Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941
551
Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780585379623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 551 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Chapter One
War, Phony and Real
The attack began before dawn. At 0445 hours German tanks crossed the Polish frontier. The Luftwaffe immediately crushed the Polish air force. That evening Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that Britain had sent an ultimatum to Reichchancellor Hitler demanding an immediate troop withdrawal. When two days later, 3 September 1939, Germany rejected Britain's withdrawal deadline of 11 A.M., Chamberlain broadcast that "all my long struggle to win peace has failed." By the end of the day, Britain and France had declared war on Germany, thus turning the Poland invasion into World War II. Hitler justified his attack on the grounds that the Poles would not cede the German-speaking areas of Danzig and the Polish Corridor.
* * *
Once war broke out, blame for the conflict varied. Certain noninterventionists accused Hitler of triggering the conflict as did over 80 percent of Gallup poll respondents. Wrote Oswald Garrison Villard of the Allies, "Theirs is the righteous cause; they were willing to negotiate; the records show that Hitler went around lying and in haste." Using data just released in Britain's White Book, the Chicago Tribune argued that Hitler had sought war, whereas Britain desired only peace and the integrity of Poland. The socialist Call conceded the legitimacy of Germany's claim to Danzig and the Corridor but found Hitler's attack putting Poland's sheer existence at stake. Charles A. Lindbergh saw "the fault of the war about evenly divided in Europe." The liberal monthlyCommon Sense thought it irrelevant to assess guilt, asserting no one in Europe really wanted a clash.
A surprising number of anti-interventionists had little sympathy for the Allies. To understand their position, one must examine their views on Danzig and the Corridor, Hitler's earlier diplomatic overtures to Poland, the Anglo-French guarantee to the Poles of March 1939, the Munich pact of September 1938, and the German-Soviet accord of August 1939. To begin with, several figures accepted a major German claim—namely, that the Polish crisis was rooted in the status of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. The Versailles treaty of 1919 had designated Danzig, whose population was overwhelmingly German, as a free city, self-governing under the general supervision of a high commissioner responsible to the League of Nations. At the same time, Danzig was incorporated into the Polish customs system, and Poland represented the city in foreign affairs. To assure Poland "free and secure access" to the Baltic Sea, the language of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, Poland obtained a "corridor" lying along the Vistula River. Although the Corridor contained more Poles than Germans, it severed the relatively small territory of East Prussia from Germany proper. No German leader ever supported Polish domination of either Danzig or its surroundings.
Even after the German attack, noninterventionists often maintained that the German position on the Corridor was just. In 1919, they recalled, President Wilson had warned that depriving Germany of such areas would lead to another war. Prime Minister Lloyd George's famous Fontainebleu memorandum to Clemenceau, dated 25 March 1919, prophesied that putting German nationals under foreign rule would create conflict.
Still more important to such anti-interventionists, Danzig and the Corridor remained unquestionably German. Danzig, said Congressman Hamilton Fish (Rep.-N.Y.), was "97 percent German, 97 percent Prussian, and 97 percent Nazi." To Yale law professor Edwin M. Borchard, "Morally Hitler has a good case."
Of course, attacks on Poland's domination of the Corridor were far from limited to the anti-interventionists. In 1933, for example, FDR himself told the British that the Corridor should be returned to Germany? Yet all polls taken in August and September 1939 indicated that Americans, by a large margin, found Hitler's claims to Danzig and the Corridor unjustified.
Even when the fighting started, several anti-interventionists maintained that Hitler had sought peace with Poland. Such a view was based on the German-Polish negotiations launched in late October 1938. German foreign secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop offered Josef Lipski, Polish ambassador to Berlin, a series of terms, including Danzig's incorporation into Germany, a German-controlled road and rail link with East Prussia, German guarantee of the Polish frontier, a twenty-five-year extension of the 1934 nonaggression pact between the two countries, and Polish membership in the Anti-Comintern Pact that included Germany, Japan, and Italy. Realizing that such terms would result in Poland's subordination to the Reich, Polish foreign minister Josef Beck refused. The entire spring and summer of 1939 were consumed by relentless German pressure, both propagandistic and military, against the Poles.
