A Patriot's History of the Modern World (31 page)

The Washington agreement was followed by a host of binational treaties and pacts, each pledging peace and nonaggression. Germany promised to observe French and Belgian borders and in the Locarno Pact (1925) all relations between the Allied powers in World War I (except the Russians, who had already signed a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk) and Germany were restored. Weimar Germany was thus admitted back into the family of nations a mere six years after assuming full blame for the worst conflict in human history. In 1928, French foreign minister Aristide Briand, seeking to solidify an American alliance with France, suggested a compact between the two nations. Americans, however, remained wary of future interventions in Europe, and the U.S. secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, turned the proposal into a blanket prohibition of war as “an instrument of national policy.” The ensuing Kellogg-Briand Pact enlisted sixty-five nations that signed an agreement outlawing war. It proved utterly irrelevant in stopping the Japanese invasion of Manchuria three years later, or in affecting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, or in restraining in any way a single national aggressive move in the 1930s.

In the failure of those treaties and the numerous other compacts entered into during the 1920s, the concept of collective security ignored the most salient point. Collective security
can
work if—but only if—the participants have a direct stake in the outcome. A classic example of this was the American “Wild West,” where it was long thought that bank robberies were common. In fact, however, they were extremely rare…due to collective security. While every town had a sheriff, it was the
armed citizens
who acted as a collective security force. Any bank robbers had to effect their escape from the middle of a town (the normal location of a bank) through the gunfire of almost every citizen—and depositor—between them and the outskirts of town!
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Such was not the case in post–World War I Europe, where collective security failed because at no time could European nations (or America) see clear interests in fighting wars in remote places that were not their own.

Command of the Air

In its attempt to limit weapons at sea, the Washington Conference produced one of the more remarkable unintended consequences of the post–World War I era by accelerating the rise of air power as a strategic tool. Naval air power, of course, was relatively new, but the advances in aircraft design were obvious to all. Between 1912 and 1920 alone, average aircraft
speeds had increased from 126 mph to 171 mph. Although the controversial Italian general and central director of aviation at the General Air Commissariat, Giulio Douhet, had written his influential
Command of the Air
(1921), for which he was jailed (it constituted a scathing attack on Italian war leadership for failing to properly prepare for war in 1915), only a handful of visionaries truly understood that, when correctly used, aircraft could carry out important tactical and strategic aims. American aviator Colonel Billy Mitchell met with Douhet in 1922 when he visited Europe, thereafter circulating an excerpted translation of Douhet's book. By then, Mitchell had already stunned the Army and Navy brass with his “Project B” bombing demonstration in 1921. Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had agreed to hold trials to test Mitchell's highly public claims that he could sink ships at sea with land-based bombers.
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Mitchell was particularly critical of the (in his view) misallocated spending in which a thousand bombers could be built for the cost of a new dreadnought.

Mitchell's claims that land-based bombers could sink capital ships ruffled feathers among the admirals, who could nevertheless not ignore a genuine aerial threat. They agreed to the demonstrations, but a week before the test Mitchell was dismissed from the project, only to be reinstated by the new secretary of war John Weeks, in part because of Mitchell's public support. Assembling a group of Martin, Handley-Page, and Caproni bombers, Mitchell trained the crews in antiship bombing techniques, aided by Alexander de Seversky, a Russian who had attacked German shipping in World War I. In July 1921, Mitchell's planes hit their targets with bombs after two unsuccessful tries, “sinking” the German battleship
Ostfriesland
according to the rules of the experiment. Navy officials insisted the test meant nothing, but Mitchell and an influential young officer named Curtis LeMay, who would perfect long-range bombing during World War II, were convinced otherwise.

Mitchell seemed to tromp into a puddle of controversy with every new step. After a tour of Hawaii and Asia, he returned with a report that anticipated a war with Japan and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
³³
Following a demotion to colonel, which was not an entirely unusual postwar rank adjustment, Mitchell found himself in an obscure posting in remote Texas. Some suspected this was due to his criticisms of the Army before the congressional Lampert Committee. His constant lobbying for weather stations at all air bases seemed prescient when the Navy dirigible
Shenandoah
went down in a
lightning storm, killing fourteen crewmen. An incensed Mitchell accused the top brass (and President Calvin Coolidge, by inference) of “almost treasonable administration of the national defense.”
³⁴
Coolidge could not allow such insubordination to stand unchallenged, and Mitchell was court-martialed, found guilty, and reduced in rank. He resigned rather than accept punishment.

Prescient as Mitchell was, his grating style and outspokenness limited his ability to effect change. That fell to another Billy, Billy Moffett, a South Carolina–born naval officer who fought in the Battle of Manila Bay, then won a Medal of Honor at Veracruz in 1914. Moffett himself did not fly, yet was instrumental in founding the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics in 1921, often conflicting with Mitchell in his desire to develop a separate naval air arm. Together, the two Billys brought American military aviation into the forefront of weapons design and war planning. Neither lived to see the application of American air power in World War II, Moffett dying in a blimp crash in 1933, Mitchell succumbing three years later to multiple illnesses. One of the high ironies of World War II occurred as the United States languished at its lowest point following the attack at Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines, when a single morale-lifting counterstrike changed the war's momentum. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's crews flew B-25 bombers from an aircraft carrier to Japan in broad daylight, dropped their lethal loads, and galvanized patriotic enthusiasm. The nickname of the B-25? The “Mitchell.”

