The Crisis Is Here

VOLUME 169

NUMBER 6

JUNE, 1942

BY WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

To BE fatalistically convinced that a war will last for a long time is a poor psychological preparation for victory. Once this belief becomes prevalent, tension is relaxed, people tend to adopt a life-as-usual attitude, war inconveniences excepted. There is nothing like the all-out voluntary effort that would be forthcoming if everyone believed that the outcome of the struggle depended on the issue of a battle that was actually in progress.

Men usually learn little from historical experience. Yet the memory of the ‘phony war’ psychology that existed from September 1939 until the spring of 1940, and of its disastrous consequences for England and France, is surely recent enough to furnish some useful lessons.

There was a very general hope during this period that the war would be won almost without fighting, through the operation of the blockade and through the building up of an air superiority that was most misleadingly represented as being just around the corner. The French were soothed by the wide distribution of a poster showing the vast expanse of the British and French Empires compared with the small black spot on the world map represented by Germany, and bearing the caption: ’We shall win, because we are the stronger.’ Perhaps tattered remnants of that poster are being used as substitutes for shoe leather today.

For the catastrophe that overtook France in May and June 1940, that England barely fought off in the fall of 1940, there were many causes, military, diplomatic, moral. In the psychological field I believe there was no more potent factor than the predestination theory of a long war, with the accompanying absence of any sense of urgent, immediate peril that would have stimulated national energy to the highest pitch.

It would be an exaggeration to place America in 1942 in the same category with France and England in 1940. There has been an energetic, purposeful drive to step up war production. The elements of distance and sea power are sufficiently important to rule out any probability of large-scale foreign invasion or of sustained destructive air raids, unless there should be a disaster such as the most profound pessimist could scarcely anticipate: the sweeping of the American and British navies off the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Copyright 1942, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Yet it is doubtful whether most Americans are sufficiently awake to the magnitude of the war stakes of 1942. I was recently with a group of persons of more than average education who reacted rather indifferently to the suggestion that the strategic situation and the balance of raw materials had altered to our disadvantage because of the Japanese sweep in the Southeastern Pacific area.

‘Oh, it is just a matter of waiting until we get our muscles flexed,’ was one typical comment.

A friend tells me of a conversation in which a young woman, a university graduate, expressed candid surprise when someone remarked that the Germans were still deep in Russian territory.

‘Are there still Germans in Russia?’ she said. ‘I thought they had all been destroyed, just like Napoleon’s troops.’

There could be no better tonic for American alertness than the constant repetition of the phrase: ‘The war can be won or lost in the next six months.’

And this would not be a synthetic, unreal slogan. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that, within this period, events will have predetermined either victory or defeat.

Take the optimistic possibilities first. Suppose that Hitler can be contained on the eastern front, or even pushed back farther. As another article in this issue of the Atlantic shows, there is solid statistical reason for believing that the German war machine is already thirsty for oil. If the oil resources of the Caucasus and the Near East can be kept out of Hitler’s grasp, German striking power, after six months of the intensive campaigning that may be expected this year, may be curtailed, if not positively crippled. It will be a bleak second winter for the German forces in the scorched earth of the Soviet Union if there is no exhilaration from further progress to the east.

Assume also that the French fleet and colonies are not handed over, that the Germans are harassed by continuous air raids and commando thrusts from Norway to the Pyrenees. All this would not mean that Hitler would be obliged to blow his brains out or to resort to any other spectacular form of abdication or surrender. Barring a rout of his armies in the East or an invasion of the continent from the West on a scale which scarcely seems feasible this year, he would still control a large block of continental territory, with a population of about one quarter of a billion people. Hard battles would still be in prospect, just as severe fighting was necessary after the Russian debacle of 1812 before Napoleon’s edifice of power toppled over.

But, given these optimistic assumptions, the tide of the war would have unmistakably turned. The spectre of 1918, the vision of an endless future inflow of American man-power, munitions, and supplies, so vividly depicted in Remarque’s epic novel of the last war, would again begin to haunt the German consciousness. Both on the fighting fronts and on the home front there would be a weary sense of having put forward the utmost exertion without having achieved final victory. The sense of siege, of encirclement, dissipated to some extent by the fall of France, would become more intense and more crushing. The end might come sooner than one would dare to predict, on the basis of what is positively known at the present time. The fall of Hitler’s military despotism might be as swift and spectacular as its rise.

