Could we not, should we not, have strained our energies to correct the defects of Germany, to give her legitimate satisfactions, long before the advent of Hitler? In the East, the only bulwark and barrier to Bolshevism was Japan. Should we not have strained our energies to keep our friendship for Japan, instead of offering all our sympathies to chaotic China, the prey of war lords, ripe for Bolshevism?
From the viewpoint of Sirius, it was at once tragic and comic that Germany, falling under the domination of an extraordinary personage with madness in his brain, should have made war on England and America, his natural allies against Bolshevism. The fatality of history ordained that Japan should range herself against the anti-Bolshevik countries. Thus we had the inconceivable spectacle of Japan and Germany joining hands against the anti-Bolshevik countries, and the anti-Bolshevik countries helping Bolshevism to triumph over its adversaries.We supplied Bolshevism with unlimited quantities of arms. We taught Bolshevism how to make arms for itself. We insisted on the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan, after inflicting the maximum of damage on them, forgetting that after war there should be peace, after destruction, reconstruction. We disarmed, dismantled, shattered to pieces Japan and Germany, rendering them utterly impotent. We refused to admit anti-Bolshevik countries like Spain into international assemblies. We complacently encouraged Bolshevism to fortify itself in defiance of our pledges in the Atlantic Charter in the Baltic states, which were annexed by Russian Bolshevism. We had gone to war to protect Poland, and we abandoned half of Poland to Russian Bolshevism, and permitted the other half to be subjugated by Bolshevism. We had been ready, at one moment, to attack Russia for her action against “brave little Finland,” and then we acquiesced in the taking of parts of Finland. We prepared the way for the victory of Bolshevism in China, deserting our questionable protégé, Chiang Kai-shek, when he was in danger of being swept aside by the rising Red tide. We gave Bolshevism half of Germany, half of Austria, half of Korea, and much besides. In Europe we were troubled greatly when we saw that all the Balkan states were doomed by our war strategy to fall under the yoke of Bolshevism. In short, hypnotized by the conflict with Germany and Japan (Italy was comparatively negligible), the Allies forgot the permanent menace of Bolshevism, and provided Bolshevism with arms and strategic advantages in the future struggle.
At the same time, in praising Bolshevism as the inspirer of national energy (forgetting that Bolshevism preached and practiced surrender in 1917), the Allies gave a new impulse to the potential enemy in their own countries, where the Bolsheviks were granted full scope for their subversive propaganda and agitation. Vital secrets were betrayed with impunity. We formulated a doctrine of peace which forbade us to check Russian expansion on pain of branding ourselves as “Imperialist” warmongers. We hurriedly disarmed, while leaving Russia as heavily armed as ever, by far the most powerful military nation in the world.
From Sirius one could readily foresee the consequences of the decisions taken at Teheran and extended at Yalta. Roo- sevelt was convinced that he could convert Stalin, the head of a materialist and atheistic state, the autocrat of the Kremlin, to Christian and democratic views by making concessions that were both anti-Christian and anti-democratic. He thought the hard-boiled Stalin susceptible to his “charms.” The Anglo-Americans took a pledge to land in France, and operations in the Balkans were forbidden. This was tantamount to making a present of the Balkan peoples to Stalin.
As for Poland, for whose integrity we had gone to war against Hitler, boundaries well within German territory were to be accepted, and about fifteen million Germans thrown out of their own country, by way of compensation for the annexation of the eastern part of Poland by Russia. What had become of the Atlantic Charter which expressly forbade the bartering of territories and populations? What were the Allies to receive in return? They were to obtain Russian help against Japan months after the defeat of Germany help which they did not need, which was never effectively given and was designed simply to enable Russia to participate in the immobilization of Japan in the event of a Russo- American conflict at a later date.
Eight years later, it seems impossible that we should have given up so overwhelmingly much for so preposterously little. The Russians won the war at Casablanca and Teheran. They won Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Manchuria, not to mention the possibility of winning Germany and Austria, not to mention the later winning of China; as for the Baltic states, nobody cared any more about Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania. . . .
