A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (129 page)

In retrospect, three central reasons justified the dropping of the atomic bombs. First, and most important, the invasion of Japan would cost more American lives—up to a million, perhaps far more. The interests of the United States demanded that the government do everything in its power to see that not one more American soldier or sailor died than was absolutely necessary, and the atomic bombs ensured that result. Second, Japan would not surrender, nor did its leaders give any indication whatsoever that they would surrender short of annihilation. One can engage in hypothetical discussions about possible intentions, but public statements such as the fight-to-the-bitter-end comment and the summoning of Japan’s top atomic scientist after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped demonstrate rather conclusively that the empire planned to fight on. Third, the depredations of the Japanese equaled those of the Nazis. The Allies, therefore, were justified in nothing less than unconditional surrender and a complete dismantling of the samurai Bushido as a requirement for peace.

Only in the aftermath, when the prisoner-of-war camps were opened, did it become apparent that the Japanese regime had been every bit as brutal as the Nazis, if less focused on particular groups. Thousands of prisoners died working on the Siam railway, and field commanders had working instructions to kill any prisoners incapable of labor. (Guards routinely forced fistfuls of rice down prisoners’ throats, then filled them with water, then as their stomachs swelled, punched or kicked the men’s bellies.)
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Almost five times as many Anglo-American POWs died in Japanese hands as in the Nazi camps, which reflected almost benign treatment in comparison to what Chinese and other Asians received at the hands of the Japanese. As with the Nazis, such horrors illustrated not only individuals’ capacity for evil but, more important, they also illustrated the nature of the brutal system that had produced a view of non-Japanese as “subhumans.”

At the same time, Japan’s fanaticism led to a paralysis of government that prevented the nation from surrendering. The outcome of the war, evident after Midway, was probably decided even before. In February 1942, advisers had told the emperor that Japan could not possibly win. Human suicide bombers were used in 1944 with no end of the war in sight. Fanaticism of that type mirrored the fiendish Nazi ideology, and in the end, the Japanese warlords and Nazi despots had made the Second World War a contest between barbarism and civilization. Civilization won.

Atoms for Peace

H
aving defeated the totalitarians and vanquished the Great Depression, it was inevitable that the United States would develop a can-do optimism and problem-solving confidence at the end of World War II. Threats remained, at home and abroad, yet were these not minor compared to the victories already achieved? By 1960, however, many would reflect on the immediate postwar years soberly, reevaluating their optimism. For by that time the civil rights movement would have exposed racism and the lingering effects of Jim Crow; the Soviet Union would have shown itself to be a dangerous and well-armed enemy; and the role of world leader meant that America could afford few mistakes—politically, morally, or culturally.

Having just fought and bled a second time in thirty years, having witnessed a massive—though many at the time thought necessary—shift of power to the executive branch, and having seen inflation and high taxes eat away at the prosperity that they anticipated would come from defeating the Axis powers, Americans were open to change in 1946. Government had grown rapidly in the period following the Great Crash, and the size of the federal government doubled in a scant three years from 1939 to 1942, ballooning to almost 2 million employees! More than 250,000 government workers lived in the Washington area alone, up from a mere 73,000 in 1932.

The 1946 elections, in which Republicans ran against “big government, big labor, big regulation, and the New Deal’s links to communism” produced a rout in which the GOP captured control of both houses of Congress for the first time since before the Great Depression.
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Not only had the Republicans whipped the Democrats, but they also virtually annihilated the liberal wing of the Democratic machine, sending 37 of 69 liberal Democrats in Congress down to defeat, shattering the Left-laborite coalition that had sustained FDR.

