THE CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD

WAR TWO TO GREAT BRITAIN:

TWENTY YEARS OF DECLINE,

1939-1959¹

 

Our sins and our good deeds, our virtues and our vices, our good and evil qualities alike, long expended on the stupendous material of a world empire, are leading us, not to one day of reckoning or to two, but to a whole unbroken series of desperate and deadly encounters with those we have wronged.-Francis William Lauderdale Adams, The New Egypt: A Social Sketch (London: T.F. Unwin, 1893), p. 252.

 

On September 3, 1939, at 11 a.m. Great Britain declared war on Germany, thus reversing the story of just over 25 years before, unaccompanied this time by loud cries of outrage aimed at the State with the immoral temerity to declare war first, as had been so general among Germany's enemies in 1914. It served Anglo-American propagandists well to allow the American populace to believe England was an innocent respondent to attack. Undoubtedly the vast majority believed this and may believe it still, even though this was disavowed even while the war was going on. Winston Churchill in his July, 1943 Guildhall speech stated quite plainly, "We entered the war of our free will, without ourselves being directly assaulted." (Time, July 12, 1943, p. 35.) The excuse given the world was Britain's treaty obligation to come to the defense of Poland, dating from the last day of the previous March. France followed England's lead with a similar war declaration on Germany at 5 p.m. the same day.

 

A week and a half before this plunge into war, the world had been stunned by the non-aggression pact signed between Germany and Soviet Russia, the prelude to the last stages of the tense German-Polish controversy and the subsequent invasion of Polish territory by German armies on September 1, following the Polish mobilization. So Britain went to war with the most powerful State in Central Europe, the most powerful State in Eastern Europe remaining an inactive spectator.

 

Rarely has any nation taken up arms in such unpromising if not utterly forbidding circumstances. Its touted promise to Poland promptly became a farce. Britain proved unable to supply Poland even with bows and arrows2 in the latter's record collapse before the German forces. And far from standing ready to maintain the integrity of Poland, Britain took a prominent part in the drama which was to see Poland go into eclipse and remain in that condition under her powerful neighbors, in turn, to this day.

 

Aggravated and continuous invective was turned loose on the Germans and Russians for having consummated their Nichtsangriffspakt, and much of the non-German world wallowed in righteous indignation at this seeming peak of political disgracefulness. But British abuse of them for having done so had the distinct flavor of sour grapes. One thing which was soon forgotten, once the war was under way, was that British leaders had been just as eager as the Germans to negotiate a deal with Stalin prior to September, 1939. If an agreement with the Communists was such an ignoble act on Hitler's part, why had the British tried so hard to achieve one themselves? What would have been their ideological and moral explanation had it been Britain and not Germany which had come to an understanding with the Soviet Union?

 

The subsequent propaganda charges of sole German responsibility for unleashing World War Two through its treaty with Stalin was a masterstroke, and has entered the standard historical accounts with barely a tremor of qualification. All questions of dishonesty and bad history aside, those who charge this have still to present a credible explanation why Britain's wooing of Stalin was morally superior to Hitler's, and how the general situation would have been improved by a Russo-German war, with Britain as a spectator. That this would have been immeasurably preferable politically from an English point of view is undeniable, but given the dominance of warlike Germanophobes in high political places in the Government, it is unlikely Britain would have remained outside the conflict no matter what powers made up the sides.

 

The subsequent behavior of the Chamberlain government suggests that a non-belligerent role was a faint possibility regardless of the lineup on the Continent. There was an establishment in Chamberlain's ranks which had no interest in any solution to the European questions except another war. It demonstrated its influence by rudely cutting off the attempts to negotiate the differences between Britain and Germany after the end of the German-Polish campaign. It was not very hard to frustrate the possibility of a negotiated peace. There was no opposition to speak of to battle down from liberals and socialists as in 1914. On the contrary, for years they had been bellowing for such a test of arms. This was for them a 'peoples' war,' their diversionary and delusionary term for a new blood bath, in which, as usual, the 'people' did the working, paying, bleeding and dying. There were no prominent pacifists such as Russell and MacDonald expressing willingness to go to jail as demonstrations of non-cooperation (those going to jail under Regulation 18B at the start of World War II were representatives of the British Right), and no E. D. Morel to castigate Halifax for his deceptive warmongering, as the former had attacked Lord Grey for his in 1914.3 The largest part of the articulate community was neatly blended into a war party, which indulged in the fixation that maintaining Britain's subsequent monolithic national socialism was sublime democracy in action.

 

This war party had reiterated that this 'people's war' on Germany had been forced on the governments of both Britain and France by popular acclaim, with the sole aim of bringing to a halt German aggression and rescuing the victims of this aggression.4 If this had been true, there is hardly another war in history which failed so completely in its objective. If the elements suffering from German oppression or persecution were distressed before the war began, their subsequent fate made their pre-war existence seem like a paradise by comparison, as the incredible loss of life between 1943 and 1945 and the attendant mass destruction amply prove. Rather than providing succor for the ill-treated, the war party doomed the lot by scorning a negotiated peace and committing themselves to a knock-out, continent-wide, and, ultimately, world-wide, war.

 

The sins of the Germans did not equally apply to the Russians during the 22 months Stalin remained as the tacit ally of Hitler. Winston Churchill in a speech broadcast on October 1, 1939 apologized for the Soviets for their part in the occupation of Eastern Poland, and even the Prime Minister, Chamberlain, told the House of Commons that this aspect of the invasion was an act of self-defense on the part of the Reds. In the hope of weaning away the Russians from their understanding with Germany, the onus for the new Polish partition was placed entirely upon Germany, and the foundations laid for the ultimate disposition of Eastern Europe under Soviet auspices. The caterwauling over alleged Stalinist faithlessness growing out of the empty talk and vague gestures concerning postwar settlements at the February, 1945 Yalta conference is amusing in retrospect. Yalta represented a solemn convention where survivors gather to ratify the death of an aunt. The disposition of Soviet military power at that moment foreshadowed the political realities that were to follow.

 

Postwar 'Allied' shrieks about Russian intransigence regarding Poland conveniently ignored the unbroken record of acquiescence toward Russian settlements in accord with Soviet interests dating back to the first few weeks of the war. There was no protest of any significance even when the Russians made it quite evident that they were going to make ready a Red Poland by providing for a government for the Russian-occupied portions before the smoke from the Polish-German military operations had hardly been dissipated.

 

An especially dismal era in Britain's history was the lugubrious 'phoney war,' or 'Sitzkrieg,' covering the late fall, winter and early spring of 1939-1940. There were no German moves at Britain, no attacks on its cities, in fact, nothing but patrols on the frontiers of the French border to signify that a state of war existed among them. (Some observers even reported a considerable commercial traffic between the French and German belligerents during part of this time.) It was, however, a period of sustained rejection on Britain's part of all efforts to bring the war to a halt and to prevent its spread, despite the absence on Britain's part of any evident power to continue the hostilities in its favor.

 

That Britain by blockade and world blacklisting of German firms might attempt to ruin Germany's seaborne commerce was accepted as proper without a qualm; that the Germans should fight back and wreck what they could of Britain's became a great crime. But the Germans did do serious damage, and soon. Rationing was introduced in the British Isles after only five months of formal hostilities, and in these five months German submarines sank more 'Allied' and neutral shipping bound for 'Allied' ports than they had sunk in the entire First World War put together, even managing to penetrate English harbors and sink major war vessels. The picture of frustration befalling the 'war effort' was embarrassing even to its most fond well-wishers.

 

From what seemed to be emanating from the offices of the grand strategy makers, the plan appeared to be one of strangling Germany in a hangman's noose fashioned out of British pounds. Fervent faith was expressed in almost all quarters in the sure effectiveness of an economic constriction program. After all, for eight years now, scores of economists of all varieties had proclaimed to the world that Hitler's Germany was an economic system with feet weaker than clay, that it lacked the staying power potential of its 1914 predecessors by a wide margin, and that a few months of deprivation of the resources of the world through the immense global order of the Empire would bring it crashing down in defeat. If this did not eventuate soon, then the massing of the manpower of France during the winter, and the unparalleled productiveness of British, French and American factories, would make possible the assembling of an overpowering force by the spring of 1940 which would make the big drive on Germany a sure success.

 

This strategy was based on the conventional understanding that Britain in 1939 was still the richest country in the Old World. But the citizenry were unaware that its rate of accumulation overseas had been dipping almost annually since 1919. By 1930 and after, it had been living off its capital, despite its impressive foreign investments, the goods and services its famed industrial system was furnishing the world, and the even more famed shipping and banking services Britain was providing to other nations. But in view of past performances and reputation, there was little more for a loyal taxpayer to do than to assume an attitude of affront at the upstart German pretensions, and to bide his time in anticipation of the surefooted approach of catastrophe for Germany. Lord Marley, Labor Party whip in the House of Lords, speaking in Boston, Mass., in December, 1939, expressed a general fixed idea when he declaimed, "The German people must be made to 'take the count'; they have been a nuisance to themselves for twenty centuries," though some saw here an up-dating of Tacitus. In another sense this was a man-on-the-street phrasing of the substance of the sophisticated Germanophobia long preached by Lord Vansittart, which continued long after the war in undiminished venom. One should see his The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958) which probably exceeds his several earlier products in reflecting this sentiment.

 

For distraction in the first winter of the war there was the invasion of Finland by the Russians, which performed such profound deeds of destruction to two decades of leftist thinking, built so ornately around a pedestal and image of alleged Russian purity in foreign relations. The years of the Popular Front and the incredible intrigues buried under front cognomens of 'resistance to fascist tyranny' and 'collective security' vanished overnight when the Reds revealed their ability to act like any other State in pursuing what it deemed to be their best interests. How Britain managed to escape becoming involved in this war against Russia is not easy to understand, but it cannot be credited to Mr. Churchill. Though not in the Government, no one did more to try to involve the nation in such a bottomless adventure.

 

The major political parlor game of the first winter of the war was that of playing at 'war aims.' From every sector of the liberal-left came the brickbats of reproachfulness that the government was asking the people to engage in a war which seemed to have no declared goal other than the destruction of Germany. Sir Arthur Salter called the state control system introduced after September, 1939 "The bastard socialism of the vested interests." British leftists such as Allen Butt were outraged by it. There was an unremitting bellow that it be announced to all just what the war was being fought for, and what the man on the street could reasonably expect his taxes and blood, and the multitude of harassments which he was beginning to be met with, were to achieve.

 

Nothing was forthcoming. About all that could be extracted from the spokesmen were mutterings concerning the necessity of destroying Nazism root and branch. But of sensible substitutes for the order which was to be obliterated, none appeared from governmental sources.

 

But it was not just the situation on the Continent which was causing profound distress and vexation. The ear East was in full flame, where a dangerous state of affairs between the Arab and Jewish factions in Palestine already had exploded in serious bloodshed three times since 1936. India had become extremely restless, and the All-India Congress was pressing for an unequivocal statement relative to Indian freedom at an early date. (The situation in India was never better revealed than by the action of the All-India Congress in the first week of May, 1942 when it voted by 176-4 to meet the threatened Japanese invasion with non-violent passive resistance. This, despite the powerful influence of a leader such as Jawaharlal Nehru, a strong sympathizer with the new Labor-saturated coalition Churchill Government. The Government was always generous with news of German repressions in their occupied lands but the uproar in India was too delicate a subject; over 400 persons were killed or injured in riots there in the last 4½ months of 1942.)

 

The West Indies colonies were revealed to be in such shockingly maladministered circumstances that a disturbance in Jamaica had led to a full investigation and report. And in Northern Ireland the Irish Republican Army was causing so much trouble that some people thought them as menacing as the Germans. But trouble with the Irish was hardly new. Ireland had been joined in legislative union with England in 1801; during the next 85 years, Ireland was under martial law 56 of them.

 

And to all these there were added serious questions as to what might be expected in the form of changes at home, no doubt partially due to the memories of the veterans of 1914-18 who still nursed sentiments of rage over Lloyd George's lightly-delivered promises about the preparation of a land suitable for heroes once the hostilities had been concluded. All in all, the times called for something more than negative cries for military victory unrelated to the realities of world politics, and particularly the immediate European world the citizens of Britain had as next door neighbors.

 

Journalistic wishful thinking and misrepresentation which portrayed the Russo-Finnish war as a continuous Finnish victory until the Finns collapsed about four months later should have helped to prepare Britain for the season of swift and sudden reverses immediately ahead, which culminated in the abrupt scuttle from the Continent at Dunkirk. Fortunately for Britain the Finnish collapse came suddenly, or they might have found themselves in a war both with Germany and Russia as a result of the impulsive miscalculations of Mr. Churchill's circle. The poor performance of the Red Army in the early months against the Finns tended to encourage the thinking of twenty years before, that they were on the verge of falling apart, and that a little help from England might be all that would be needed to precipitate a Red debacle. It was a case of wanting so desperately to see something take place that in the minds of those eager for Stalinist destruction the result all but materialized. One might have been reminded of the complacent confidence of Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, who, speaking in New York City at a war relief banquet on the second anniversary of the end of World War One, assured his hearers, "The end of Bolshevist rule in Russia is approaching. I think it is only a matter of a comparatively short time." (New York Times, November 12, 1920). Sentiments such as those expressed by former Sec. Root became a staple in some anti-Bolshevik opinion centers and were much repeated despite increasing evidence against the likelihood of such an eventuality.

