Truncating
the Antecedents
How Americans Have Been Misled about World War II
by
Robert Higgs
by Robert Higgs
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Whereas historians
obsessively trace every event's causal lineage further and further
into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they
assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event
they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency "truncating
the antecedents." Among the general public, it has given rise to
mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous
to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently,
in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an
interest in propagating them.
I was recently
struck by this tendency while reading comments at a group blog associated
with the History News Network. A commentator there had mentioned
that the blame for World War II is not as cut and dried as Americans
typically assume it to be, and hence some revisionism is long overdue.
In response, another discussant, whose previous contributions to
the blog show that he is an intelligent man, expressed bafflement:
"Yes, obviously some revisionism regarding the 'great allied leaders'
of WWII is called for. But an attempt to be revisionist about the
justness of a war where U.S. territory is attacked by one opponent
and war is declared on the U.S. by the other opponent is sort of
like justifying the War on Iraq on the basis of mythical WMD."
Like Americans
in general, this man takes the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941, and the German declaration of war on December
11, 1941, as dispositive evidence that Japan and Germany started
the war that ensued between these nations and the United States,
and therefore he concludes that they should be held responsible
for it. In a later post, he persists in this interpretation by saying:
"Nation X attacks Nation Y. One or the other is right. Either Nation
Y is a victim or the attack was a 'justified pre-emptive attack.'
Yes, the response may be disproportionate, etc., but those really
aren't reasons to declare Nation Y 'wrong.' Or the two 'equally
wrong.'" This view represents a classic case of truncating the antecedents.
Many people
are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United
States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations
of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United
States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations.
Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy
conducted "shoot [Germans] on sight" convoys, which might include
British ships, in the North Atlantic along the greater part the
shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though
German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating
attacks on American shipping. The United States and Great Britain
entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons
development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other
forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated
with the British military in combat operations against the Germans,
for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings
of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S.
government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other
supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets,
who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government provided military
and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes
and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan. The
U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the
British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future
combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S.
government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic
warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament
that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them
to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a
quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British,
and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed.
Consider
these summary statements by George Victor, by no means a Roosevelt
basher, in his recently published, well-documented book The
Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles,
Va.: Potomac Books, 2007).
Roosevelt
had already led the United States into war with Germany in the
spring of 1941 – into a shooting war on a small scale. From
then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan's
attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to
obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted
for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution
reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In the
eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken early in
1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United State
– a declaration that did not come, to their disappointment. .
. . Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt,
that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must
wait for an "incident," which he was "confident that the Germans
would give us." . . . Establishing a record in which the enemy
fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt's
tactics. . . . He seems [eventually] to have concluded – correctly
as it turned out – that Japan would be easier to provoke into
a major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be. (pp.
179–80, 184, 185, emphasis added)
The claim
that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was
. . . typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know
that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war
to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting
to lose a war with the United States – and lose it disastrously – Japan's
leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this
point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has
come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate.
. . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the
United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was
after learning of Japan's decision to go to war with the United
States if the talks "break down" that Roosevelt decided to break
them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle,
Roosevelt said he hoped for an "incident" in the Pacific to bring
the United States into the European war. (pp. 15, 202, 240)
These facts
and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the
most part anything but new; many of them have been available to
the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have
read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects
of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s that showed
the various ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility
for the country's eventual engagement in World War II – showed,
in short, that the Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country
into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure
that, sooner or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that
would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States
appear to have been the victim of an aggressor's unprovoked attack.
(See Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by
Harry Elmer Barnes [Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953].) As Secretary
of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, "we needed the Japanese
to commit the first overt act" (qtd. in Victor, Pearl Harbor
Myth, p. 105).
At present,
however, sixty-seven or more years after these events, probably
not one American in 1,000 – nay, not one in 10,000 – has an inkling
of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt,
pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has
utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement
in the "Good War." Only a few years ago, when an essay of mine was
included in a collection being considered for publication by the
University of Chicago Press, the press's expert outside reader expressed
shock that I had mentioned in passing Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor
maneuvers to bring the country into the war, and he declared that
crackpot statements of this sort would discredit the entire volume.
(In deference to the editor and to discourage the volume's rejection
by the press, I removed the single obnoxious sentence, which was
not central to my purposes in the essay in any event, and eventually
the
book was published, notwithstanding this "expert's" negative
appraisal of my own contributions to it.)
Observations
such the foregoing ones tend to elicit angry accusations of "Holocaust
denial" and "moral equivalence," among many others. For the record,
then, let me avow that I do not deny the Holocaust, nor do I regard
the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to Hitler's regime.
While I am making my innocence plain, let me also avow that I do
not regard the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to
Stalin's regime. This latter comparison comes up surprisingly seldom,
however, given that the two regimes were close allies in the war,
and, most important, that the major outcome of the war was to leave
Stalin and his puppet regimes astride the greater part of the European
continent in an area that stretches from the Urals to Bohemia and
from Estonia to Azerbaijan. In short, if anyone deserves to be recognized
as the war's "winner," that person is Stalin. Somehow this fact
has never seemed to me to fit comfortably into a characterization
of this horrible conflict as the "Good War." Perhaps I'm just unduly
squeamish.
