Winds of War (80 page)

“Yes, as a man of honor. I heard you. I really believe you mean it. General Jagow said you Germans were a difficult people to understand. That is the truth. Im giving up. My assignment here is over.” Victor Henry knew he had hit too hard, but he had reacted as he did in a ball game, on instinct and impulse. He stood, and the banker got to his feet too.

“See here, old top,” Stöller said gently, “we Germans are at war, surrounded by foes. If the United States is ever in such a situation - and history takes strange turns – you may one day make an approach like this to a man you respect and find it as difficult as I have. I think your response has been naïve and wrong. Your phrasing was coarse. Still, the spiritual quality was there. It was an honorable reaction. I have absolutely no hard feelings. I trust you have none. I place a high value on your goodwill, Victor. And we did have good times at Abendruh, didn’t we?”

Smiling, Stöller held out his smooth thin clean hand. Pug turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Out of the loudly echoing bank he walked, nodding at the door attendant’s deep bow. In the warm sunlit Berlin evening, on the sidewalk outside, beautiful German children surrounded a one-legged man on a crutch, who was selling paper dolls that danced on strings. Victor Henry walked several blocks at a pace that made his heart pound. The first new thought that came to him was that, with his grossly insulting words and acts, he might have murdered Ted Gallard.

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Chapter 36 - The Garden Rose

(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Falling Crown

The winter and spring between the Battle of Britain and our attack on the Soviet Union stand in popular history as a breathing spell. Actually, in these eight months the axis of the war changed, for the British Empire as a reality left the stage of history.

In 1939, this momentous event lay shrouded in the future. A proper name for this war might well be “The War of the British Succession,” for the real question that was fought out was this: after the collapse of the British Empire, which would drag with it all European colonialism, what shape was the new world order to take, and under whose rule?

This historic turn, and this momentous issue, Adolf Hitler foresaw. He inspired and mobilized Germany to rise and dare all to seize the falling crown. The feats that our nation performed against odds will someday be justly treated in history when passions die and the slain of certain minor excesses con be seen in perspective. Meantime historians write as though only the struggles of the Allies were heroic, as though we Germans were a species of metal monster incapable of bleeding, freezing, or hungering, and therefore deserving of no credit for our vast victories. As Hitler said, the winning side writes the history. Yet, in their praise of their own arduous successes, the Allies despite themselves honor us, the nation that almost won the British succession, against a combination of all the industrial nations in the world except feeble Italy and far-off impoverished Japan.

For all of Hitler’s military mistakes, and they were many and serious, my professional judgment remains that the German armed forces would have won the war, and world empire, but for one historical accident. His real opponent, and more ruthless political genius, with more sober military judgment and greater material means for industrialized warfare: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The nation this man led was in no way comparable to the German people in military valor, as test after test in the field eventually showed. But that did not matter. This great manipulator so managed the war that other nations bled themselves almost to death, so as to hand his country the rule of the earth on a silver platter.

The United States of America, today the troubled master of the world, lost fewer men in the entire war than Germany expended in any one of half a dozen campaigns. Almost twenty million soldiers, sailors, and airmen perished in the Second World War. Of these, America in four years of global war lost about three hundred thousand on all fronts including her war with Japan! For this almost bloodless conquest of the earth, which has no parallel in all history, the American people can thank that enigmatic, still shrouded future, the Augustus of the industrial age, the Dutch-descended millionaire cripple, Roosevelt.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s world conquest still goes unrecognized. In the present historical writings on the war, he is granted nothing like the stature he will one day have. There is little doubt that he wanted it that way. The Augustan ruler, a recurring figure in history, seizes the realities of power under a mask of the humble, benign, humanitarian citizen. Nobody since the emperor Augustus ever managed this as Franklin Roosevelt did. Even Augustus was not as sanctimonious, for in those days the Christian vocabulary of humility and humaneness was not in vogue to lend such depths to hypocrisy.

Roosevelt’s Feat

In his successful waging of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt made no major military mistakes. That is a record not matched by any world conqueror since Julius Caesar. His slogan of “unconditional surrender” was widely called a blunder, by commentators as diverse as Goebbels and Eisenhower. I do not agree, and in its place, I will take up that stricture and challenge it.

Our propaganda office called him a tool of the Jews, but of course that was the silliest bosh. Roosevelt did nothing to save the Jews. He knows that any such action would annoy Congress and interfere with winning the war. Under his clever façade of a Christian humanitarian liberal, he was one of the coldest, most ruthless calculators in history. He sensed that the Americans liked the Jews no more than we did; and they amply confirmed this all through the war in their immigration policies, and at the Evian and Bermuda conferences, where they simply abandoned the Jews to their fate.

This author is no admirer of Roosevelt as a person, but the aim of my work is to set down the facts as military history should view them. On such a valuation, Franklin Roosevelt was the mastermind of the war. Even such a powerful, energetic, and brilliant figure as Adolf Hitler was in the end no more than a foil for him. Adventuristic conquerors often pave the way, in the fashion, for the dominion of their enemies. The adventurer sees the opportunity, and with meager means tries to capture it. He does the destroying and the bulldozing. His ice-blooded successor then crushes him and builds on the ruins. Napoleon in the last analysis merely put Wellington’s England in the saddle for a century. Charles XII hardly has a place in history, except as a foil for Peter the Great. And the German people under Adolf Hitler accomplished nothing in the long run except to hand the British succession to the United States under Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s Difficulty

Franklin Roosevelt’s problem was that at this great turning point in history he did not lead a warlike nation, whereas Adolf Hitler did. The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history. Spoiled children do not bear well the rigors of the field. Once they entered the war, the Americans fought with a logistic train of luxury and self-protection that to the warriors of Germany, the Soviet Union, and even England, was laughable. Nevertheless, they had the riches and the will for this. The strong can fight any kind of fight they please.