 

The invasion of Denmark and Norway by Germany served to center attention on the incompetencies of the Admiralty under Mr. Churchill, even though subsequent revelations disclosed that Britain had led off the round of breakage of international law, beginning with the violations of Norwegian sovereignty by arresting the German ship Altmark in Norwegian waters, mining part of the Norwegian coast, and undertaking an attempted landing there which was beaten to the gun by a lightning move by Hitler.

 

An irritated post-mortem on the German Blitzkrieg success in the Scandinavian countries with a coastline facing the British Isles led to the great legend of the Quisling "fifth column," the assertion being that the remarkable ease of the German operation was facilitated by a veritable army of native traitors, a story brought to a high degree of embellishment by American journalists, especially Leland Stowe. Not until 16 years later was there the flat admission that this had been "quite beside the truth," as the Dutch writer Louis De Jong wrote in his disenchanting The German Fifth Column in the Second World War (De Jong concluded it had been largely imaginary.)5

 

It became quite evident, even before full German success had been established, that the 'Allies' (that fortuitous term applied to the joint forces of Britain and France) had been toying with the idea of establishing a northern front since the Finnish war with Soviet Russia had broken out. There is some substance to the assertion that Hitler's moves in this area were more a response to the attempt to tighten the blockade on Germany in a polar direction, than simply a motiveless crushing of weak and thinly settled neighbors. The British retaliation in the form of the occupation of Iceland was represented in no way other than protection of a beleaguered nearby land, but similar actions by the Germans had customarily been spotlighted as "rapes." Mr. Churchill continued his reputation for catastrophic bad guesswork by confidently announcing before the House of Commons that the German action in Norway was "as great a strategic and political error" as Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808. But this was just one of a series of poor predictions which accompanied the series of disastrous blunders that stretched into the year 1942 and thereafter.

 

On the heels of these humiliations came a fresh succession of reverses at the hands of the Germans. On May 10, the Wehrmacht poured into Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg. The Chamberlain ministry fell, and Mr. Churchill now assumed the premiership in full charge of the war, surrounded by a Cabinet which ultimately included sixteen Labor Party members in various superior and inferior posts. The Party which for 20 years denounced the First World War as a senseless blunder of rival capitalisms now went to the bar of public opinion bawling its deep belief that at last there was a pure and unsullied ideological war to support, a "people's war." The voice of one of their most eloquent mouthpieces, Harold Laski, was heard in exultation above the huzzas of the multitude, overjoyed in the Party's remarkable vault to prominence in the war government leadership, admitting that "Labor had no moral alternative" to supporting the war wholeheartedly, and unable to do anything except aid Churchill and his war party Tories because of the part Laborites had played in bringing about the defeat of Neville Chamberlain. But now the task ahead involved organizing the victory over Hitler, and "Out of that victory we shall take the power to start building the first democratic socialist state in the modern world," Laski promised. But being built on the treacherous rubble of a smashed world, it is no wonder that Laski's promised political paradise became the initial stage of the political calamity of the twentieth century.

 

Whatever may have been the effect on popular psychology induced by the dramatic entrance of Mr. Churchill upon the scene as a modern Charles Martel, he and his heavily Labor-flavored Cabinet proved their ability to out-bungle its predecessors in the ensuing weeks and for the next two years of the war. He was able to assume the reins just in time to direct the stunning fiasco in France, where the superior tactics of the German generals were discounted to the populace with cover-up stories of Belgian perfidy, and the whole lamentable and draggling retreat to the Channel coast blamed on the allegedly unnecessary capitulation of the small and utterly outclassed Belgian forces on their flank. The subsequent rescue of the remains of this World War II BEF gained repute the world over and assumed the proportions of a new Thermopylae saga, thanks to the usual astute English language propaganda expertise. After considerable inflation through repeated tellings, it even began to take on the trappings of a victory.

 

Not until well after the war was over was it possible to discount these legends. As the separate testimonies of the German generals Kesselring, Guderian, Blumentritt and von Mellenthin demonstrated, the successful withdrawal was a gratuity from Hitler. The war has now receded into the past far enough even for his opponents to admit as much, as the long-respected writer on military affairs, RH. Liddell Hart, has done.6 The restraining hand of Hitler upon his field commanders prevented the entire British army in France from ending in a prisoner of war camp. But Churchill gained more prestige by supervising this frightful defeat than his opponents ever did by displaying their astuteness and competence. This was the same Mr. Churchill who had promised, early in April of this same year, a month before the Germans swept Britain out of Scandinavia, that "All German ships in the Skagerrak and Kattegat will be sunk."

 

Less than a month later German forces had overrun France, suppressed all organized resistance, and obtained a French withdrawal from the war, in addition to imposing German control upon three fifths of France. During this drama Britain stood by in helplessness. Mr. Churchill's sole suggestion to the French in this desperate moment was an appeal in the form of an offer of common citizenship, a scheme so crack-brained that it was responded to by Britons and French alike who committed suicide in despair.

 

Meanwhile the British Isles became the assembly point for the remnants of the "shattered states" of the Continent, as Mr. Churchill described them, and the whole melancholy facade of the "governments in exile" went into initial construction stages. In this department the British superiority in preparation of propaganda for international consumption once more began to show itself. It also gave Britain finger-holds on the cliff of European opinion by permitting the Government officially to back a rival government outside the homeland as a counter to the one which in each case found it inexpedient, impossible or shameful to fly to London and allow its own people to remain unsupported in the face of the German occupiers. For those who had the courage to remain behind to face the music of defeat there were the incredible and despicable postwar retaliations at the hands of those who had earlier fled, but now returned in the wagons of the 'liberators' as specialists in dispensation of drum-head 'justice.'

 

The new Churchill government was not without its moments of hysteria as the Versailles political dispensation in Western Europe crumbled. The Ministry of Home Security under Sir John Anderson jailed numerous Englishmen, many for the duration of the war, under the suspicion of being sympathetic to the Germans. And starting May 12, 1940 there were arrested and detained in special concentration camps about 75,000 German, Austrian, Italian and Czech nationals, enemies of their home regimes,7 who had fled to England and were collaborating with the British enemies of their home governments. A ship carrying 1200 of these interned though friendly aliens to Canada, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland on July 3, 1940 and half of them lost their lives.

 

This incoherent program was soon abated. But it is instructive to observe that after all the holy hubbub made over the German policy of requiring persons being released from their concentration camps to sign a document promising .to remain silent over the conditions of their confinement, the British similarly requested signature of a document also demanding silence from those released from their internment camps, as the New Statesman and Nation reported August 10, 1940.

 

A faint glimmer of what the war was to cost Britain in the future began to seep into public consciousness by now. The spread of the war was as much an 'Allied' responsibility as it was German, even though repeated frustrations and defeats were capable of being partially retrieved by portraying the entire unfolding of events as part of a peculiarly German diabolism. The resolution in the shape of total French collapse and the expulsion of Britain from the Continent set the stage for an especially intense world propaganda about alleged Hitlerian plans to convert the planet into a slave state on the model of antiquity.

 

At home in Britain, the economic cost began to loom, as does the portion of an iceberg below the sea's surface. In the spring of 1940, fifty per cent of the national income was already being spent on the war, and economists were wracking their brains in the hope of discovering new and more ingenious means of converting even more of British production to this titanic conflict. The citizens who so light-heartedly accepted this new crusade against things German were learning that crusades are bought from a very expensive shelf for the second time in a generation. We can recall John Maynard Keynes's engaging scheme for compulsory saving, How to Pay for the War, published in the spring of 1940, which sought to answer the question, "What is the most just and socially least disruptive way of extracting from the pockets of the British citizens a full half of their incomes?" Five more years of war were required to bring home to everyone that the real cost of victory was a British tumble into a weak second-class State, immediately followed by a loss of everything for which the war had been professedly fought in so dramatic a manner that even Nemesis might have been impressed by the totality of it.

 

Some thought it strange that after the years of incandescent indignation the British should adopt the same foreign trade practices of the Germans, as the March 5, 1940 White Paper of the British Export Council admitted:

 

"The Council places no limits on the expedients they would be prepared to consider, involving barter arrangements and trade negotiations and insurance facilities (such as guaranteed export credits) for foreign trade." There were devised two different valued pounds, one pegged at $4.02 for the home market and the other a "free" sterling pound which dropped the first week of April, 1940 to $3.44. This was almost identical with the German practice of assigning the mark a different value depending on where it was to be spent.

 

Temporarily both Americans and British were cleaning up on the Latin American trade of the Germans now, with the British seapower seriously curtailing German mercantile shipping. And American Anglophiles gave their full support to the policy of "buy-and-burn" which was applied to the raw materials of Latin America and Africa to keep them from German hands, as outlined in the London Evening Standard of June 4, 1940. This aspect of "preclusive buying" became much enlarged by the Roosevelt administration's famous boycott-blacklist announcement of July 17, 1941 when 1800 firms in Latin America came under the proscription of the still-nonbelligerent USA, the most spectacular assistance to the British world economic warfare received prior to formal American involvement in the war after December 7, 1941.

 

Immediately after the French debacle there began two prodigious campaigns: the Battle of Britain, against the German air force, and the Battle for America, largely fought on American soil by regiments of Britain's well-wishers and those vehemently pre-disposed toward the British order of things in the world. The threat to this state of affairs was evident to all pro-British circles, and this second combat took the form of a campaign against the American majority, which was preponderantly against participating in the war directly, though well-conditioned over the years into accepting the dictum that "America's first line of defense" was Britain.

 

The first and really only important engagement in this battle for the American mind was won almost at once. Americans generally accepted the task of supplying the implements of war to its once more bedevilled partners of 1917-18, and thereby assured that their entrance into the shooting stages of the second world combat was to be merely a matter of time.

 

The United States may have hesitated many months before committing themselves in the First World War, but they were never uncompromisingly neutral a week in the early years of the Second. American mores may have made necessary an inching into war so that the provocation of attack might rationalize participation, but eventual entry came with precise and measured tread. Truly the crowning achievement of Mr. Churchill was his important part in the guiding of the American colossus to Britain's side. It was about the only real achievement during the entire war period which can with credit be laid at his door.

 

As far as the Battle of Britain is concerned, the literature of the world will probably ring with its glory as long as literacy remains a human achievement. Mr. Churchill reached rapturous rhetorical heights, and the planet received an impressive lesson in Britain's gifts as a manufacturer and distributor of ethical and moral homilies. "Never have so many owed so much to so few," the radios of the world reverberated. The exploits of the intrepid British air force laid the foundation for a formidable heap of books and screen scenarios and radio dramas. But there was a vast amount of hyperbole associated with this pulsating episode.

 

The German air force in 1940 was preponderantly a tactical arm of the land and sea forces, put together to cooperate with them in joint campaigns, and to that moment had only furnished support to mechanized troops in clearly outlined short range objectives. It was utterly unsuited for long range strategic actions such as the bombing of distant military targets or their enemy's back country. Their planes had neither the armament nor the bomb-load capacity to serve such purposes effectively, and many of them even lacked fuel capacity to make the round trip flight from adjacent air bases in France to targets in Britain and back. The result was a serious setback for the Germans at the hands of the RAF in operations extending over the next nine months. But this did not prevent a successful propaganda campaign which painted the scene in somber shades, picturing a Britain with its back to the wall and almost smothered by German aircraft. What the story lacked was the facts that the decision to bomb cities far from the fighting zones had been made first by the Air Ministry in Britain in 1936, long before the war began, that all attempts by Hitler to reach an agreement that such bombing was to be forbidden by all had been brusquely rejected, and that the RAF had actually attacked Berlin six times by air before London received its first air raid.

 

It is hard to determine why so many American intellectuals reached such heights of hysteria and horror over the bombing of London. There was rarely an intimation among them that Berlin was getting similar treatment. Only the Communist press, in its rare moment of detachment between August 23, 1939 and June 22, 1941 concentrated on this aspect. It was pointed out elsewhere, moreover, that the British had been dealing out such punishment to colonial populations for some time, and that both the British and French air forces had been documented as engaged in routine bombings of recalcitrants in their respective Asian and African colonies for years, with only faint moral tremors resulting. But now the meting out of such by the Germans upon Britain became in the view of the latter's American sympathizers the unsurpassable crime of the ages, rivalling the Crucifixion. Nobody among such elements chose to remember the repeated British bombing of villages in Iraq and northwestern India, or the French demolition of Damascus in the six months beginning in September, 1940. The absence of these factors from the story helped to fix an image of a barbarian Germany deeply in the consciousness of the yet uninvolved world, and especially in the English-speaking portion of that world. (British propaganda skill, at least up to the time of the 1956 Suez fiasco, was so ancient and well developed that the moment any country became an opponent of Britain it was so lost to shame that it was compelled to record its wickedness instantly by committing atrocities.)

