America's Second Crusade

14. Crusade in Retrospect

14 Crusade in Retrospect America’s Second Crusade belongs to history. Was it a success? Over two hundred thousand Americans perished in combat, and almost six hundred thousand were wounded. There was the usual crop of postwar crimes attributable to shock and maladjustment after combat experience . There was an enormous depletion of American natural resources in timber, oil, iron ore, and other metals.The nation emerged from the war with a staggering and probably unredeemable debt in the neighborhood of one quarter of a trillion dollars. Nothing comparable to this burden has ever been known in American history. Were these human and material losses justified or unavoidable? From the military standpoint, of course, the crusade was a victory. The three Axis nations were completely crushed. American power on land and at sea, in the air and in the factory assembly line, was an indispensable contribution to this defeat. But war is not a sporting competition, in which victory is an end in itself. It can only be justified as a means to achieve desirable positive ends or to ward off an intolerable and unmistakable threat to national security. When one asks for the fruits of victory five years after the end of the war, the answers sound hollow and unconvincing. Consider first the results of the war in terms of America’s professed war aims: the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. Here surely the failure has been complete and indisputable. Wilson failed to make his Fourteen Points prevail in the peace settlements after World War I. But his failure might be considered a brilliant success when one surveys the abyss that yawns between the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms and the realities of the postwar world. After World War I, there were some reasonably honest plebiscites, Crusade in Retrospect [ 349 ] along with some arbitrary and unjust territorial arrangements. But the customary method of changing frontiers after World War II was to throw the entire population out bag and baggage—and with very little baggage. No war in history has killed so many people and left such a legacy of miserable, uprooted, destitute, dispossessed human beings. Some fourteen million Germans and people of German stock were driven from the part of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, from the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia, and from smaller German settlements in Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Rumania. Millions of Poles were expelled from the territory east of the socalled Curzon Line and resettled in other parts of Poland, including the provinces stolen from Germany. Several hundred thousand Finns fled from parts of Finland seized by the Soviet Union in its two wars of aggression. At least a million East Europeans of various nationalities— Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Letts, Lithuanians, Estonians— became refugees from Soviet territorial seizures and Soviet tyranny. Not one of the drastic surgical operations on Europe’s boundaries was carried out in free consultation with the people affected. There can be no reasonable doubt that every one of these changes would have been rejected by an overwhelming majority in an honestly conducted plebiscite. The majority of the people in eastern Poland and the Baltic states did not wish to become Soviet citizens. Probably not one person in a hundred in East Prussia, Silesia, and other ethnically German territories favored the substitution of Polish or Soviet for German rule. What a mockery, then, has been made of the first three clauses of the Atlantic Charter: “no territorial aggrandizement,” “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned ,” “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The other clauses have fared no better. The restrictions imposed on German and Japanese industry, trade, and shipping cannot be reconciled with the promise “to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.” [ 350 ] America’s Second Crusade The terrific war destruction and the vindictive peace have certainly not helped to secure “for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.” In the year 1950, five years after the end of the Second Crusade, “all men in all lands” are not living “out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” Nor are “all men traversing the high seas and oceans without hindrance.” The eighth...