I will, in this place, to show that the Allies were not taken by surprise and that they persisted in their folly, mention the Yalta accords of February 1945, when the war was practically over. The new Polish line in Germany was drawn and the Poles, who had fought valiantly with the Allies, were thrown to the wolves as wicked anti-Communists. Germany was divided into zones, that is to say, the Russians were provided with a platform in Germany from which they might secure the whole country. Berlin itself was placed in the Soviet zone, and the Allies had not even a free corridor by which they could always obtain access to the German capital. By way of reparations, eighty per cent of German industries were to be scrapped, aviation factories confiscated, as well as the factories for the manufacture of synthetic petrol, and exorbitant payments in kind were meant to demolish Germany.
One of the most culpable aspects of the Yalta concessions was the fact that they were entirely unnecessary. No further concessions had to be made to Stalin. His aid was not needed to help conquer Japan the reason given by Roosevelt’s apologists. We now know that Japan was ready for peace on al- most any terms before Yalta. Indeed, President Roosevelt had received through General MacArthur before he left for Yalta much the same peace terms that were accepted by President Truman the following August. Walter Trohan published them immediately after V-J Day.
What would be the value of waking up to realities five or ten years too late? If statesmanship is the art of looking ahead, then statesmanship has never in the world’s history failed so signally. This statement is elaborately confirmed with extensive documentation in the book by the able American journalist and publicist, William Henry Chamberlin, Americas Second Crusade. What is most astonishing, and in many ways disheartening, is that many Americans, who wisely and courageously opposed the “second crusade” are now vigorously supporting a third and more horrible crusade in Asia.
In the meantime, the Allied advance in Italy continued slowly. Both Field Marshal Alexander and Field Marshal Wilson, when the operations against General Kesselring had succeeded, wished to press on to Vienna, to Budapest, the Balkans in general. And it had at one time been hoped to bring Turkey and Greece into a Balkan drive. It is not my business to write of military matters, but any diplomatic observer can see at a glance that such a plan would have far-reaching political consequences. In pushing back the Germans, the Allies would have prevented the Russians from invading and virtually annexing the Balkans. They would also have spared France, as Marshal Petain was hoping. But “Uncle Joe’s” aspirations and feelings had to be considered. He had been promised spoils at Teheran, and he must be allowed to take them. What would happen later in Europe was not considered.
Two capital blunders without counting innumerable mi- nor blunders marked the campaign of the Allies: the prolongation of the war, until the paroxysm of fury and destruction could reach no higher, by the proclamation of “unconditional surrender” at Casablanca; and the diversion of the Allied troops to France instead of to Central Europe, for the sole benefit of Russia. It would be difficult to decide which of these major blunders was of the greater assistance to Bolshevism. They were both unnecessary and pernicious presents, which may well ruin us and our civilization….
A crowning mistake of the Allies was their treatment of defeated Germany. Seemingly, they had learned nothing from the example of the disastrous effects of the Versailles Treaty. The Casablanca formula of “unconditional surrender” assured that Germany would be utterly destroyed in a military way and all but demolished materially, leaving a vacuum into which Russia could penetrate unless Germany was permanently occupied by a large Allied force or rearmed in serio-comic defiance of the whole principle of the Casablanca decision. The division of Germany into zones of occupation was determined at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, and this made it virtually certain that a large portion of eastern Germany would remain rather permanently under Russian domination. But this was not all; the notorious Morgenthau Plan to destroy German industry and transform Ger- many into a pastoral and agricultural country, even if it involved the starvation of millions of Germans, was approved by Roosevelt and Churchill (after brief opposition by the latter) at Quebec in September 1944. It was approved and applied, with slight changes, by the Potsdam Conference of July 1945. This led to further demoralization and destruction of the German industrial plant and the transfer of much which remained to Russia, Britain and France.”