The fate
of the European Jews also requires mention, inasmuch as after the
war many people professed to believe that saving the Jews was the
war's prime justification. Aside from the fact that none of the
Allied leaders held that view – Roosevelt himself was a genteel
anti-Semite of the sort typical in his time, place, and class – the
undeniable truth is that the Jews were not saved: approximately
80 percent of them had perished by the end of the war. Little wonder,
too, because U.S. and British war plans did not give high priority
to saving them; as a rule, those plans completely disregarded the
urgent need to rescue the surviving Jews.
Few Americans
have ever entertained the idea that their country ought not to have
entered World War II. They persist in believing that they – the
ordinary people of the country, as distinct from its political leaders
and their foreign legionnaires – were genuinely threatened by
the Japanese and the Germans and therefore that the war "had to
be fought." Even George Victor, from whose honest and useful book
The Pearl Harbor Myth I quoted earlier, has brought himself
to believe that Roosevelt had excellent motives for his persistent
provocation of Germany and Japan. Thus, he writes: "As Germany began
to prepare for conquest, genocide, and destruction of civilization,
the leader of only one major nation saw what was coming and made
plans to stop it. As a result of Roosevelt's leadership, a planned
sequence of events carried out in the Atlantic and more decisively
in the Pacific brought the United States into one of the world's
greatest cataclysms. The American contribution helped turn the war's
tide and saved the world from a destructive tyranny unparalleled
in modern history" (p. 16).
Unparalleled?
What about Stalin's tyranny or Mao's? Regardless of one's answer
to this question, however, another question remains – whether
Nazi Germany, as evil as it certainly was, had the ability to defeat
the United States, much less to "destroy civilization." Americans
love to speculate about German acquisition of atomic weapons, intercontinental
ballistic missiles, and other military capabilities the Nazis, in
fact, never came close to acquiring. As things actually stood, Germany
lacked the capability to invade and conquer even Great Britain.
Conquering the United States, thousands of miles across the Atlantic,
was realistically inconceivable. Whatever else one may take U.S.
leaders' motives for war to have been in the early 1940's, national
self-preservation could not have been among them, unless they were
shockingly ill-advised as to the economic, logistical, and technological
constraints on the German war machine. In reality, that machine
had its hands more than full in dealing with the Soviets on the
eastern front, not to mention the British and others who were pestering
it on other fronts.
Thirty-six
years ago, Bruce M. Russett's little book No
Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into
World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) was
published. Russett noted at the outset that "[p]articipation in
the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly
in the realm of theology" (p. 12). In this regard, nothing has changed
since 1972. Yet Russett argued forcefully, with logic and evidence,
that this orthodoxy rests on shaky grounds. He concluded that World
War II "may well have been an unnecessary war that did little for
us and that we need not have fought" (p. 20). Nor did he concede
that although the war may have been imprudent on instrumental grounds,
it was well justified on moral grounds: "it is precisely moral considerations
that demand a reexamination of our World War II myths," he insisted
(p. 21). Although much has been added to the corpus of World War
II scholarship since the publication of Russett's book, this little
volume remains unjustly neglected, and its argument deserves serious
consideration even now.
 Of
course, many other great events in American history might be examined
as I have suggested U.S. participation in World War II ought to
be examined – by taking the relevant antecedents fully into
account. For historians, this advice should be unnecessary; if they
know anything, they know that history did not begin yesterday. The
American people at large, however, remain extremely vulnerable to
misleading descriptions of the government's actions, especially
its plunges into foreign wars – accounts of which generally
disregard many relevant antecedents, particularly those that cast
blame on the United States for stirring up enmities abroad. Yet,
any honest
account of U.S. foreign policy reveals that this country's government
has engaged again and again in foreign interventions whose official
justifications cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Many of these
interventions amounted to little more than armed
errand-running for privileged American business interests seeking
to beat foreigners into line and, not coincidentally, to line their
own pockets. This aspect of U.S. foreign policy famously led General
Smedley Butler to declare that war
is a racket.
 Time,
some wit has said, is God's way of keeping everything from happening
at once. Taking this idea to heart, we may remind ourselves and
others that whenever the U.S. government launches a new war abroad,
we would be well advised to look into what happened in that part
of the world previously, perhaps over the course of several decades.
We may well discover that the locals have legitimate grievances
against our government or some of its corporate cronies. Or we may
simply discover that the situation is more complicated than it has
been made out to be. We know one thing for certain at the outset,
however: we cannot rely on the government to tell us the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unvarnished truth is
to our rulers as holy water is to vampires.
March
18, 2008
Robert
Higgs [send him mail] is
senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. He
is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His
most recent book is Neither
Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government.
He is also the author of Depression,
War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence
of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against
Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.
Copyright
© 2008 Robert Higgs
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