Hitler's formal terms—as filtered through the popular press—appealed to some anti-interventionists, including more than the obvious profascist elements. Harry Elmer Barnes found Germany's formal demands "very reasonable." Frank C. Waldrop of the Washington Times-Herald suggested that Poland should have linked itself with either Russia or Germany and have declared Warsaw an open city.
Several anti-interventionists bestowed major responsibility for the conflict on Britain and France, accusing them of foolishly encouraging Polish resistance. Such critics pointed to one Allied assurance to Poland after another, each increasing the degree of commitment. Although France had entered into a formal alliance with Poland in 1925, only on 31 March 1939 did the British government promise Anglo-French aid in case independence was threatened. On 25 August, the British intensified their commitment, entering into a mutual assistance pact with Poland and, in a secret protocol, specified Germany as the potential aggressor.
Less than a month before war began, Congressman Fish sought negotiation of the Danzig crisis. President of the American delegation to the Interparliamentary Union Conference, which met in mid-August 1939, Fish first spoke with European leaders, including the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany. On the 17th, he introduced a resolution at the Oslo meeting calling for arbitration, mediation, and a cooling-off period of thirty days. Because of the opposition from British and Norwegian representatives, he withdrew his proposal. In September, Fish blamed the British for rejecting a proposal that might have "saved Poland from being crucified by invasion and war."
During the last week of peace, some noninterventionists were particularly blunt. Borchard claimed that Britain's "churlish refusal" to accept Hitler's demands created another case in which "Hitler will again appear to be right and the Allies wrong." Felix Morley, chief editorial writer for the Washington Post, found the British fighting to save "face," not Poland. Writing of British intransigence, poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, "Is this courage or is it stupidity?" To her husband Charles, "Poland is beyond help under any circumstances." Once the British and French entered the conflict, attacks on their Polish guarantee became even more strident. General Hugh Johnson called Britain's declaration of war "one of the greatest and most stupid blunders in history—if not the greatest."
To many, the fundamental error went far beyond the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland. Rather it lay in failing to follow through on the genuine détente established by the Munich conference of late September 1938. At that time Britain and France acceded in the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, an event that within six months led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
True, some anti-interventionists attacked Munich bitterly, including Senator William E. Borah (Rep.-Idaho), who referred to "the dismembered body of Czechoslovakia, the only real republic in that portion of the world." Others defended the pact. By signing the agreement, they said, the Western powers had bought time to defend themselves. Furthermore, Munich might turn German expansion in an easterly direction, thereby creating conflict with the Soviet Union. "Having given Hitler at Munich the keys to Eastern Europe," wrote Lawrence Dennis, "the British decided six months later to forbid him to use the keys." According to journalist William Henry Chamberlin, France had missed its opportunity to crush Germany single-handedly during the Rhineland crisis of 1956. Hence, it had only one reasonable policy left: to acquiesce in German expansion eastward.
The German-Soviet accord of 23 August 1939 created even more diverse reaction. Earlier that month, an Anglo-French military mission had traveled to Moscow, seeking to explore the possibilities of containing an obviously expanding Germany. When the Russians insisted on the right to transport troops across Poland as part of any agreement, the head of the British mission balked, in the 23 August agreement, Germany and the Soviet Union, hitherto the bitterest of enemies, signed a nonaggression pact. Both parties pledged to refrain from attacking the other and promised neutrality if either party were attacked by a third. A secret codicil was attached that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
Not surprisingly, American communists endorsed the agreement. The pact, predicted party head Earl Browder, would break the Axis, while commentator Theodore Draper alleged that the pact had temporarily shattered "the appeasement front." Conversely, Father Charles E. Coughlin found the pact embarrassing. When news of the agreement was released, he told a radio audience that Americans must henceforth treat communism and Nazism alike. Sooner or later, he went on, Stalin's and Hitler's star would set.
A few opponents of intervention saw the agreement as reducing the chances for conflict, the New York Daily News maintaining it showed Stalin's unwillingness to enter a general war. And even if the pact did not advance the cause of peace, it could still be defended. Senator Borah, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thought the British deserved such treatment, for they had excluded the Soviets from the Munich conference, while seeking their aid in protecting Poland. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes went further. He conceded the Soviet Union was guilty of aggression but asserted that it was the Soviets' desire for peace and security that induced them to sign the 23 August agreement.
