CHAPTER 34
The World at War interviews were sometimes more illuminating about the early 1970s than they were of the war itself. The reason why the only non-participant interviewed was the American historian Stephen Ambrose, and why he was used to set the tone for the programme Reckoning: 1945 . . . And After appears to be that in 1970 he had published a well-received account of Eisenhower's war years and also gained notoriety for heckling President Nixon. One can sense a degree of editorial unease in this decision, because the dominant geopolitical fact of the years after the Second World War was that America shouldered the responsibilities commensurate with her power that she had so signally shirked after the First World War. The makers of the series wanted someone to capture that changed reality in a few words and the comments of such as Harriman, Hiss and Galbraith were too wordy to include in an already overcrowded programme. In 1998 Sir Jeremy Isaacs, series producer of The World at War, produced American TV mogul Ted Turner's 24–part Cold War series, but as the following pages indicate there was enough material collected for the earlier series to merit at least another episode. That would, however, have required the conceptual audacity to argue that the Second World War was not entirely over, which would have challenged the consensus prevailing in the early 1970s. While I am happy to use that argument now, I am not sure, in all honesty, that I would have done so then.
It seems to me, an individualist rather than a collectivist by sympathy, that one of the greatest historic strengths of the English-speaking world was the old liberal belief that individuals knew better than governments how to live their lives and spend their money. That belief was undermined by the Great Depression and buried deep by the powers necessarily accumulated by governments during the Second World War. Since The World at War was made many of those powers have receded. Although the view from 2007 is probably no clearer than that in 1973, perhaps the continuing erosion of excessive state power and the restoration of personal responsibility and autonomy will be seen in the future as the last campaign of the Second World War.
DR STEPHEN AMBROSE
At the end of the war there was a great hope. No one dared to use the words Woodrow Wilson had used in World War One, that this was 'the war to end all wars', but that was the sentiment. There was great hope in the world that this would happen, that this was the last war, that the victors would now be able to cooperate in peace as they had in war, to see to it that the four policemen – as Roosevelt liked to refer to Britain, France, the USSR and the United States – would be able to see to it that there would be no more aggression in the world. That the war had meant something, that it had been fought for something rather than simply against Nazism; something positive, a better world was going to emerge. I suspect even Stalin felt it.
DR NOBLE FRANKLAND
From the point of view of the victors it was purely a defensive war. We had no aims, there was nothing that we wished to introduce, we simply wished to stop Hitler. The war was an extraordinarily simple one, almost uniquely simple, and the victory lay in preventing something, not in achieving anything. That accounts for the very complex situation which arose after the war. They were divided because the effort to stop Hitler was so great it introduced an entirely different power balance in the world. Before the war Britain and France were really leading major powers – or appeared to be, and it's what appears to be that counts. At the end of the war it was evident that Britain and France were now in a sense declining powers and this was due to the strength that was generated in order to stop Hitler. So the whole complex power balance after the war arose from a very negative action, in the sense that war was to stop things, not to start them.
GENERAL ANDRÉ BEAUFRE
I would say that the collapse of the French Army in 1940 has created the collapse of Europe, of Western Europe. Of course afterwards the defeat of Germany completed the phenomenon, but if the French Army had stood as it did in 1914–1918, then the situation in Western Europe would have been entirely different and all the decolonisation would have been entirely different and the position of the Russians and Americans would be entirely different. I think it has been the key event which has produced the history of today, and we are paying today the results of this defeat.
DR AMBROSE
The British had as many problems, if not more, recovering from victory as the Germans did recovering from defeat. What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much, she lost a great deal. Positively she got a moral claim on the world as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year and provided the moral leadership against the Nazis at a time when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis.
DR FRANKLAND
The great effect on Britain was to increase the speed at which the natural course of developments was taking place. The British one might say were a non-imperialistic empire; the British, in acquiring their empire, had been very reluctant to call it an empire. When Queen Victoria took the title of Empress of India there was an outcry, people said our queen being called an empress was ridiculous. She might have declined the offer had it not been proffered by Disraeli, who had a particularly charming way of putting those sort of propositions. It wasn't really a very British idea. We are a trading people and the empire was really a by-product of trade. When the empire served its purpose, created communities, set up trade patterns, it really ceased to have a political significance in terms of an empire. And things would have gradually developed in much the way they have developed, but the war accelerated this.