 

In the meantime, the defense of Britain's skies was related in dramatic accents rivalling anything that had ever been seen or heard in epic history, though the actual situation was somewhat more prosaic. As Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris later related, the job of shooting down the mainly unarmed German bombing planes, virtually without protection because of the modest fuel capacity of their covering fighters, was similar to shooting cows in a meadow. And the Germans suffered probably an even more drastic defeat on the propaganda level, as the world learned to agonize every day over their radios at the desperate plight of Britain as reported by a completely partisan news dissemination contingent.

 

In the midst of this rhetorical imagination and flowery literature an occasional bit of sober fact crept into the record, if one were diligent enough to search for it. The American weekly Time, despite its fervent enlistment in the war, Quoted from the Economist in the first week of September, 1941 that only 2% of British real estate had been destroyed by German bombing, and that only a tiny fraction of that amount consisted of industrial sites. Also included was a note which commented on the furious pace at which speculators were buying the bombed sites "for a song," creating such a scandal that the Government established a requirement that such premises, which in reality amounted to the land involved, when taken for the purposes of reconstruction, was to be paid for at the rates prevailing in March, 1939. Though there were no air raids on England in August, 1941 the Royal Air Force was conducting hundred-plane raids on "scores" of German cities during that month. (Articles "Teeth for Two," p. 19, and "Rebuilding England," p. 61, in Time for September 15, 1941.)

 

While the RAF retaliated with sometimes even heavier blows at the German Ruhr cities, a sentimental case was made out for heavily battered Coventry; but hardly a word escaped on the six-times-heavier bombing of the even smaller German city of Osnabruck. This passion for hammering Germany from the air struck a strange note of revengeful fury. The RAF was staging WOO-plane raids over Cologne as early as June, 1942, while British forces were being beaten in the African desert war and while their Navy was losing control of the Mediterranean. In both these areas they could have especially used the airpower being wasted on senseless shattering of cities hundreds of miles from any real war objective. There were nine big raids on the Ruhr in the first half of September of the same year, in each of which more bombs were dropped than in the worst raid on London, that of May 10-11, 1941. These latter assaults did serve to take the minds of the people off the botched "commando" raid on Dieppe, on the French coast, mainly by Canadians, the previous month. By the end of the war, when the combined Anglo-American bombers had dropped an average of 315 tons8 of bombs on German targets for every one the Germans had managed to loose on Britain, a self-satisfied public considered this a proper and reasonable proportionate retaliation.

 

The emotional community between Britain and America grew much closer as a result of the Battle of Britain. On the political side, it undoubtedly softened up the American Congress to approve an agreement early in September, 1940 whereby some fifty destroyers were transferred to the British Navy in exchange for 99-year leases of air and naval bases in British colonies in the Western Hemisphere stretching from Newfoundland to South America. In this same month the great invasion scare reached its peak: the projected assault on the British Isles by the Germans from the French coast opposite the English Channel. To this day the information as to whether the Germans actually committed themselves to such an invasion has been inconclusive, despite many assertions in support of this contention. The lesson was mainly lost on distant America, which was whipped into shudders of fear at imminent invasion from well over 3000 miles away by Hitler's legions, when these same troops were finding it impossible to cross some 25 miles of water from a point in France where the British coasts could be seen.

 

In the meantime, after almost a year of war, the more sensitive Laborites were still plaintively calling for some declaration of war aims which could enroll their faith. Laski, in the Daily Herald for August 8, 1940 in an article titled "Trust the People," declared,

 

We want full knowledge, and in concrete terms, of our war aims. It is not enough, after almost a year of war, to be told our aim is victory. Victory for what?

 

And four days later a Daily Herald editorial complained,

 

We have been at war for nearly a year. By now the world should have a pretty clear idea of what we are fighting for. But has it? It has not.

 

Some found it ludicrous to hear Churchill and his government trumpeting that they were trying to prevent Hitler Germany from conquering the world, when Britain was ruling one fourth of the world's surface and controlling one fourth of the world's population as well, five times as many people as were temporarily under the jurisdiction of German authority. Yet the world propaganda channels saturated by the English Speaking Union, the P.E.N. Club, Clarence Streit's "Union Now" spokesmen, the world network of the Rhodes Scholars and Anglophile radio announcers such as the sepulchral-voiced Edward R. Murrow continually pictured Britain as a heroic little nation manfully battling a gigantic German monster, and spoke not at all of Britain's world organization and resources, nor of the impact of its global blacklist of German economic enterprise.

 

The German determination to organize the unity of Europe under German leadership9 was their most heinous crime, in the eyes of many traditional Britons. This was obviously an affront to a Britain which even under the worst of the German attacks on its homeland in 1940 serenely posed as the power whose future contained the ordination to effect this end. As the Times imperturbably announced to the world on August 6, 1940, "Great Britain will become the natural leader in the reconstruction of Europe." And as if to reinforce the image of unflappability and seeming unruffled control of the situation was the casual announcement that the annual grouse shooting would go on as usual, though the traditional opening date of the hunting season would be advanced a week, from August 12 to the 5th. (Associated Press dispatch from London, July 31, in New York Times, August 1, 1940, p. 10.)

 

The summer of the next year brought to an end the "Battle of Britain, " as German air attacks tapered off sharply with the beginning of their invasion of Russian-occupied Poland in June, 1941. But British victory was nowhere in sight, and the ultimate cost of the war was being brought home more effectively by the week. In January, 1941, Britain had exhausted its $6,500,000,000 dollar exchange in the United States, and what with the air attacks and the submarine campaign, it was becoming evident that survival made necessary full dependence upon the armories and food warehouses of America. One of the first consequences of world-wide economic warfare was now becoming evident: the advanced state of liquidation of British overseas investments. There were others to come.

 

However, the immediate situation was saved by the passage by the American Congress of the Lend Lease Act, in March, 1941, which was the first major step in the conversion of Britain to an American dependency. Henceforth, according to part of the stipulations of this legislation, the formal accounting methods of the first World War were to be abandoned, and the implication to the American taxpayer was that exchanges of goods now could be considered as unreturnable gifts; there would be no brawling over 'war debts' at the conclusion of this war as there had been before. And now, for Americans to continue the pose of sympathetic neutrals involved high arts of self-delusion; the USA was as full a legal and economic war partner as could have been desired, if not yet a formal belligerent.

 

The end of the fighting on the Continent with the overwhelming of France led to a frantic period of re-balancing of accounts in Central and Eastern Europe, in this first phase of the war. Four days after the Franco-German armistice, the Russians demanded from Rumania the regions of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (the Bolshevik regime had given up the first after their withdrawal from the war in 1911-18) and promptly occupied them two days after this. Additional parcels were promptly snatched up by Hungary and Bulgaria. Three weeks later, the Russians announced to the world that the Baltic states of Lithuania, Esthonia and Latvia had "asked to be admitted" to the Soviet Union, and they were swiftly incorporated.

 

The Germans, three months after that, moved into occupation of what there was left of Rumania, and the post-1919 Central Europe was completely done in. The cordon sanitaire built against the Bolsheviks and the Little Entente counter-balance against Germany, propped up by French bayonets and British pounds, were completely in ruins, and the influence of both these powers in this area reached a rock-bottom low, from which point it has not yet risen. So another dark war cost was entered in British accounts: the dissipation of its influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

 

The spreading of the war to the remainder of southeastern Europe and a repetition of the ineffectual Scandinavian counter-moves finished Britain there too, and by the late summer of 1941 Britain faced a German-Italian dominated Continent from the Arctic Circle of Norway all the way to the Ukraine. British efforts to bolster Greece against Italian demands were ultimately fruitless. After four months, through the winter of 1940-41, of successful counter-attacks against Italian forces based in Albania, there came the massive German invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece. In twelve days both countries had been swamped, and the British were forced to repeat Dunkirk on a smaller scale in their hasty withdrawal from Greece. A month later it was repeated again, this time from the island of Crete, taken by surprise by German parachute troops and strong air support. What was left of the British soldiery after these crushing blows withdrew in haste to Cyprus and Egypt. So this new series of campaigns under the overall direction of Mr. Churchill's government had now resulted in the conversion of the Mediterranean lifeline of the Empire into a virtual Halo-German lake. The southeastern Europe fiasco of October, 1940--May, 1941 was the Gallipoli of the Second World War.

 

The war in northern Africa started almost as soon as Mussolini took Italy into the war on June 10, 1940, against France and Britain. Preceding this by a few weeks was the spread of the southeastern European war zone to the ear East, where Anglo-French 'mandates' and colonies came under serious threat; their oil and their strategic location determined their desirability. So two campaigns raged for a time, both aiming in the direction of Egypt from the opposite African and Asian shores on the Mediterranean's southerly side. Here the 'Allies' recouped their fortunes partially, after much perilous teetering. But with the region already drawn taut by the issue of Zionism, and a full-throated Arabic nationalistic movement under way from Morocco to the borders of Iran, years before European hostilities broke out, the full consequences of turning loose the war dogs on this vast land were never contemplated. Once again, for the fleeting joys of temporary victory, the 'Allies' lost, mainly through having no long range war goals. In essence the fate of the' Allies' in the Second World War was a lesson to all: the imbecility of fighting a war of staggering cost and extent with no clear political goals whatever.

 

With the aid of those French in the Asian or African dependencies when the rout of 1940 took place at home, the so-called 'Free French' forces of General Charles De Gaulle, supplemented by such French as were able to escape France, the British managed to hold on to Syria and Iraq, while applying the same kind of pressure upon Iran that they had fulminated over when applied by the Germans on neighbors who occupied critical real estate next door to German interests. The moral difference between German weight applied to Hungary and Bulgaria and that of Britain upon Iceland and Iran was precisely zero. But world opinion was persuaded to condemn the former as brutal aggression, while approving the latter as fortuitous acts in defense of vital interests.

 

In North Africa, Mussolini's hope of absorbing British colonial territory received a rude blow in the winter of 1940-41, resulting in a wholesale capitulation to Britain in Libya in January of the latter year, followed by the loss of Somaliland and Ethiopia in the succeeding two months. Thus were erased the presumptions of Italy to imitate in Africa the actions of its British and French predecessors in carving up Africa as colonial preserves, so successful and spectacular in an earlier time. But, as the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, had observed some years earlier, the nations which had been so successful at territorial poker in the nineteenth century and earlier now had decided that the game was immoral, and requested that those who wanted to play it at this late date to change to contract bridge. However, since the former had decided to keep every last inch of their earlier winnings, the inspiration for beginning the old game once more remained, whatever scowls of disapproval were now to be bestowed on the newcomers for their attempts at emulation.

 

Successful in holding off these adventurer-challengers, with massive aid from others. the French and British proved to be quite impotent in suppressing the independence aspirations of the inhabitants (the 'natives') of these lands. Thus the losers of the war performed the first act in prying the 'Allied' democracies loose from their gigantic colonial holdings. The local revolutionaries needed hardly any more inspiration than the demonstrated weakness of their long time wardens, which the German, Italian and Japanese explosions of 1939-45 supplied. There being no more room for these aspiring members of the Colonial Club, they undertook the wrecking of the Club.

 

Again, as in Albania and Greece, Italian weakness galvanized their German partners into action. In April, 1941 North Africa exploded in war once more, an Italo-German army under Rommel driving the British all the way to the Egyptian frontier. A counter-attack in the winter of1941-42 regained much of the lost territory, only to inspire another Rommel drive, in the spring and early summer of 1942; by the end of June the Empire forces were once more penned up in Egypt, with their enemy 70 miles away from Alexandria, where a third British offensive checked them at the Egyptian frontier, in mid-November, 1942.

 

The United States was in the war almost a year by this time. The Roosevelt Administration's careful, step-by-step provocation of Japan for over two years had finally precipitated the sudden attack on the Pacific fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, resulting in serious losses, but gaining the Roosevelt regime almost unanimous political and popular support for a war declaration not only on the attacking Japanese but also on the two European nations with whom the United States had been at war informally for some time. Six months before Pearl Harbor, the war had finally enveloped the rest of Eastern Europe with the German attack on Soviet Russia. These two major changes in the war's format doomed German hopes of fastening down North Africa. The Eastern campaign drained away vast amounts of material and manpower which might have made the North African affair an overwhelming triumph, and America's entry gave the British the surge of supplementary resources of all kinds which alone made the hope of an eventual Empire victory acquire a bright glow.

