Dr. Steven Jonas

archived: 29 May - 4 Jun, 2005 Back Next

UPDATED: June 2, 2005

“PAT BUCHANAN’S ‘WHAT IF,’ II?’”

This is the second in a three-part series on this subject. It deals with the subject of a book Patrick Buchanan published about a year ago, and has been getting some more publicity on in the context of Bush’s remarks that “Yalta was worse than the Nazi-Soviet Pact.” Buchanan has postulated that things have been worse in the world, especially for the US given that there was a World War II as it was, than they would have been otherwise. This series supposes that World War II as it did occur historically was not fought (although given the imperialist designs of both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan at the time, another war surely would have been).

Given a set of other historical facts as we know them, I speculate upon what might the world, and especially our country, look like today, had indeed World War II as we know not occurred. (In this column, most of the real stuff appears within parentheses). We here consider Pat Buchanan’s “What If?” That is, what if there had been no World War II, as we know it? For that to have happened the British and the French would not have gone war with the Germans and eventually with the Japanese and the Italians – and thus the US would not have entered the war on their side at some point. And so.

At the end of the scenario set forth in last week’s column, Hitler had invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939. (In the real world, the British and the French honored their treaty obligations to Poland and, following the expiration of a fairly short ultimatum period, declared war on Germany.) In Great Britain, there is strong pressure from the Churchill faction of Chamberlain’s Conservative Party and from the Labor minority led by Clement Atlee to declare war on Germany. But Chamberlain himself is still hoping to be able to cut a formal, if secret, deal with Hitler allowing him to continue to exercise a “free hand” in Eastern Europe in return for a guarantee to leave the British Empire alone. (In fact, when WW II started, until the Germans invaded France on May 10, 1940 and Chamberlain lost the Prime Ministership, through back channels he continued to pursue such a deal.) Further, Chamberlain has a strong, behind-the-scenes ally in King Edward VIII, the Nazi sympathizer, who brought with him major sections of the British industrial class. (In the real world, King George VI, consulted by Chamberlain, strongly urges that Great Britain declare war on Germany.)

The British and the French now do with their treaty obligations to Poland just what they had done with their treaty obligations to the Czechs: not intervene. In regard of the latter, at the time of the Munich Agreement in Sept. 1938, when Hitler marched into the Western part of the country, he had guaranteed that so doing resolved his “territorial demands in Europe.” In March 1939, when Hitler took over the rest of the country, unopposed, the British and the French did not honor the obligations they had supposedly taken on at Munich. Now, in the Polish crisis, they are just acting consistently.

Churchill, the strong anti-Nazi voice in Great Britain of the 1930s, is given the Colonial Office in the British government. (It happened in the real world that, before Churchill took up the anti-Nazi cause in Parliament in the mid-1930s, his cause was the maintenance of the British Empire, especially India. Once the real war started, in his negotiations with Roosevelt to gain the American assistance without which Great Britain could not have held out alone against Germany, he said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.) But in the scenario projected here, Churchill is essentially bought off. (He is not named to the Admiralty on the evening of September 1, 1939, as the re-installed First Lord, a position he held during the First War. There is no fleet message to the Royal Navy around the world that evening saying simply, “Winston is back.”) Everyone, it is said, has his or her price.

In France, the Right, hearing secretly from the British King about the pressure he is exerting on his government, exerts increasing pressure on their own Daladier government and France goes along with the British. It is not too long before the same French Right-Wing takes control of the French government and declares neutrality. (In the real world, the French Right agreed to set up a German puppet government in Vichy following the Fall of France in June 1940. Led by the French fascist Pierre Laval and the WW I hero Marechal Petain, the Right, in control of what was left of the French government, indeed declared neutrality in the real WW II). In the East, according to the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union picks off its allotted portion of Poland.

In the United States, there is no voice for war. The British and the French have declared hands-off and the Soviet Union has made its own deal with the devil, so neither the right-wing isolationists nor the vocal American Left, led at that time by the US Communist Party, want anything to do with attacking Hitler Germany in any way. Roosevelt promises to “keep the US out of war” (he really did this in the 1940 Presidential election campaign) and is easily re-elected.

Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe gets underway. With no war on between Germany and any of the Western powers, there is no Western intelligence operation anywhere in Europe. The Nazis’ campaign, led by Reinhold Heydrich (the Chiar of the Wansee Conference that in January, 1942, really did plan for the destruction of European Jewry) proceeds in utter secrecy. On June 22, 1941, Germany invades the Soviet Union (as really happened). In this scenario, however, Hitler is fighting a one front war. He rolls up the Soviet Army all the way to Moscow, in December 1941 (as really happened). A Soviet counterattack using Siberian troops (a real occurrence) halts him there. The Germans regroup over the winter. The Spring Offensive in 1942 (a real occurrence) sets them rolling once again, this time towards Stalingrad, the gateway to the Caucuses and its huge reserves of oil.

In the meantime, the Japanese are conquering ever-larger parts of China in the war they started back in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria and intensified in 1937 with the invasion of China proper. Roosevelt is concerned with Japanese expansion in the Western Pacific, especially in regard of the American colony of the Philippines. He makes noises about the illegality of the Japanese War on China. He gets the neutral Dutch (whose neutrality has been respected by Hitler, there being no war in Western Europe) to declare an embargo on oil to Japan from the Dutch East Indies. (This is an event that did occur.) Under strong pressure from the isolationist and in the case of some of them pro-fascist, forces in the US, Roosevelt, however, enters into negotiations with the Japanese on these issues (this really happened).

Roosevelt cannot possibly try to enter into any kind of alliance with the Stalinists of the Soviet Union. There being no other potential allies against a force that he knows in his gut represents the worst tyrannical dictatorship ever seen on the face of the Earth, he has no choice but to cave in to the Japanese. (In both this scenario and the real world, Japan has a close military and diplomatic alliance with Germany that requires either of them to enter any war with any third power that either of them engages in. In the real world, it was this alliance that required Hitler reluctantly to declare war on the US on December 8, 1941, even though people like Pat Buchanan would have you believe that Roosevelt declared war on the Germans.)

In return for assurances that the Japanese will not try to take the Philippines, FDR withdraws US objections to the War in China, on the pretext that “that is an Asian matter for Asians to resolve.” He tells the Dutch that it is OK with the US if they end the embargo, something they want to do anyway to avoid a German invasion of the homeland and a Japanese invasion of their most profitable colony and resume selling their oil. Pearl Harbor never happens. Nor does Midway meaning that that Japanese Navy (which in the real world lost its four main aircraft carriers at that battle) is on its way to becoming the most powerful one in the world. In the US mid-term elections of 1942, the Republicans and their isolationist allies among the Democrats take over the Congress. Among other things, whatever is left of the New Deal is killed by that Congress (rather than left to be killed by the current Georgite Regime). The Great Depression continues on apace.

Germany is able to use all of its forces in the assault on Stalingrad at the end of the summer of 1942. (In the real world, they were engaged at the same time in fighting the British in North Africa, having to commit major amounts of men and materiel there. In the real world, the beginning of the end for them at Stalingrad was shortly preceded by a great British victory in the desert west of Cairo, at El Alamein. In the Pat Buchanan scenario, though, there is no such major defeat, the first one in actual fact suffered by the Wehrmacht.) Overcoming some stubborn Soviet resistance, the Germans break through at Stalingrad. They quickly take over the Caucasus and the oil there and then are invited into Iran by the openly pro-Nazi Shah (yes, that Shah -– the same one who the US placed back on the throne in 1953 when it was instrumental in the overthrow of the moderately left-wing republican government of Iran --- really was pro-Nazi.)

For the time-being, honoring their agreement with the British, and realizing full well how treacherous for any foreign invader the buffer country of Afghanistan is, the Germans stop at its border, leaving the jewel of the British Empire, India, at peace. The Japanese, having taken over all of Southeast Asia, march through Burma, but stop at the Indian border too. They leave Singapore in British hands as well, figuring that the 600 mile trek through a supposedly impenetrable jungle (which they did undertake in real life, totally surprising the British) was not worth the candle.

In the United States, a totally demoralized Roosevelt heads for retirement at the spa at Warm Springs, GA, where he eventually dies of stroke on April 12, 1945. The Democrats choose as their candidate a little-known Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman. The Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, a strong anti-New Dealer, a moderate isolationist, no anti-Semite, but tolerant of both of those wings of his party, easily defeats him. The headline in the Chicago Tribune reads: “Dewey Beats Truman.”

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