AMBASSADOR CHARLES BOHLEN
I think the collapse of British power was inevitable, one of the reasons was that nobody, and I doubt if you did either, foresaw the loss of power that Great Britain would suffer following the dissolution of the empire. I know that Roosevelt firmly believed that there would be three great powers in the world, China was one by courtesy, France also to some extent, but I mean that Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union would be the three dominant powers. And when it turned out not to be the case, this was brought sharply to our notice in February 1947 when the British Embassy sent us a note saying they could no longer bear the burden in Greece and Turkey, which led to the Truman Doctrine. And then came the Marshall Plan, which was probably the most successful adventure in which we would jointly engage with you and other European countries, which then necessitated some consideration of security in the area. And that produced the North Atlantic Pact. Those were the twin foundations of American foreign policy which formed our actions in the world since that time.
SIR ANTHONY EDEN, EARL Of AVON
The war transformed the position of the United States in the world. For a long period America lived and grew under the protection of their own law and, it's fair to say, under the protection to some extent of the British fleet, which kept the seas open, and at peace. The two wars, particularly the second, plunged them into this leading world position from which there can be no withdrawal, and one cannot but have sympathy with them and with those Americans who are courageous enough to face up to these new responsibilities. America was founded on the idea that they'd get away from all that in the world, away from the entanglements of Europe and build up their own society. And here they are plunged into all these responsibilities, which they have to carry, and asked to bear the burden financially in a project like the Marshall Plan, and they did a wonderful job for Europe. And now they are finding things turn sour upon them, which is not in any way surprising.
DR AMBROSE
Economists in the United States felt during the war that the big problem was going to be a return to Depression conditions and they agonised over the problem of 'what's going to happen when we demobilise these armies and all of a sudden we are going to have twelve million unemployed again?' What they failed to recognise was that money was being made hand over fist in the United States during the war and there was nothing to spend that money on. So it was being saved and you had this enormous pent-up demand for consumer goods that only American factories could satisfy, not only within the United Stated but for Europe and Asia as well. So at the conclusion of the war, the United States went into a boom that made everything preceding it in America look like peanuts. This is when America really takes off and begins to dominate the world and what we think of as the American lifestyle today begins to take hold in post-1945.
PROFESSOR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
I think it's easy to exaggerate the importance of economic interest in this but there's no doubt that with the passage of time the Cold War became a very great source of comfort and a reward to the military–industrial complex and we are finding how great that reward is now, as we try to reduce the scale of arms expenditure. I think it was more a general feeling that American well-being required European well-being, and vice versa. But by the time the Marshall Plan came, the worst fears of a post-war collapse had passed – 1946 and 1947 were rather prosperous years in the United States.
PROFESSOR PAUL SAMUELSON
The successful mobilisation of the economy by the government was a lesson not lost on anyone and right after the war we passed what's called the Full Employment Act of 1946. Very controversial, but this was the charter that from now on the American economy is not rugged capitalism, it's not laissez-faire, it's going to involve militant fiscal and monetary policy with a planning goal for high employment, for full employment, and we've done a tremendously better job in the post-World War Two period than was ever done by capitalism in its heyday. The expansion periods have been much longer, the periods of recession which we still have with us have been nothing short of anaemic. The one place where we haven't done such a good job is on the price front.*88
ALGER HISS
The Yalta spirit disintegrated because of the new forces that had developed during the war, from a period under the New Deal when our industry was prostrate, when big business really abdicated its leadership, it had lost its own self-confidence and it was certainly discredited with the public as a whole. From that period until the end of the war, when a magnificent new industrial base had been created with new captains of industry in control, enormous expansion of the military with new generals and admirals in posts of importance. There was a power vacuum in the world and these people were not going to be denied their crack at it.
DR AMBROSE
In the case of Poland, Stalin simply couldn't allow the Polish colonels, the Catholic Church, Polish landlords to come back and take control. Poland, as he pointed out time and again, had three times in the past generated the gateway for the invasion of Russia. In Greece, for example, with the Greek civil war being waged at the time and the British very deeply involved fighting against the Communists, Stalin quite clearly lived up to the wartime agreement with Churchill and refused to support the Greek Communists. In France and Italy the strongest individual parties were the Communist parties and they had strong moral claims on the nation because they had led the resistance to the Nazis. It would have been possible for the Communists in both countries to raise all kinds of hell at a minimum and go into armed revolt. One of de Gaulle's greatest fears at the end of the war was, 'Here we've got this resistance, Communist dominated and it's armed – what happens if they go into open revolt?' Stalin could have encouraged them to do so and create chaos in the West – but Stalin didn't want chaos in the West, Stalin wanted the West to recover so it could help Russia recover. And so he cooperated all along the line in France and Italy by telling the Communist parties there to cool it.
