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BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoovers Secret History of the Second World

War and Its Aftermath

Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash

Hoover Institution Press, 2011

Reflections on World War IIPrompted by Herbert Hoovers Secret

HistoryHerbert Hoovers Secret History of World War II and Some

Reflections it Prompts

Dwight D. Murphey

Wichita State University, retired

Long held in storage by the Hoover family but just recentlyreleased, former U.S. President Herbert Hoovers secret historyof World War II, written between 1944 and 1963 and now editedby Hoover historian George H. Nash, sheds light on nineteengigantic errors of strategy and geopolitics that Hoover saw ashaving been committed by the administrations of Franklin D.

Roosevelt and Harry S Truman starting with the diplomaticrecognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. The result is arevisionist history that runs counter to the image of the goodwar that was created by the Allied perspective during the warand that has remained the conventional perception. Hooversaccount and the reflections to which it gives rise have particularrelevance today because they bear directly on the perceptionentertained by Americans, so important to both neoconservatismand neoliberalism, that the many foreign interventions by theUnited States are benign because they are well-intentioned. Thisarticle will review highlights of the history as Hoover relates itand will ponder some of the implications that so greatly contradict

todays conventional wisdom about the war and its aftermath.


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Key Words: Herbert Hoover, World War II, strategic errors,

insouciance toward Communism, the good war, U.S. foreigninterventions, double standards toward totalitarian systems,Hoovers mutual exhaustion premise, Churchills Balkansstrategy, undeclared wars, total war, bombing civilians, moralityof atom bombs, World War II conferences, post-World War IItreatment of millions, Manchuria, Soviet entry against Japan,Marshall mission to China, loss of China to Mao, Korean Warprecursors, Katyn Forest massacre, Nuremberg trial.

Herbert Hoover was president of the United States from 1929 to 1933.Despite the eclipse that his reputation suffered because of the Great Depression, he

deserves to be remembered as one of the monumental figures of the first half of thetwentieth century. He was already world-renowned, before he became president,for leading the food-relief efforts during and after World War I that saved so manymillions of lives, including (as just a small part) an estimated 20 million in Russiain the famine of 1921. For several years after his presidency, his opponentsinvoked his name as a symbol of failure, but long before his death in 1964, Hooveremerged as a highly respected elder statesman. His philosophy was that of aclassical liberal: in domestic matters, he favored a properly regulatedindividualism; in foreign affairs, he favored an active involvement of the UnitedStates in the world, but, in keeping with the United States traditional posture priorto 1898, held that it is not the right of any American to advise foreign peoples asto their policies.

Freedom Betrayed is, as the subtitle says, a secret history of the SecondWorld War and its aftermath. When the book first arrived to this reviewer, itsimposing bulk (caused largely, it turns out, by the high quality of the paper) gavehim the impression that it is a tome that will mainly interest archivists and serioushistorians, but will be tedious reading for the general public. He soon found,however, that those who are intimidated by the size will miss out on an awfullygood read. The book is tremendously informative and provocative, but at the sametime moderate in tone and engagingly readable.

The history is secret only because Hoover did not offer it for publicationduring his lifetime (he finished it in 1963 and died the next year) and because hisfamily held it in storage until they recently made it available to the Hoover

Institution on War, Revolution and Peace for editing by George H. Nash, the


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preeminent Hoover biographer and scholar,1 and release in 2011. Already a

prolific author, Hoover began work on the history in 1944 and continued with thewriting, through many revisions, for some twenty years. He considered it hisMagnum Opus,the most important of all his writings, according to Nash. It iseasy to see why he assigned it so high a place: the history of that time involvedstrategic and geopolitical decisions that deserve the most serious attention and thatgo far beyond the simplified gloss that most people give them.

Each of the decisions can be examined as a nugget for its own sake. Theseinclude such issues as whether it was wise to enter into a wartime alliance withStalin, to have demanded unconditional surrender, to have dropped the atomicbombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to have urged Stalin to enter the war withJapan and take control of Manchuria, or to have intervened repeatedly in the war

between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao and thereby to have facilitated Maos victory.In this article we will look at several of these.

Before we do, however, it is worth considering how Hoovers narrativebears on two myths that are important in contemporary American thought. One isthe panoramic image that for the United States the Second World War was thegood war. The other is that American interventions around the world are benignin intention and constructive in result, and that therefore, in keeping with bothneoconservative and neoliberal thought, the United States acts appropriately whenit seeks to serve as both a social worker and policeman of the world.

Within a few days after this reviewer finished reading Hoovers history, afriend commented on how lucky we were to have had a man like FranklinRoosevelt lead us in the fight against Hitler. In light ofwhat the book had justbeen making so clear, this comment was dumbfounding. And yet, as far removedfrom the reality of those times as the observation may be, the friend was merelyarticulating what almost every American would say: In effect, Nazi Germany wasa monster whose leaders ambitions threatened the peace and freedom of the world.Even though a large majority of Americans before Pearl Harbor wanted to stay out,FDR had a greater wisdom in knowing that Hitler had to be stopped. Japanssurprise attack warranted the strongest possible response against its militarism and,as an unintended benefit, brought the United States into the war with Germany.The alliance with the Soviet Union was desirable, providing an ally that reversedthe Nazi tide at Stalingrad and joined in bringing the war to a successful

1 Dr. George H. Nashs scholarly writings include a three-volume biography of Herbert Hoover,as well as other writings that include his The Conservative Movement in America Since 1945 andhisReappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism. The latter of thesewas reviewed in this Journal in its Fall 2011 issue, pp. 393-397.

Formatted: Font: 12 pt

Formatted: Justified


Formatted: Font: 12 pt, Italic





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conclusion. By defeating Hitler, the United States and its allies won the war.

Though costly in lives and treasure, it was a good war.All peoples need their myths their heroes, their victories and their images

of glories won. Serious historians can and will dig behind the myths and knowbetter, but their discoveries often wont disturb the quiet surface of public opinion(unless an angrylienated ideology such as the one that has so long attackedAmericas culture and historic memory goes on a myth-destroying mission). Itwould be arguable that the conventional image of World War II should be left as arallying point for national pride, with the realities left on a side-track for scholarlydiscussion, were it not for the reinforcement the myth gives to the second of themyths we have mentioned.

The premise guiding most American opinion today, among those who are

generally known as the neoconservatives, and theneoliberals, the media (suchas television dramas), and the average person as found in day-to-day conversation,is that, to the extent Americans become aware of it, no injustice, suffering ormisfortune around the world should be tolerated. It is felt that each of these has alegitimate claim on the sensibilities of Americans, who must not simply sit on theirhands and allow it to happen. This premise guides the American centuryaspirations and military interventions of the neoconservatives. The neoliberalsrhetoric is sometimes softer, but the military interventions of Clinton and Obamaare hardly distinguishable from those of George W. Bush. There are, of course,many additional interventions that circumstances allow to fall short of overtmilitary action.

We are confronted, however, by serious questions: Are the good intentionsrealistically thought out, or are they nave, failing in their appreciation of theworlds complexities, and often guided by subterranean lobbies? Are theconsequences benign either in their effect on Americas interests and nationalsecurity or in their impact on other peoples? Are the interventions presumptuousby often brushing aside the role those other peoples may wish to play indetermining their own well-being? And (perhaps as a lesser point, but neverthelessone that shouldnt be omitted) do the American people receive a truly objectiveview of the worlds miseries and injustices, or isnt there necessarily a great deal ofselectivity that goes into what is sensationalized for them?) It is here that Hooverssecret history prompts us to critically examine a critical examination of theaccepted image of World War II. is called for. As we see from Hoovers account

and from many other sources, the Second World War provides an example ofprecisely how inappropriate the nave view of the world is as a guide to action.

Herbert Hoovers History of the War


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In a climactic final chapter, Hoover reviews nineteen gigantic errors,

characterizing them as lost statesmanship. The books structure, however, doesnot focus on them directly. It consists of three volumes (all included in thisbook). The first goes into detail about events leading up to the war; the seconddiscusses the Allies wartime conferences, such as at Casablanca, Tehran, Yaltaand Potsdam; and the third takes up case histories of Poland, China, Korea andGermany. Because the discussion of the nineteen points runs through the entirenarrative, however, they provide the best basis for a review of his history. Thefollowing is a summary of many of the points. We will tell more about several ofthem as part of our later reflections. All nineteen are listed in an Appendix to thisarticle.

The recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. Hoover observed that it was

President Woodrow Wilson who first adopted a policy of not diplomaticallyrecognizing the Communist government in Russia. The reason, Wilson said, wasthat we cannot recognize a government which is determined and bound toconspire against our institutions. This remained the policy until FDR extendedrecognition in November 1933. Hoover says the recognition of Russia by theUnited States gave the Soviet government a stamp of respectability. Further:no sooner had they won recognition than the Communists began violating theirpledge [made in an agreement signed at the time by Maxim Litvinov] not toconspire for the overthrow of the American government.

