Both the poor and the rich have--in my mind--the misfortune to believe that their stewardship of the nation and its institutions, as well as the subsequent rewards, are something that is inherent and automatic. For them, it is a right that they are owed, not a duty and privilege that they have earned.
A note: throughout American history, there have been politicians who have transcended the class they were born into: both members of the poor (including Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower); and the oligarchs (including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy), who have become staunch defenders of the need for the middle class. There are also those who have turned their back on their middle class roots (Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover come to mind), and served the oligarchs and their selfish agenda.
In the recently published volume of his biography, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (edited with an introduction by his official biographer George F. Nash; Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University; 2011) , President Hoover is quite clear in stating his belief that we should have let Hitler and Stalin slug it out, once the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In Hoover's opinion, we should have stayed out of the war against Germany by any and all means possible until one dictatorship had destroyed the other. Given Hoover's unremitting hatred and unalloyed suspicion of the Communists, I am certain that he was rooting for, and believed that, the German's would win, but at such a cost that Germany would no longer represent any danger to the rest of the World.
Hoover may have been correct about a Nazi victory over the Soviets. Certainly, Stalin was seriously considering a negotiated armistice with Hitler in early October 1941, which would have ceded the Ukraine (including the Crimea), Byelorussia, Eastern Poland, and the Baltic States in exchange for a peace treaty. Hitler (in the unanimous opinion of every historian and military expert I have ever read) stupidly diverted Army Group Center from its assault on Moscow to aid Army Group South in its attack on the Ukraine, giving Stalin the time he needed to strengthen the defenses around Moscow. By the time the Nazis renewed their assault on Moscow in November, Stalin had brought hundreds of thousands of veteran troops from his Far Eastern commands in Siberia (having learned from his master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that Japan had no intent of attacking the Soviets in the Far East) to reinforce Moscow, and then launched a series of massive counterattacks when the German attack stalled in the December snows.
However, even with the extraordinary bravery of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and Stalin's willingness to bear losses that would make any Western leader blanch (e.g. 20+ million dead between June of 1941 and May of 1945, one-eighth of the Soviet Union's pre-1939 population) it would have been, without the military aid provided by the Americans and British from the outset of the war between Hitler and Stalin, very unlikely if the Soviet Union would have survived, or if they had, they almost certainly would not have been at the gates of Berlin in April, 1945. More than 360,000 trucks, 12,000 tanks, 10,000 locomotives, nearly 40,000 rail cars, plus radios, aircraft, food, uniforms, boots, telephone wire, and all of the other mat à © riel that makes modern war possible, were received by the Soviets from their American and British allies. By the end of the War in Europe in May 1945, two-thirds of the trucks and one-half of the tanks in the Soviet active combat inventory were either American or British made. (John Mosier, Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2006; p.202)
The British and Americans performed an equally valuable service for the Soviets when they started the Strategic Bombing Offensive in 1942. It was the second front that Stalin kept demanding, just not in the form that he desired. Hitler's Luftwaffe was forced to bring thousands of fighters back to Germany to ward off the American and British bombing raids against the German heartland, rather than protecting the Wehrmacht against the Red Air Force. By the middle of 1943, the bombing offensive had insured that the Red Air Force always had local air superiority over the Red Army's offensive operations, and by the end of 1943, total air superiority over the entire Russian Front. This gave the Red Army a tremendous operational advantage against the Wehrmacht, because it required the Nazis to disperse their forces for counterattacks rather than concentrate them for maximum effectiveness, or face a mauling by the Red Air Force. It also helped to put pressure on Hitler until the American and Royal Navies could win the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boats, a prerequisite to an effective invasion of France by ground forces sufficient for the task.
The primary problem with Hoover's idea of letting the dictators fight it out was this: Hitler and the Nazis were not that far from breaking the British Eighth Army in Egypt in the Spring of 1942. When Fritz Todt, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, died in a plane crash in February 1942, he was replaced by Albert Speer, a far more capable and dangerous man who had Hitler's confidence, immediately oversaw a large increase in German war production. Without Hitler declaring war on the U.S. after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Germany would have had additional reserves that it could call upon for both Fall Blau, the assault on Stalingrad and the Caucasus in the summer of 1942, as well as an effort to take Malta and reinforce Rommel's Panzer Army Afrika in Egypt in the spring and early summer of 1942.
Without Malta, it would have been impossible for the Royal Navy and Air Force to effectively intervene against Rommel, and prevent him from being resupplied and reinforced in North Africa. Reinforced, and with some sort of proper supply line beyond the borders of Libya, Rommel could have easily taken Egypt and secured the Suez Canal. Once across the Suez Canal, Rommel would have easily destroyed the light British forces (fewer than three divisions) in Palestine and Jordan, and then moved quickly to secure the oilfields in the Mosul region of Iraq, solving Hitler's petroleum problem for the foreseeable future. This strategy would have also turned the Mediterranean into an Axis lake, and possibly brought both Turkey and Spain into the war on the side of Germany against the Soviets and the British.
Meanwhile, without the impetus of a war with Germany, the Manhattan Project does not have the priority that it did with the Nazis as an enemy. Because of this, Heisenberg and the Germans probably develop the A-bomb before the United States. If the United States enters the war against Hitler even one year later, there is probably no Soviet Union west of the Volga River, and maybe none west of the Ural Mountains. With the raw materials of Greater European Russia to command (including the oil fields of Baku and Maikop), Nazi control of all of Europe becomes a fact, not a historian's "What If?" scenario, and the invasion of France a practical impossibility.
Having read President Hoover's book, I now understand where Pat Buchanan gets his crazier ideas about the Second World War. (See my September 22, 2009 article " Hysterical Fantasy , " for more on this subject.) Rose-colored glasses? Definitely rose-colored welder's goggles.
America's Isolationists before World War II were driven by two separate but equal forces. The first of these was the memory of the unremitting slaughter of the First World War (Approximately 53,000 American combat deaths in six months of actual fighting in the trenches of France). The other was the unremitting hatred of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the foreign policy beyond the Western Hemisphere that his policies represented.
Herbert Hoover's hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, his foreign policy, and all that the New Deal represented is palpable in Freedom Betrayed. FDR can do nothing right, from the recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 (which Mr. Hoover's book implies was part of a carefully orchestrated, subversive plot by Moscow to use the "socialist" New Deal as the means to destroy American laissez-faire capitalism, which--like many modern Republicans--Hoover equates with freedom), to the disaster at Pearl Harbor. In the end, it comes across to me as the bitter words of a bitter old man, who cannot believe he lost to a cripple.
After December 7th, most general histories of the Second World War present the United States rising as one people to destroy the Axis powers. Unfortunately, this is not true.
Although men like Charles Lindbergh quickly changed from isolationist to patriot, not everyone was so accommodating. Here are some examples:
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The automakers demanded the right to make a limited number of cars for sale to the public, expecting to be able to take advantage of the new millionaires they were certain the war would bring. Roosevelt's War Production Board not only disabused them of that notion, but the work of Senator Harry Truman and his Special Senate Committee made certain that the corrupt practices that had created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires during the First World War (See Marine Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 booklet "War is a Racket," for more on that phenomenon.), were not repeated in the Second.
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The Mafia sank and burned the French ocean liner S.S. Normandie while she was berthed in New York harbor. They got concessions, including the release of Lucky Luciano from prison, and his transport to his native Sicily after Operation Husky took that island from the Italians and Germans.
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