ALGER HISS
The signal element of conflict was Poland: other things were pretty well ironed out and that symbolised the Soviet insistence for what Stettinius regarded as security interest. Perhaps the Soviets are more aware of their security than we were. From their point of view the band of containing states must no longer exist. Poland was not going to be an outpost of the West, nor were any of the Balkan countries. They thought they had various agreements about spheres of influence with Mr Churchill: they left Greece pretty much in British hands; they could have certain proportional influences in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, particularly Poland. My impression at Yalta was that the Russians thought we had got the substance – not an unreasonable assumption because it was the underlying assumption of the United Nations charter – of co-existence. They could contend their interpretation was not followed by us because we did not allow them to run things as they allowed us to run Latin America. We sent agents in; we were in touch with unhappy dissidents remaining in those countries and our Military Attaches who served in those places were pretty busy about what have seemed to the Russians political matters. So when you have that bone of contention with neither side prepared to give up its position, you can only expect trouble.
LORD AVON
It's conceivable that the change in the American position was taking place before Roosevelt died. I read recently in some American source that there was a last message of his to Winston. A last message which was tougher and endorsing some of the things which Winston had said to him we must do in relation to the Russians. So perhaps a change would have come anyway. Certainly Truman, I know, felt the Russians were not carrying out the terms of their engagements and we ought to tell them so, and do all we could to correct what they were doing.
DR AMBROSE
US journalist Walter Lippmann pointed out the Americans were asking for an awful lot: they wanted to control the areas that their armies had conquered, but also wanted to have a major say/influence in the areas the Red Army had conquered. In 1943 when Italy surrendered the Russians wanted to be part of the occupation, but the Americans and the British systematically excluded the Russians. Stalin originally protested but then eventually he said, 'Ah, I see, a precedent has been set, the principle is clear – whoever occupies a country also imposes upon it his own social system.' The Americans were not willing to go along with that when the shoe was on the other foot. The Americans were demanding a major say in Poland while being totally unwilling to give the Russians any say in areas that their armies had conquered. The Russians systematically followed this principle for the remainder of the war and to the post-war period.
AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN
I had seen a good deal of Stalin during the war and I went up to him and I said, 'Marshal, this must be a great satisfaction to you after all the trials that you've been through and the tragedies that you've been through, to be here in Berlin.' He looked at me and said, 'Tsar Alexander got to Paris,' so it seemed perfectly clear to me, after what I'd been through before, that he had every intention of spreading his influence not militarily but through the Communist parties and he saw Europe wide open. All industry was disrupted – it wasn't only physical damage but there was also vast unemployment, hunger. I'm sure his Communist leaders in Italy and Prance told him we can take these two countries over. I'm satisfied that he thought that Communism could take over Western Europe either directly or else it would become some sort of glorified Finland under Russian domination. Instead of that Truman had the extraordinary initiative to recognise that something had to be done, and he authorised General Marshall to make his famous 1947 speech. Molotov was invited to the ensuing Paris conference but didn't sense the fact that if he'd stayed in Paris it would have been very difficult. Instead he said, 'We must find out from the Americans what they'll give us, and then divide it in accordance with the one that suffered the most should get the most' – which was Russia. But British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault took the stand and said the American offer was a cooperative, so Molotov left in a huff. Stalin declared war on the Marshall Plan, but there was no doubt in my mind Stalin thought economic conditions were such, he told me once, that there could be a Communist takeover. Communism bred in the cesspools of capitalism and Europe was in an appalling condition. For the United States to take such an initiative was really an extraordinary change. I think Churchill once said that if the United States behaved after World War Two as they did after World War One, Stalin would have challenged the British Channel at least.