But the picture of what may occur in the near future has dark as well as bright shades. Both should reinforce the American sense of urgency, the realization that the war is by no means predestined to endure ten years, or even three years.

Suppose that Hitler has amassed enough reserves of man-power and matériel to crack the Russian front and get possession of the Caucasus. This mountainous, colorful, romantic corner of the world between the Black and Caspian Seas, with its medley of races and its association with the songs of Russia’s great lyric poets, Pushkin and Lermontov, is the key to the issue of the war on the eastern front. Stalin could afford to lose Leningrad. He could even lose Moscow, although this would be a heavier blow, and still preserve an intact front.

But the seizure of the Caucasus would mean the loss of 85 per cent of Russia’s oil output. And, while it is possible to evacuate a munitions factory, there is no means of moving an oil well. The Caucasian oil would not immediately be fully available to Hitler. There would be destruction of the installations and difficulties of transportation. German engineering skill, however, would most probably find means of utilizing this oil. And, what would be still more serious, the oil would be irretrievably lost to Russia. This would be a disaster of the first magnitude, not only for the Soviet air force and mechanized units, but also for the food supply of the country, which is dependent, since the introduction of collective farming, on tractors and gasoline-driven machines.

Von Hindenburg complained in World War I that Russia had no ‘heart,’ no single exposed point at which a blow could be struck. This is still more true of Russia than of most other countries. But the very industrialization that has made Russia stronger in some respects has made it more vulnerable in others, and especially in this matter of oil.

When one considers the likelihood of a successful German offensive in Russia, it is difficult to avoid an agnostic attitude. There are too many unknown facts. Even our accredited military observers, according to Secretary Stimson, have not been given adequate facilities for studying conditions on the Russian front. As to the situation on the German side, we are still more dependent on rumor and hearsay and the uncertain evidence of Hitler’s prolix and cloudy speeches. All that can be said with certainty is that, while Soviet counterthrusts and the Russian winter have doubtless inflicted heavy losses since last December, there has been no indication of a chaotic rout of the German armies. The Germans have held stubbornly to a line of fortified towns, beginning with Novgorod and Staraya Russa in the northwest and running through Vyazma, Bryansk, Orel, Kursk, and Kharkov, touching the Sea of Azov at Taganrog. This line is several hundred miles east of the point of departure of the German offensive in June 1941. Whether it can be used as the starting point of a new major offensive after the ground hardens will perhaps have been made clear before this article can appear in print.

Assume that the conquest of the Caucasus is supplemented by a breakthrough of the British position in the Near East, in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt, which has not yet been seriously tested in large-scale attack. Throw in as an additional measure of bad luck a transfer to the Axis of the French fleet and the French African colonies, with all that this would imply in reducing an already uncomfortably tenuous margin of Allied naval superiority and providing bases for new threats to sea routes of communication and to South America.

Indeed a turn for the worse in the attitude of the Vichy Government would most probably be a result of decisive German successes in Russia and the Near East. For such successes would strengthen the argument of Laval and the other ‘collaborators’ that Germany had won the war and that France had no alternative except to climb on the Nazi bandwagon. By the same token a stalling of the German advance in the East will strengthen those forces in France which are hoping for an Allied victory and will diminish Vichy’s ability to proceed to the full limit of compliance with Hitler’s desires.

There is no reason to assume that Japan will remain inactive in the Far East. Japanese stabs at Alaska and Hawaii are possible; attacks on India and Siberia, the latter timed to coincide with Hitler’s maximum pressure in European Russia, are more probable.

Should the Axis win both in the West and in the East, should Germany and Japan effect a junction somewhere in India, victory would recede behind a very distant if not an entirely lost horizon. It would be impossible in such an eventuality to count on the effective cooperation of Russia and China. Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek, encircled and bottled up, might give up the struggle altogether.

The United States, with its expanded army and increased war production, could still hope to defend successfully its own territory and the Western Hemisphere, at least as far as the bulge of Brazil. It might be possible to create an English-speaking military and political alliance, of which the British Isles would be the European outpost, while the Pacific members would be Australia and New Zealand. But it would be a formidable enterprise to wrest the continent of Europe from Hitler and a large part of the continent of Asia from Japan.