The agreement, some anti-interventionists correctly suspected, involved secret understandings. The New York Daily News suggested that the pact might involve the partition of Poland. To Hugh Johnson, the agreement included the return of the Baltic states to Russia and the partition of Rumania. Within ten years, Social Justice predicted, Hitler would control the Balkans, dividing its rich markets with Stalin, while the USSR would command Turkey, Iraq, and Persia.
On 27 September, Soviet troops advanced from the east, meeting the Germans at Brest-Litovsk two days later. Again, the communists strongly defended the move, quoting British politician David Lloyd George and playwright George Bernard Shaw on the matter. Several noninterventionists expressed outrage. To jurist John Bassett Moore, Russia had become "the chief exponent of the spirit of aggression" The New York Daily News stressed such Soviet perfidies as the shooting of priests. At the same time, it argued, Britain had gone to war fully aware that the Soviets would not come to Poland's aid.
Why, some anti-interventionists asked, had not the Allies declared war on Russia as they had on Germany? In noting the observation made by British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax—namely, that the Soviet-Polish border simply followed the ethnic Curzon line drafted at the 1919 Paris conference—the Christian Century accused Britain of acquiescing in the Soviet annexation of more than a third of Poland." Socialist leader Norman Thomas requested Roosevelt to extend his neutrality proclamation banning arms and munitions to the USSR, though he maintained that Poland's Jews and White Russians would be better satisfied under Stalin than they had been under either Hider or the old Polish autocracy.
Among the anti-interventionists, Poland had its share of sympathizers. "My heart bleeds," said Congressman Lewis D. Thill (Rep.-Wis.), for a people who "so valiantly defended their homeland against German and Russian attacks." Senator James J. Davis (Rep.-Pa.) warned, "Nazi ruthlessness is eradicating a people from the face of the earth." To Hamilton Fish, Poland had been "crucified." In February 1941, the usually reticent Charles A. Lindbergh told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he was "very much opposed to what happened in the German invasion of Poland." Before the Soviets invaded Poland, the communist Daily Worker urged "maximum aid."
Roman Catholic journals voiced particular concern, no doubt partly because of Poland's historic prominence as a Catholic nation. Even Social Justice saw Warsaw displaying "a heroism unsurpassed in the annals of militant patriotism," whereas Hitler embodied "the pagan plottings of anti-Christ." The fact that Coughlin's journal was published in a suburb of Detroit, a heavily Polish area, was undoubtedly a factor in its position.
As news spread of German atrocities against Poland's Jews, anti-interventionists vehemently denounced Hitler's anti-Semitic policies. Hitler's new "Jewish State" there, predicted Villard, would become "nothing more than a huge concentration camp and charnel house" Calling for mass protest meetings, he continued, "The Jews are treated literally as no German would be allowed under the law to treat a dumb animal." Not since Genghis Khan and Attila, suspected Hugh Johnson in January 1940, had there been such barbarism. In February 1941, Herbert Hoover, speaking to the Jewish Welfare Fund of Chicago, called for the creation of a new refugee state in Central Africa.
A few noninterventionists were more reserved. Pacifist leader Dorothy Detzer conceded that atrocity stories concerning Poland might well be true, but she accused the British of deliberately timing news releases so as to influence neutrality debates in Congress. Catholic World even saw the Germans as possible victims. In reviewing Polish Acts of Atrocity Against the German Minority in Poland, published by the German Library of Information, the Paulist monthly judged that Berlin's claims were as credible as those who stressed Nazi atrocities.
Many anti-interventionists were unsympathetic to Poland, and several focused on Poland's long history of anti-Semitism. More Jews had been persecuted in Poland, said Senator Burton K. Wheeler (Dem.-Mont.), than in any other country in the world.
Furthermore, such noninterventionists depicted the Polish government as oppressive, its ruling class exploitative. Harry Elmer Barnes cited socialist writer Max Nomad in claiming that Poland's regime was "hated by the majority of its own people." According to the Christian Century, civil liberties had ceased to exist when General Joseph Pilsudski had launched his coup in 1926. Call columnist Lillian Symes contended that the Allies were fighting for the restoration of "a semi-fascist government of less military significance than Czechoslovakia."