DR AMBROSE
Soviet reconstruction could either be by forced savings on the part of the Russian citizenry, who had been through hell, but if you continued to make demands of them, force them to work, provide them with none of the ordinary consumer goods, Russia could rebuild on her own. This was the least desirable choice. A second choice, that worked hand in glove with it, was strip all the areas that you had conquered, just move everything that's movable and bring it back to the Soviet Union. Both of those were solutions that were followed. The third possibility was get investment capital from the United States and the Soviets did ask for a loan, but they were not about to let the Americans come into Russia, that is the enormous American corporations coming in making investments and taking control of the economy. They wanted a loan with no strings. The United States, when they discussed the loan with the Soviet Union, said, 'We want you to open up all of your books to us,' and they weren't about to open their books to the West. So the Russians were forced back upon themselves to reconstruct.
AMBASSADOR BOHLEN
Why the Soviets didn't join the Marshall Plan is not too difficult to discern, I think the main reason was that their system would not permit the land of interplay that went on during the whole Marshall Plan for the countries that were receiving the aid. And the other thing is they were concerned about losing their control over the eastern Europe countries, which they helped set up, with the exception of Czechoslovakia. The terms of the Marshall Plan as drawn up in the speech were not drawn with the idea of keeping Russians out, but certainly they would not have got through the Congress of the United States just to give out billions of dollars to any country and say, 'Go ahead and spend it the way you want to.' They were really demanding and would require some form of joint responsibilities for the utilisation of this aid. At the end of the war there were considerable shortages in this country, some of which were in the field of materials that we were planning to send to Europe. There were three committees which were looking into the state of the American economy and to see how much we could afford to do, and they came out with plus answers that we could indeed afford it. The Marshall Plan was really pretty heavy going in Congress until the Russians helped organise the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and I think that really pushed it over the edge.
DR J GLENN GRAY
I think we felt unduly virtuous as victors in World War Two. We felt we had won because we were in the right, and that has led to unfortunate consequences in Vietnam and elsewhere. We Americans somehow have a feeling that we have a superior land of virtue. We never fight until we are attacked, we never fight imperialistic wars, we are always the defenders of justice and so on. This again, by means of our policy of unconditional surrender, gave us an undue sense of virtue. It was almost too easy for us. After all, in both world wars America played not a central role or an important role, but all Americans seem to feel after World War Two that without us the Germans would have won. I'm not so sure this is true.
AMBASSADOR BOHLEN
The Cold War is not a new phenomenon in Soviet life: the Soviets began the Cold War on 8th November 1917. The only question is targets, changed from the beginning of the Soviet seizure of power. Virtually until the rise of Hitler you were public-enemy number one, the British Empire was all that was evil and wrong in the world, and a great deal of Soviet policy was geared to that conception. And for a while reality and fiction merged. After the war we were the chief obstacle, as they saw it, to the achievement of certain aims that they were after, we became public-enemy number one. We called that the Cold War because we were the victim of it – a term first used by [US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Committee] Bernie Baruch in October 1946, which is an interesting date because it came entirely from dealing with the Soviets over the Baruch Plan for control of atomic energy.
DR AMBROSE
The atomic bomb was tested while Potsdam was going on but there were only two atomic bombs and in 1945 they were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so in practice the West did not have atomic bombs available to use in a war in Europe. The West did have a mighty Air Force, British Bomber Command and the United States Strategic Air Force. 'Tooey' Spaatz, who was the commander of the USAAF, strongly advocated, 'Let's leave the Air Force in being in England as a deterrent to the Russians.' All these ideas associated with the Cold War were very prominent in the minds of the American military, most especially the idea of deterrence.
ALGER HISS
None of us at any but the highest level knew of the atomic-bomb development; the first we knew was when it was dropped on Hiroshima, so I have to look back with hindsight.*89 I can only say, knowing something about Mr Baruch's cockiness and truculence as a person – and Mr Truman had some of these qualities – that if there was arrogance to American policy, possession of the atomic bomb did not minimise it. I consider myself a premature revisionist. I was a revisionist before there were any other revisionists because I saw things quite differently from the way many of my colleagues did, and what happens in politics, as in art, is partly in the eye of the beholder. They had been trained by different values than I – I was a New Dealer, and there were not many New Dealists in the Department of State.
PROFESSOR GALBRAITH
It is true that in the late 1940s and 1950s American foreign policy passed into the hands of the New York–Washington foreign-policy establishment. Secretary of State Byrnes, whose knowledge of foreign policy depended on position and not information, and it was the grandeur of the Dulles brothers [John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State 1953–59; Allen Dulles, Director of CIA 1953–61] as members of [the law firm] Sullivan & Cromwell rather than their knowledge of the world which won them their post, and in principle the only knowledge, the great fact of which they were beholden was that their free enterprise was good and Communism was wicked – and there was certainly a Cold War attitude, developed particularly in the 1950s. As we now look back on it, it's dangerous and partly ludicrous.