Part of the Republican victory could be attributed to the high taxes and heavy regulation imposed by the New Deal and the war.
U.S. News & World Report
’s headlines blared
the handout era is over
as the can-do attitude that characterized the war effort quickly replaced the helplessness of the New Deal.
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National security and communism also concerned the public. Shortly after Germany surrendered, the nation was shocked by the discovery that the magazine
Amerasia
had been passing highly classified documents to the Soviets. In June of 1945, the FBI traced the documents to a massive Soviet espionage ring in the United States.
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When word of that leaked, it gave credence to allegations that the Roosevelt administration had been soft on communists. Consequently, the Republican Congress came in, as Representative Clarence Brown put it, to “open with a prayer, and close with a probe.”
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Far from being paranoid, most Americans correctly perceived that Soviet espionage and domestic subversion was a serious a threat.

President Harry Truman eventually made hay campaigning against the Republican “do-nothing Congress,” but in fact it did a great deal—just nothing that Truman liked. The Eightieth Congress passed the first balanced budget since the Great Crash; chopped taxes by nearly $5 billion (while at the same time exempting millions of low-income working-class Americans from taxation); quashed a socialist national health-care scheme; passed the Taft-Hartley freedom-to-work act over the president’s veto; and closed the Office of Price Administration, which had fixed prices since the beginning of the war. In a massive reorganization of government, Congress folded the departments of the army and navy into a new Department of Defense, and the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) out of the former OSS. In international affairs, Congress funded the Marshall Plan and America’s commitment to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations.

An Atomic World

In a sense, World War II did not end with the surrender of Germany in May 1945, or even of Japan in August 1945, but rather continued until the 1990s, when the Soviet communist state fell. The Second World War, after all, was a struggle between barbarism and civilization, and it only moved from an active heated battle in 1945 into a quieter, but equally dangerous phase thereafter. Indeed, instead of a true two-sided conflict, World War II had been a triangular struggle pitting Hitler and his demonic allies in one corner, Stalin and his communist accomplices in another, and the Western democracies in a third. Keep in mind that until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he and Stalin were de facto allies, and American communists, such as the American Peace Mobilization and the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), had lobbied hard for nonintervention.
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Shaking off the shortsightedness of Roosevelt and other policy makers, by 1946 a few advisers in the Truman administration had recognized the dangers posed by an expansionist Soviet Union. Truman himself required more convincing. As late as 1945 the president had referred privately to Stalin as “a fine man who wanted to do the right thing”—this about a dictator whose mass murders had exceeded those of Hitler and Tojo combined.
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Stalin was, said Truman, “an honest man who is easy to get along with—who arrives at sound decisions.”
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Well before the Missourian spoke those words, however, this “fine man” had started work on a Soviet atomic bomb—developing the weapon in the middle of the Battle of Stalingrad, when it was apparent it could not be ready in time to assist in the destruction of Germany. Stalin was already looking ahead to the postwar world and his new enemies, the United States and Great Britain.
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Over time, Truman formulated a different assessment of the Soviet dictator, recognizing the dangers posed by an expansionist Soviet Union. For the next forty-five years the ensuing cold war in many ways required more national commitment than was ever before seen in American history. By 1991 the Soviet system had collapsed, and the United States and the West could claim victory. In a sense, this constituted the unfinished conclusion of World War II’s struggle against tyranny. Victory had several architects, including Americans Harry Truman, George Kennan, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush as well as British allies Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Only the most prescient foresaw that conflict. By the time the atomic bombs had fallen on Japan, the United States had lost 280,677 men in Europe, 41,322 in the Pacific, and 115,187 in training accidents and noncombat losses along with 10,650 deceased POWs (about one fourth of all American prisoners held by the Japanese) for a total of 447,836 dead and 971,801 wounded. The war drove the national debt up (constant dollars, as a share of GNP) to a level two and a half times larger than the $5 trillion national debt of the United States in the 1990s. Although the domestic economy recovered during the war, a complete rebound from the Great Depression may not have occurred until 1946.
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Dropping the atomic bombs had the unintended effect of showing the rest of the world the power of nuclear weapons and made clear that, at least until 1949, America had a monopoly over such weapons. The United States had successfully bluffed other nations into thinking it could deliver large numbers of atomic bombs, even deep into the Soviet Union. In reality, however, America’s nuclear arsenal remained a hollow threat until the early 1950s because of the limited range of strategic aircraft and the small number of available nuclear bombs.
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By the time of the Korean War, nuclear capability had caught up to the perception, and the United States never looked back. It “had a force…with potential to deliver a smashing blow against Soviet cities,” consisting of some hundred atomic bombs and two hundred aircraft capable of hitting Russia from mainland American bases through the use of aerial refueling.
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Despite a new threat that emerged when the USSR exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949, Truman and Eisenhower maintained American nuclear superiority.