 

The part of France not occupied by the Germans after the defeat of June, 1940 set up a government headed by Marshal Petain, based at Vichy. Although the United States established diplomatic relations with Petain, and was at peace with his regime, this did not impede American forces from attacking and invading its North African possessions of Morocco and Algeria, in November, 1942. Not long before that it had been a behavioral fixation to condemn violently similar enterprises undertaken by their enemies, but now the necessities of the day made it imperative to advance moralistic apologies to explain such actions. The tangible effect was not only to put American troops in the Europe-Africa war theater for the first time, but to create a front behind Rommel and provide the ingredients for a squeeze upon his positions from both eastern and western North Africa. The coordinated actions of the Anglo-American forces in the spring of 1943, with overwhelming manpower and resources, forced the capitulation of the steadily weakened enemy, and the fighting in North Africa ended in the second week of May, 1943, in a total victory over the Italians and Germans. But the destruction, disturbance and unrest created by the war set loose forces which the 'Allies' proved themselves unable to control ever since, and in a little over a decade later the Arab world succeeded in shaking Franco-British colonial control almost completely. Though it was never fashionable to relate the debility of these two erstwhile behemoths in these areas to the war which preceded it, one may search for a long time before discovering a better demonstration of cause and effect.

 

From June, 1940 to June, 1944 the story of the war on the Continent is one which can be told largely without British characters, except for British bombing of European cities, which was often very heavy, and the related maritime and blockade activities, along with the immense arms support via airdrop of several 'underground' and 'resistance' elements on the Continent in countries occupied by the Germans. The attack by the latter on Russia on June 22, 1941 brought prompt promises from Mr. Churchill of aid to the Soviet forces, without any conditions attached to such aid. In this burst of impulsive enthusiasm in the fight to kill Germans and crush Germany, Mr. Churchill made the first major move in the direction of ultimately losing the substance of any victory which might come out of the war.10 In his war memoirs, he flatly announced that he would welcome an alliance with the devil if it would help in contributing to this lethal objective. Judging from Western foreign policy and public announcements from early 1946 on, it would indicate that this is precisely what Mr. Churchill did in joining forced so blithely with those of Josef Stalin. All the pious expressions of righteous fighting for the integrity of small nations and the right of political independence and the vaunted "Four Freedoms" associated with the incredible hoax called the Atlantic Charter were proven in a short time to be diaphanous rhetoric, if not unconscionable blather. The immediate evidence of the insincerity of this was the joint invasion of Iran by Communist and British troops two months later, and the severance of diplomatic relations with Finland, on the pretext the Germans were using Finland as a base for attacking the new Russian ally. But there was little need for any mincing or scruples in this latter case. Its crushing at Russian Communist hands in 1940 had been deplored but soon forgotten in the panic of the Scandinavian defeats. The Chamberlain-Churchill expostulations were reserved for evidences of German indecencies thereafter.

 

However, Britain deserves no more censure for its innocent and uncritical impulsiveness toward the Communists than does the USA. No one did more to put Russia on the road to dominance of Central and Eastern Europe than Mr. Roosevelt's government, through its Master Lend-Lease Agreement of June, 1942. Stalin received as a result of the provisions of this insurance policy a blank check entitling him to the resources of the United States in the form of goods and services of almost every imaginable kind, with the sole stipulations that they were not to be passed over to a third country without the President's consent, and that the unused materials were to be returned at the conclusion of the 'emergency' which had called forth this astounding agreement.

 

But Mr. Churchill's previous unconditional grant of largesse can hardly be discounted merely because it was overshadowed by the mountainous American commitment. Without a doubt the weight of this vast material contribution told heavily in the Soviet favor in the campaigns of 1943 and after. By that time the dimensions of Stalin's face-lifting operation on Central and Eastern Europe were beginning to take shape for all to see, but the irreversibility of the Churchill-Roosevelt testaments of generosity could do nothing but maximize distress now. A score of disquieting moves forecast the final auditing of the political wartime books at Yalta and Potsdam; there was no need for the bawls of injured innocence that followed from Stalin's wartime partners and the delayed accusations of faithlessness and knavery levelled against the Communists. The political side of the war and its aftermath require detailed examination, but the material making this possible remains veiled from us; there have been no massive revelations and confessions following World War Two matching those of 1918-25 which so profoundly demolished the official legends and fables down to the end of World War One.

 

The other explosions which shattered Britain's post-Versailles world were detonated in Asia by Japan. At excruciating cost the superficial aspects of the old Order were recaptured, but, as in Africa, the secondary factors released by the vast military and political upheaval wrecked all efforts to reproduce the status quo ante bellum. In an unprecedented calamity, the Western power with the largest territorial and economic stake in the Orient was reduced to little more than a modest island off the China coast, and its financial position changed from one of enormous assets to one of heavy indebtedness to its 'emancipated' colonies. History gives us few incidents involving such precipitous declines in such a short interval.

 

Of course, the indignities to which Britain was subjected were shared by its French and Dutch colonial wartime partners in this region, and the secure and lucrative colonialism of just a short time before vanished so precipitately that within a decade the era of Occidental colonial dominance seemed a memory from a much more remote time. Here, also, the Communist wartime 'ally' became the residuary legatee of much of the territory and trade previously at issue with the Japanese, and the strenuous effort to prevent being excluded in part from the markets of the East Asian mainland by Japan culminated in being emphatically expelled from this identical area by the Chinese Communists.

 

There were even more grim overtones which survived the war, guaranteeing that the tenuous attachments to the Far East would henceforth become even more perilous. The Japanese military performance in over-running East Asia and a vast area of the Pacific was not lost on the other Asian peoples. Although forced to capitulate after many years of fighting the mighty United States and portions of the armed forces of several other powers, this country, the size of California, possessing the natural resources of about that of the state of Mississippi, wrecked for all time all pretensions of Occidental fighting superiority and all the preconceptions of a multitude of "Old Asia Hands." Nothing did more to open the eyes of Asia to Western weaknesses and bluffing, and to spark the impressive anti-colonial and independence impulse.

 

Again it is ironic that the Western powers helped to prepare their own ambush in Asia. Their erstwhile Communist comrades used the immediate breathless months after the atom bombing of Japan to fasten their grip on the just 'liberated' areas to the best of their abilities, and got well-entrenched for the reaction to their swift absorptions. This they were able to frustrate to a large degree in North China and Manchuria, Korea, Indo-China, and, with somewhat more modest success, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Burma, the Malay peninsula, and elsewhere. In less than a decade, the majestic colonial establishments of Europe had been shrunk to Hong Kong and the tiny Portuguese enclaves in India, which latter were soon terminated. One can imagine hearing all Asia guffawing upon hearing the American, British and other Western loud speakers acclaiming the 'victory' in the Far East. Indeed, Pyrrhus, the symbol of defeat in victory, was a winner beyond his wildest dreams in comparison to this astounding evaporation of substance.

 

It is demonstrable that Britain's hope for sustained influence in Asia had grown dim as early as 1931. The abortive effort to obtain a paper condemnation of Japan by the League of Nations for its invasion of Manchuria in that year signalled a noticeable defeat. The refusal to admit widespread chaos in China and the absence of a responsible government capable of protecting Japanese interests in Manchuria gave Japan as good a pretext for such action as had been invoked by the British and other Western lands on numerous similar occasions elsewhere. The immediate tendency to admit the existence of a case for Japan went into obscurity suddenly, however, and the issue was soon clothed in the high-altitude-low-oxygen-count of rarefied 'international law.' Britain's most famous export-hypocrisy-made its suave and dignified appearance, though it took shape in several different forms as the occidental colonial powers expressed their separate contrived horror over Japan reorganizing Manchuria and re-naming it Manchukuo. After having swallowed up most of Africa, much of Asia and almost all of Pacific Oceania, they managed not so much in sounding outraged as crestfallen that they had overlooked something. And momentarily Britons were outmatched by Americans in rhetoric about Japanese 'aggression.'

 

But the famous international insurance company based in Geneva, in which Britain and France had for years controlled a majority of the stock, failed to support the verbal condemnation of the Japanese action, or the tangled findings of the League committee headed by Lord Lytton. Thereupon the floodgates of Asia slowly opened, a crack which was to widen in a gaping opening, large enough to admit the high tides of Communism and anti-colonial revolution as well as dynamic Japanese imperialistic designs cut on the Western pattern. (There was an amusing sally by a Japanese spokesman shortly after their takeover in 1932. It was run by Chinese in harmony with Japan, such regimes commonly called "puppets" when run by adversaries but bearing much kindlier designations when working in the interests of European colonial powers. William Henry Chamberlin, reviewing Wilfrid Fleisher's Volcanic Isle [Doubleday, Doran, 1941, in New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1941, p. 3], recalled the retort of the Japanese spokesman, Toshio Shiratori, to a rumor that Japan intended to recognize Manchukuo immediately; "We are in no hurry. We have no canal to build," a satiric reference to the unseemly haste of the US recognition of the new state of Panama in a matter of 56 minutes after the announcement of its revolutionary secession from Colombia on November 6, 1903.)

 

From this time onward, the spotlights of the Western world were played upon Japan without respite. Under these ideal conditions the power of Communism spread sharply and effectively. The Soviet system edged eastward with no fanfare, absorbing Outer Mongolia and reshaping it under the disarming appellation of a 'peoples' republic.' At the point of collision between Japan and Russia, observers in the rest of the world chose to see only China, soon a symbol of outraged national self-respect aspirations. Its waxing Red military forces and sympathetic countryside in the large provinces of western and northwestern China prospered in an atmosphere disguised as the simple ones of a dignified rural peasantry seeking modest democratic and agrarian reforms. By 1935 this was a region the size of France with a Red-controlled population of some 70,000,000.

 

While all this was going on, the successive governments of Britain went on serenely ignoring everything but the Japanese 'menace,' supported by a platoon of ancient American statesmen in and out of office whose ideas on the future of China seemed to be based on restoring the situation circa the time of the Boxer Rebellion. After the war, as in the case of the Yalta agreements, a fierce shouting arose in the West over the alarming spread of Communism, once again a reflection of two decades of political blindness during which they had prepared, as Mr. Churchill was to put it so ruefully, to kill the wrong pig. But there was no reason for this frenzied commotion upon seeing the barn full of wolves instead of sheep. Very few had bothered to check the species as the structure was filling up, and most of those who had noticed what was going on had written scores of books and hundreds of articles in vociferous approval. Between 1925 and 1945, Anglo-American reportage from the Far East, which developed an anti-Japanese ferocity of formidable proportions, managed to conceal all during that same time a vivacious and ardent pro-Communist fellow-travelerism.

 

So, as Russia and Japan edged closer to each other with flexed muscles, Britain and the other imperiled concessionaires with long-standing privileges in perennially-weakened China could speak only in the cliches of the long-decayed traditional integrity of China, the 'Open Door,' and the sanctity of the ancient handgrips of extra-territoriality, persistent memoirs of a generations-long weak Chinese state. As in the case of a rising Germany in Western Europe, there was the occasional admission that revision of the status quo was reasonable. But this was qualified by a clutching to previous privileges and advantages which made it obvious that the upholders of the status quo would never submit a plan for revision or accept willingly the non-coercive plan of any other country. Therefore it was also obvious that those who decried the use of force the loudest had no intention of enduring any change brought about in any other manner except force.

 

The Russo-German pact of August, 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of war between Germany and Poland forced a fundamental shakeup of Japanese policy on the Chinese mainland. The full scale war in China with the nationalist and Communist opponents both after 1937 brought Japanese forces into even more intimate contact with the Reds of Russia in Mongolia and Siberia. Hundreds of armed clashes between Japanese and Russians occurred in the next thirty or more months, and the journalists had poised the readers of foreign news for just as long a time in anticipation of a full-scale Russo-Japanese war.

 

But the relaxation of German pressure on Russia made imperative an understanding with Russia on the part of the Japanese. In like manner, the war in Europe forced Britain and France to concentrate their energies and attentions there, opening up to Japan the possibilities resulting from a truce with the Russians, while a slackened pace in China followed in part through the creation of a pro-Japanese government in the more southeasterly occupied portion of the country. The fat and prosperous colonies of Britain, France and Holland lay to the south, inviting the newest expansion impulse, with only a remote United States as a possible barrier. Further west were Burma and India; to the south, Australia and New Zealand, and a multitude of islands between.

 

The course of the war, with its abrupt calamities to all three of the major European colonial powers in Asia, brought complementary moves from Japan. The occupation of the French and Dutch holdings appeared to be only a matter of time by the late summer of 1940, while Britain contracted its supply lines by withdrawing its traditional garrison based in Shanghai, the first major symbolic gesture of vacating the Far East, in addition to closing the main Chinese supply line, the Burma Road.

 

In September, Japanese began the occupation of French Indo-China12 (Vietnam), and the temperature of Nipponese-American relations, already skirting the fever mark as a consequence of the expiration of the 1911 trade treaty early in 1939, and left unrenewed by the Americans, rose rapidly. American diplomatic talk grew much more grim, which had little effect on further Japanese expansion. But in July, 1941 the event described as the "Japanese Pearl Harbor" occurred, the precipitate freezing of all Japanese credits and resources in the United States and the virtual halting of all economic relations. America's 'short-of-war' measures were being pushed into the breach in an effort to stem pressure on the desperate 'Allies,' and such actions were deeply appreciated. In August, Mr. Roosevelt warned Japan's government that an impending American move to safeguard United States interests in Asia could be expected if a radical change in Japanese policies in Asia were not soon forthcoming, and this ominous gesture received a prompt proposal of support from Mr. Churchill, though hardly anything more than a declaration of intent at that particular moment. Russia and Germany were now at war, and the Soviet threat rested much lighter on Japanese brows as a consequence. In the light of almost universal 'Allied' disaster at that moment, the insistence on Japan's withdrawal from the Asian mainland had a ludicrous sound. No power combination in the world at that moment could have effected a result of this kind. And the American pressure from August to December, 1941 might have drawn a war declaration from San Marino or Andorra, let alone a proud, tough and successful opponent such as Japan.