Poland's recent conduct in Europe was severely questioned. The Christian Century recalled that even before the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 had even adjourned, Poland had attacked Galicia and within a year had invaded Soviet Russia. After Munich, Congressman John Marshall Robsion (Rep.-Ky.) noted, Poland had seized seven thousand square miles of Czech territory. Barnes accused the nation's leaders of envisioning a "Great Poland" stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Anti-interventionists occasionally pilloried Poland's war leaders for fleeing to Rumania. Pundit H. L. Mencken, for example, accused them of looting the gold resources of their own nation.
To several figures, Poland's fall did not simply result from its leadership. Publisher Robert R. McCormick indicted Britain and France for remaining totally inert during the German invasion. Joseph P. Kennedy asserted England would rather "sell 100 Polands down the river than risk the life of a British soldier or the loss of a British pound." Even if Poland was restored, declared Mencken, Britain would make it a "puppet state" similar to Egypt and India. Congressman Bruce Barton (Rep.-N.Y.) found Western aid infeasible. A look at the atlas, he said, showed that there was no way France and England could come to Poland's aid.
Once Poland's fate was decided, certain anti-interventionists sought to alleviate its disasters. Herbert Hoover launched a full-scale campaign to feed starving Poles, establishing the Commission for Polish Relief and raising some $6 Million. In February 1940, Senator Alexander Wiley (Rep.-Wis.), pointing to Polish forces fighting in France, urged $15 million in congressional aid. Fish found surplus American wheat and cotton able to clothe and feed the Poles. Indeed, some anti-interventionists remained optimistic concerning Poland's ultimate survival. Congressman Thill predicted that the division of Poland would not last forever: "The world is too small for both Hider and Stalin."
Yet, irrespective of their analysis, all such commentators concurred with one claim of the Chicago Tribune: the United States had not created the Danzig situation; it therefore had no stake in it. Even if the U.S. so desired, it could not eject Hitler from the old free city of Danzig, much less force Stalin to return his portion of Poland. Senator Robert A. Taft sympathized with the invaded Poles but saw "no reason why we should run on the field and play quarterback."
* * *
Despite the loss of Poland, many anti-interventionists did not think the Allies would be defeated. The American public itself was equally optimistic; a Fortune poll taken in October predicted an Allied victory 64 percent to 7 percent, with 29 percent uncertain. At best Hitler's foes would emerge victorious, at worst experience stalemate. Said General Hugh Johnson in November, "An ignorant and brutal upstart has shot craps with destiny once too often."
Several reasons were given. First, Allied ground forces appeared invincible. Not only did the French possess the largest effective army in the world; it was the best. The Allies, wrote columnist Boake Carter, could put three soldiers in the field for every one the Germans could muster. Second, so both Herbert Hoover and Charles A. Lindbergh noted, the Maginot line served to deter the Germans. Third, as Hoover stressed, Allied naval strength appeared far superior. The French and British would continue to control the seas.
Only one factor was debated: air power. Boake Carter foresaw German factories demolished by British and French bombs; ten million Germans, he predicted, would die. Arguing to the contrary, Colonel Lindbergh envisioned Germany as soon possessing complete air supremacy. The discussion was often taken to another level, for several anti-interventionists denied that air power alone could ever conquer a nation. Hugh Johnson, writing in October, called German raids on British naval forces "flops"; new defenses made mass raids on large cities too dangerous even to attempt. The Chicago Tribune, which acknowledged German air superiority, found that pursuit planes and antiaircraft weapons could defend cities against air attack. Dennis and Gravenhoff were particularly skeptical of bombing, for even if Germany should capture the Netherlands and use it as an air base, the Luftwaffe could not inflict much damage on Britain. Ninety percent of London itself consisted of open spaces; therefore, over three-fourths of any bombs dropped there would be wasted.