The 1939 British-French guarantee of Poland and Rumania. Hooverspeaks of this as probably the greatest blunder in the whole history of Europeanpower diplomacy, since by this act, they threw the bodies of democracy between

Hitler and Stalin. Not only was it a military impossibility to stand behind thisguarantee, but it served as a trigger for war between Britain and France againstHitler (but noticeably not against Stalin) when Hitler and Stalin sent their troopsinto Poland in September 1939. Since Hoover believed the western powers shouldhave stayed out of the war, allowing Nazi Germany and Communist Russiaeventually to fight each other, he considered this trip-wire an egregious blunder.British Prime Minister Chamberlain made the commitment reluctantly. Hooversays he would not have done so had it not been for the constant needling fromWashington.

The United States undeclared war against both Germany and Japan before Pearl Harbor. Hoover considers this a total violation of promises upon

which he [FDR] had been elected a few weeks before [in the U.S. presidentialelection in November 1940]. The acts of war against Germany included, accordingto Senator Robert Taft, the seizing of Axis ships while we were supposed to beneutral, sending American ships into the combat zone, and the occupation of


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Iceland.2 Hoover regarded the total economic sanctions on Japan in July 1941

as war in every essence except shooting, because the sanctions threatened Japanwith starvation and ruin.

The alliance with Stalin. The greatest loss of statesmanship in allAmerican history, Hoover wrote (applying a superlative once again to underlineits importance), was the tacit American alliance and support of Communist Russiawhen Hitler made his attack [on the Soviet Union] in June, 1941. Hoover foresawthat American aid to Russia meant victory for Stalin and the spread ofCommunism over the world. Instead, statesmanship imperiously cried to keepout, be armed to the teeth and await their [the two monstrous dictators] mutualexhaustion. Hoover argued that these monstrous dictators were bound to exhaustthemselves no matter who won. Even if Hitler won military victory, he would be

enmeshed for years trying to hold these people in subjection. And he was boundeven in victory to exhaust his military strength.3

The refusal to accept Japans September 1941 peace proposal. The bookseditor, George Nash, speaks of Hoovers thesis that Roosevelt could have come toterms with the peace-minded Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoye, in the earlyautumn of 1941. FDRs rejection ofKonoyes repeated peace overtures forcedhim out of the premiership in October. This passed power to Tojos militaristicfaction (although even Tojo then preferred to avoid war with the United States, andthe Emperor himself proposed peace in November). The acceptance of[Konoyes] proposals, Hoover wrote, was prayerfully urged by both theAmerican and British ambassadors in Japan. It is significant that Hoover tells usthat the terms Konoye proposed would have accomplished every American

purpose except possibly the return of Manchuria, including so significant a thingas Japans withdrawal from China.

The demand for unconditional surrender. Roosevelt introduced thisdemand at the Casablanca conference in January 1943. Hoover, in common with

2 Robert A. Taft,A Foreign Policy for Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company,Inc., 1951), p. 126.3 It is certainly not unreasonable to question this premise. A negotiated peace might well haveoccurred before the two were exhausted; and if Hitler won, he would have come into possessionof oil, agricultural and other resources of immense military and economic importance. Hoovermade his point many times in speeches and this book, but so far as this reviewer knows neverquestioned his own premise or provided detailed substantiation for it. Even if one does not

accept his mutual exhaustion idea, however, much can be said for the wisdom of the UnitedStates having stayed out and armed itself to the teeth,. as Hoover recommended. Hooverdidnt concern himself with Britains wisest course, but it is arguable that if it had adoptedPrime Minister Chamberlains preference for remaining at peace with Germany and thereby notcoming to rely so totally on the United States as it did, it might not have lost its empire.


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many others, saw much wrong with it. It played into the hands of every enemy

militarist and propagandist; it prolonged the war with Germany, Japan and Italy.And in the end major concessions in surrender were given to both Japan and Italy.It held out no hope of peace to the Germans if they got rid of the Nazis.

The sacrifice of the Baltic States, East Poland, East Finland, Bessarabiaand Bukovina to Stalin at the Moscow conference in October 1943, and of sevenmore nations at the Tehran conference that December. Stalin emerged from thewar imposing Communist control on a dozen countries. Hoover ascribed this toconcessions made to Stalin at the wartime conferences, and considered them a profound repudiation of the Atlantic Charters statement of war purposes, whichincluded each peoples right of self-determination. (We consider an emphasis onthe verbal concessions odd, at least so far as those relating to the nations that could

have been reached first by the Western Allies, because the actual reality on theground (vastly more important than concessions made in words) was created bythe strategic military decisions that allowed the Red Army to reach those nationsfirst. Hoover might well have included these strategic decisions in his list ofgigantic mistakes. They consisted of (1) the choice that Roosevelt made toestablish the Second Front in Normandy rather than to follow Churchills often-repeated preference for attacking Nazi Germany by going north through theBalkans, thereby getting to eastern and central Europe before the Red Army; and(2) in like manner, the choice to hold back and not get to Berlin and Prague aheadof Stalins forces, and to withdraw from Czechoslovakia, letting Stalin have it. Bythese choices, Stalin was allowed de facto control over eastern and central Europe.As to the nations the Western Allies could not have reached first, it is reasonable to

think that the agreements at Tehran and Yalta were as meaningful and destructiveas Hoover thought them to be.)

The refusal of the Japanese peace proposals of February-July, 1945.Hoover says that early in February, 1945, Mr. Roosevelt received a long dispatchfrom General MacArthur, outlining terms of peace that could be made with Japan.These terms amounted to unconditional surrender, except for maintaining theposition of the emperor and strongly urging that no concessions be made toRussia. The next month, a Japanese overture was made through Sweden; and inApril the Emperor substituted a group of civilian anti-militarists for the militaristministry (our emphasis). Another attempt was made by Japan through Moscow inJuly, and a mission by Prince Konoye (who was then back in favor) for thispurpose was refused by Stalin. Hoover says that President Truman knew of thisoverture. Indeed, Hoover himself had in mid-May sent Truman a memosupporting the overture. In the face of all this, the declaration made at the Potsdamconference in July continued to insist on unconditional surrender, and Japan was


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informed only after its surrender following the bombing of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki that it could retain its emperor (which was an item of inestimableimportance to the Japanese).

Dropping the atomic bombs. Despite the irony of his personal friendshipwith Truman, Hoover speaks of Trumans immoral order to drop the atomic bombon the Japanese, calling it the act of unparalleled brutality in all Americanhistory. The brutality was compounded by the fact that it was gratuitous: Hooversays American military men and statesmen have repeatedly stated that its use wasnot necessary to bring the war to an end.

Giving China to Mao Tse-Tung. The book speaks of Rooseveltshideous secret agreement as to China at Yalta which gave Mongolia and, in effect,Manchuria to Russia. This placing of the Soviet Union in such a dominating

strategic position where it could (and did) assist Maos conquest of China wasfollowed by a long series of actions favorable to Mao: Truman sacrificed all ofChina to the Communists by insistence of his left-wing advisors and hisappointment of General Marshall to execute their will.

There are a number of other points about the war that are not includedper sein Hoovers list of strategic errors, but that are discussed in histhe narrative. Onehas to do with the Morgenthau Plan to dismantle Germanys industry and turnGermany into an agrarian nation, a plan that was still being carried out de facto aslate as 1949, a year in which, according to one historian, 268 factories wereremoved, in whole or in part.4 Hoover was intensely critical, saying that to turnGermany into a pastoral state would cause starvation or otherwise force thevictors to exterminate or move removal of as many as 25 million people.Another point is raised in Hoovers case history of Korea, where he told how theactions of the Truman administration placed South Korea at the mercy NorthKorea and virtually invited the attack that occurred.

Going Beyond the Review: Reflections Prompted by the History

Hoovers history of the strategic decisions suggests a variety of facets for usto reflect upon. These could Reflections about the wars countless facets shouldideally go on indefinitely, but there is a limit to what we can cover here. There ismuch to say about each of the three subjects we will select. They are (1) howprofoundly the intellectual context affected the war; (2) the adoption of total waragainst civilian populations; and (3) the brutality of the Allies postwar treatmentof many millions of civilians and prisoners of warpeople. Our examination of

4 James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation,1944-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company (Canada) Limited, 1997), p. 95.


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these subjects will not be for the purpose of encouraging alienation against the

United States or Great Britain, but will stem from the conviction that the events ofthat period deserveand even demanda truly thoughtful comprehension. As wediscuss them, we will keep an eye out for what Hoover had to say about them.