 

The idea of using a renewal of the trade treaty as an inducement to obtaining Japanese withdrawal from the Asian mainland, supplemented by nothing more than the naive moral exhortations of the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had little chance of success. But the Japanese did seek an understanding, and patiently proposed courses of action which involved concessions on their part. But the procedure laid out by Hull to the Japanese to return to good odor among the Western nations carried overtones of insult so palpable that one may wonder that they persevered in diplomatic negotiations as long as they did.

 

These diplomatic conversations collapsed at the end of November, 1941, and a few days later came the Japanese answer to the threat of the American Pacific fleet to their continued expansion at the expense of the colonial countries: the devastating aerial attack from aircraft carriers upon the fleet and the military installations at Pearl Harbor, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

 

Mr. Roosevelt and his administration assumed an air of outraged innocence, which subsequent investigations and scholarship have torn to shreds, but the door was now open to enter the European war, as well as that in the Far East. A complication was added to the scene by the Russians, who responded to the US going to war with their enemy, Germany, by abstaining from becoming involved in war with the US enemy, Japan. This state of affairs continued until two days before the Japanese surrendered in August, 1945, at which time Stalin calmly shattered his neutrality treaty with Japan with a surprise commencement of hostilities. A similar action by Italy in going to war with France in June, 1940 had been denounced as the nadir of statecraft at that time, especially by Roosevelt, who technically headed a neutral nation when it took place. But the well of indignation was quite dry by August, 1945. There were no gestures condemning the Soviet action, least of all from its Anglo-American associates.

 

The postwar tempest over whether the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was anticipated or whether Roosevelt and his entourage were as surprised as they pretended tended to obscure a more basic situation, namely that after four years of sustained antagonism and provocation the Americans should not have been surprised if the Japanese had bombed the whole Pacific Coast on December 7, 1941.0liver Lyttelton, wartime British Production Manager and subsequently Colonial Secretary under Churchill in 1951, was undeniably correct in his speech of June 20, 1944, when he declared, "America was never truly neutral. There is no doubt where her sympathies were, and it is a travesty on history ever to say that the United States was forced into the war. America provoked the Japanese to such an extent that they were forced to attack." The synthetic horror after the long period of deliberate baiting was one of the most tiresome hypocrisies of the century, and Mr. Lyttelton's candor was a refreshing antidote, though his comment was not intended to be a criticism.

 

The contest over American entry, which had absorbed so much of the attention and energy of Mr. Churchill from the very beginning, was settled by Pearl Harbor. Churchill's speech of June 4, 1940 in which he promised that Britain would fight on whatever the difficulties until "in God's good time the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old,"11 was one of his most subdued though eager invitations to the USA to get involved in the war. But with 93% of Americans opposed at that moment, the process was bound to take some time. Now the impatient wait for American belligerence was over.

 

Nothing now remained in the path of the United States to becoming the receiver-general of the bankrupt Anglo-Franco-Dutch colonial expires, to be achieved through nearly four years of the bitterest and most grievous fighting. Preceding the coming to grips with America, the Japanese rapidly overran the rest of Southeast Asia, took Singapore in a few weeks' campaign, spilled over into Burma and saturated Indonesia and the Philippines with stunning speed. Malaya and Hong Kong also went the way of the other colonial bases, while the Japanese air force disposed of the major elements of the British Navy in rapid order.

 

By March, 1942, the Japanese had concluded a campaign which in scope dwarfed the German exploits in Europe, and from this point on the collision with America began, a slow and bloody island-by-island war of attrition, with the vast assemblage of men and machines put together by the United States gradually crunching its way back over the route the Japanese had so swiftly come before. Japan was drowned in military equipment and overwhelmed by its antagonists' massive manpower superiority .

 

But for Britain there was no glory in this virtual race war. Going to war with Japan was the final step in a decade of liquidation of substantial influence in the affairs of East Asia. The signal was the loss of the big battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse after a few minutes of Japanese aerial bombing off the coast of Malaya three days after Pearl Harbor, and the base of Singapore and Malaya itself two months later; Singapore, the supposed impregnable fortress. As the Manchester Guardian's Singapore correspondent put it, in February, 1942, "After nearly 120 years of British rule the majority of Asiatics were not sufficiently interested in this rule to take any steps to ensure its continuance." Their behavior could not have demonstrated better the utter separation of the people from the Government and the British residents.

 

The season of disaster in Asia did not greatly ruffle Mr. Churchill; "We hold what we have," he announced imperturbably, and to the bitter end there was the determination to hang on to India. Its value could hardly be overestimated, and its influence since the Industrial Revolution on the British economy was undenied. Lord Morley is credited with declaring in the House that Britain fought 110 wars in the 19th century which had not cost her a penny, with the insinuation that the India Office could tell any interested person who had paid for them. Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, stated the case in another way, in the more formal language of statecraft, in February, 1943, when he asserted, "If the United Nations are to succeed after the war then their architects had better have in mind the structure of the British Empire." But at that time there was no evidence Britain's war leaders were about to cut loose its empire, to see it be re-assembled in some form in this amorphous political entity. The eminent Chinese literary figure Lin Yu-tang put it much less deviously in his book Between Tears and Laughter: "If I do not misinterpret Winston Churchill, he is fighting a 20th century war in order to take off his boots after the war and climb back into a 19th century bed, comfortably mattressed in India, Singapore and Hong Kong."

 

If the war had not lasted so long, a sizable part of this Asian empire might have been salvaged, even if the record posted there was nothing to broadcast to the world. After a century and a half of British rule, the average annual income per head in India just before the war broke out was ₤3, and the people remained 92% illiterate. But the forces working for independence among the British, French and Dutch colonies, once set at large by the chaos of invasion and war, were not to be placed back in their traditional leg irons. The Laborites had long clamored for Indian independence, so a favorable pre-disposition toward such a step existed in the Government throughout the war, whatever may have been the intention of the pro-Empire Tories. On the 15th of August, 1947, in the postwar Labor era, India was formally set adrift; the inability to keep it in tow any longer had more influence that did any magnanimous and benevolent impulses in the government on behalf of its freedom. With the subsequent loosing of Burma and Ceylon the drama which began with Clive and Raffles faded out in a whisper.

 

Reinstalled in Hong Kong and in Malaya on a very shaky tenure at war's end, a pathetic postscript was added. But the expulsion from China at the hands of the once-hailed Communist Chinese ally finished the formidable economic colossus of the Empire. Neither Britain nor its Western associates could any longer build economic power on the labor of hundreds of millions of Asians and their resources. Worse yet, all were to suffer recurring indignities and debasement thereafter. For the French, there was to be the expensive and disastrous fight for Indo-China12 (Vietnam) with the Communists; for the Dutch, physical expulsion from Indonesia after a wobbly decade of continued residence at Indonesian suffrance. The 'liberated' found little use for the 'liberators' in the new order built on the ruins of both Western and Japanese dreams. As in Central Europe, in the case of Germany, the Western powers proposed to check the looming dominance of Japan in Asia. By dint of crushing expenses of life and resources and property the Japanese were ruined, only to find a healthy and energetic Communism moving into the vacuum by default. The object of contention was reduced to rubble in each instance, and the scene became the camp of the new force which clearly stood to be the only likely winner of such an affray even before it began. The blank, stunned looks of dismay on Western faces after 1945 and the pose of betrayed innocence served them well in concealing their own part in this cataclysm. [Three decades of inch-by-inch defeats at the hands of Communism have produced no appreciable instances of admission of wrongdoing from those who botched the world while pretending to save it between 1939 and 1945. So the area of the world under Communism doubled while, as H. L. Mencken put it, Roosevelt was towing ashore the corpse of the British Empire.].

 

Dishonesty characterizes Western world political enterprise since 1945. This is the principal reason for the futility and debility of Western statecraft. Some figures connected with the official viewpoint have been known to admit that America and Britain fought the wrong war at the wrong time, as they were inclined to phrase it, but there was no doubt that they were principally responsible for elevating their new Communist adversary to his position of importance and virtual regional dominance. Their postwar attitude of outrage at alleged Stalinist treachery, perfidy and related attributes was and continues to be transparent and ineffective. They had the opportunity many years before 1941 to study Russian knavery, when practice of this study was to their advantage. The persistent and rigid refusal to admit grievous' error in letting the war break out and spread makes the pose of consistent rectitude laughable. It has always taken two to make a fight or a war, and the "Allies" have yet to own up to their share in the responsibility which is still saddled exclusively on the Germans. Hitler has been convicted in their history books of premature anti-Communism; Germany still labors under the weight of one of the greatest forgeries of history ever known. The need for Germany in the anti-Communist "free world" which was under semantic construction for a decade after 1945 forced the Vansittart-Duff Cooper-Churchill-Eden brand of historiography relative to Germany into a supporting position. It served its ugly purpose in poisoning the world against all things German twice in a generation, however. What started out in 1939 as a crusade to free Germany and Europe from the political sin of National Socialism promptly took the 1914-18 road of a planetary jihad against the very idea of Teutonic culture, and scurrilous mass extermination lunacies were substituted for war. Of the propaganda which accompanied this incredible sortie, the books which sought the antecedents of Hitler further and further in the German past stand out in their criminality; the clincher was F.J.C. Hearnshaw's Germany the Aggressor Throughout the Ages. That such a notable and careful scholar could stoop to a contribution such as this is an index to how low in disrepute the writing of history has sunk in this age. The mischievous distortions of past eras assume an aura of dignified understatement by comparison with the library of hate the English-reading publics have had to contend with concerning Germany.

 

The satisfaction of a desire for vengeance comes with a terribly high price tag in this age of military technology. It is a game which only the richest nations can afford. It is unlikely Britain will ever be in a position to play this game again. Those who saw only war as a way to halt a resurgent Germany from once more joining the great powers, from regaining its world reputation as an industrial and technical giant, and from seeking to make a reasonable and workable system out of the chaos which the bunglers of Versailles had bestowed upon Central Europe, still have an explanation to make. The propaganda which was used to prepare planetary opinions for this new blood-letting of 1939-45 can not be used indefinitely as a substitute for the history of the period. Conflicts of interest have been portrayed as moral conflicts for thousands of years, and World War II is no exception. Those who pose as moral superiors have no reluctance to assuming that winners have the right to write the history, but it may not serve to explain anything. Spinoza has been credited with the observation that wars are not conflicts between right and wrong, but between right and right. Perhaps, we might have had a more realistic account of the war by now, had not post-war politics been built on this war and the political mythology which accompanied it and followed it. But the imbecile policy of Britain, France and the United States in this century toward Germany cannot be condemned often enough or in language too strong for the situation.

 

A look at the postwar decade is in order. At the Lord Mayor's banquet on November 10, 1942, Mr. Churchill declared, "I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." He was partially right. The voters turned him out to the political pasture in July 1945, even before the war was over; their faith in his peace-time qualifications remained as faint as ever. In his place, they elevated Laborite Clement Attlee, a member of the wartime coalition cabinet, who had excoriated the minority of his Party in their annual meeting in the fall of 1939 for insisting that the war was a contest between rival imperialisms. It was Attlee's job to complete at Potsdam the total scuttle before the pressure of the Russian Communists, already initiated so admirably by Mr. Churchill there, and earlier at Yalta. But more than that, it was Attlee and his colleagues who inherited the unenviable assignment of carrying out the first part of what Mr. Churchill asserted he had not been appointed to do, namely, the casting loose of specific parts of the Empire.

 

When Mr. Churchill returned six years later he supervised the remainder of the chore. In reality, Mr. Churchill preferred to go down with the Ship of Empire rather than be an onlooker while another captain brought it into port safely.

 

The economic exhaustion laid Britain in such a dolorous state by the end of the war that America was called in to administer first aid, and its relief missions, under various guises, were in attendance a long time. Lend-Lease, UNRRA, the Truman Doctrine, The Marshall Plan, ECA, Point Four, Military aid, and outright handouts tell the story. The earliest tremors of debility reflected the incompetence to handle the defense of the Mediterranean and the Suez lifeline. As the Reds descended with a whoop on the Adriatic, the Balkans and Greece in 1946, setting up the savage Tito regime in Yugoslavia, a string of other puppets in Hungary, Albania, Rumania and Bulgaria, while measuring Greece for the kill, it became evident that the job of policing the region was a task beyond traditional British powers. In addition, there was the murderous state of Jew-Arab relations in Palestine, soon to explode sky-high in a welter of fragments.

