and preacher – certainly not the sort of guy with whom the average American would want to spend a Saturday evening. ‘Why should they pay seventy-five cents to see Wilson on the screen’, asked Zanuck’s old family doctor in Nebraska, ‘when they wouldn’t pay ten cents to see him alive?”

Yet the fact that Wilson was a commercial flop should not obscure its political impact. By February 1945 an estimated 10 million Americans had seen the film at premium rates, even before its release at normal prices to second-run cinemas. Although some Republican papers denounced the movie as ‘fourth term propaganda’ for ‘Franklin Delano Wilson’, the response of critics was highly positive. Life magazine called Wilson ‘one of the best pictures Hollywood ever made’; another review was headlined ‘The Movie to Prevent World War Three’. The film’s message was stark, even melodramatic, with Wilson as the goody and his Republican opponent, Henry Cabot Lodge, as the baddy, frustrating the President’s great crusade for his own narrow political ends. At the end Wilson, invalided by his stroke and no longer president, tells his former Cabinet that the ideal of the League of Nations will never die and that ‘it may come about in a better way than we proposed’. Then, taking his wife’s arm, he walks out of the room and into history. The message was not lost on audiences. Wilson’s Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels felt those at the New York premiere left the cinema feeling ‘that this generation must repair the errors which made possible the present holocaust’.54 Interest in Wilson and his writings rose dramatically and in July 1945 Americans ranked him fifth among the greatest men in the nation’s history. Little wonder that FDR considered the film ‘excellent’ and predicted it would ‘have a splendid effect’ – even though muttering to his physician as Wilson collapsed with his stroke, ‘By God, that’s not going to happen to me’.

Ironic words, of course. By the time the United Nations Organization was inaugurated in April 1945, Roosevelt had been dead for two weeks – taken by a massive cerebral haemorrhage – and friction with Stalin over Poland was already straining the inner circle of great powers that he had laboured so hard to create. Roosevelt never envisaged a permanent American military presence in Europe: at Yalta he warned that Congress would oblige him to bring all GIs home within two years. Some in the British Foreign Office feared a repeat of 1919-20, with the United States swinging away from international cooperation into ‘an expansionist isolationism of a highly inconvenient character’.56 This was why Churchill bent all his efforts during and after the war to forging a permanent alliance with the United States, making the term ‘special relationship’ one of his catchphrases. His famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, often seen as an anti-Soviet clarion call, was actually as much about building a ‘fraternal association’ with America, involving military cooperation, shared bases and even common citizenship. Churchill was talking up the Cold War to justify the special relationship.57

Within four years of victory over Germany, the confrontation with the Soviet Union had drawn the United States into a permanent Atlantic alliance. A decade after the end of the Third Reich, West Germany was a member of NATO. None of that was imaginable in 1945. But even though America’s future world role was still nebulous on Victory Day, no one could doubt American power. The Great Republic has come into its own,’ exulted the New York Herald Tribune: ‘it stands first among the peoples of the earth’. Despite the tensions underlying the war effort, such as fraught race relations and an acute housing shortage, one can already discern an overwhelmingly positive narrative about 1941-5. This also put the war effort of 1917-18 into a more favourable light, while highlighting the mistakes of the League of Nations fight in 1919. The war had not only ended with the total defeat of Germany, as FDR had envisaged, it had also served to pull the United States out of the worst depression 1n 1ts history, which many blamed on the legacies of the Great War. In 1933 unemployment stood at 25 per cent and the figure was still 14 per cent 1n 1940, but by 1944 it was barely 1 per cent. Much of the growth in the labour force was due to the Draft but, for many young Americans, the armed forces offered not only their first secure job but also other novelties such as three square meals a day and decent medical care. Uniquely among the belligerents, the United States produced massive armaments without suppressing civilian living standards – on the contrary between 1939 and 1945 output of alcoholic drinks rose by 50 per cent and that of processed food by 40 per cent. The job half done in 1917-20 had now been finished triumphantly by a country producing both guns and butter on a scale that powered it to the peak of world affairs. War was hell but ‘for millions of Americans on the booming home front, World War II was also a hell of a war’.