I. Ideas Have Consequences: The Sweeping Impact of Educated theWesternersElites Attitude toward Communism

Perhaps what stands out most starkly when all of the facts (and more) recitedby Hoover are seen together is how much they were prompted by the Westernelites indulgent attitude toward Communism in general and Stalin and Mao inparticular. (By elite in this context, we are referring to the broad spectrum ofmostly college-educated people who share what has come to be known as a

politically correct worldview.) Very few people today will have read the issuesofThe New Republic and The Nation, at one timethe two flagship journals of theAmerican Left, during the 1920s and 1930s. This reviewer has, and his reading ofthe writings of hundreds of Americas leading intellectuals as they appeared inthose pages became the basis for his bookLiberalism in Contemporary America.5The infatuation with the Soviet Union was intense during the three decades fromthe time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1947. Indeed, the RedDecade of the 1930s was simply part of the three-decade picture. Although thedenizens of the leftist intelligentsia lent their names to the hundreds ofCommunist front organizations in the 1930s, the 1920s had much the sameflavor, with one pilgrimage after another to Soviet Russia advertised and writtenabout in glowing terms. Along these lines, the premier liberal philosopher JohnDewey contributed a series of six articles to The New Republic in 1928 about histrip to Russia to observe its educational system, which he describedenthusiastically. Stalins show trials and purge of a great many of the originalBolsheviks, the exiling and eventual murder of Trotsky, and the Hitler-Stalin Pactall caused consternation, and a number of people left the Communist fold becauseof them; but it is only the slightest hyperbole to call these things mere hiccupsdisturbing the overall rapture. For the most part, The New Republic forgave orignored them. It would sideline us too greatly to spell out the countless details thatwove the fabric of the intellectual mindscape of those years. But that isunfortunate, since an appreciation of that atmosphere is essential if its effect onAmerican policy is to be fully credited. Hoover devotes a section, consisting of

five chapters and entitled A Great Intellectual and Moral Plague Comes to Free5 Dwight D. Murphey,Liberalism in Contemporary America (McLean, VA: Council for Social& Economic Studies, 1987, 1992). This book is available through the publisher or online atwww.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info


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Men, to Communist ideology and its infiltration into American life. It would

have been fitting for him to comment on how greatly the intellectual milieuinfluenced the decisions made during the war.

It would be a mistake to confuse the ubiquity of this atmosphere with themuch narrower, albeit important, issue that came to preoccupy Americans in the1950s: that of Communists in government and entertainment. The intellectualsubculture of the American Left fought bitterly against any rooting out ofCommunists and of Soviet agents, but what almost certainly lay behind itsvigorous anti-anti-Communism was its sense that a rooting out of formal membersof the Communist party came awfully close to exposing the intellectual subcultureas a whole (many of whose members had lent wholehearted support to theCommunist enterprise but had not joined the Communist Party as such).

All of this is prelude to the point that is most pertinent to our discussion ofAmerican policies during World War II. The point is this: that the mindset ofFranklin D. Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S Truman, and of a sizeablenumber of the people around them, was greatly influenced by the intellectualtapestry just described. It should hardly be necessary to caution that this issomething very different from saying that they were Communists. Those whowere Communists were important for that fact, to be sure; but it is the atmosphereof indulgence and acceptance that has the most direct bearing on what we will beexamining. (Although to say so doesnt relate to World War II, it is worth notingthat the overhang of that indulgence continues to color American perceptions tothis day. In one context after another, one runs into obdurate ignorance of theatrocities committed by Communist totalitarianism, a double standard as between

Communism and Nazism, and a self-congratulatory openness to such Communistheroes as, say, Che Guevara and Diego Rivera.)

For his part, Franklin Roosevelt manifested a remarkable insouciance towardCommunism. Hoover comments on this, observing that it is to be supposed thata statesman of the stature capable of leading the American people would informhimself of the history, the beliefs, the policies, and the character of leaders withwhom he chose to make partners Stalin had publicly proclaimed his fidelity toLenins teaching and himself had confirmed that his purpose was to envelop theworld in Communism His character was indicated in headlines over yearsrecounting the thousands of even his own colleagues whom he had put to death inorder to further his own ambitions. It is nonsense, Hoover says, for FDRs

supporters to attempt his defense by laying his failures to Stalins wickedness andbetrayals. In the face of all that was known, FDR was moved to speak informally


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and affectionately of Stalin as U.J. [Uncle Joe].6 In a radio address on December

24, 1943, FDR said: To use an American colloquialism, I may say that I gotalong fine with Marshal Stalin I believe that we are going to get along very wellwith him, and the Russian peoplevery well indeed.7

Recognition of the Soviet Union. The diplomatic recognition of the SovietUnion by the Roosevelt administration in November 1933 is the first of thedecisions we will cite in support of our point. In addition to the reasons Hoovergave for criticizing the recognition, something quite monstrous should be noted.The recognition came just months after one of the twentieth centurys worstgenocides. During the winter of 1932-1933, Stalin had sealed off vast areas andsent in thousands of men to forcibly stripped the inhabitants of food. In his 1986book Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest estimated the deaths at

between five and seven million in Ukraine, one million in the North CaucusesTerritory, and one million elsewhere.8 It was an act of intellectual, moral depravityfor the Wests intellectual culture to have ignored, and even actively covered up,an atrocity of this magnitude. If Franklin Roosevelt was unaware of this genocide(or, if he was aware, cared little about it), it was because he was encased in thesensibilities surrounding him.

Allying with Stalin. The decision by the United States and England to allywith Stalin was a further consequence of the mindset. Immediately followingHitlers invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, FDR announced that theUnited States would give all possible aid to Soviet Russia, as though supportingStalin against Hitler were intuitively obvious. It wasnt obvious to Hoover. In aradio address five days after FDRs announcement, Hoover said the provision of

aid to Russia would make the whole argument of joining in the war to bring thefour freedoms to mankind a gargantuan jest. He saw that Western civilizationhas consecrated itself to making the world safe for Stalin If we go further and join the war and win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of communism onRussia, the enslavement of millions, and more opportunity for it to extend in theworld. Here, we see the sharp contrast between the thinking of Hoover andRoosevelt on the question of Communism. Both Roosevelt and Churchill sawHitler as the singular threat to monster stalking the world; to Hoover, both Hitler

6 See Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelts Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (NewYork: Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2002), p. 389.7

Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, p. 409.8 For a description of these events, see this reviewers article Lest We Forget (or Never ReallyKnew): The 60th Anniversary of Soviet Communisms Deliberate Murder of Millions byStarvation, Conservative Review, December 1992, pp. 38-44. The article is available on thereviewers website as A46 (i.e., Article 46).


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and Stalin were in that categorymonsters. Most Americans today will reflexively

agree with Roosevelt that fighting Hitler had to be paramount over all otherconsiderations, so it is worth recalling that Hoover saw a viable alternative thatAmericans at the time favored but have long since forgotten: for the United Statesto assure its own security by arming itself to the teeth, to allow the totalitariantitans to fight it out against each other, and to provide Great Britain with allpossible support within the law. It is relevant to this that, as Hoover pointed outin 1938, neither Germany nor the Fascist states want war with the Westerndemocracies unless these democracies interfere with their spread eastward.Hoovers assessment is borne out by Hitlers repeated peace overtures to Britain.9

Rejection of the Balkans strategy. It isnt, however, necessary to agree withHoover in his opposition to an alliance with Stalin to see that several crucial

decisions during and after the war reflected the mindset of the American Left andgreatly facilitated the expansion of Communism in Europe and Asia. Churchillsrecord during the war was one of blowing hot and cold on Communism, theindulgent cold almost certainly prompted greatly by the all-consuming need toget along with Roosevelt, which is what he saw as the key to British survival.10The hot side, his opposition to Communism, found expression in his repeatedadvocacy of a strategy of attacking north through the Balkans. Hoover says thatPrime Minister Churchill, at the First Quebec Conference August 11-24, 1943

9 It is doubtful whether most people today know of these overtures. In Hitlers War(NewYork: Avon Books, 1990), p. 309, one of the worlds most conscientious and courageous (butcastigated) historians, David Irving, summarizes:For twenty years Hitler had dreamed of analliance with Britain. Until far into the war he clung to the dream with all the vain, slightlyridiculous tenacity of a lover unwilling to admit that his feelings are unrequited. Hitler shoutedto an adjutant: We have no business to be destroying Britain. We are quite incapable of takingup her legacy [i.e., her empire]. In August 1940, Hitler said I now find myself forced againstmy will to fight this war against Britain. That summer, he hesitated to crush the British,according to Irving; Hitler stayed the hand of the Luftwaffe and forbade any attack on Londonunder pain of court-martial. Of course, we know that when Britain refused his peace offer, theBattle of Britain ensued. But it wasnt long before all possibility of a German invasion ofBritain disappeared when Germany went to war against the Soviet Union in June 1941.10 Churchills blowing cold toward Communism (i.e., indulging it) is illustrated whenHoover writes that the Prime Minister found no difficulty in getting into bed with Stalin byway of forming an alliance with the Soviet Union after Hitlers attack o n that country. Hooverpoints out that at the Moscow conference in mid-October 1944, Churchill sided with Stalin overthe objections of the Polish government-in-exile to the planned post-war partition of Poland that

annexed the eastern part to Russia and made the rest a Communist state. Churchill praised Titoin Yugoslavia and near the end of the war chose to support Tito, a Communist, over the anti-Communist Mihailovic. At the same time, there was much that contradicted all this, such as wesee in Churchills Balkans strategy and in his having had British troops put down a Communistinsurgency in Greece in late 1944.


