Seventy years ago last week, the armies of Hitler swept into Poland, in the opening act of what would soon be World War II. By the time that war ended, some 60 million human beings had been killed, and the Holocaust in Europe, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, had shockingly extended mankind’s comprehension of its capacity for evil.
Since then, the Jews have rightly striven not to let the world forget what was done to them (though Israel’s cruel oppression of the Palestinians has by now quite undermined the moral high ground bequeathed them by the Holocaust). In the US, on the other hand, a persistent campaign by the hawks to sell the value of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having ‘saved American lives’ has succeeded sufficiently to blur the horror of what they did. And it was a horror that extended far beyond those two Japanese cities with their dead and dying (mainly the aged, the infirm, women and children, since most of the men were off at war).
In a word, those demonstrations of the awesome power of the atomic bomb cemented the nuclear arms race that, to this day, condemns life on earth to subsist under the muted threat of extermination. Moreover, launching another nuclear attack is not unthinkable in today’s Pentagon. Indeed, during the recent reign of the boy emperor, GW Bush, a claque of madmen surrounding Dick Cheney seriously argued for dropping nuclear bombs on Iran’s deep-buried centrifuges.
So, how did it happen?
Historians see the genesis of World War II in the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which the allies imposed upon a defeated Germany in the wake of World War I. That treaty left Germans with an understandable sense of injury: fertile ground for an avowed avenger like Hitler to garner popular support.
(An intriguing parallel involving al Qaida exists today. Bin Laden has long affirmed that it was outrage – his, and that of his fellow-Muslim fundamentalists – over the ‘infidels’ garrisoning some 40,000 American troops in the sacred land of Mecca after the Persian Gulf war that prompted the ‘vengeance’ of 9/11. And, in a curiously under-reported move, the Bush administration did in fact remove the offending American legions to neighbouring Kuwait; a move no doubt undertaken at the pleading of the Saudi sheiks, their conspirators in the global oil racket, and one that can only have been designed to placate bin Laden and his ilk.)
As for the rest, the war in Europe can safely be ascribed to Hitler’s growing monomania and his penchant for making one mistake after another. (That much, at least, Hitler shared with Cheney; after a certain point, every move he made was the wrong move.)
Granted, Hitler was tempted to his errors by his early ‘bloodless’ successes, the product of war weariness in Britain and France. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement (‘Munich’) is well known, although, by then, Hitler had already breached numerous restrictions imposed on Germany at Versailles, and done so without being punished when it would have been easy for the allies to have punished him.
Those ‘victories’ (beginning with Germany’s defiant rearmament) both enamoured Germans of Hitler and provoked him to underrate the ‘spineless’ West. And it was in that mood that, with the enthusiastic support of the German people – who, once they had tasted the fruits of German aggression, were hardly the reluctant warriors they were once portrayed as having been – Hitler overran Poland, a move which prompted Britain and France finally to react.
That it also called Mussolini’s bluff (for the swaggering Il Duce was by now thoroughly frightened, and warned the Führer, his ally, that Italy lacked the means to fight by his side) failed to give Hitler pause; and that was his second error. Though it meant that Germany was now effectively alone, Hitler didn’t hesitate to send his Panzers into western Europe, in a blitzkrieg that impressively overran Holland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and France in a single summer.
Yet even as he stood, now, at the zenith of his fortunes, the ground was opening under Hitler. Once Goering’s Luftwaffe had failed in its bid to dominate the skies over England, the Nazi warlord knew that Britain, increasingly armed and supplied by Roosevelt, would remain a threat.
And yet this student of history, who had long harangued his dinner table guests about the dangers of fighting a war on two fronts, now tore up the peace treaty he had cannily signed with Stalin prior to ‘Poland’ and, after a pique-driven attack on Yugoslavia – his third error, since it fatefully delayed his eastern offensive, ensuring it would be fought in the depths of the same cruel Russian winter that, as Hitler knew, had once defeated the invincible Napoleon – threw three million German troops across the Polish-Soviet border.
As so often in the course of human history, this, Hitler’s final error, was in part the product of racism. Hitler viewed the Slavs as rabble; and he completely ignored the vast human and natural resources which Stalin had at his disposal, out of sight, as it were, in the Siberian steppes ‘behind’ Moscow. After the German armies were defeated at Stalingrad, the fate of Germany was no longer in doubt, and it was opportunistically rather than out of vital necessity that Roosevelt finally launched America into the European war and with Britain belatedly opened the dreaded ‘second front.’
All this is simplifying only in the sense that, after Dunkirk, all of Hitler’s subsequent moves were seen by him, not as wanton, but as forced. He needed to defeat Stalin in order to persuade Churchill to sue for peace; he needed the oil from the Caucasus in order to sustain Germany’s war-making ability; he needed to declare war upon the United States in order to prompt his ally Japan to invade Russia from the rear, and so on.
And in a sense all that is irrelevant. With Poland, Hitler set his country on an ever-narrowing path, one that, after ‘Barbarossa,’ became a cul-de-sac; and Germany duly paid the price.
What was forced, however, on the other side of the world, upon Japan by the canny FDR, was the Catch 22 represented by the US’s oil embargo. The latter meant that Japan would either have to surrender its empire without firing a shot or go to war with the United States. There were those in the Japanese cabinet who knew that, given the vast natural resources and industrial might of the US, Japan couldn’t win a war with America.
But they were outvoted by the hawks; Pearl Harbor was the result; and after that the outcome was never in doubt. Even more than the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the world, infinitely for the worse and perhaps for all time. But those particular crimes against humanity were never strategically necessary. Without them, the US would have prevailed just as surely in the Pacific.
At any rate, after World War II, a new world order appeared: a bi-polar world dominated by the victors of World War II, the US and the Soviet Union, while, finally exhausted, the old British Empire crumbled and collapsed.
Today, 70 years later, that order has in turn collapsed. It’s worth asking, especially now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle: can it happen again?