There is a general vague feeling that the supposedly inexhaustible material resources of the United States and its allies and the friendly neutrals of Latin America will certainly defeat the Axis in the end. It would be advisable to check up this theory in the light of available facts and figures. Before the outbreak of the war the advantage of the non-Axis powers in material resources was overwhelming. But this has been a war of steel against gold, of streamlined militarized economies against countries which, with the exception of Russia, had not even begun to turn their butter into guns. So far all the positive military victories and all the conquests (except Abyssinia, Syria, and Iran) have gone to the militarized economies.

Consequently the balance of strategic materials, while it is still in our favor, is a good deal less encouraging than it was four years ago, or even six months ago. Hitler’s conquests in Europe and Russia, Japan’s acquisitions in the Orient, have completely upset pre-1939 statistical tables. Before Pearl Harbor the Axis powers could not manufacture a tire from natural rubber grown in their own territory. Now Japan is in physical possession of an area which normally accounts for 90 per cent of the world’s rubber supply. The box score on tin, before Japan started on the warpath, was 90.6 per cent for the United Nations, 9.4 per cent for the Axis. Now the respective figures are 26.5 per cent and 73.5 per cent. A few other comparative figures for 1938 and 1942 are instructive: —

In some cases, to be sure, the Axis powers have not been able to exploit fully the resources of conquered regions. There are still many commodities — oil, copper, nickel, for instance — in which Allied superiority is very considerable. But if there should be another big upset in the balance sheet of man-power and raw material as a result of sweeping Axis victories in Russia and in the Near and Middle East, America’s maximum war effort might only assure an inconclusive stalemate.

So the stakes of 1942 can scarcely be overstated. They are nothing short of a strong possibility either of victory or of defeat. The crisis is here. The time for supreme effort is now. What form that effort should take in the military field is something that very few laymen are qualified to suggest with authority. But any clearsighted observer can recognize the danger of thinking exclusively in terms of the perfected armaments of 1943 and 1944 when many of the bases from which these armaments might be used may have gone the way of Hong Kong and Manila and Singapore.

II

The stakes of the coming peace, like the stakes of the present war, are tremendous. Should peace ‘break out’ unexpectedly, we should immediately become conscious of vast changes that have passed almost unnoticed in the heat of conflict. Whether the war is to be long or short, we shall find ourselves living in a new and strange worId when it is over. To adjust ourselves to this world will require all the mental and spiritual toughness and resilience that we can muster. The crisis will still be here when the problem of winning the war gives way to the problem of winning the peace.

Marx once referred to war as ‘the locomotive of history.’ Certainly a global war is apt to prove an immense accelerator of the pace of events. So the few months since Pearl Harbor have witnessed a pretty complete liquidation of old-fashioned Western imperialism in the East — a process that would probably have extended over decades if the world had remained at peace. Such developments as Chiang Kai-shek’s intercession with India’s nationalist leaders on behalf of Great Britain, the sending of Chinese troops to help in the defense of Burma, the rejected offer of Sir Stafford Cripps, going much farther than any previous British offer of Indian selfgovernment, would have seemed unthinkable ten years ago and improbable even a year ago.

This old-fashioned imperialism, under which a small class of British, French, Dutch, or other European officials and soldiers governed and policed vast areas of the Orient, inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, was largely the product of two nineteenth-century factors, neither of which is eternal. The first was the overwhelming superiority, at that time, of Europe over Asia in industrial technique, and hence in military strength. The second was the unchallenged might of sea power. Thanks to these factors, and to the intangible prestige element of supposed Occidental invincibility, almost the whole of Africa and a large part of Asia came into a status of colonial or semi-colonial dependence.

All these conditions have now been radically changed. Japan has shown that an Oriental people can match the West at its own military and industrial game. What Japan has done yesterday and today, China and India with their much larger populations may conceivably do tomorrow. The legend of white invincibility began to lose potency with the Russo-Japanese War. It faded entirely after the fall of Singapore.

Whatever may be said for the civilizing benefits of Western imperialism, it proved unable to withstand the impact and the challenge of the present iron age. It failed on three counts. It did not give the peoples who were brought under its sway any sense of national consciousness, any very strong desire to resist foreign invasion. If there was any considerable native participation in the defense of Indo-China, Malaya, the Netherlands Indies, and Burma against the Japanese onrush, this fact has certainly escaped mention in the news dispatches.