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prior to Tehran, had urged an operation which came to be called an attack on the

soft underbelly of Europe. The concept was that in addition to operations on theItalian mainland, and across the Channel to France, an attack should proceednorthward from either the head of the Adriatic or Aegean Sea. Churchills purposein this operation was to create an Allied wall against Communist occupation ofYugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary which would otherwise likelyoccur with the German retreat Churchill repeatedly urged this strategy. Hoover points out that General Mark Clark,... at that time in command of the AlliedArmies in Italy, strongly supported the Prime Ministers strategy. In Clarks bookCalculated Risk, Clark wrote that failure to push on into the Balkans was one ofthe outstanding political mistakes of the war Had we been there before the RedArmy, not only would the collapse of Germany have come sooner, but theinfluence of Soviet Russia would have been drastically reduced. Clark said thatto Stalin the thing that he wanted most was to keep us out of the Balkans.11From early in the war, Stalin pressed Britain and the United States to launch aSecond Front across the English Channel into France. Roosevelt and his principalmilitary advisor General George Marshall pushed hard for such an attack throughFrance in 1942, and then in 1943; but in each case Churchill succeeded insidelining it because he believed that the Allies were wholly unprepared for itand that, accordingly, an invasion that early might prove disastrous. In his bookGreat Mistakes of the War, Hanson W. Baldwin supports Churchills reluctance,writing that in retrospect it is now obvious that our concept of invading WesternEurope in 1942 was fantastic The British objection to a 1943 cross channeloperation was also soundly taken militarily.12 The Normandy invasion came

eventually on June 6, 1944, by which time Roosevelt had sided with Stalin in preventing Churchills Balkans strategy. The result, we know, was the RedArmys conquest of the Balkans and central Europe, leading to the many years ofcaptive nation status forthe peoples there.

11 Clarks book is quoted in Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, p. 389.12 In recent years, the image that informed Americans have of Senator Joseph McCarthy has, inlight of the Venona Papers and other revelations, been considerably rehabilitated. Readers whoare open to it will be well advised to read McCarthysAmericas Retreat from Victory: The Storyof George Catlett Marshall, published in book form and given as a speech in the U.S. Senate onJune 14, 1951, which is a remarkably good history that both preceded and paralleledsHooverssecret history. (Oddly, Hoover never mentions McCarthys study of Marshall, preferring to

speak entirely for himself.) McCarthy quoted Baldwins statement set out in the text here, andsaw that where you stand at the end of a war is of paramount importance. Accordingly, toMcCarthy, the decision to concentrate on France and leave the whole of Eastern Europe to theRed armies was without question the most significant decision of the war in Europe.McCarthy,Retreat, pp. 29-30.


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Holding back Allied forces. In common with this failure to block the Red

Armys takeover of eastern Europe was the decision, again over Churchillsobjections, to stop the British and American assault in Germany at the Elbe riverrather than to go on to Berlin and then farther east to the Oder. Persico tells us thatwho occupied the German capital, Churchill believed, would decisively influencewho dominated postwar Germany. Accordingly, Churchill showered Rooseveltand Eisenhower with pleas not to abandon Berlin to the Soviets.13 This wasrejected by Truman, by that time president of the United Statesafter Rooseveltsdeath, with the result that, as Baldwin tells us, for about three weeks our forcesremained virtually static at the Elbe as the Russians took Berlin. Baldwin saysthat further south our troops moved into Czechoslovakia Prague lay virtuallydefenseless near at hand. But in response to a Soviet request, our troops markedtime, and the honor and political prestige of taking Prague went to the Russians.I was very much chagrined, noted the late General George S. Patton, Jr. So,too, in the south, where Vienna was voluntarily relinquished.

14

Concessions at the wartime conferences. At Tehran and Yalta, Rooseveltand Churchill agreed to, as Hoover says, Russian annexation of the Baltic States,Western Finland, Western [the editor corrects this to Eastern] Poland,Bessarabia. About Tehran, Hoover says that all threeChurchill, Stalin, andRoosevelt agreed to Russias having a border of friendly states. In a secretagreement (which Hoover tells us wasnt revealed until after the 1944 presidentialelection in the United States because FDR feared losing millions of Polish-American votes), it was decided that East Poland was annexed to Russia and thatWest Poland would become a puppet Communist state. The fog of confidence in

Uncle Joe was such that free elections were specified for the western part ofPoland, but it is too mild to call this nave: it was a form of gross self-deception.No wonder Arthur Bliss Lane, who later served as ambassador to Poland, could askhow could elections be free as long as Red Army forces and the NKVD [theSoviet secret police] remained to enforce the will of the Kremlin? Lane reportedto Hoover that about 50,000 Russian secret police infest the country; wholesalearrests are going on daily; over 120,000 non-Communist Poles are in concentrationcamps. Hoover says Bliss reported that in collaboration with the Red Army asystematic liquidation of all leaders opposed to Communism was taking place byshooting, summary execution and deportation. The arrests, executions anddeportations were estimated at 100,000 in Galicia alone.

The wartime conferences were thus highly significant in their moral andpractical dimensions. We mentioned above, however, that as to those parts of

13 Persico,Roosevelts Secret War, pp. 422-3.14 Baldwin, Great Mistakes, p. 55.


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southeastern and central Europe that could have been kept out of the hands of the

Red Army the situation on the ground was far more controlling than thedelusional verbal agreements.

The ideas that came to prevail in the thinking of the Western Allies, bothmilitarily and at the conferences, were day-dreams. They were very much areflection of the intellectual atmosphere of those years.

Yalta did, however, go beyond a self-deceptive confirmation of vastterritorial concessions that had already been made or were about to the made toStalin in Europe. Earlier here, we saw Hoovers complaint about the hideoussecret agreement as to China which gave Mongolia and, in effect, Manchuria toRussia. 15

Facilitating Maos conquest of China. The act of bringing the Soviet

Union into the war with Japan at a time when Japan was already helpless and suingfor peace, and placing the Soviet Union in a strategically critical position where itwould empower Mao eventually to take over all of China,16 was decided at Yalta,but can best be understood as just a major link in a long pattern of hostility toNationalist China and of indulgence toward Mao Tse-Tung. This mindset bubbledup to Roosevelt and Truman from all of those who papered-over Maos combinedCommunist ideology and thuggery17 by calling him an innocuous agrarianreformer and who simultaneously could see nothing good in Chiang Kai-shek.18

The other links in the pattern of hostility included FDRs reversing adecision that was made between himself, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek at theFirst Cairo Conference in November 1943 in which, accordingly to Admiral

15 Another matter of substance was a secret provision agreeing to the Morgenthau Plan to stripthe German economy far beyond what was necessary for disarmament and to turn Germany intoa pastoral state.16 Joseph McCarthy,Americas Retreat from Victory, p. 5, told of an intelligence report of 50of [Gen. Marshalls] own officers, all with the rank of colonel or above that warned that ifRussia enters the Asiatic war, China will certainly lose her independence, to become the Polandof Asia.17 To understand why it is fitting to speak of Maos thuggery, read Jung Chang and JonHalliday, Mao: the Unknown Story (New York: Anchor Books, 2005, 2006). A book reviewarticle centered on this book was published in the Spring 2007 issue of this journal, pp. 61-73,and appears as Article 93 (A93) on www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info18 A ludicrous example of this mentality, which still has a hold on so many Americans, came up

in one of this reviewers conversations this past weekend. An older man was praising GeneralJoseph Stilwell (who detested Chiang and was one of those who spoke of Mao as an agrarianreformer). The man said glowingly that the Chinese love Stilwell. They have a statue of him.He turned the conversation to another subject after this reviewer asked, It was the Communistswho built the statue, wasnt it?


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William D. Leahy, FDR promised Chiang that there would be a vigorous

campaign to recapture Burma through an operation that would include anamphibious assault on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. (Burma was akey to supplying Chiangs forces fighting the Japanese.) With the reversal, Leahysays the Chinese leader had every right to feel that we had failed to keep apromise.19

In Mao: The Unknown Story, historians Jung Chang and Jon Halliday tellhow even during the war the United States put all the pressure on Chiang, linkingthe issue of aiding his government with an end to civil conflict [with theCommunists] in effect, regardless of who was causing it. A similar attitude,they say, was taken by Churchill.20 In January 1942, FDR appointed GeneralStilwell to serve as Chiangs adviser. Hoover said that the advisers to Stilwell

included John Stewart Service, Owen Lattimore and Lauchlin Currie, and thatGeneral Stilwell and these advisers developed the idea that there should be apolitical coalition of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communistsunder Mao Tse-tung. For his part, Chiang resolutely refused to acceptCommunist representatives into his Cabinet.