To the noninterventionists, the Allies held advantages in resources. Britain and France, maintained Boake Carter, dominated the world's entire financial resources and 70 percent of its material ones. As Hoover noted, the Allied nations possessed 115 million people, Germany only 80 million. In regard to foodstuffs, he found France practically self-supporting, Britain well supplied from its dominions. Germany, in contrast, was starting the war "on bread cards." In fact, Commonweal believed conditions in Germany so bad that it suggested a relief organization. The strategic situation itself, wrote Newsweek editor Raymond Moley, worked to Allied advantage. Germany, he said, feared the enormous sacrifice that an attack on the western front would entail, for "if she weakens herself Russia will move westward." Conversely, several anti-interventionists saw Germany internally weak, lacking essential foodstuffs and such raw materials as iron ore and oil. Besides, it risked rampant inflation.
Even if Germany won the war, according to such reasoning, it could not dominate Europe for long. Senator Taft envisioned any dictator facing countless occupation difficulties. Senator Robert Rice Reynolds (Dem.-N.C.) concurred, stressing the colossal task Germany would face in holding down the French and British empires. Moreover, there were the punative lessons of history, as shown by ill-fated would-be conquerors ranging from Julius Caesar to Napoleon.
Several saw a possibility of Hitler's Reich dissolving internally. John T. Flynn spoke of economic collapse or a leftist revolt. In due time, predicted Senator William J. Bulow (Dem.-S.Dak.), the German people would overthrow their Nazi rulers. Drawing on José Ortega y Gasser's Revolt of the Masses (1930), Congressman Barton claimed that a long war would trigger popular revolts in both Germany and the Soviet Union. Already, wrote Boake Carter in September, some eight million Czechs were prepared to revolt.
To Oswald Garrison Villard, a close observer of German affairs, Germany lacked the strength for a long-term struggle. Arriving there just before the outbreak of war, he remained three and a half weeks and then reported on his trip to both the public and Roosevelt himself. From what he observed, Germany was a most unhappy land, the bulk of its people worn, tired, depressed, and in some cases hopeless. While denying the possibility of an early collapse, he said that internal differences within the Reich, centering on opposition to Nazi policy, would eventually result in Hitler's defeat. At one point, he noted that 75 percent of the people he met in Germany opposed Hitler's regime and that as many as 90 percent were against the war. His firsthand account, Within Germany (1940), received favorable reviews.
A few went further in emphasizing Germany's internal problems. Early in December 1939, Norman Thomas found discontent reaching the high command. In January 1940, the New York Daily News discovered Germany rationing hot water.
Amid such optimism, there was one warning: the Allies must not go on the offensive. Any such blunder, Hoover warned, would exhaust British and French manpower. At the very outset of the conflict, Colonel Lindbergh feared that the British and French would attempt to bomb German cities, a move that could only draw terrible retaliation. Only one prominent anti-interventionist urged an Allied offensive: William Randolph Hearst. Britain and France, suggested the publisher in March 1940, should place themselves under such capable "war dictators" as French foreign minister Edouard Daladier, then secure Turkish support and attack through Italy, thereby assuring control of the Mediterranean.
Throughout the winter of 1939-40, anti-interventionists saw only deadlock ahead. They frequently pointed to lack of combat in Western Europe, a circumstance that changed only in April 1940. Congressman John Rankin (Dem.-Miss.) quipped that the troops "are merely playing pinochle." If, said Senator Edwin Johnson (Dem.-Colo.), the Allies could neither crack the Siegfried line nor starve the Germans, who were supplied with unlimited Soviet assistance, victory would be extremely difficult. German submarines, lacking bases on the Atlantic, would soon be neutralized. The New York Daily News kept stressing that any fight to the finish would result in unspeakable ills—starvation, communism—and that both sides realized it. "England and France are in no position," wrote Hugh Johnson, "to fight any kind of war except an interminable affair of siege, blockade and starvation. Do you want to encourage that. Lawrence Dennis and V. D. Gravenhoff denied that any German leader advocated "lightning war" against the Allies. Rather, Germany's "extremely logical" plan was based on submarine and air offensives against Allied shipping and naval bases.
Several foes of intervention found the whole situation on the Western front absurd. Hearst's San Francisco Examiner called the conflict "about as senseless as two men quarreling in a boat which is about to carry them over Niagara Falls." The Allies, it was argued, lacked a fighting spirit. "There is something phony about this war," said Senator Borah, coining a famous phrase, for he was accusing the Allies of polling their punches against Germany. Why, asked Hugh Johnson, had the Allies not bombed the Krupp works at Essen? Socialist editor Oscar Ameringer answered such queries by claiming, "The plutocrats are not going to bomb their own."