The most famous aviator of the age, however, was not Billy Mitchell or Giulio Douhet, but a lanky engineering school dropout and the son of a Minnesota congressman, Charles Lindbergh. Enrolling in flying school just as Moffett was getting the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics off the ground, Lindbergh became a “barnstormer” who flew professionally (despite lacking a pilot's license) across the American Midwest. During the interwar years, American influence in Europe grew robustly, with no greater symbol than Lindbergh's successful solo transatlantic flight in 1927. Responding to a reward of $25,000 offered by hotel owner Raymond Orteig to the first man to complete a nonstop flight from New York to Paris, the former mail pilot left the dirt runway of Roosevelt Field on Long Island on May 20 with “four sandwiches, two canteens of water and 451 gallons of gas.”
³⁵
Just over thirty-three hours later, after a journey of 3,500 miles, he set down at Le Bourget Field to be mobbed by 100,000 people. For his courage and historic achievement, Lindbergh was the
“new Christ,” a term only a few years earlier applied to Wilson. As a European writer observed:

Awarded the Legion of Honor in France, Lindbergh returned home to the acclaim of four million Americans lining the streets of New York before he embarked on a nationwide tour sponsored by the Guggenheim fund. In March 1929, just before leaving office, President Calvin Coolidge presented Lindbergh, a reserve military officer, with the Medal of Honor. Lindbergh remained in the reserves until 1941 when he resigned as a colonel in the Army Air Corps after President Franklin Roosevelt publicly questioned his loyalty to the United States because of his noninterventionist activities with the America First Committee.

Lindbergh represented the first true American international celebrity—the American that foreigners wanted to be. By the 1920s, there was already more to America, though, than a flash-in-the-pan celebrity aviator. Lindbergh seemed the quintessential American who ignored the odds and overcame the impossible. Increasingly Europeans identified with, and wanted to emulate, average Americans. Americanophilia was largely a factor of the growing American cultural influence through movies, which still celebrated rugged individualism, entrepreneurship, self-deprecation and humility, and above all, material accomplishment. Adolf Hitler's untitled “second book” admitted as much. “The European today,” he wrote, “dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe's possibilities as from the real conditions of America.”
³⁷
In 1930, Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the first American to do so, and forced Europeans to acknowledge a distinctly American form of writing. Lewis, in books such as
Babbitt
, presented “crusading social criticism” with “cheerfulness and alacrity” as opposed to the “weightily serious” realism of the Europeans.
³⁸
Now, after only a decade since an American planted the U.S. flag at the North Pole and only a few years after the Americans opened the Panama
Canal, at a time when American architecture and engineering had gained equal status with that of Europe, Lindbergh's flight offered one more example of the growing reality of the influence of the United States across the spectrum.

Lindbergh's accomplishment also forced Europeans to realize that America was a serious competitor, not just culturally, but technologically as well. Even though the French and British rapidly caught up with the United States, then surpassed American airplane designs during World War I, the first transatlantic solo flight seemed to underscore their second-class status in aviation, which had first become apparent with the Wright brothers. When the Wright brothers staged their first demonstration flights in France, distraught French aviators were embarrassed. “We are beaten—we just don't exist,” said one. “We are like children compared to the Wrights,” mourned another.
³⁹

But the Lone Eagle's flight marked another achievement for America by underscoring its rugged individualism and lack of dependence on government. After a brief fling with government-subsidized aircraft under Samuel Langley, whose $50,000 in aid from Uncle Sam did him little good in his competition with the unsubsidized Wrights, the United States embarked on what would become a long-standing policy of using the mails to encourage private builders and airlines to make their own choices. Cornelius Vanderbilt had repeatedly overcome hefty congressional subsidies to competitors in the 1840s and 1850s to provide superior service in packet steamers to California and across the Atlantic, driving the government-subsidized firms into oblivion. Now, in the 1920s, the U.S. Postal Service used the lucrative mail contracts to keep the infant American airlines in business.
⁴⁰
Unfortunately, no government assistance comes without a price. In the case of the American airlines, the Post Office dictated schedules and even engine designs for the planes. Ultimately, however, the flexibility of the system proved far more beneficial than direct government control or ownership, leaving the Americans when war arrived in 1941 with a dozen major aircraft manufacturers, each with different areas of expertise and experience.

Life Unworthy of Life

As the 1920s commenced and soldiers returned to civilian roles throughout Europe and America, unemployment surged. Noncombatant workers had taken many of the jobs, leaving returning soldiers without work. Production of farm goods—which met the wartime demands of armies—now became
overproduction as fighters became farmers. With the subsequent fall in agricultural prices, farmers became bankrupt farmers. Recovering from wartime devastation and retooling from weapons manufacturing took time and money, and thousands of disaffected veterans, unemployed unionists, and displaced, homeless civilians fell in the gap. Many were impatient for postwar policies to provide relief; many looked to politicians who promised faster solutions.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini introduced a seemingly new political philosophy that many, mostly Europeans, found appealing in an ideology called “fascism,” for the Roman
fasces
or bundle of sticks. Mussolini essentially slapped a national label on widely accepted European socialism. All fascist movements were, at their core, socialist, and Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and newspaper editor from Naples, perceived that a glaring weakness of Marxist doctrines was the absence of national unity that ethnically cohesive populations craved. He shrewdly glimpsed that in the wake of the Great War, while complaints about excess nationalism abounded, no one wanted to entirely abandon the premise of national identity. Then, to adapt socialism to the twentieth century, Mussolini wedded it to big business through corporatism, permitting companies to manufacture and distribute products, but only after government had answered the fundamental economic questions of what was to be made and who would receive it. Corporate leaders retained their perks, companies made “profits,” but these were little more than crumbs dribbled out to party supporters. The only difference between “pure” socialism and fascism lay in the single layer of companies that carried out the wishes of the regime. The companies became closely aligned with the government, often in what would later be termed “public-private partnerships.” Others would call these alliances “crony capitalism,” but in any case the national government selected compliant corporations, regulated their industries, and insured their profitability through government loans, subsidies, and contracts.