Jung and Halliday are among the many who have recounted what isappropriately called the sellout of China at the end of World War lI and duringthe years that culminated in Maos victory in late 1949. They tell us that whenSoviet Russia entered the war, it swept into Manchuria, but after its withdrawal inMay 1946 the Nationalists won major victories there, so that the Communistforces had been reduced to a state of collapse. The upshot was that Mao was onthe ropes. Then he was rescued by the Americans Roosevelts successor,

Harry Truman, sent Americas top general, George Marshall, to China inDecember 1945 to try to stop the civil war Marshall visited Yenan [Maosheadquarters] on 4-5 March 1946, making a report to Truman that oozedillusions Marshall was to perform a monumental service to Mao. When Maohad his back to the wall in late spring of 1946, Marshall put heavy anddecisive pressure on Chiang to stop pursuing the Communists into northernManchuria, saying that the US would not help him if he pushed further. Thisturned the tide. Jung and Chang say Marshalls diktat was probably the singlemost important decision affecting the outcome of the civil war.

19

Leahy is quoted by Hoover at Freedom Betrayed, p. 398.Note to Rupert: With the removal of Footnote 19, the later ones should renumber, but they

arent. I dont know if you can correct that. If not, just let it go, allowing #19 to be

skipped.20 Jung and Halliday,Mao: The Unknown Story, pp. 228-9.

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A cease-fire was declared and then extended by Marshall, with the result that

the Reds had the time to rebuild their forces and to receive vast supplies fromStalin. Chiang was thereafter not able to defeat Mao.21 This course of action was,of course, backed by President Truman, who appointed Marshall Secretary of Statein January 1947. Hoover quotes General Albert Wedemeyer to the effect that uponbecoming Secretary of State Marshall continued to deny military or economicaid until Chiang should agree to take the Communists in. An American officerwho was involved in military assistance to China later told Senator McCarthy thatthe tanks which we dumped into China had their guns spiked and their breechesblown.22 In April 1948 the U.S. Congress appropriated a large sum for economicand military aid to Nationalist China, but Marshall held this back, insisting that theinclusion of Communists into the government was still a sine qua non ofAmerican aid.

23 The arms were not delivered, Wedemeyer later wrote, untilthe end of that year when it was too late to stop the Communists.24 SenatorMcCarthy told how over the hump in India, the United States military authoritieswere detonating large stores of ammunition and dumping 120,000 tons of warsupplies in the Bay of Bengal.

25

Korea. Nor do the consequences of the illusions toward Stalin and Mao stopwith the loss of China. Senator Robert A. Taft wrote that the Korean war and theproblems which arise from it are the final result of the continuous sympathy towardcommunism which inspired American policy.26 It is well known that U.S.Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech on January 12, 1950 (not quite sixmonths before the North Korean invasion) describing what the United Statesconsidered its Pacific defense perimeter to be and left South Korea outside the

line. Taft reflected that the Communists took the Secretary of State at his word.They knew that we had permitted the taking over of China by the Communists andsaw no reason why we should seriously object to the taking over of Korea.

27 Itwasnt just Mao who understood this; Owen Lattimore, who was perhapspreeminent among the American advisers favorable to Mao and who was in theState Department at the time, seems to have summed up American policy when inJuly 1949 he said that the thing to do is to let South Korea fallbut not let it lookas though we pushed it.

28 Its worth noting that in May 1950 the Chairman of the

21 Jung and Halliday,Mao:The Unknown Story, pp. 287-294.22 McCarthy,Americas Retreat from Victory, p. 117.23 Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, pp. 721-2.24

Ibid, p. 729.25 McCarthy,Americas Retreat from Victory, p. 117.26 Taft,A Foreign Policy for Americans, p. 60.27 Ibid.28 Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, p. 748.


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U.S. Senates Foreign Relations Committee reiterated that Korea was not an

essential part of the defense strategy.29There was more to it, however, than just these declarations. A string of

actions had taken place that set the stage for the invasion. Hoovers historyrecounts that it was agreed at Yalta that Korea should eventually becomeindependent and that, until then, there would be a four-power trusteeship over it.In August and September 1945 (i.e., immediately after the Japanese surrender), theSoviet Union invaded from the north, the United States from the south.Thereupon, the two militaries established the 38th parallel as an administrative linefor purposes of accepting the Japanese surrender of the peninsula. In violation ofthe Yalta agreement, the Soviets proceeded to set up a government of NorthKorea. As early as September 1947, General Wedemeyers report cautioned

President Truman that the Soviet Union had created a powerful North KoreanPeoples Armyand would then withdraw Russia forces, and thus induce our ownwithdrawal. Wedemeyer warned that the withdrawal of American forces fromKorea would result in the occupation of South Korea either by the Sovietsthemselves or by the North Korean army they had created. Hoover tells us thatWedemeyers recommendations were rejected and the report suppressed. AsWedemeyer predicted, Stalin did propose evacuation by both Russia and theUnited States; and Hoover says that having set up a Communist puppetgovernment, and trained a completely equipped army, the Russian troops left NorthKorea in January, 1949. Then, flying in the face of a resolution in November 1948by the new South Korean legislature [urging] that United States troops be kept inSouth Korea until the security forces of the Republic became capable, the U.S.

Army revealed on June 30, 1949, that all American forces except 500 officers andmen had been quietly withdrawn from Korea, with no protests from the StateDepartment. South Korea was supplied only with light arms, adequate formaintaining internal order but inadequate to resist invasion. In October 1949, theU.S. Congress approved arming South Korea, but, according to Senator Taft, byJune 1950 [i.e., the time of the invasion] not a single bit of aid had been given,except merely some small arms that had been left behind when we withdrew fromKorea.

30

As the world knows, when the North Korean invasion came on June 25,1950, President Truman reversed U.S. policy and put the United States into thewar. General Douglas MacArthur oversaw the defeat of the North Korean army bythe end of that same year, but what might well be called the Second Korean warstarted when Mao sent in Chinese troops, driving the Americans down to the 38 th

29 Taft,A Foreign Policy for Americans, p. 105.30 Taft,A Foreign Policy for Americans, p. 104.


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parallel where eventually a ceasefire was agreed to. (Its worth noting that this

second war would not have occurred if Mao had not conquered China, as he had ayear earlier.) MacArthur complained of restraints placed by the Trumanadministration upon his acting against Chinese sanctuaries across the Yalu River,whereupon Truman fired him, citing MacArthurs inability to give his whole-hearted support to U.S. policy. In MacArthurs farewell speech to Congress onApril 19, 1951, he said that although he did not want American troops used on theChinese mainland, he favored strong action against Mao, including an economicblockade, a naval blockade ofthe Chinese and Manchurian coasts, the removal ofrestrictions on Chiang Kai-sheks forces on Formosa, and the giving of logisticalsupport to those forces.

Vietnam War. These things, and the illusions that underlay them, are

essential to understanding both the first and the second Korean wars. It is not toomuch to say that the giving of China to Mao, which we have traced in detailabove, was a necessary precondition to the Vietnam War. (The Soviet Unionsupported Ho Chi Minh, but its relevant to know that Jung and Halliday relatehow China had over 320,000 soldiers in Vietnam during the years 1965-68,including more than 150,000 anti-aircraft troops, some of whom stayed into late1973. The presence of these troops in North Vietnam allowed Hanoi to send manymore of its own forces into the South, where some Chinese accompanied them.31

The opposition to American involvement in Vietnam was often accompaniedby an explanation that Ho Chi Minh is a Vietnamese nationalist more than really aCommunist. This was much the same as the dismissal of Mao as an agrarianreformer in China, and, as with Mao, overlooked a long personal history of

Marxist-Leninist activity and association with Stalin. This mental evasion againtypified the attitude toward Communism that is the subject of these reflections.32

Dishonesty about Katyn. Hoover tells how iIn April 1943, the Germansdiscovered mass graves in the Katyn forest in western Russia (near Smolensk) inwhich there were thousands of bodies of executed Polish officers. Joseph Persicowrites that the lengths to which Roosevelt and Churchill would go not to imperilthe alliance with Stalin emerge in their secret correspondence regarding the Katyn

31 Jung and Halliday,Mao: The Unknown Story, p. 563.32 One of the features of the decades-long struggle for and against Communist expansion inAsia, Africa and Latin America was that national liberation movements felt so little

compunction against allying themselves with (or even embracing) Communism. This tandemrelationship complicated the picture considerably, preventing the United States fromsimultaneously supporting a peoples becoming independent while at the same time opposingtheir subjugation to Communism. The fact that the Third World so readily lent itself to this toxicmixture is itself a reflection of the worlds intellectually deficient grasp of Communist reality.