The Iron Curtain and the Cold War

Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, along with the potential for communist regimes in Greece, Italy, and even France posed a new communist version of the old Nazi threat. In key elements, communism and fascism looked remarkably similar: totalitarian control of the economy, communication, and information centers; a national identity based on a single characteristic (race with the Nazis, class with the communists); the obsession over existence of an enemy, whose very presence supposedly prevented the appearance of the ideological utopia; and all power relegated to a dangerous and ambitious dictator. It is true that the Soviets, who lost millions of lives in World War II, had good reason to strike a strong defensive posture after the war, but that does not justify their takeover of sovereign nations. Mistakenly, most of the Allies—again, Churchill was the lone exception—hoped the USSR really did not mean its rhetoric about international revolution and the destruction of the international bourgeoisie. When it became clear that the Soviets had no intention of leaving occupied areas, but rather planned to incorporate them into a new Soviet empire, a belated light went on in the heads of many in the State Department.

Churchill had been sounding the alarm about the communists for years. Roosevelt, however, naively expressed his confidence in his one-on-one ability to handle Stalin, eerily echoing the attitudes of Neville Chamberlain, who thought he could handle Hitler at Munich. Once again, FDR’s own prejudices had been amplified by rosy reports from the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, who instructed the president that to “distrust Stalin was ‘bad Christianity, bad sportsmanship, bad sense.’”
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By 1945, Churchill was shrewdly trying to manipulate American power like a “great unwieldy barge,” steering it into the “right harbor,” lest it “wallow in the ocean.”
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Churchill remained clear eyed about the long-term threat posed by an expansionist, communist Soviet Union. His March 5, 1946, speech to Westminster College in Missouri proclaimed that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” placing the nations of Eastern Europe under a “high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
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Truman refused to endorse Churchill’s position, continuing to refer to the Soviets as “friends,” even offering Stalin a chance to deliver a rebuttal to the students at Westminster! Yet beneath the surface, Truman’s attitudes had started to change.

Harry Truman was born in Independence, Missouri, to a life of great contrasts. Raised in a Southern Baptist tradition, steeped in Victorian morality, he wrote in his diary in the 1930s that America needed a “reformation of the heart.” At the same time, he used profanity with staggering deftness, and in any company. One Roosevelt appointee, Chester Bowles, expressed his shock at the emotional discussions he had had with Truman in a half-hour conversation “punctuated by extraordinary profanity.”
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Truman’s World War I combat experience gave him what no president since Teddy Roosevelt had possessed—firsthand knowledge of the horrors of war. Perhaps that fact accounts for both men’s willingness to support a strong peacetime military force, when others, including Coolidge, had failed to see the need for such investments. After the war Truman moved to Kansas City, where he opened a haberdashery. That, like most of his other business attempts, failed.

Business failure led Truman to his true calling in politics. Taken under the wing of Thomas J. Pendergast’s Kansas City Democratic machine, Truman won election as a judge on the Jackson County Court in 1922, with the unusual job (for a jurist) of overseeing the Kansas City road system and supervising its (largely corrupt) paymasters. This was akin to trying to stay sweet smelling in a fertilizer factory! Truman pulled it off, largely by throwing himself into the legitimate aspects of the road programs. Truman’s frugal lower-middle-class lifestyle testified to his fundamental honesty. When his mentor, Pendergast, was tagged with a $350,000 fine and fifteen months in Leavenworth Federal Prison for graft, Truman wrote Bess, “Looks like everyone got rich in Jackson County but me.”
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