Other noninterventionists, however, rejoiced in the static situation. At the present pace, remarked Senator Lynn Frazier (Rep.-N.Dak.), Hitler could never smash the Allies. To New Republic editor Bruce Bliven, "The mass slaughter of human beings is about the most dreadful thing I know," and he deemed it best for the Allies to "sit still and starve Germany out" The title of his article: "I Like a Phony War."
Certain figures in the Roosevelt administration were less optimistic. Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, was in a decided minority in seeing stalemate ahead. Secretary of State Cordell Hull envisioned the defeat of Britain and France, the partition of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the severing of all trade between the United States and Europe. Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes saw little reason for the Allies to count on a victory. In November, both the state department and military experts, noted Ickes, predicted a German drive to the Channel through the Netherlands.
Roosevelt's own attitude fluctuated. He told Ickes in October that German morale would crack; at other times he gave the Allies only a fifty-fifty chance of victory. Within higher British circles only Colonel Hastings Ismay, military secretary to the war cabinet, predicted that France would collapse in the face of a German onslaught.
* * *
Almost as soon as the war started, some noninterventionists saw peace in the offing. Early in September, Norman Thomas declared that the war might stop with the conquest of Poland. On 9 October, John Rankin predicted peace within a few days. Others were a bit more vague but still hopeful. "Some sort of peace," commented Hearst's San Francisco Examiner in mid-October, might come by Christmas, after which a world conference would undo the "obvious and almost universally hated injustices of the Versailles Treaty." Signs included a warm German reception for a false armistice report, the return home of a hundred thousand French troops, German seizing of two supposed British peace agents on the Dutch border, and the scuttling of the German battleship Graf Spee off the Argentine coast, which showed Hitler could not endure the heavy casualties involved in a battleship fight. Just before he died on 19 January 1940, Borah told a reporter he expected peace that spring, followed by a general revision of the Versailles treaty.
Some were wary. As early as October, Herbert Hoover predicted that the impasse would only last until the spring. Anne Morrow Lindbergh foresaw the conquest of Poland and merciless bombing of London and Paris. She thought in terms of "a new Spain," referring to the civil war that had just ended. To her husband Charles, it was again "The Charge of the Light Brigade." In March 1940, Villard feared that Hitler would soon attack Britain by both air and sea.
A few anti-interventionists divined an Allied initiative, though not necessarily in Western Europe. In mid-February, the New York Daily News anticipated an Allied move in the Middle East. Noting the sudden appearance of thirty thousand Anzac troops at Suez, it contemplated a drive to sever the Soviet Union's Baku oil fields from Hitler. To block the move, Germany and Russia might push into Rumania, attacking the strategically vital Constantinople.
* * *
For many, if not most, anti-interventionists, the greatest danger to the world came not from Germany but from the Soviet Union. Who, queried Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was "the potential invader of Europe, the real threat of European civilization?" "Ask the Balkans and the Baltic states. Ask Finland; ask Rumania; ask Turkey." With Europe "bled white by wars and prostrated by devastation, her [Russia's] advance will be slow, inevitable, and deadly—like a flow of lava."
So far, some argued, Hitler was already a loser, not a winner. On the political right, such opinions were expected. Read one editorial headline in the Chicago Tribune: "The Winner, Red Joseff." But liberal noninterventionists too saw Stalin as the victor. Norman Thomas found the German dictator doing "the fighting," the Soviet dictator "the annexing."
Even Germany was not excluded from going Red. Villard envisioned a communist takeover within five years. Hearst correspondent H. R. Knicker-bocker gave Hitler's Reich six years. Dire consequences, several warned, would not be limited to Germany alone. Once the belligerents had been "bled white," predicted Representative Fish, "the Communist vulture will sweep down on the bloody remains of Europe."
Stalin's aims appeared insatiable. Reynolds spoke of Russia "creeping down" on Persia and India. Congressman George A. Dondero (Rep.-Mich.) suspected Soviet designs on China and the Philippines. Norman Thomas warned of "a kind of world hegemony." By the war's end, the New York Daily News predicted, the United States "may be the only non-Communist nation left in the world." To Social Justice, the West faced a series of revolutions, led in France by such "Communists" as Leon Blum, in Britain by such "rocking chair Communists" as Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, and in the United States by such figures as financier Bernard Baruch and labor leaders Harry Bridges and Walter Reuther.