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affair The world at that time had scant reason to doubt that the massacre of Poles

was merely another in the mounting catalogue of Nazi atrocities. Yet, throughsecret sources, FDR and Churchill knew otherwise33 (our emphasis).

Despite this knowledge, the Allies collaborated with the Soviet Union inincluding in the indictment against the Nazi defendants before the InternationalMilitary Tribunal at Nuremberg a charge that the Nazis had committed themassacre. Frederick J. P. Veale says Lord Justice Lawrence, the British presidingjudge, listened with unwearied patience to the evidence which the Communistchief prosecutor laid before the court concerning the Katyn Forest Massacre. Butafter the non-Soviet members of the tribunal became conscious of the travesty,they struck on what Veale calls a brilliant solution of what had seemed a hopelesspredicament True, this solution entailed defiance of the elementary principle of

justice that when the prosecution fails to establish a charge, the defendant isentitled as of right to have the charge dismissed. The solution was that whenthe time at last arrived to deliver judgment, Lord Justice Lawrence avoided allmention of the charge. The Tribunal acted as if it had never been brought! 34InFreedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover discusses the Soviets having committed theKatyn forest massacre, but doesnt speak to the charade about it that occurred atthe Nuremberg trial.

The truth eventually came out. Persico says that documents releasedfollowing the collapse of the Soviet Union reveal that between nine thousand andfifteen thousand Polish military officers, government officials, intellectuals, andlandowners were murdered in the Katyn forest on Stalins orders in April 1940.

35David Irving tells how in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev formally confirmed that Stalin

had personally ordered his secret service, the N.K.V.D., to massacre altogetherfifteen thousand Polish officers and intellectuals. 36 The research scholars whowrote The Black Book of Communism were apparently unaware of Gorbachevsannouncement when they wrote that only in 1992, on the occasion of a visit byBoris Yeltsin to Warsaw, did the Russian government acknowledge the SovietPolitburos sole responsibility for the massacre.37

33 Joseph Persico,Roosevelts Secret War, pp. 261-2.34 Frederick J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: the Development of Total Warfare (NewportBeach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1968), pp. 248-9.35

Joseph Persico,Roosevelts Secret War, pp. 263.36 David Irving,Nuremberg: the Last Battle (London: Focal Point, 1996), p. 124.37 Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosekand Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999), p. 211.




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As important as it was, especially in its dysgenic effects on Poland, this

episode involving the killing of some 15,000 of a countrys leading men is ratherminiscule in the context of the egregious dishonesties and brutalities that markedthe Second World War. But it illustrates as well as anything can the mentality visa vis Communism that governed the war.

II. An irony in a post-Wilsonian age of human rights idealism: the conduct oftotal war against civilians

Among the many reflections that are called for about World War II, one ofthe more obvious (although one that goes beyond what Hoover discusses in hisbook) has to do with the unspeakable escalation of brutality, especially towardcivilians, by the United States and Great Britain. We point to their brutalities for

two reasons: (1) the people of the United States and Great Britain are generallyself-congratulatory about their respective countrys role in the world, and althoughthey know full well that brutality is to be expected from totalitarian states, theygive little thought to the immense brutality of which their own democracies havebeen capable; and (2) there is irony beyond measure in the fact that the horrorscould be committed in an age that, especially since Woodrow Wilsons 14-Points,Roosevelts Four Freedoms speech, and the idealism of the Atlantic Charter, hascome to pride itself in its championing of human rights.

To mention horrors against civilians most immediately brings to mostpeoples minds the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is safe to saythat most people are unaware that more people were killed in the fire-bombing of

Tokyo and, before that, of Dresden than in Hiroshima.

38

The significance of

38 David Irving, inApocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden (London: Focal Point, 1995),p. 245, gives the figure of 71,379 for Hiroshima and says that 83,793 were killed in the fireattack on Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, delivered by the Superfortresses of the UnitedStates 21st Bombardment Command. There were three major raids on Dresden in February1945. Nikolai Tolstoy, Secret Betrayal, pp. 72-3, says that Dresden was full of at least 200,000Silesian refugees who were fleeing from the advancing Red Army eighty miles to the east.There were other refugees from East Prussia and western Germany, all added to a city populationof 630,000. A firestorm as massive as any in Hamburg, Darmstadt, Brunswick, Heilbronn orPforzheim was set off by a rain of 1,477.7 tons of high explosives followed by 650,000incendiary bombs. Historian Alfred de Zayas, in hisNemesis at Potsdam (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1988), p. 205, tells us that the International Committee of the Red Cross

estimated 275,000 killed, but that other estimates vary between 40,000 and 400,000. The Nazigovernment estimated between 180 to 220 thousand. Irving, Apocalypse 1945, pp. 244, firstaccepted the figure of 135,00 dead but later, after the Dresden police chiefs report was found,lowered his estimate to from 60 to 100 thousand. In this reviewers opinion, the higher estimatesseem far more plausible than the lower, given the number of people in the city, the lack of any


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the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings lies primarily in nuclear weapons symbolism

as having reached a new threshold in the delivery of horror that has since 1945posed a continuing existential threat to humanity (but that also may have preventeda World War III because of the nuclear standoff).

In this reviewers experience, every older American he has talked with hasdefended the use of the atomic bombs. The reasons given are two-fold: that thebombs shortened the war by forcing the surrender of Japan; and that the August1945 surrender made the planned November invasion of Japan unnecessary, savingthe lives of many thousands of American combat soldiers. (A great many men intheir 80s today believe they would have been part of the invasion force and wouldprobably have been killed.)

Their thinking is so fixed on the point that it isnt likely that their minds will

be changed by a review of the facts, which few of them have felt the need to make.Hoover points out that on September 20, 1945, Major General Curtis LeMay,commander of the U.S. air force in its bombing of Japan, said the atomic bombhad nothing to do with the end of the war The war could have been over in twoweeks without the Russians coming in and without the atomic bomb. Thefollowing month, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. PacificFleet, concurred: The atomic bomb did not win the war against Japan. TheJapanese had, in fact, already sued for peace.39 Hoover recounts, further, thatAdmiral William D. Leahy later wrote that it is my opinion that the use of thisbarbarous weapon was of no material assistance The Japanese were alreadydefeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and thesuccessful bombing with conventional weapons. Hoovers editor, George Nash,

adds a footnote saying that in an interview (on November 11, 1963) [GeneralDwight D.] Eisenhower declared that he had opposed dropping the bomb for tworeasons: First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and Second, I hated to seeour country to be the first to use such a weapon.40 Historian Hanson Baldwin, inhis Great Mistakes of the War, wrote of the strong opposition by numerousscientists and Japanese experts, including former Ambassador [to Japan] JosephGrew.41

Herbert Hoover agreed. In our earlier review of his 19 gigantic mistakesof the war, we saw his reference to Trumans immoral order to drop the atomic

defense, and the surprise nature of the attack arising from the mistaken German assumption thatDresden (which had no military significance and was a cultural gem) was immune from attack.39 Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, p. 493.40 Ibid, p. 567.41 Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War, p. 91,


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bomb on the Japanese, and his characterization of it as the act of unparalleled

brutality in all American history.But, of course, the atomic bombings were only part of the brutality against

civilians. The conduct of total war was a reversal of many centuries ofhumanevolution. At one time, slavery itself was an advance over the killing of captivesand had then given way before the British anti-slave-trade movement in the late18th and early 19th centuries. F. J. P. Veale tells how, beginning at the end of the17thcentury the European nations began to settle on what became known as theRules of Civilized Warfare, the fundamental principle [of which] was thathostilities should be restricted to the armed and uniformed forces of thecombatants, from which followed the corollary that civilians must be left entirelyoutside the scope of military operations. He points out how in the course of

World War I, however, civilization began a retrograde movement without a parallel in history.42 The British blockade of Germany during and after WorldWar I was estimated by a British government White Paper to have caused nearly800,000 deaths naturally these were mainly of women and children and old people, according to R.A.F. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in his 1947 book Bomber Offensive.43 Then in the Second World War, the philosophy that wasexpressed by Winston Churchill was that to achieve this end [defeat of the Nazis]there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go. This was the samefeeling later expressed by U.S. air commander Curtis LeMay when he was askedby an Air Force cadet about his moral feelings about the firebombing of Tokyo: Iwasnt particularly worried about how many people we killed in getting the jobdone [i.e., in ending the war].

44

The strategy of an air war against civilians had been germinating in Britainfor several years before the war. Veale says the conception of terror bombing canbe traced back to as early as the 1920s when Air Marshall [Sir Hugh] Trenchardrecommended the construction of large long-range bombers designed for attackson the civilian population of the enemy. 45 This was in line with the thinking ofthe famous Italian airpower theorist, General Giulio Douhet, Garrett writes.His essential proposition was that a massive air attack by a fully-developedstrategic bomber force at the outbreak of hostilities would prove decisive sinceit would lead to a complete breakdown of the social structure.