There is a striking contrast between the passivity of the peoples who have lived under imperialist rule and the attitude of the Filipinos, who furnished the majority of the troops which defended Bataan under MacArthur and Wainwright. The reason is obvious. The Filipinos felt that they had a free country to defend, a country which their leaders had been governing without even the mildest American interference in internal affairs since 1935. Not because of any exceptional virtue on our part, but because we had a vast continental area to develop, because we were not susceptible to the impulses for overseas expansion of European peoples with thickly settled homelands, we have never been a consistently imperialistic people. It is on some such basis as the American-Filipino relationship, a basis of coöperation, not of domination, that the future intercourse of West and East should rest.

It was not only in failing to inspire national consciousness that imperialism failed. The vast majority of the people in the colonial countries of Asia were illiterate. It was naturally not easy to give them any idea of what they were fighting for, or fighting against, and to train them in the use of complicated modern weapons. Moreover, the foreign ruling powers, interested in keeping the colonies as sources of cheap raw materials, did not encourage the development there of the heavy industries which are the prerequisite of effective modern warfare.

So the defense of the vast rich colonial area of Southeastern Asia devolved upon small foreign garrisons, fighting in the midst of indifferent or even hostile peoples (there have been repeated reports of Burmese rebels fighting on the side of the Japanese). And these forces were dependent for airplanes and other munitions and supplies on long uncertain routes of maritime communication. The issue of the struggle was pretty well predetermined, even apart from individual blunders and misjudgments.

About this passing of the old-fashioned type of Western imperialism there is an element of finality. The choice in the future lies between a more coöperative relation between East and West and the streamlined, ruthless, efficient Japanese brand of imperialism, which chloroforms a part of the ruling class in subjugated countries as puppets and keeps the masses in the position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Japan is the sole threat to the freedom of the other Asiatic peoples now because it is no longer possible to rule Oriental peoples over great expanses of distance by means of gunboats and small foreign garrisons.

A change that started in the early thirties, but that has been accelerated by the war, is the shift in the Soviet Union from doctrinaire international communism to Russian nationalism. All the available information indicates that the struggle against Hitler is being fought on a nationalist basis, with reminiscences of 1812 and with a minimum of specifically revolutionary appeals.

Even before Hitler’s attack Soviet histories and encyclopedias were being drastically rewritten. There was selective praise for the Russian past, not the uncritical, indiscriminate abuse which was characteristic of the first years of the Revolution. There was even an official rehabilitation of Tsars who had contributed to the building up of the Russian state, such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. And there were many concessions to the irrepressible and indestructible human instincts for inequality, for distinction and for color. Officers received back their titles and epaulettes, abolished in the first revolutionary fervor. The academic term ' doctor’ was restored. Conspicuous merit in any field received recognition both in new honorary Soviet titles and in the more solid form of bonuses and higher wages and salaries.

After this war the situation of 1919, when Russia was trying to excite revolution throughout Europe, may be curiously reversed. Russia is likely to emerge from the war, always assuming that Hitler is defeated, with its frontiers intact, even enlarged, but economically desolated and exhausted, intent on what will certainly be vast problems of internal reconstruction. And Western and Central Europe may well be rent by revolutionary movements to which Russia will prove allergic. It is certainly hard to imagine a bloodless transition from the Nazi régime to some other form of government in Germany. Italy will also experience some kind of upheaval, although the problem of establishing social order there will be easier than in Germany. It is almost certain that the Vichy régime in France will go down with the Nazis, and this may also be true as regards Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, depending on how far this has been identified with Hitler’s cause.

If the Left in France had to pay the penalty for the loss of the war, the Right is closely associated with a peace compared with which Versailles was mild, with a peace of cruelty and hunger and oppression. It will be surprising if there is not a new violent swing of the French political pendulum in the event of a German collapse.

It is an unmistakable trend of the times to jump over old national frontiers in economics. We are letting down trade bars with England and with Canada. Hitler’s ‘New Order’ in Europe and Japan’s ‘New Order’ in Asia imply economic unity for big areas. Even if and when Hitler and Japan are smashed it is conceivable that traces of their careers of conquest may remain in the form of regional economic federations where tariff barriers will be abolished or greatly reduced. Some such development is almost inevitable in the age of the airplane and the conveyer belt.

Another change in the making that we in America will feel more keenly, because we escaped its impact (which was very pronounced throughout Europe) after World War I, is increased state control over the national economy and, therefore, over individual existence.