 

In retrospect, the empty pomposity of President Truman's proclamation at the end of the war in May, 1945, "The flags of freedom fly allover Europe," when the capitals of twelve European nations lay firmly in the hands of Stalinist massacre artists, is positively breath-taking. It did not take Truman long, the rest of that year, actually, to learn how much 'freedom' existed on the Continent. Less than nine months later he was already heading up another crusade, again to be fronted by Mr. Churchill, to try to undo what they had achieved so gloriously in comradeship with Stalinism.

 

Mr. Churchill, out of office but still luxuriating in his super-inflated role of world savior, now that Mr. Roosevelt no longer lived, helped to start the launching of the cold war with his American speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March, 1946, in which he gave the English-speaking world goose pimples over the state of affairs now existing between Russia and the other "freedom-loving" nations. His adroit borrowing from his late German adversary of the term "iron curtain" gave the world a catch-phrase of seeming permanent durability. But Mr. Attlee's Labor team had the distasteful task of implementing the tactical side of this somersault, and its effect on the beloved Empire was catastrophic.

 

The re-assumption by Mr. Churchill of his old role of implacable anti-communist, a la 1919-1922, was not without its drawbacks. His veteran drinking partner of the Moscow-Cairo-Teheran-Yalta days, Stalin, delivered a blistering condemnation of him after Westminster, calling him "worse than Hitler." And things got worse, resulting in a blanket attack in Pravda on September 12, 1949. When Mr. Churchill tried to make some hay ex post facto as a seer on the consequences of Russian victory by the release of secret 1942 memoranda, the Moscow press charged that he had always been working for a "fascist united Europe" "behind Russia's back."

 

The Stalinists got the message the world over relative to the change in tune on Churchill, and little was left undisturbed in the assault on Stalin's erstwhile foremost non-Communist admirer in England. When the CPUSA's International Publishers issued the two-volume Documents Relating to the Eve of the Second World War in 1948, it was reviewed in Masses and Mainstream (March, 1949, pp. 83-85) by the official theorist for the Party in America, Herbert Aptheker, who informed readers of several gems in this Moscow-oriented collection, including the following: "Churchill, in the summer of 1938, tells Albert Foerster, Gauleiter of Danzig, that while anti-Jewish legislation is 'irritating,' still 'It is probably not an absolute obstacle to a working agreement because the reasons for it were understandable.'" Churchill's thirty years of opportunistic ambivalence on Communist Russia from the Bolshevik revolution on into the Cold War era has been examined in different contexts in the recent books by Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (1954) and by Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill: British Bulldog; His Career in War and Peace (1955).

 

The confession of impotence in halting Russian influence in Greece and Turkey soon found American succor. Progressive decay of British strength in the Mediterranean set in, collapse in Palestine followed, and a near-bottom low of British influence in this area and the Near East ensued, and not much better prevails today. The Marshall Plan proposed in June, 194/ to supplement the Truman Doctrine provided the margin to stop the attempted Red takeover at the Dardanelles, but it did not halt the separation of India, discussed at greater length, above. The vultures of the war kept coming in to roost, meanwhile. The Communists reached out and took over Czechoslovakia in February, 1948, following this with a determined bid to oust the Reds' erstwhile partners in the devastation of Germany fron the ludicrous position they held in Berlin, surrounded by Red-held territory, as a consequence of one of the many brainless settlements agreed to in the 1945 apocalypse. The Americans frustrated this Red blockade with their stupendous "airlift," demonstrating to Stalin that American resource: were going to be committed indefinitely, if necessary, to maintain the frightfully-bad bargains which had already been negotiated. But no om inhibited the Czech absorption. All the reams of indignant writing and aI the decibels of outraged radio condemnation of the Munich settlemen with Hitler in 1938 and his occupation of Prague in 1939 now drifted out 0 sight and out of mind; the elements who considered Hitler's reduction 0 this jerry-built mistake of Versailles the crime of the century had little emotion left to denounce its recreation as a Communist spearhead deep into Central Europe.

 

By this time the now-fallen-out Allies had concluded the only project they were still in agreement upon,13 namely, the killing off of the leading figures of the powers which they had just recently defeated.14 The suicide of Hitler, and the grisly murder of Mussolini and public defilement of his body by Italian Communist Party assassins saved their enemies some trouble. (On the latter the chapter by F.J.P. Veale in his War Crimes Discreetly Veiled [New York, 1959] is essential reading.) "Hang the Kaiser" may have been a vainglorious blab-phrase in 1918, but in 1946-48 it became a fact insofar as the leaders of the losing side were concerned this time. The astounding kangaroo court convictions and subsequent hangings of several major German leaders as "war criminals" had occurred as far back as October, 1946. Russian political biology here had mainly depended on the stupendous capacity for legal hypocrisy among the Americans as an aid in getting out of the way the remainder of the unassimilables among Nazi leading circles. In December of 1948 the last major act (the minor ones went on for years) of this farcical caricature of justice occurred in Manila with the hanging of the top Japanese leaders. It is to the credit of Britain that it contributed sparingly to these proceedings, and that the majority of the condemnations of these reprehensible discreditings of Anglo-Saxon legal and judicial procedures have come from outraged Britons. But it must not be forgotten that Sir Hartley W. Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor, was as spirited away by delusions of grandeur as to Nuremberg's contribution to "international law" procedures in the future as the bemused American Robert H. Jackson and his battalion of obscure legal aides. It was Sir Bartley, trying to outdo the purple rhetoric of Justice Jackson, on the first day of the prosecution's charges, who thundered that the 22 defendants were personally guilty of "12,000,000 murders" (Associated Press story, July 26, 1946.) One more objective of the Soviet was now an achievement, but in their determination to eliminate potentially embarrassing political opponents, few Russians ever committed themselves theatrically to the venomous hate politics in Germany and Japan, which narrowly missed making both of these lands additional Red acquisitions by default. (Though the Stalinists could maintain a rigid position toward major German enemy leaders, they had no objection to employing many former supporters of Adolf Hitler in their East German Communist adjunct. And it must have amused them no end to see Anglo-Saxons take on the role of the chief kangaroos in an obvious copy of 1930s-style Red purge courts.)

 

By the end of 1948 even the dimmest intelligence in America and Britain realized the folly of their policies in Germany, especially. Few can forget the frantic efforts beginning the next year at recouping lost ground: vastly increased Marshall Plan aid, NATO, economic reform, the creation of the West German republic. But the world wide disintegration continued. In China, meanwhile, the Communists, praised and treasured since Mukden days as the great champions of China against the Japanese monster, had finally achieved the major parallel objective of ousting Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang Nationalists. The Reds gobbled up all of China that year (1949), expelling Chiang to the precarious perch of Formosa (Taiwan), off the coast, and creating an exclusion economy in China proper that made Japanese tenure appear to be free trade by comparison. Poetic justice had arrived at last to the Anglo-American Far Eastern 'experts' who had dreamed of re-establishing the dear, dead order of extra-territoriality and the halcyon days of 1895-1910. Britain's treasured concessions were now wiped out, and the modest and precarious holding of Hong Kong became the sole consolation prize remaining of a once proud and impressive economic stake in East Asia. It was a dismal conclusion to a dark year which started with the Jewish victory in the Near East, the shattering of the Moslem state of Palestine, and the entrenchment of the Zionist homeland of Israel, which amounted to little more than a European beach head in Asia. Here a population mainly consisting of Arab Jews under the direction of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe prepared to call "home" an enclave surrounded on all sides but the sea by a host of bitter, hostile Moslem Arabs, and immediately overlooking a wretched gathering of 900,000 refugees of their own creation. The perceptive British journalist H. N. Brailsford never spoke a truer word than when he declared that home is not home if you have to sit on the front door step with a machine gun.

 

Especially painful had it been to see Mr. Attlee's Labor Government go down in its battle with the mounting terrorism of Zionist 'extremist' groups, culminating in the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946 with a loss of life ranging in estimate from 91 to 120. Credited to the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which even the Jewish Agency was shocked into denouncing as a "gang of desperadoes" the following day, it more or less signaled to the world that the settlement in Palestine was out of British hands, when a handful of reckless zealots could wreck the headquarters of the British Army and the Secretariat of the Palestine Government. (The immediate release of an official White Paper charging the Jewish Agency with masterminding the whole range of Zionist terrorism was truly an anti-climax.)

 

In the meantime Mr. Attlee was struggling with the fantastic problem of running their part of war-devastated Germany, the dolorous results of which were memorialized so dramatically by Victor Gollancz in his books In Darkest Germany (1947) and Our Threatened Values (1948). The physical destruction, incapable of being understood unless one actually saw it, was further complicated by the political imbecility of the wartime (1943) "unconditional surrender" doctrine, which created a vast vacuum. The continuous problem induced the harassed Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin late in July, 1949 to issue a fierce condemnation, stating that this policy had left a "shambles" upon which to rebuild the German nation; "Unconditional surrender left us a Germany without law, without a constitution, without a single person to deal with, and without a single institution to grapple with, and we have had to build from the bottom on nothing at all." (But "Ernie" had been in Churchill's wartime cabinet and was not noticeably concerned at the time, in February 1943.)

 

Mr. Churchill ceased his criticism of the Laborites momentarily to admit that Roosevelt had enunciated this doctrine "Without consultation with me," but his persistence in roasting the performance of the Laborites in running the world he had left them produced some testy responses. Attlee in August, 1949 commented scathingly that "Any government which does not contain him is always denounced as incompetent," and the following month, Aneurin Bevan, Attlee's Health Minister, in an "angry scene" in the House of Commons, had some drastic remarks to make on Mr. Churchill as a historian. "Mr. Churchill is known as a very great stylist," Bevan began; "The reason he moves so gracefully across the page is because he carries a very light weight of fact." Bevan's concluding quip elaborated on this; "He 'sub-edits' his history and if there are any disagreeable facts, overboard they go."15

 

To make things worse, Dr. Kurt Schumacher, leader of the German Social Democratic Party, jailed by Hitler all during the war, and head ofthe political force closest to the Laborites ideologically, delivered an election speech in Germany on August 5, 1949 which quoted him as saying "The British fought the war [World War II] merely as a trade war to benefit the interest of their profiteers, who wanted to rid themselves of German competition." This was in the minds of many in Britain an appalling indulgence in nationalistic expression on the part of one they expected to concentrate on the achievement of the British common good.

 

The outbreak of the Korean war in June, 1950, brought Britain back to the firing line again, but as a most reserved junior partner to the United States in this "United Nations" "police action" against the latest move of Communism in Asia. Mr. Attlee's government had other distress to occupy their efforts, the Communist guerrilla war in Malaya, a supporting engagement in part to the Reds' campaign to separate the French from not-too-distant Indo-China, with Siam (Thailand) and Burma lying conveniently alongside as possible extra dividends in case of success. In the neighboring Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) the remaining major associate in the great Pacific war against Japan was undergoing a similar ordeal in the shape of a native revolt of their own. And the Hukbalahap Communists were rampaging in the Philippines. To make matters worse, Iranian restlessness was on the verge of introducing still newer vexations for the bewildered Laborite custodians of the Empire. The victory of Mossadegh and the Abadan runout took place just as the electorate once more placed the scepter in Mr. Churchill's hands, in October, 1951. The Press bawled its praises of the Liberator returned to the premiership at a time when Europe lay bound hand and foot deeper in slavery than it had ever been since before the time of Charlemagne.

 

So to Mr. Churchill and his successors was passed on the bitter job of trying to rationalize the disintegration of the rest of the Empire and make it appear to the world as a calm, good-natured process of granting home rule or increased independence and privileges to deserving candidates. It may be possible that some Britons seemed to accept this dissolution of empire with equanimity because of fundamental lack of understanding of what was actually involved; the American weekly Time reported in its issue of December 13, 1948 that a recent poll in Britain had revealed that 3% of the English thought the United States still were part of the Empire. Its actions in the recent decade certainly were such as to induce one to suspect that the separation in 1783 had been merely nominal.

 

The Government managed to display to the world the new symbol of puissance by proclaiming in triumph the successful detonating of an atomic explosion in Australia, and followed that with an anticlimactic announcement, the proclamation of the emergency in Kenya. The disability so glaringly revealed in Asia had now infected East and Central Africa. Under cover of the pretext of putting down a barbarian effusion called Mau Mau, the armed forces in Kenya carried out a ferocious program of counter-atrocities much like the repression in Malaya, featured by mass arrests, shootings and jailings without proper judicial procedure and accompanied by a breath-taking violation of the processes of justice as understood in Britain since before the time of the Norman Conquest. Forgotten now were the pious shudders at German Nazi acts of 1933-45, the concentration camps, racism, the shooting of hostages and reprisals against franc-tireur "resistance" civilians, and the much-publicized destruction of the Czech town of Lidice (1942), probably the Allies' most publicized propaganda stunt of the war, until the Reds began to exploit the captured German concentration camps late in 1944. Every one of the charges laid at the doors of the Nazis was repeated by the colonial authorities in Kenya and Malaya, often exceeding the Germans in zeal. Native villages in both places were burned by the dozens, the inhabitants herded into concentration camps, the captured belligerents sometime subjected to brutalities which equalled in every respect the worst acts of the wartime enemy. The racial indignities inflicted upon these Africans and Asians by the British were such that it ill behooves them to continue to adopt superior poses to Americans for traditional racial excesses. In 1957, Mau Mau was announced as suppressed, as it had been annually, but the basic problem remained untouched. The native leaders Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta languished in prison, and a handful of settlers presumed to rule four million natives, which simultaneously enjoying the fruits of the largest and best part of Kenyan lands.