The Americans have a tradition of militia-like fighting. Presented with a threat, they drop their pleasures, take up arms, and fight amateurishly but bravely to get the thing over with. They formed this pattern in their revolution, and confirmed it in their civil war and the First World War. Roosevelt could present the chance for world conquest to his people in the guise of a threat to their safety. This, with a masterly exhibition of patient, spider-like waiting, he did. Meantime, he robbed Germany of two certain victories – over Great Britain and over the Soviet Union – by an inspired instrument of indirect war-making, a genuine new thing in military history, the so-called Lend-Lease Act.

A Cunning Trick

By the end of 1940, despite her narrow escapes at Dunkirk and in the air battle, Britain was sinking to her knees. She had only one recourse left on the planet to save her: the United States. But the Neutrality Act threatened to cut the English off from the American farms and factories that were keeping them alive. They were running out of dollars to pay even for grain and oil, let alone the ships, planes, guns, and bullets which they could no longer manufacture for themselves in the necessary quantities. For they lacked labor, materials, and plant, and they kept falling further behind under air attack.

The Neutrality Act forced belligerents to pay dollars for United States goods, and to come and fetch them. The Act posed more of a dilemma for Roosevelt than for the British. For them, a clear wise course lay open: negotiated peace with Germany. As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today. The Soviet Union would have been crushed in a one-front war, and instead of a rampant Bolshevism we would see in Russia at worst some pacific, disarmed form of social democracy. But none of this fitted in with Roosevelt’s ideas. He had no intention of allowing Germany to gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.

And so, to circumvent the Neutrality act, Franklin Roosevelt devised Lend-Lease, which was nothing more or less than a policy to give the British free of charge – and later the Russians too – all the war materials they needed to fight us! The audacity of the trick was breathtaking; the disguise was cunning. And while the record shows that Roosevelt’s clever advisers did much to push this unprecedented proposal through the stunned, balky congress, it also clearly shows that the revolutionary idea sprang, in the phrase of Sherwood, straight from Roosevelt’s “forested mind.”

Roosevelt sold this scheme to the simpleminded, inattentive American people with a typical bit of Augustan demagoguery, the famous comparison to a garden hose. When a neighbor’s house is on fire, he said at a press conference, one does not bargain with him over the sale or renting of the garden hose he needs to put it out. One gladly lends him the hose, so as to keep the fire from one’s own house. Once the fire is out, the neighbor returns the hose; or if he has damaged it, there is time enough then to settle the account.

This was, of course, shameless and hollow poppycock. Warships, warplanes, war materials are not garden hoses. To take Roosevelt’s comparison at its face value, if your neighbor’s house is on fire, what you really do is rush over there and fight the fire with him. You do not lend him your hose, and then stand idly by watching him try to cope with the flames. That this silly stuff was swallowed whole by the Americans simply shows how uncannily shrewd Roosevelt was in managing them. During his successful 1940 election campaign for an unprecedented third term, he had declared in a famous speech, “
I tell you again, and again, and again, your boys are not going to be sent into foreign war
s.” He was eagerly awaiting a chance to go back on the clear pledge. Meantime he had to use tricks and guile to oppose Germany.

The Real Meaning of Lend-Lease

It was impossible for him – and this he knew – to present the case to his people in realistic terms. Otherwise he could have told them in effect, “My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve that mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting. What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership. They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. May they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule.”

That was what Lend-Lease meant and that was how it worked.

First the British, and then the Russians, were induced by Lend-Lease to keep on with extremely bloody, almost hopeless struggles, when the easier, safer, more profitable alternative of negotiated peace always lay open to them. There is reason to think that at Stalin’s low point late in 1941, when his armies and his air force had virtually ceased to exist as coherent battle formations and we were smashing toward Moscow, that supreme realist would have proposed peace again, if not for the encouragement in words and supplies – not in lives – of the United States. As it was, the Russian people made sacrifices in blood never matched in all history, to transfer world hegemony from one Anglo-Saxon power to another.

And Franklin Roosevelt so maneuvered matters that the British had to beg for this bloodletting help! They were put in the position of being abjectly grateful for the chance to fight Roosevelt’s battles. On December 8, 1940, Churchill wrote the American President a very long letter, which deserves a bolder place in history than it now holds. Churchill once said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the Empire, but with this letter he dissolved it. Churchill in this document frankly stated that England had come to the end of her rope, in the matter of ships, planes, materials, and dollars; and he asked the President to “find ways and means” to help England in the common course. This was what Roosevelt had been icily waiting for in his wheelchair: this written confession by the British Prime Minister that without American aid the Empire was finished. Within two weeks he had proposed Lend-Lease to his advisors and within a month he had laid it before Congress.