In a Wall Street Journal review (February 3, 2011) of Between War and Peace, a collection of historical essays on “How America Ends Its Wars,” Richard Hart Sinnreich argues against the view “that military victory solves nothing”:
“It prevented the submission of Europe to a monstrous tyranny and the imposition of Japanese hegemony over East Asia…. One might prefer a less expensive and more humane way of settling such matters, but settled they were…. resolution required a military winner and loser. By contrast, every American military engagement allowed to terminate short of outright victory — Korea, the Gulf War — remains to this day unresolved.”
Sinnreich is repeating the conventional view of World War II as a triumph of Western democracy over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. What he downplays is the true “decisive victory” of the war: the imposition of the “monstrous tyranny” of Communism over China and much of central and Eastern Europe.
Historians in the United States and Western Europe tend to see World War II as primarily a struggle to liberate France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy from German occupation; to protect England from invasion; to free China, Southeast Asia, the Malay peninsula, Indonesia, and the Philippines from Japanese occupation, and to defend India against invasion.
But a historian writing about Central or Eastern Europe would tell a very different story. The war there was not about the defeat of the Nazis, but about the defeat — at the hands of the Communists — of states that had been sovereign republics before World War II. And in China, Japan was a third party to a two-decade-long civil war between the KMT and the Communists that culminated in Mao’s triumph in 1948-49.
Despite Sinnreich’s rosy view of “resolution,” the fate of Eastern and Central Europe after World War II remained “unresolved” until 1989 (and China’s fate remains an open question). While the Western nations celebrated a military victory in 1945, vast areas of Europe — stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans, from Czechoslovakia to Belarus — were saved from Nazi occupation only by surrender to Russian domination for the next four-and-a-half decades. The Russian victory over Germany on the eastern front simply replaced one invading and occupying force with another.
The “Hossbach memorandum” of 1937 made clear Hitler’s strategy of seeking Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, and Stalin certainly understood that war would be fought over, and at the expense of, all the countries between Germany and Russia. Churchill understood that the war in Europe was primarily between Hitler and Stalin. Roosevelt did not. Nor, apparently does Sinnreich.
Sinnreich is correct in disputing the idea “that military victory solves nothing.” But he fails to identify just who the actual “military winner and loser” were in World War II. Russia surely won. Germany certainly lost — but so did Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, and many other Eastern and Central European nations. Japan lost, but so did China. Great Britain lost an empire, as did France, Belgium, and Holland.
As for the United States, an enfeebled Roosevelt overestimated his power and underestimated Stalin’s, and a timid Eisenhower kept Patton from driving across the Rhine and beyond to Berlin — aggressive offensive moves that might have thwarted, or at least stalled, postwar Russian expansionism.
Whatever else the United States achieved in World War II, it was not “outright victory.”
If it had been, it would not have been necessary to fight the cold war for the next four-and-a-half decades.