Within interventionist circles, such apprehension was occasionally shared. To Ickes, Hitler had "a big and unmanageable bear by the tail that will destroy him in his turn even if he succeeds in destroying France and England." Assistant Secretary of State Berle found Stalin and Hitler ruling "from Manchuria to the Rhine, much as Genghis Khan once ruled." Walter Lippmann, undoubtedly the most respected columnist among the interventionists, defined what he saw as the real issue of the war: "What shall be the boundary of Europe against the expanding invasion of Russian imperial Bolshevism?" Only Roosevelt dissented slightly, denying that Germany could ever go "Communist in the Russian manner, for it had always honored the values of private property and family independence.
Fortunately, so many hoped, a negotiated peace might be in the offing, one that could end the bloodshed and deflect the wide-sweeping ambitions of the Soviets.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Many Mansions of Anti-interventionism Chapter 2 War, Phony and Real Chapter 3 Early Hopes for Peace Chapter 4 A Matter of War Aims Chapter 5 American Goals: An Object of Suspicion Chapter 6 Initial Engagements Chapter 7 The Fall of Western Europe Chapter 8 Protecting the Republic Chapter 9 Military Defense of the Hemisphere Chapter 10 Economic Survival in the Americas Chapter 11 War, Peace, and Elections Chapter 12 Lend-Lease and the "Future War" Chapter 13 A Troubled Spring Chapter 14 Great Britain: An Unfit Ally Chapter 15 The British Empire: A Dubious Cause Chapter 16 The Soviets: A Greater Enemy Chapter 17 A Pivotal Summer Chapter 18 Projections of Conflict Chapter 19 Waging Undeclared War Chapter 20 The Domestic Front Chapter 21 The Asian Cauldron Chapter 22 Towards the Pacific War Chapter 23 ConclusionWhat People are Saying About This
Professor Doenecke's new book, "Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941", is by far the most inclusive work on pre-war isolationism ever written. Meticulously researched, easily read, and most informative, it is bound to become the standard study of this subject.
— Hans L. Trefousse
In this extraordinarily well-researched and comprehensive study, Professor Justus Doenecke examines the intellectual underpinnings of the American anti-interventionist movement of 1939-1941. Although much has been written about the bitter isolationsit/interventionist controversy before America's entry into World War II, no one has ever systematically analyzed the anti-interventionists' mindset, motivating ideology, and prejudices...Justus Doenecke fills this gap.
— George H. Nash
Doenecke, a respected historian of the U.S. tradition of isolationism, provides an exhaustive record of the most important episode in that tradition--1939-1941. This important work should spur fresh and much needed debate over that entry into war and the larger anti-interventionist tradtion in recent American history.
— Walter LaFeber
Justus Doenecke's study of ideological dimensions of anti-interventionist opposition to American entry into World War II is exhaustively researched, broadly conceived, clearly organized, well written, and balanced and in its analyses. It is a superb scholarly accomplishment.
— Wayne S. Cole
This exhaustive, penetrating study should demonstrate once and for all that FDR's foreign policy opponents prior to Pearl Harbor were not simply 'illustrious dunderheads' or ostriches blind to international dangers. As prophetic critics of both the imperial presidency and unrestrained globalism, Doenecke's nonintervntionists may have lost the 'great debate' over U.S. entry into World War II, but they still speak to subsequent generations as alternative voices from a usable American past.
— J. Garry Clifford
As "Storm on the Horizon" amply demonstrates, Justus Doenecke knows more about the so-called isolationists of the pre-World War II era than any other living historian. This comprehensive and even handed book on opposition to American intervention should remain the standard account for generations.
— Leo P. Ribuffo
Eloquently argued and exhaustively documented, "Storm on the Horizon" traces the principles and practices of the non-interventionists from 1939 to the Pearl Harbor attack. While war ended their opposition, Justus Doenecke, as no scholar before him, demonstrates the logic and resolve of their lost crusade.
— Irwin F. Gellman