 

In Mid-Africa, an even more disturbing political storm blew up in 1952, involving aspirations to independence on the part of the natives, and alsc presenting the insoluble colonial mathematical problem, a numerator ol 170,000 Europeans squatting on a denominator of 7'h million Africans. Here there existed a slightly more sophisticated political self-consciousness, sufficiently advanced to lead in 1957 to the creation of the independent Negro state, Ghana, and also communicating to still unfree British, French and Belgian fiefs the explosive virus of yearning for independence. The disintegration of colonialism in Africa is still in progress; the final acts wait for the future. But the evaporation of influence in Nortl Africa and the Near East is long an accomplished fact.

 

In 1952, the corrupt Farouk regime, on which the Government still smiled sunnily in expectation someday of a favorable revision of the pre-war treaty recognizing British suzerainty, fell apart under the impact of an army revolt under Naguib. Less than a year later the Republic of Egypt was proclaimed, and the possible move back under the wing of Britain made even more unlikely by the passing of power over to Gamal Abdel Nasser in April, 1954. Three months later, terms were reached providing for the evacuation of the Suez Canal Zone. The age of influence dating from Kitchener was over; like India, another towering way-station to the Indies and China had been liquidated. The feeble efforts to suppress an explosive and contagious Arab national sentiment were to culminate in the humiliatingly abortive Anglo-Franco-Israeli attempted coup of November, 1956. To Sir Winston's successor, Anthony Eden, was assigned the task of supervising this perhaps most futile and anti-climactic gesture of British foreign policy since the first Elizabeth. It is difficult to recall an occasion when British prestige sank to such a low spot as it did through its collaboration in this ill-conceived bit of would-be brigandage. Only the French by their bombing of Tunisia early in 1958 [and their staggering withdrawal from Algeria four years later after a futile 8-year civil war] have been able to match them in club-footed, obtuse 'statesmanship.' Nations which have flown into the moralistic rages these two states displayed in 1936 over Mussolini's Ethiopian adventure are hardly in a position to exceed the worst aspects of the Fascisti with impunity.

 

Additional evidences of "imperial" infirmity may be compiled to the point of great agitation; the wringing of special status by Sudan where Mr. Churchill had cavorted so gaily in his youth, the ousting of General Glubb and the deflation of influence in Jordan to the vanishing point, the hypocritical interference with the political affairs of Guiana and Honduras, further undermining respect for a traditional reputation of disinterested fairness, topped by the Makarios incident and the bloody botchery of Cyprus, all these are documentation of the wasting of Britain since its triumphant participation in the second World War. An urgent and insistent group of Tories and Laborites convinced the country in 1939 that Britain could no longer survive under the menace of the awful threats to their existence represented by Hitler Germany. In alliance with a large part of the world, Britain emerged from six years of war so weakened that even the wildest optimist could hardly have described its position as secure. Richard H. S. Crossman, a formidable Labor Party figure since the '30s, deputy director of psychological warfare for the combined Allied armies in France in WW 2, observed in 1946, "Britain ended the Second World War as France ended the First-a victor, but a victor who could never afford to fight again." ("A Strategy for Britain," New Republic, [March 18, 1946], pp. 371-374.)

 

The part contributed by its wartime Russian ally to its undermining at home and the disruption of its colonies made the pre-1939 status seem like a bastion of safety. From one of the two richest nations in the world it had tumbled to the predicament of a dependent upon its colonies and commonwealth partners. And the cold war and the perfection of the atomic and hydrogen bombs by Russia put Britain under a threat of extinction which reduced all the dangers of 1939-45 to the level of Napoleonic times. Less than a dozen H-bombs could make the entire British Isles utterly uninhabitable, and the defenses provided by the Government were totally incapable of guaranteeing protection. Where civil defense against conventional weapons had permitted the nation to emerge with a minimum loss of life and property, the new set of circumstances erased the idea of civil defense from consideration as a practical matter. Civil defense in hydrogen-bomb age Britain promised to be about as useful as a first aid kit in the pocket of someone who had fallen a thousand feet off a precipice.

 

The dissolving of the Empire should not be permitted to take the whole stage while portraying the effect of the war on Britain. There is a home front episode of nearly equally dismal proportions. Some random observations may help indicate the general outlines of what there is to be told. Some socio-economic facts have been reverberating for over three decades. In May, 1939 compulsory military training in peacetime was adopted, and two decades later it was still in effect, as Britain has become an impoverished partner in America's new order, which appears to be based on the existence of a permanent powerful enemy, in which they have an entrenched economic interest. In December, 1942 the Beveridge plan for the pauperization of Britain's common man was broached, and in partial form it has been established. Thus Britain has taken the mighty leap into the general welfare state, defined satirically by some as a state in which nearly everyone is generally on welfare. But it is the material exhaustion which stands out most dramatically.

 

By the end of July, 1940 the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the war was now consuming about 60% of the estimated national income, and the Press cried out that this was not exacting enough a burden. Few people ever submitted to such indignities under the guise of seeking victory; the post-war eclipse was clearly forecast for a people willing to commit so much of their substance to utter destruction. The inroads of German submarine and aerial attack on shipping was another omen of decline. Emanuel Shinwell in the Times for January 28, 1942 told the public that four million tons of shipping had been sunk or destroyed, and the toll continued high for the rest of the war. The greatest merchant marine in the world was reduced to a decayed shadow of its former self, and although feverish rebuilding took Britain back to top position in the next decade, by 1956 it had lost first place in shipbuilding to the wartime enemy, Japan, and this nation has continued in this position ever since, with the German yards closely behind in third place. Britain's share in world shipping production slipped from about 28% in 1955 to about 17% two years later.

 

British export business, under fierce pressure from Germany between 1933 and 1938, during which it was pushed out of ranking position to the United States in Latin America, dropped calamitously between 1938 and 1943, declining by more than one half, despite picking up much of what had been German business. Where overseas trade had accounted for 10% of the national income before the war, it had slumped to less than 3% now. As the Board of Trade commented with unconscious irony, Lend-Lease, which had so helped Britain's war effort, had contributed mightily to the ruination of the export trade. And there were additional setbacks to come. In January, 1957 the United Kingdom ran a staggering foreign trade deficit of about $290 millions, and the heat of competition showed no signs of relaxing. German, Japanese, Italian and Iron Curtain industrial competition gave every indication of growing much more grim. As early as 1952 the Japanese were selling more textile products to the British Colonies than Lancashire; in 1957 overseas competitors sold more such goods to Britain than Lancashire sold overseas. in fact, by 1958 one hundred Lancashire mills had shut down.

 

The spending of the war days guaranteed a towering debt even before the end of hostilities. On December 16, 1941 Sir Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the House of Commons that Britain had spent ₤8,300,000,000 ($33,200,000,000 in terms of the value in U.S dollars at that moment) to fight the war in its first 15 months. With the military machine's voracious appetite consuming from 13½ to 14½ million pounds daily between the spring of 1942 to late 1944, it is little wonder that the national debt began to be expressed in the mathematical language of astronomy. On July 6, 1944, Lord Woolton announced that not only had Britain dissipated its overseas assets, but had now incurred overseas debts double the amount of the total of all previous overseas investments. To make things worse, there was now an official tendency to be proud of it. Said Minister of Information Brendan Bracken on November 28, 1944: "We have sacrificed most of our Victorian inheritance. What was the treasure of our grandfathers is gone, and it has been well and gladly sacrificed." Spokesmen such as this help explain Britain's hasty slide to international mendicancy. The situation in the postwar decade grew worse; Britain was in debt to the overseas sterling area alone to the sum of ₤2,860,000,000 early in 1957.

 

This stupendous expenditure and debt might still in the last analysis be rationalized if there was anything in the shape of national security or other goals to show for it. On the contrary, the reverse was true. For example, the military budget for 1954-55 ran to ₤1,640,000,000. This was more than one third of the government's total expenditures for the year, and subsequent ones have stayed in this general vicinity. And there was ever so much less security than there had ever been in the threatening days of the 1930s.

 

Much of the spectacular economic decline described in the preceding pages was documented in the public record, but never was part of widespread public awareness in most of the world outside of the United Kingdom. For the most part it was a slow and almost imperceptible process, punctuated here and there by sensational acts. As John Morley wrote in his Life of Richard Cobden, "Great economic and social forces flow with a tidal sweep over communities that are only half-conscious of that which is befalling them."

 

For the outside world the first great signal of Britain's collapse from greatness was the announcement on September 19, 1949 that the unit of currency which had symbolized unfailing security even before the American dollar, the British pound, was being harshly devalued, falling below $4 for the first time in the twentieth century, from $4.03 to only $2.80. [Declines from this latter value in the last quarter of a century have been in small incapable of guaranteeing protection. Where civil defense against conventional weapons had permitted the nation to emerge with a minimum loss of life and property, the new set of circumstances erased the idea of civil defense from consideration as a practical matter. Civil defense in hydrogen-bomb age Britain promised to be about as useful as a first aid kit in the pocket of someone who had fallen a thousand feet off a precipice.

 

The dissolving of the Empire should not be permitted to take the whole stage while portraying the effect of the war on Britain. There is a home front episode of nearly equally dismal proportions. Some random observations may help indicate the general outlines of what there is to be told. Some socio-economic facts have been reverberating for over three decades. In May, 1939 compulsory military training in peacetime was adopted, and two decades later it was still in effect, as Britain has become an impoverished partner in America's new order, which appears to be based on the existence of a permanent powerful enemy, in which they have an entrenched economic interest. In December, 1942 the Beveridge plan for the pauperization of Britain's common man was broached, and in partial form it has been established. Thus Britain has taken the mighty leap into the general welfare state, defined satirically by some as a state in which nearly everyone is generally on welfare. But it is the material exhaustion which stands out most dramatically.

 

By the end of July, 1940 the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the war was now consuming about 60% of the estimated national income, and the Press cried out that this was not exacting enough a burden. Few people ever submitted to such indignities under the guise of seeking victory; the post-war eclipse was clearly forecast for a people willing to commit so much of their substance to utter destruction. The inroads of German submarine and aerial attack on shipping was another omen of decline. Emanuel Shinwell in the Times for January 28, 1942 told the public that four million tons of shipping had been sunk or destroyed, and the toll continued high for the rest of the war. The greatest merchant marine in the world was reduced to a decayed shadow of its former self, and although feverish rebuilding took Britain back to top position in the next decade, by 1956 it had lost first place in shipbuilding to the wartime enemy, Japan, and this nation has continued in this position ever since, with the German yards closely behind in third place. Britain's share in world shipping production slipped from about 28% in 1955 to about 17% two years later.

 

British export business, under fierce pressure from Germany between 1933 and 1938, during which it was pushed out of ranking position to the United States in Latin America, dropped calamitously between 1938 and 1943, declining by more than one half, despite picking up much of what had been German business. Where overseas trade had accounted for 10% of the national income before the war, it had slumped to less than 3% now. As the Board of Trade commented with unconscious irony, Lend-Lease, which had so helped Britain's war effort, had contributed mightily to the ruination of the export trade. And there were additional setbacks to come. In January, 1957 the United Kingdom ran a staggering foreign trade deficit of percentages; it was this first calamitous post-war revision downward which was by far the most shocking to the world.]

 

This numbing event stimulated a flurry of spirited articles and a few books which centered around the decline and eclipse of Britain, [but which by and large did not exude the bitter depression and hopelessness of a similar wave of literature 25 years later, when it was conventional to blame the economic prostration on "socialism" and a parcel of related factors] one of which, "Basic Cause of England's Malady," by the Associated Press foreign news analyst Dewitt Mackenzie, which actually preceded the currency devaluation, placed the very largest part of the blame on the massive and unreplaced expenditures of two world wars, and the accelerated pace of world industrialization. Like most of his contemporaries, brought up in the "there'll-always-be-an-England" line of thought, Mackenzie, who confessed that "the cure for England's economic illness" was "a matter of guesswork," expressed unbounded faith in prompt recovery; "This columnist isn't one of those who think England's greatness has run its course." But, like the followers of the Pacific island "cargo cult," those of Mackenzie's convictions still sit on the wharves, waiting for signs of returning eminence, prestige, and puissance.