46

42 F. J. P. Veale,Advance to Barbarism, pp. 14-15..43

Sir Arthur Harris,Bomber Offensive (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), p. 176.44 Churchill and LeMay are quoted in Stephen A. Garrett,Ethics and Airpower in World WarII: the British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993), pp. 31, 42.45 F.J.P. Veale,Advance to Barbarism, p. 30.46 Garrett,Ethics and Airpower, p. 6.


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With the coming of war, this did not remain in the realm of theory. Winston

Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook in July 1940 that he favored an absolutelydevastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country uponthe Nazi homeland.47 In early 1942, Professor Frederick Lindemann laid acabinet paper before the [British] Cabinet on the strategic bombing of GermanyThe bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses.48The Lindemann Plan was then accepted by the Cabinet in March 1942. Thestrategy had already been in effect, however: Irving tells us that as recently asFebruary 14, 1942 Bomber Command had been reminded in the most unmistakablelanguage that its primary purpose was to attack Germanys residential areas. Bythe time Sir Arthur Harris became commander-in-chief of the Bomber Commandon February 22, 1942, the policy was in place, and he proceeded to carry it outvigorously, beginning with the fire-bombing of Lubeck on March 28.49 For its part, the United States was reluctant to do area bombing, preferring to hitspecific military and industrial targets (which Harris spoke of disparagingly aspanacea targets). Garrett says, however, that the United States, particularly inthe last year of the war, did engage in general area attacks on German cities. Hementions U.S. participation in the Dresden fire- bombing, and says Berlin wasbombed on February 3 [1945] in an assault that may have taken as many as 25,000lives And, of course, there was the American fire-bombing of Japanese cities,notably the March 9, 1945 raid on Tokyo (in which 300 B-29s destroyed over 16square miles of the city), as well as the atomic devastation of Hiroshima andNagasaki.50

There was considerable fear that the British and American publics, and the

bomber pilots themselves, would find the strategy revulsive. Accordingly, Garrettsays, there was a steady and concerted effort throughout the war to deny or atleast not to admit to the reality of area bombing. He quotes historian MartinMiddlebrook: In some ways, area bombing was a three-year period of deceit practiced upon the British public and on world opinion Charges ofindiscriminate bombing were consistently denied. Sir Arthur Harris, on theother hand, urged a policy of complete openness about it. Just the same, Garrettwrites, aircrew were generally shielded from the idea that their mission was

47

Ibid, p. 11.48 F.J.P. Veale,Advance to Barbarism, p.18, quotes this from the bookScience and Governmentby Sir Charles Snow.49 Irving,Apocalypse 1945, pp. 18-19.50 Garrett,Ethics and Airpower, pp. xiii, xiv.


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simply to devastate German cities.51 Irving details the lies told to pilots before

they were sent over Dresden.52Detailed descriptions of the area bombings tell of horrors beyond anything

we might imagine. In the air war against Germany, these horrors were committedagainst ancient cities of incalculable cultural and historical value. Konigsberg, forexample, was the home and burial place of the philosopher Immanuel Kant.Irving recounts that of the 480 tons of bombs dropped [on Konigsberg], 345 tonswere fire-bombs of the small and particularly potent four-pound thermite type. Inall, 435 acres were destroyed. Approximately ninety percent of Nuremberg, perhaps Europes most outstanding surviving medieval city, was destroyed by acombined British-American air attack at a time (January 1945) when it was clearthat Germany had already lost the war. At Darmstadt, two five-mile wide bomb-

lanes would rip eastwards across the city, taking out the whole of the citysadministrative section and its residential areas. Altogether 234 Lancasters attackeddropping 872 tons of bombs, including 286,000 thermite fire bombs. AtDresden, according to the pilot of the last bomber to appear over the city, therewas a sea of fire covering in my estimation some forty square miles .53

The phenomenon of the firestorm is described by Sir Charles Webster andNoble Frankland in their The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945.As a result of the confluence of a number of fires, the air above is heated to suchan extent that in consequence of its reduced specific gravity a violent up draughtoccurs which causes great suction [T]he danger from radiating heat is not to beunderestimated in view of the extraordinarily high temperature developed[During the firestorm at Ham burg], the scenes of terror are indescribable.

Children were torn away from their parents hands by the force of the hurricaneand whirled into the fire. People who thought they had escaped fell down,overcome by the devouring force of the heat and died in an instant Thedestruction was so immense that of many people literally nothing remains. From asoft stratum of ash in a large air raid shelter the number of persons who lost theirlives could only be estimated by doctors at 250 to 300.54

51 Ibid, pp. 30, 31, 81.52 Irving, Apocalypse 1945, p. 144. The aircrews of No 3 Bomber Group were informed,Your Group is attacking the German Army Headquartersat Dresden. Some crews of No 75Squadron even remember Dresden being described as a Fortress city. Crews were briefed that

they were attacking Dresden to destroy the German arms and supply dumps In No 1 Groupthe emphasis appears to have been laid on Dresdens importance as a rail center.53 Everything thusfar in this paragraph is from Irving,Apocalypse 1945, pp. 62, 63 and 153.54 Webster amd Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive(London: Her Majestys Stationery Office,1961), pp. 311, 314.

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Hitler was in no position to retaliate in kind, at least until his V-weapons

came on the scene so late in the war that they could not prove decisive. Sir ArthurHarris postwar book says the Germans had, in fact, no strategic bombers at all,since their whole force was designed forarmy co-operation work and was onlyused for attacks on cities when not required to support the German army.55 Thismeans that prior to the war Hitler had not bought into the Douhet-Trencharddoctrine. Nevertheless, in his attack on Yugoslavia he ordered the saturationbombing of Belgrade and Irving tells us that as many as 17,000 civilians werekilled in the air raid.56 On the whole, however, Hitler held back from the use ofweapons of mass destruction. When his General Staff proposed using poison gasto defeat the partisans conducting guerrilla warfare behind the battle lines in theUkraine, Hitler would not hear of it. Similarly, he forbade the General Staff tostudy the problems of bacterial attack, except in a purely defensive light. We aretold that although the British employed phosphorous in their bombs, Hitlerforbade its use in the Luftwaffes, as its fumes were too poisonous. Irving furthercomments on Hitlers not using nerve gas to oppose the Red Armys end-of-warassault into Germany, a time during which one would think desperation wouldhave made Hitler feel it imperative: Since German scientists had developed nerve-gases (Sarin and Tabun) to a degree of sophistication unknown to the enemy,Hitlers inexplicable inhibitions were not without effect on the war effort.

57(This is quite a cautious understatement.) In fact, Hitler had stockpiled thousandsof tons of Sarin and Tabun, but he had embargoed their use unless the Alliesviolated the [Geneva] convention first. Irving, not wanting to leave a falseimpression, goes on to say that none of this can be read, of course, as justifying or

even mitigating the Nazi excesses.

58

Near the end of the war, right after the destruction of Dresden, a distraught

Hitler ruminated, in what Irving calls puzzling optimism, about using atomicweapons to win the war. Some time ago we solved the problem of nuclearfission, and we have developed it so far that we can exploit the energy forarmament purposes. They wont even know what hit them.

59 But this was adelusion. Persico gives us the background: the uranium atom had first been splitin experiment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1939 [T]he Fuhrercounted an atomic bomb among the Wunderwaffen, the wonder weapons, heexpected to hurl against Germanys enemies. But in April 1943 theNew York

55

Sir Arthur Harris,Bomber Offensive (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), p. 86.56 Irving,Hitlers War, p. 353.57 Ibid, p. 460.58 David Irving,Nuremberg: the Last Battle (London: Focal Point, 1996), pp. 38-39.59 David Irving,Hitlers War, p. 738.


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Times reported that Allied saboteurs had blown up the huge electrochemical

Norsk-Hydro plant at Rjukan in Nazi-occupied Norway the plant producedheavy water which could be used in splitting the atom. This had ended theGerman nuclear effort. And according to Albert Speer after the war, Hitler hadexpressed fear that a nuclear explosion might not be able to be contained.According to Speer, Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that theearth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.60 So Hitler wasgrasping at straws with his ruminations in February 1945.

III. The brutality of the Allies postwar treatment of many millions ofcivliansand prisoners of warpeople

This will be the last of our reflections (although, of course, there could be

many more). As we have said, the subjects we are exploring focus on mistakes andmisconduct by Britain and the United States. Those things have received far lessattention than the brutalities of the Axis, and for that reason call into playintellectual issues that go beyond what is ordinarily considered. What we wishnext to explore is the Western Allies often quite brutal treatment of masses ofpeople (and most particularly of the defeated Germans) after the war. In light ofhis decades of experience as perhaps the worlds leading humanitarian inorganizing the food relief to save millions from starving, Hoover would have beenideally suited to describe, and to object to, these brutalities. The fact that hetouched on only part of them illustrates, perhaps, the immensity of the war and itsmany facets. There was just too much, and students of the war need to realize thathis secret history tells only important aspects, but far from all, of the story.

