American History Revised (68 page)

In World War II, by contrast, the victorious Allies took a tough line. There would be no armistice—i.e., a temporary cessation of hostilities—as at Versailles; to the contrary, there was a full-blown surrender to the “Tripartite Supreme Authority” of the United States, Britain, and Russia. The victors demanded severe reparations—and made sure they got paid. They divided Germany into occupation zones, with Berlin left isolated deep inside the Soviet zone. Unlike World War I, in which most of the fighting took place outside of Germany, World War II was just the opposite: by the end of the war, most of Germany’s cities had been bombed into ruins. Walls were still standing, but roofs and windows were totally blown out. “Skeleton cities,” they were called, such ruins being even more demoralizing than if they had been completely flattened. No matter, Germany must be taught a lesson. “We’ve got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis,” said FDR. Churchill and FDR imposed a harsh program of de-Nazification and deindustrialization. According to JCS-1067 instructions to General Eisenhower, Germany “will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy nation.” All steps “designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy” were prohibited. The occupying forces seized all the banks and stopped foreign trade. When told that an onerous “Carthaginian Peace” could not be imposed on Germany, one American general replied sarcastically, “Well, now, you don’t hear too much from those Carthaginians nowadays.”

Eisenhower meant business. When he saw photographs of GIs giving children chewing gum, he blew up: “This must be nipped in the bud immediately.” Fraternization of any kind with Germans was verboten. If hunger and suffering was their fate, so be it. Whereas a human being normally needs two thousand calories a day, what was available in Germany provided only 1,200 calories. Many Germans lived on the verge of starvation.

The U.S. Army stationed hundreds of thousands of troops in Germany, and made Germany pay the full costs of occupation. Unlike the 1930s, when Germany had substantial assets abroad that it used to finance rearmament, the U.S. now tracked down and confiscated all German assets outside of the country. It conducted the Nuremberg Trials, and put the key German militarists in prison for a long time, and in some cases put them to death. In the meantime, the Soviets took half of Germany and shipped many of its industrial assets to Russia. The major coal-producing region of Germany—the Saar—was given to France. Quotas were imposed, restricting German steelmaking capacity to 25 percent of prewar volume. More than four million German soldiers were taken and used as forced labor in the UK, France, and the Soviet Union.

No way was Germany going to rearm, in any shape or form. There were no soldiers, no weapons, even the police were disarmed. Antique hunting guns and swords from the Franco-Prussian War were collected and destroyed. Any German caught violating the arms ban got eight years in jail. After conducting a massive search for bombs, mines, and other armaments, the Allies had disposed of 302,875 tons of German chemical weapons containing fourteen different kinds of toxic agents.

Nor was Germany going to buy its way out of poverty by printing hundreds of millions of deutsche marks. With the American advisors in firm control, Germany had no choice but to pursue sound economic and trade policies to prove she belonged to the world economy and would make every effort to repay the reparations. In 1947, when it became apparent that the health of Europe depended on vigorous trade among all European nations including Germany, the U.S. shifted gears and offered a carrot, the Marshall Plan. What made the Germans so cooperative was the total defeat they had suffered during the war, plus the stiff conditions they had endured during 1945 to 1947, a true “Carthaginian Peace.”

Japan fared no better. The United States took over the country, installed a military dictatorship under General Douglas MacArthur, and ruled the country with an iron fist. It is no accident that William Manchester titled his biography of MacArthur
American Emperor.
That MacArthur ruled wisely is a testimony to his observance of American heritage and
democratic principles but should not obscure the fact that his rule was total. Imperious to the core, MacArthur ruled like a neocolonial military dictator possessing complete executive and legislative authority. “I could by fiat issue directives,” he informed the U.S. Senate, and he did.

Observes historian John Dower in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book
Embracing Defeat
, “Such an audacious undertaking by victors in war had no legal or historical precedent.” It was the greatest experiment in “nation building” ever taken, a thorough remake of a society from top to bottom.

Unlike Germany, the United States did not have its allies to worry about. Even though it was called a multinational coalition—“The Allied Occupation of Japan”—the rule of Japan was solely by the United States; the allies were just figureheads. When the occupation began, most Americans—including MacArthur—assumed it would last no more than three years. It ended up being six years. During U.S. control, from 1945 to 1952, Japan lost its empire, reparations were extracted, the military forces were dismantled totally, a complete land-reform bill was imposed, and the zaibatsu conglomerates and holding companies controlled by the old guard were eliminated. Some 200,000 people were enjoined from holding public offices. No Japanese citizen was permitted to travel abroad. The occupation, the United States made abundantly clear, would last for however long it took for Japan to establish “a peacefully inclined and responsible government”—with America being the sole judge, jury, and executioner. To add insult to injury, in a nation where 3.7 million families were homeless, America insisted that Japan bear all costs of maintaining the occupation army. In 1948, fully one-third of the government budget (“war termination costs”) went to pay for housing the American occupying troops.