The problems of post-war reconstruction in a world of scorched earth, of starving countrysides, of cities reduced to rubble by air bombardment, a world far more shattered and impoverished than that of 1919, will be staggering. They will far exceed the competence of private initiative. It will require all the strength of governmental authority to reëstablish a system of currency exchange that will pave the way for a resumption of international trade, to allocate food and raw materials and shipping where they are most needed, to combat famine and epidemics, to perform scores of essential tasks of elementary salvage.

Moreover, our entire internal economy during the past decade has become more and more permeated with a collectivist spirit. How far this process has gone is reflected in President Roosevelt’s recent suggestion that all private incomes be limited to $25,000. This is doubtless a liberal allowance for personal expenditure, especially in time of war. But the primary function of the large fortune has never been to provide funds for personal expenditure. It has rather been to supply new capital for industrial development, to maintain privately endowed universities and schools, to sustain scientific and research foundations.

Perhaps these functions will be taken over entirely or in part by the state in the future. Certainly the forms of governmental control that have been and will be instituted in this war will not be abandoned as easily and quickly as were the war controls of 1917-1918. For between the two wars there were profound economic changes all over the world. And greater state intervention in what would formerly have been considered the field of private economic initiative has been one of the few common denominators of communism, fascism, and democracy, although the degree and character of this intervention and the methods of application varied considerably as between the Soviet Union, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. In the modern type of war, which is an endurance contest of peoples, not a mere struggle of armies, which calls for sweeping mobilization of manpower and material resources of all kinds, state control is obviously destined to become tighter and more extended with the passing of time.

And a considerable measure of this state control will almost certainly outlast the war. Does this mean that, in fighting totalitarianism, we shall inevitably be conquered by its methods from within? It would be blind complacency to deny that there is such a danger. But there is a hopeful remedy for this danger. This is the maintenance, up to the very limit compatible with military exigencies in time of war, and without any reservation whatever as soon as the military emergency has passed, of the two characteristics that clearly and unmistakably mark off an individualist, democratic order from either the fascist or the communist type of totalitarian régime.

These are the rule of objective, impartial law, which protects the citizen against arbitrary arrest and persecution, and the recognition of political and civil liberties, freedom of speech and press and assembly and election. Should these two ramparts of liberty fall, under any pretext whatever, we shall have lost the war morally, whatever might be the physical issue.

The problem of maintaining civil and individual liberty in time of war is delicate and difficult. Obviously there will always be overriding military necessities that will demand a suspension or curtailment of some peacetime freedoms. At the same time civil libertymay be and has been needlessly and unjustifiably sacrificed to a mood of panic or irritation over military setbacks, to the clamor of self-styled superpatriots, to the impatience of bureaucrats with criticism. Every incident must be judged on its merits; but there should certainly be a clear recognition of the vast importance of preserving the principle of individual self-expression. And when there is a clear case for repression it should be straightforwardly presented and referred to the courts for judgment. There should be no arbitrary executive action, no backhanded use of legal technicalities to ‘get’ unpopular individuals and publications.

It might help us to maintain the sense of perspective on this point to recall that in the fourth year of the Civil War the Democratic Party held a convention, denounced Lincoln in virulent terms, and called for a negotiated peace. There were no Gestapo or Gay-Pay-Oo methods; the issue was taken to the polls and Lincoln was chosen for a second term not by a Hitler plebiscite but by an old-fashioned American election.

The maintenance of all individual liberties is more necessary than ever in our age as a counterweight to the immense concentration of power in the hands of the administrative executive. A system of elaborate state control over national economy and man-power, unrestrained by an independent legal process and by political and civil liberties, would certainly turn into a horrible tyranny. A state order in which a small irresponsible bureaucracy does the planning and the majority is obliged to submit to its decisions is by definition little distinguishable from fascism or communism. But if the greater state control is associated with the possibility of alert, free criticism, quick to expose excesses, to denounce maladministration, to focus attention on waste, then, and only then, we may hope to preserve the essentials of our tradition of liberty, even though there may be great economic changes.

Probably the best hope for a future world order that will be both workable and tolerable lies in some such synthesis of public control in such fields as domestic economy, foreign trade, and international currency arrangements with the full assertion of basic political and civil liberties. Only along some such line can we hope to find a satisfactory solution of one of the great dilemmas of our time: the reconciliation of the right of man, in the mass, to security with the right of man, the individual, to liberty.