 

The entire collapse of Britain took place in the lifetime of a middle-aged man. The value of its 1914 pound has been more than halved by successive inflations,16 its formidable part in the economy of Central and Western Europe usurped completely by the octopus-like envelopment of Communism, its domination of the world's shipping business destroyed, and its mighty industrial power challenged, whittled away and overpowered by a battery of vigorous competitors. And there was no letup in the season of tension. The Government which wallowed around helplessly in the backwash of the Suez fiasco ran from one deflationary stunt to another. The opposition, having lain fascinated before the nostrum of Nationalization like a rabbit before a cobra for two decades, milled around in confusion, and its spokesmen were about as helpful as excited old ladies on the scene of an automobile accident. To make matters even more critical, there now began a reverse travel back to Britain from its depressed American and African colonies, threatening London with a race problem equalling that of certain deplored urban centers in the United States, and turning the British Isles into a dumping ground for the unemployed from every corner of the Commonwealth. It has been rare in human history that the public affairs of a great nation have been in the hands of such a large group of sometimes well-meaning but thoroughly incompetent bunglers as has been the fate of Britain in the last four decades. In this manner was a first rate people brought down by a State mired in eighteenth century imperialistic and balance-of-power concepts, the fruit of which in 1939-1945 came close to wrecking the world while achieving a "victory" which effectively eluded its grasp.17

 

And what of its battered German enemy? Ten years after suffering the most crushing defeat ever experienced by a nation since the obliteration of Carthage, and with a substantial part of its territory and people still in the grip of the Communists, the truncated West German Republic had rebounded with such vitality that the Chancellor of the Exchequer sadly admitted, in August of 1956, that the gold and dollar holdings of that country already exceeded those of Britain and the entire Sterling area by over four hundred million pounds.

 

This the Germans managed to do, while subjected to the loss of a substantial part of their eastern territories, putting up with the problem of integrating in the rest of Germany many millions of refugees from the lost areas, submitting to the remittance to the new state of Israel of billions upon billions in 'reparations,' and adjusting to the political insanities visited upon them by the Cold War. When added to the nightmare of the Communist regimes behind the 'Iron Curtain' and considerable unabated disorder in the rest of Europe it is no wonder that the reviewer of Herbert Hoover's book The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson in the London Times for November 14, 1958 should pause from his estimate of the calamities following the First World War to observe,

 

We have got along, somehow, for more than thirteen years without a peace treaty and with an interim settlement that makes the Diktat of Versailles a model of moderation.

 

********

 

It is proper to conclude this account of British debacle and eclipse with a summary of matters of larger import, growing out of Britain' s relations with both its allies and enemies in peace and war, and the shadow the implications cast on the future of all. The insights of Sir Wilfred Trotter in his book The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War have been heavily relied upon in these concluding observations.

 

The ending of the Second World War in the summer of 1945 once more demonstrated the two propositions which were evident at the conclusion of the First, namely, that, given sufficiently adequate leadership and a reasonable amount of luck, the side which is preponderant in both arms and men is, in time, almost certain to defeat the weaker; secondly, the countries which proclaimed themselves the pacific, peace-loving nations of the world before and after Versailles, waged war far more effectively than those countries which had been accused of having a monopoly of overt warlike qualities. Even before the atom bomb, there was no technique of destruction which the "Allies" did not apply more effectively than their allegedly more militaristic opponents. The use of the atom bomb dramatically reinforced what had already become most obvious, to wit; that as far as war-readiness and war-capacity are concerned, the difference between a 'warlike' country and a 'peace-loving' country is almost entirely imaginary.

 

Once again, after the "Allies" had demonstrated these propositions to themselves to their satisfaction, they found themselves saddled with the responsibility for making peace. In the language of the immediate postwar days, they had arrogated to themselves the 'right' to make peace. And once again they revealed to the world that the ability and capacity to win a crushing victory had no relation to the ability and capacity to make peace. (The failure of the victors of 1918 is documented dramatically by the French publicist, Alfred Fabre-Luce, in his book The Limitations of Victory [1926]). Perhaps this is a chore for which victors are peculiarly unsuited at all times. One can frame it almost in the form of a social law that the more overwhelming the defeat visited upon the other side, the more likely it will be that the winners will inflict atrociously bad peace terms. At this point, nothing exists to limit the new impositions of the winners, and these are rapidly vented upon the vanquished, which was pointed up with substantial effect between 1945 and 1948.

 

The preambles to peace-making after both World Wars shared the same markings; the overpowering preference for pinning exclusive war guilt on the defeated enemy, coupled to an almost total disinclination to try to discover, and if possible, remove, the immediate causes of the wars. Belated attempts to patch up some of the more glaring discrepancies in their actions were lamely explained to the home populaces as "losing the peace."

 

It is not too difficult to discern why the peace-making antics are often little more than the incubator of the next war, because these measures are, with few exceptions, self-defeating. After punishing the vanquished, subjecting their leaders to vast indignities and placing stiff controls on their lands and peoples, with the object of compelling them to make sufficient reparations to shore up the damaged fortunes of the winners, there was installed political machinery which in a tenuous manner was expected to establish ideal, universal, permanent peace. A major distinguishing characteristic of these new organizations is that the defeated countries were almost the only ones barred from membership and representation.

 

Since in both cases the actual settlement of the war was dictated by the victorious "Allies," and not the world auxiliary organizations they conjured up, it became evident at once that the main task of these agencies was to defend and maintain these war settlements, and to oppose vigorously any attempts to modify them. Such actions were to be interpreted immediately as interference with 'peace' and the creation of any disturbance of the status quo was construed as a threat of a new war. This called forth-a counter-threat of war aimed at the disturber of the world organization. In other words, the combined purpose of these actions were the visiting of sustained punitive measures and limitations upon the losers. It is little wonder that such enterprises have been operationally sterile from the start. It was the formidable Sisley Huddleston, once European correspondent for four major London newspapers, who remarked in his book War Unless- (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1933), a work praised by both H. G. Wells and Lloyd George, that he had been criticized in the Paris Journal des Debats for urging a revision of the treaties following World War One. The latter declared that treaty revision would mean war, and Huddleston was sure the failure to revise the treaties would mean war; thus the upholders of the status quo were of the view that another war was preferable to eliminating the distortions and provocations resulting from the previous one.

 

The most paralyzing handicap to the functioning of these world peace organizations is that they have been run by groups that assumed to dictate policy. After World War II, it was a consortium of the big powers which had teamed up to win. The former took two decades to fall apart, but the latter was a much more flimsy alliance, and began to disintegrate even before it had been effectively joined together. The unmistakable signals of this dissolution were the March, 1946 walkout of the United Nations meeting by the Russian delegate Andrei Gromyko, and the Fulton, Missouri Cold War speech by Winston Churchill in that same month.

 

The Mr. Churchill who bore tidings of Russian perfidy, treachery and threats to future world peace at Fulton was the same person who less than one and a half years earlier had reported in the House of Commons on his return from the Yalta conference in the following manner: "The impression I brought back from the Crimea, is that Marshal Stalin and the other Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and democracy with the Western democracies. I feel that no government stands more on its obligations than the Russian Soviet Government." It may be argued indefinitely whether this was the workings of a fanciful imagination, egregious bad judgment or opportunistic mendacity.

 

From the beginning, the UN had been intended for all practical purposes to be a cloak for a military alliance among the permanent members of its "Security Council." The Dumbarton Oaks conference of 1944, when the preliminaries took place, made that quite clear. But as soon as the reasons for their adherence to each other no longer existed, the whole grandiose scheme was doomed. And since the evaporation of this wartime unity, the UN has become a weapon of two widely split blocs, with a tendency in recent times to gravitate toward a group of states previously cast as audience material, the so-called "Asian-African" bloc. And they have shown increasingly astute understanding of their potential as a "third force" between the "free world" and the "peoples' democracies." One cannot miss the note of petulance in the ill-humored growling of Mr. Churchill early in August, 1957 before a London convention of Anglo-American lawyers, over the consequences of the bald hypocrisy of 1945 being taken seriously by these ex-colonies. When the machinery of the UN was being stapled together, Mr. Churchill had approved of a structure which would permit "the little birds to sing once in awhile," but he apparently never conceived that they would become such a loud and raucous cawing lot in such a short time. Mr. Churchill's unhappiness over their intelligent use of the parliamentary processes of the UN to better themselves further dramatizes the incompetence of those who thought the global war they unleashed in 1939 would shore up once more the colonial pilferings of an earlier time.

 

But examining the UN apart from its fate as a political instrument since the Cold War began, in terms of how it should have operated, reveals that, in comparison with its predecessor, the League of Nations, the United Nations is more obviously a dishonest organization. From the very beginning it lent its prestige to the proposition that might is right, after having denounced this so floridly and emotionally in the times when its major members were not so mighty. In the new form in which this thesis was now cast, it consisted of the assumption that those who won the most recent war, by virtue of this triumph, were entitled to lay down the new law of international morality. It thus gave its firm support to the infantile thesis that the ultimate cause of war is to be found in the bad behavior of 'aggressor' nations and 'evil' men. The most obvious of the hypocritical actions of this body have been the methods used to bring home to the losers the realization of the nature of their delinquency. Perhaps the most astounding were the various 'war crimes' courts, especially those of Nuremberg, Manila and Tokyo, where breaches of non-existing 'international laws' were treated with great seriousness and solemnity as unspeakable offenses. The activities of these courts threaten to become the laughingstock of posterity, were their portent not so ominous.

 

There has rarely been a more unedifying sight than the spectacle of Britain, France, the USA and the USSR, all of which were established imperialist powers, sitting in judgment on the internal pre-war policies of their defeated enemy, Germany. The most ridiculous of all was the Soviet, a product of one of the most ruthless and brutal revolutionary seizures of power in history, proclaiming upon the actions of the Hitler regime's domestic agencies, a tedious theatric of righteous posturing which has long been a standard pose of victorious Communists everywhere.

 

What struck most neutrals as the most unflattering aspect of these charges was the leveling of accusations of barbarous conduct against the losers on the part of the nations that had evolved and used the most horrendous weapon in the history of warfare. Not a single charge made at these trials could not have been made against the winners, as Montgomery Belgion laid out in his incisive and pathbreaking book, Victors' Justice (1949). A court staffed by neutrals would have had to acquit all the defendants or insist that the prisoners' dock be filled with scores of prominent military and political chiefs of the prosecuting countries as well. Instead of applying a comprehensive and non-punitive set of peace principles, the "Allied" nations decided to substitute the same kind of obsessive action as had marred their behavior after 1918, seeking to prove to the defeated enemy that he should not have gone to war unless he had been absolutely sure that he could win it. This proved conclusively that they were as bankrupt morally as their enemy.

 

The reaction to the prodigious powers of destruction which have been unleashed in the last half century is supporting evidence of deep and fundamental irrationality and the close emotional link which still ties the race to primitive times. We have reared back in superstitious awe and have tried to revoke, or abate the effects of, these alarming powers, by surrounding them with a collection of neo-magical systems similar to those used by early men when they sought to placate tribal nature gods, out of hand at times of earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. The UN represents nothing more closely than a gathering of witch doctors of many districts. Civilized man, indeed, hides his superstitious nature with great difficulty behind his professed faith in reason. In a mood of rational sobriety we may be reassured that the UN is just another committee of flyblown politicians, but our primitive belief residues turn us over to the obsession that this outfit will act as a charm against war.

 

In the meantime, war has changed, and the rules, usages and conventions of war which previously obtained have just about gone by the board. These once had the cumulative effect of localizing and restraining military conflict. The hydrogen bomb and faster-than-sound aircraft and missiles have abolished them, and no new restraints have been evolved to patrol and control these novel methods and tools of fighting. Rather, there has been a marked regression, already underway in World War II, exemplified by barely literate young aviators who undertook the obliteration of Europe's ancient cities and cultural achievements with the lack of compunction displayed, as Trotter suggests, by a housewife dousing an anthill with a kettle of boiling water. This regression reached its lowest level in the use of the atom bomb on Japan, and at this spot is where we still stand. "The bomber is the savior of civilization," J. M. Spaight proudly boasted on the first page of his book Bombing Vindicated (1944). How imbecilic these words of the one time Principal Assistant Secretary to the Air Ministry sound today.

 

Regressions of this kind in earlier times might on occasion have been excused or apologized for as incidentals to the innovation of new military forms and weapons, always with the objective of curtailing or crippling the rival armed forces. One can think of many of them in the history of war. Atomic warfare, such as was introduced in 1945 and which is already only a small part of what it was compared to the situation prevailing two decades after the beginning of World War Two, has totally changed this conception. The military today has been supplanted in the main by a civilian machine directed almost exclusively by scientists and engineers. They have succeeded in theory in stripping away from war most of its remaining heroism and dignity, and have substituted programs of extermination for the ancient rules and rituals of ' lawful' warfare, in one sense a revival of methods occasionally employed in ancient times. The most effective and dramatic exposition of the desperate circumstances to which the world has returned is that of F.J.P. Veale, in his sobering classic, Advance to Barbarism. The hydrogen bomb has obliterated the rationalization that wars can be waged to end wars. The atomic age promises to make our nightmares come true.18