The United States sought nothing less than “remaking the entire political, social, cultural, and economic fabric of a defeated nation.” Despite all efforts to bring in food, many Japanese people suffered terribly. A bag of rice that cost 2.7 yen in mid-1946 cost 62.3 yen by early 1950—assuming you could buy it. The 1946 black-market price wasn’t 2.7 yen: on the streets it was almost 380 yen. The United States managed to get the black-market premium down to two times the official price by 1949, but during this time many Japanese were starving to death, trying to live on 1,000 calories a day.

Japan was a totally defeated nation, and the peace terms dictated by the victor were absolute. Only under such circumstances could a militarist society continually at war since 1931 change its ways. That the Japanese met the challenge is due largely to the fact that they had no choice.

Total defeat, properly managed, can yield long-lasting peace.

1947
World War II didn’t end the Depression any more than the New Deal did.

In 1932, 13.7 million Americans were out of work. Despite the morale boost provided by FDR and all the programs implemented by his administration, the New Deal of 1933–40 made only scant progress in ending the Depression. In fact, many countries had started to recover from the worldwide collapse of prices; the U.S., by comparison, was a laggard. The most successful economy was Nazi Germany. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had annual growth rates in the 20 percent range; America’s was a pathetic −7 percent. England’s national income in 1937 was 25 percent higher than the high-water mark of 1929; the United States’s national income was 15 percent lower than in 1929. Recalled the famed newscaster David Brinkley, “By the winter of 1938–39, Roosevelt knew, but was not yet willing to say, that the New Deal, as a social and economic revolution, was dead.”

The unemployment rate was 17 percent. Some 10 million Americans still had no job. Recognizing the obvious, FDR came out and admitted as much: “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win the War.”

But even World War II and the booming demand for war materials and American men and women failed to end the Depression. The boom provided by wartime was only temporary, and was pretty much confined to the defense sector (while other sectors suffered). Americans were terrified of the economic consequences of peace when the soldiers would come home and the factories stopped: 15 million jobs would disappear and the U.S. would be back where it was in 1932. “It would be the Pearl Harbor of Peace,” wrote one correspondent. Cassandras were everywhere. Wrote the historian Merle Curti, “The individualism and the opportunity of an earlier America seemed to have faded, and some felt that the United States had suddenly grown old.” Paul Samuelson, soon to become the country’s best-known economist because of his popular college textbook, predicted “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” “Peacetime prosperity,” he thundered, “could be assured only if the slack left by business investment and expenditures could be taken up by government expenditures.” Other New Deal economists cited intractable problems such as uncertainties in foreign trade, the enormous disparities in the price and wage structure, and the inability of consumption to ever catch up with the country’s enormous production capacity.

For a year or two, they were right. But as price controls were lifted on consumer products and government spending fell two-thirds from $98.4 billion in 1945 to
$33 billion in 1947, genuine recovery began to occur and the American economy never looked back.

This caught many people by surprise. “Keynesian economists,” says the historian Thomas DeLorenzo, “expected a two-thirds reduction in government spending to lead to another depression, but they were dead wrong.” Instead, what ensued was the fastest, most startling economic boom in American history.

1951
It may seem ironical to call the Korean War—“the forgotten war”—America’s most successful military endeavor, but it achieved its objectives and had the most satisfactory long-term results.

The purpose of waging war is not just to win battles, but also to secure a political peace. World War I was an obvious failure in this regard. But even America’s two most decisive wins left a legacy of animosities and unresolved differences. The first one, World War II, resulted in America becoming the most powerful nation on earth—only because of its sole ownership of the bomb. The Soviets, who had done most of the fighting, still had vastly superior manpower forces, thus opening the door for Soviet expansionism. The result was the Cold War.

The other military slam-dunk, the Gulf War, secured the West’s oil supplies, but left Saddam Hussein in power. Free to do as he pleased, he threw out UN weapons inspectors and taunted the world that he had weapons of mass destruction (a dangerous bluff).

The Korean War, on the other hand, stands up well to the test of history. It was a military stalemate and a very unpopular war at the time (which is why Harry Truman quietly refrained from seeking reelection in 1952). But in terms of achieving a stable, long-lasting peace, the Korean War was remarkably fruitful. The country we saved, South Korea, eventually went on to become one of the world’s strongest democracies. For more than a half century, both the U.S. and the Soviets/Chinese have respected the Thirty-eighth Parallel that physically separates the two countries. Even more significant, both sides refrained from using nuclear weapons or launching massive invasions of a million men, which they could easily have done. By their conduct of the war, all parties—Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Russians—signaled “limits” to each other. In so doing they initiated the era of limited war that has characterized warfare to this day.