Forcing millions back into Stalins hands. If the Roosevelt and Trumanadministrations had not been so greatly influenced by their condonation of Stalin, itis impossible to imagine that they would have forced a repatriation of millions ofpeople to a terrible fate in the Soviet Union near the end of World War II andduring the wars aftermath. The story is told by Nikolai Tolstoy in The SecretBetrayal.61 He says that the NKVD files show that five and a half million peoplewere repatriated between 1943 and 1947. Although we are using the wordrepatriation, thousands consisted of Tsarist refugees from Russia who had neverlived in Soviet Russia. Millions were packed into cattle trucks for the return. TheBritish, Tolstoy says, forced the return of the Cossack emigres, using bayonets andclubs, and even threatening them with demonstrations of firing squads and a flame-

60 Persico,Roosevelts Secret War, pp. 226-7.61 Nikolai Tolstoy, The Secret Betrayal(New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1977).


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throwing tank. Although some of those sent to Soviet Russia went voluntarily,

Tolstoy says the returnees were uniformly treated brutally: shot, raped or enslaved.These horrors are little known in the United States. Those who wish to

know more about them can do so by reading Tolstoys book and also books byJulius Epstein,62 and Nicholas Bethell.63

Treatment of the defeated Germans.

The Morgenthau Plans stripping of the German economy. We havealready considered this, and have seen how the stripping continued de facto into1949. In his publishers preface to the 1992 edition of Ralph Franklin KeelingsGruesome Harvest, T. J. OKeefe said the Plan aimed at the permanentdestruction of Germanys industrial heart and that if it were fully carried out itsineluctable consequence [would have been] the death through starvation and

disease of millions and tens of millions of Germans.64Starving the Germans. After President Truman in March 1946 named

Herbert Hoover to direct world food distribution, General Lucius D. Clay, ourcommander of the American zone informed me, Hoover wrote, that the foodsupply had been reduced to such a low level in the American, British, and Frenchzone that the Germans were at the point of mass starvation; moreover, that theAllied policies had produced immense unemployment and destitution in alldirections. In February 1947, Hoover made an extensive report to Truman, andtold him how the fishing grounds in the Baltic and North Seas are being limitedagainst German fishing. As there are ample supplies of fish in these seas, it seemsa pity that with this food available, British and American taxpayers are called upon

to furnish food in substitution for fish the Germans could catch for themselves.By early 1947, Britain and the United States were spending $600 million annuallyto prevent starvation of the Germans in the American and British zones alone.

65

James Bacque reports that immediately after the wars end in May 1945,the Allies were depriving men, women and children in Germany of availablefood. Foreign relief agencies were prevented from sending food from abroad; RedCross food trains were sent back to Switzerland; all foreign governments weredenied permission to send food to German civilians; fertilizer production wassharply reduced; and food was confiscated during the first year, especially in the

62 Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to thePresent(Old Greenwich, CN, 1973).63

Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia 1944-7(London, 1974).64 Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies Postwar War Against the GermanPeople (Chicago: Institute of American Economics, 1947), publishers preface to 1992 editionpublished by the Institute for Historical Review, p. VI.65 Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, pp. 778, 789, 792.


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French zone. Several U.S. senators objected strongly, and Senator Kenneth

Wherry said The truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of tons ofmilitary rations in our surplus stock piles that have been spoiling right in the midstof starving populations.66 In a speech in the U.S. Senate on February 5, 1946,Indiana Senator Homer Capehart said that it continues to be the deliberate policyof a confidential and conspiratorial clique within the policy-making circles of thisgovernment to draw and quarter a nation now reduced to abject misery For ninemonths this administration has been carrying on a deliberate policy of massstarvation.67 Bacque describes the relationship between Hoover and a reluctantGen. Clay: Hoover had to beg... Clay to improve the official ration, which hadbeen cut from slow starvation, 1,550cpd [calories per day], to 1,275, effective from1 April 1946. He says, with regard to 1947, that since the rest of the world wasso close to normal, it is clear that the reason for German starvation was not thatthere was a fatal world shortage of food. 68 Giles MacDonogh, inAfter the Reich,tells of reports that during the winter of 1946-7 people were eating rats andfrogs snails horsemeat nettles acorns, dandelion and lupine roots wildmushrooms and that even by the winter of 1948 the situation had not beenremedied.

69

In March 1947, Hoover made an extensive report to Truman, and told himhow the fishing grounds in the Baltic and North Seas are being limited againstGerman fishing. As there are ample supplies of fish in these seas, it seems a pitythat with this food available, British and American taxpayers are called upon tofurnish food in substitution for fish the Germans could catch for themselves. Thislatter point about Britain and the United States providing food shows that the

Western Allies had begun to act against the starvation. Hoover says that by early1947, Britain and the United States were spending $600 million annually to prevent starvation of the Germans in the American and British zones alone.

70Nevertheless, Bacque gives the detail about how reluctant General Clay was toincrease the German calorie level even as late as the spring of 1947, 71 and we sawabove that MacDonogh tells how hunger continued into 1948.

Note to Rupert: Here again, the footnotes have not renumbered after the removal of one of

them (in this case, number 65. This will be worth correcting, if you can.66 Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, pp. 31, 91, 93, 157.67 Capehart is quoted in Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 75.68

Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, pp. 160, 155.69 Giles MacDonogh,After the Reich: the Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York:Basic Books, 2007), p. 366.70 Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, pp. 778, 789, 792.71 Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, p. 160.

Formatted: Font: Bold



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Rape and forced sex. The vast extent of rape by soldiers in the Red

Army as they progressed into eastern Europe and Germany is well known, and isconfirmedby MacDonogh when he writes that it is sadly true that the Red Armyraped wherever they went. They even raped Russians and Ukrainians. The worstand most aggravated rapes were perpetrated against the women of the enemyfirstthe Hungarians, then the Germans They were egged on by Ehrenburg and otherSoviet propagandists who saw rape as an expression of hatred. When Britishofficers arrived in Berlin, they saw the lakes in the prosperous west filled with thecorpses of women who had committed suicide after being raped.

IIt wasnt, however, just the Russians who raped. MacDonogh speaks ofthe widespread incidence of rape by American soldiers, for which a number ofAmerican servicemen were executed. 72 (This is noteworthy because it shows that

the rapes were not condoned by U.S. military authorities.) Keeling explains thatfor the most part the American method was not so direct as the Russian: instead ofusing physical force, we compelled the German women to yield their virtue inorder to live to get food to eat, beds to sleep in. He quotes the ChristianCentury issue of December 5, 1945: The American provost marshal said thatrape represents no problem to the military police because a bit of food, a bar ofchocolate, or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary.73 MacDonogh saysthe liaisons naturally resulted in children. It is estimated that 94,000Besatzungkinderor occupation children were born in the American Zone undermilitary government.

74 In this brief discussion, we dont mean to suggest thatrape or starvation-induced sex was exclusively the domain of Russian andAmerican soldiers.

The mass expulsion of millions of Germans from central Europe. Theexpulsion of the Volksdeutsche from central Europe at the end of the war wassanctioned, MacDonogh tells us, by Article 13 of the Potsdam Accords,although it was stipulated that the expulsion of the civilian populations should take place in the most humane manner possible.75 Alfred de Zayas speaks of thework I have done myself in The German Expellees and Nemesis at Potsdamrevealed the horrifying statistics behind the mass expulsions of fifteen millionGermans from the Eastern Provinces and the Sudetenland into the Occupied Zonesfrom 1945-50. At least 2.1 million are known to have died. Chancellor Adenauer

72 Ibid, pp. 25-7, 114, 240.73 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, pp. 57, 64.74 MacDonogh,After the Reich, p. 241.75 Ibid, p. 158.


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himself wrote in his memoirs that six million of them died.76 Buchanan

describes the expulsions as the largest forced transfer of populations in history, acrime against humanity of historic dimensions. He says the territories of EastPrussia, Pomerania, Eastern Brandenburg, Silesia, Danzig, Memel, and theSudetenland were relentlessly and ruthlessly cleansed of Germans, whosefamilies had inhabited them for centuries.77

Starving the German prisoners of war. It would seem that almost noAmericans know of the American actions toward German prisoners of war afterGermanys surrender. MacDonogh tells how the prisoners were reclassified todeny them the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Convention was appliedto the 4.2 million who had been captured before the wars end, and who remainedclassified as POWS. But 3.4 million others, taken prisoner later, were reclassified

as Surrendered Enemy Persons and Disarmed Enemy Persons. These men[were thus] robbed of their status as combatants with the effect that while theInternational Red Cross had a right to inspect POW camps, the barbed wiresurrounding SEPs and DEPs was impenetrable. He reports that the Alliestreat[ed] them with so little care that a million and a half died. He speaks ofallowing anythi

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