LORD AVON
There've been many changes and formidable ones. The main difference I suppose is that Europe's authority and power suffered very considerably. Had the dictators not plunged us into that war, Europe today would be the centre of authority over a wider part of the world. But as a result of the war, Russia and the United States were left commanding the heights, and European power by varying degrees was secondary and that position has never really changed fundamentally, even the rise of China hasn't changed that, so far.
DR FRANKLAND
The main effect was the nourishing of the spirit of nationalism in Asia. A large part of Asia had been under British rule and most of that which had not was under Dutch rule or some European rule. And the people were beginning to aspire to the creation of their own political institutions. The demonstration by Japan that the British could be beaten, and beaten very severely, naturally encouraged in the eyes of the people of South-East Asia the belief that they too might be able to secure a much stronger position against the British than they'd previously dreamed possible. This had a great effect on opinion on India and all over South-East Asia.
LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
Suddenly I found myself responsible as the Supreme Commander for an enormous area of the globe with a distance of six thousand miles across it, that's as far as from London to Bombay, with a hundred and twenty-eight million starving and rather rebellious people who had just been liberated, with a hundred and twenty-three thousand prisoners of war and internees, many of whom were dying and who we had to try and recover quickly. And at the very beginning I had some seven hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen to take in surrender, disarm and put into prison camps, awaiting transportation home. Even looking at that it sounded a big problem, but I had no idea what I really was in for. What I really was in for was trying to re-establish civilisation and the rule of law and order to this vast part of the world.
DR AMBROSE
Truman made the decision at Potsdam that no one would be allowed into Japan except for American troops. The United States had a major influence in western Germany, in France, in the United Kingdom and had its own industrial plant. What this meant was that of the six areas in the world that can support a modern war through industrial productivity – Japan, France, West Germany, Great Britain, USSR and the USA – the United States either controls or has a major influence in five of these. The Pacific has become an American lake: the US Navy has built bases throughout the Pacific during the war and it held on at the end of the war, and in addition extended itself into Japan and made Japan into a major military base. The one area of the world in which the United States did not have a predominant influence was the USSR but the Americans were in a very strong position in Asia because of their extremely strong position in the offshore islands, most of all in the Philippines, Japan, Okinawa and Formosa.
LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
It was of course an extraordinary stroke of fate that it all fell on the Supreme Commander, perhaps luckily because the Supreme Commander's not obliged to listen to anybody's advice, he is the dictator. I had very few advisers who were qualified to give me advice on this – very few people had studied this in military headquarters, after all – and I don't think that anybody particularly agreed with what I was going to do. But I must say they all followed it very loyally, they soon saw the point. I realised that I was setting the sign for all future developments of this sort, which is quite a heavy responsibility. I realised if I made the wrong decision there could be an absolute bloodbath throughout the world and indeed I believe any attempt at real suppression in my part of the world would have resulted in real civil war, in real fighting of a much worse nature than we had at any time.
DR AMBROSE
America wanted to have a very strong Japan, as a counter to the Soviets in the Far East and as a counter to what they feared was going to happen in China – already the handwriting was on the wall in China as to who was going to win the civil war there. The Americans wanted Japan rebuilt as quickly as possible and a highly industrialised Japan to emerge from the war within the American orbit. So they systematically excluded all of the Allies. The Aussies and the British had wanted reparations from Japan: they had suffered pretty badly at the hands of the Japanese and had a good claim for getting something back. The Americans absolutely refused and Japan had to pay no reparations at all. The Russians in the Far East, aside from gains of such places as Port Arthur, Manchuria and North Korea, get a Communist China. It's not clear that Stalin wanted a Communist China: he gave very little support to Mao to win the Chinese civil war. Both parties would soon enough have reason to wonder how good a deal they made, with the growth of Japan since the war and her economic position today, and obviously the Soviet Union has had enormous difficulties with China.
LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
I had two French colonels, one of them called Mitterrand, who at this precise moment is now Prime Minister of France. I had dropped him to the north of Vietnam and he was captured quite soon, and the very gallant fellow then escaped. In talking with General Philippe Leclerc, his aide reminded me quite recently that I said to him, 'When you go in with your troops I strongly advise you to make friends with the local insurgents to explain you've come back to help them, and not try and take vengeance on them. If you do that, then French Indochina will have the benefit of working with the French. If you go in, in a military way, in the long run you'll be defeated.' He said, 'I appreciate your advice, but I'm a soldier, my orders are to take over the military way and that's what I'll have to do.'
AMBASSADOR BOHLEN
For about twenty years, until the Vietnam business, the United States seemed to accept the world role that we had really thrust on us by history. Vietnam, to this country and to the effect of which is certainly not over, may take a number of years to really absorb and get over. What effect that has had on the American public's willingness to accept some responsibility abroad just has to be seen. I think there's certain areas where we still feel we have a duty, particularly in Israel. It is a certain open question as to whether the experience didn't give us a push in the direction of not so much isolationism as non-commitment.
PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH
The lesson the Second World War taught us was to keep out of war. Fortunately I think the atomic bomb has done just that for the last generation and I hope and trust it will do it for another ten generations. By that time the world may become sane so that we won't need it. But you can be sure of this, no country, ruler or group of rulers is going to take its country into an atomic war for one reason – they know that no matter what else happens in that war, they themselves will not survive it. If they are not eliminated by the enemy they will be eliminated by their own people. As long as we have an atomic stand-off as we have today, I think we can rest and have bets with safety.
DR AMBROSE
Was a Russo-American conflict inevitable? Surely, no question – it mattered little if it was a Tsarist Russia or a Communist Russia. Of course all of these great world conflicts, of which the twentieth century had seen the worst, are always followed by a falling-out between the victors once they have lost everything that holds them together – the common enemy. Russian ambitions and American ambitions were bound to clash. Added to it is the ideological dispute between capitalism and Communism that heightened but did not create the tension. I think this is one of the few times in history when one can use the word 'inevitable'. I don't think there was a ghost of a chance of the Russians and Americans creating the kind of world they talked about during the war – an Atlantic Charter kind of world, or a United Nations kind of world, in which the victors continue to cooperate as they did during the war.
DR FRANKLAND
The principal effects of the war on people and political systems bore upon the countries in eastern Europe, Poland most of all, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and those countries. These people were hoping that the war would liberate them from the threat of Nazi tyranny and in fact at the end of it they found themselves in the Communist bloc, which was far less sinister than the Nazi bloc. This was a very solid achievement of the Second World War, a very much less sinister type of tyranny replaced a highly sinister tyranny. But this was not the freedom for which they'd hoped, and for which we had fought. But this was the product of Soviet power, which was necessary to the destruction of Germany. This was simply the price that has to be paid in order to gain the fighting alliance of the Soviet Union.
AMBASSADOR BOHLEN
The gains and losses from the war are a very big question and I don't know that I could answer because in the first place, if we hadn't won the war it would have meant that the Japanese and the Germans would've won it. And I just think you can imagine what kind of a world that would have been. It's true that the problem of Russia emerged shortly after the war, but I would say on the whole that was certainly the lesser of the two evils. Their society certainly didn't get much satisfaction out of the results of the war but I think this was inevitable within the Soviet system. On the other hand a large portion of the world is still able to exercise a certain degree of freedom, particularly in their internal affairs, and I think the world would have been quite intolerable under Nazi and Japanese rule.
GENERAL ALBERT WEDERMEYER
Well – did we win? The verdict of history will take account not only of the military victories won by the Allies but also of the tragic political results which flowed from those victories. We eliminated the tyranny of Nazism from Europe and of Japanese militarism from Asia, and we substituted the tyranny of Communism.
DR AMBROSE
There's a view around today that World War Two turned out disastrously for all concerned except possibly the Communists. I think one can be very positive about World War Two: the most important single result is that the Nazis were crushed, the militarists in Japan were crushed, the Fascists in Italy were crushed, and surely justice has never been better served.
MAJOR GENERAL OTTO-ERNST REMER
I am quite convinced that Hitler never wanted a world war because at the beginning of it we were not at all prepared for one. Our production was in no way up to it. One has to regard Hitler as a reformer and an innovator for Germany and for Europe. He wanted a new kind of society and he wanted Europe to be a counterweight to America's pure capitalism and Russia's pure Communism. He wanted to create a form of living which suited us Europeans because we have to live in a very limited space compared to the two world giants. One has to look at Hitler in this light, as an innovator of a new form of life.