A world to gain - a personal odyssey

Citation

Toughill, T. (2005), "A world to gain - a personal odyssey", European Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417eab.004

A world to gain - a personal odyssey

Keywords: Influence, International politics

Purpose - Aims to provide a personal view of the "balance of power" between the USA and Europe.Design/methodology/approach - An opinion piece based on the author's research.Findings - Roosevelt was not the only American politician who viewed the Second World War as a struggle for world hegemony between America and an expanding Germany. The strategic danger to the USA of a united Europe was averted by the defeat of Hitler in 1945. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USA's role in Europe and the world is increasingly being questioned.Originality/value - Provides useful insights into the nature of power.

I am one of "Roosevelt's children".

That is to say, I was born into the world created by the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the 32nd President of the United States who brought America so decisively into the war against Nazi Germany.

That is not to say, however, that I have always been aware of my status. Indeed, it is a measure of Roosevelt's greatness as a politician that it took me years of study and reflection before I came to realize just how remarkable his achievements were. My book, A World To Gain, is a product of that learning odyssey, of a lifetime of asking the right questions and (one hopes) finding the right answers.

In the 1950s, I grew up in a Scotland where the second language was Polish, spoken by men who had fled their homeland in 1940 to help Britain fight Hitler, but who had stayed on after the war rather than live under the Soviet dictator, Stalin, who then controlled Poland, indeed most of Eastern Europe. Why, I asked myself, did the British government go to war with Hitler over Poland in 1939, only to hand that country over to Stalin in 1945? If the Second World War had simply been about freedom and democracy, how could such an arrangement be explained?

As a student in the early 1970s, I visited what was then West Germany where I was struck by the wealth of that country. I remember visiting the beautiful home of a man who, as a soldier in Hitler's Wehrmacht, had been captured in Normandy after D-Day and sent to labour in the fields of Louisiana, but who had returned to his Heimat in the late 1940s where he prospered to a point which to my young mind seemed impossible in Britain. Clearly, I saw, there was something missing in the instruction I had received about the Second World War, indeed about the nature of the so-called "German problem". If the Germans had truly lost both world wars, why were they still so much better off than the British?

A few years later, I travelled overland across the United States, "from sea to shining sea". As the seemingly endless miles unfurled before me, opening up vast landscapes which made me feel like an ant on a football field, I began to appreciate what made America, America. The United States, I began to understand, was not a country like Britain, or France or Germany. It was a continental sized monolith, enjoying the benefits of a common language, a unifying constitution, a single currency, and access to the resources of the entire western hemisphere. Clearly, no single European country could hope to match such power; only a united Europe could ever hope to do that. What role then, I came to wonder, did Hitler's plan to construct his New Order - a united Europe under German direction - play in the formulation of Roosevelt's policies?

However, the crucial moment in my odyssey was a trip I paid to Berlin in the spring of 1992. Whilst strolling through that city, which then still displayed much of its immense wartime damage and with the Russian Army still present, questions poured into my mind about the war and its aftermath. How did things ever get so far? Why did the Germans stand by Hitler to the very end? Why did Hitler not suffer the same fate as Napoleon?

This comparison with Napoleon's fate intrigued me. Bonaparte's enemies drew a clear distinction between his regime and France. He was brought down not only by external force, but also by internal opposition in which his own Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, played a leading role. Moreover, once Napoleon was out of the way and a "safe" regime installed in Paris in the form of the restored Bourbons, France's neighbours were content and the European family of nations brought peace to the continent via the Congress of Vienna. In contrast, Hitler's enemies refused to differentiate between his government and his country. Germany herself became their target, not just the Nazi regime, with the result that Europe after 1945 was divided up into two ideologically hostile camps, the capitalist West and the communist East. After asking myself why that should be, I concluded that the answer to that question, indeed to many of the questions bothering me, could be found not in the similarities between the two conquerors, but in the essential strategic difference between the two men. This is, of course, that Napoleon never fought America.

I was well aware that established opinion had it that Roosevelt sought to keep America out of the Second World War. A.J.P. Taylor, for example, wrote in his controversial Origins of the Second World War that before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America, had "asked only to be left alone". Some historians have expressed surprise that, once in the war, FDR should have chosen to make Germany, and not Japan, his prime target. Sir Max Hastings begins his splendid book on the Normandy invasion, Overlord, by describing Roosevelt's decision to defeat Germany first as "Not the least remarkable aspect of the Second World War. . . "

However, my own research into FDR's policies, which I began after my Berlin trip, revealed a very different picture. The memoirs of Roosevelt's advisers, and of Churchill himself, clearly show that FDR saw he simply could not stand by and let Hitler create his New Order in Europe, a power which in time would have become wealthier and stronger than the United States. Indeed, Roosevelt's basic aim in the Second World War was to prevent Hitler from doing what the Americans themselves had done - create a nation out of a continent. (When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in pursuit of the Lebensraum he thought essential for his New Order, he directed that the Russians were to be treated as "redskins".) In short, while Abraham Lincoln fought the American Civil War to preserve the Union and stop America from becoming like Europe, a number of small, squabbling nations which can be played off one against the other, FDR fought the Second World War to stop Europe from becoming like America, a unified, continental-sized country with immense natural resources.

FDR was by no means the only American politician who viewed the Second World War as a struggle for world hegemony between America and an expanding Germany, a fact of which Hitler himself was well aware. In an address to his Party faithful in November 1941, the German Fuehrer commented contemptuously on a statement made by FDR's Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie:

• •

  And if Mr Willkie, this man of honour, declares that there are only two possibilities: either Berlin will be the capital of the world, or Washington, then I can only say that Berlin does not want to be the world's capital and Washington will never be the world's capital.

My research established that FDR's plans to deal with the threat posed to America by Nazi Germany were spelled out in a top-secret paper in September 1941 by General Marshall, the US Chief of Staff. Robert Sherwood, the editor of The White House Papers Harry Hopkins, FDR's close assistant, described this "Estimate", as it was known, as "one of the most remarkable documents of American history." If anything, that is an understatement, for this document was nothing less than a plan for the establishment of American military and economic supremacy throughout the world.

In his Estimate, Marshall made two recommendations of special significance. The first was that America should enter the war at once and bring about "the complete military defeat of Germany". The second was that after the war, America should establish "balances of power" in Europe and Asia which will "most nearly ensure political stability in those regions and the future security of the United States. . . "

I see in these recommendations an explanation for the world into which I was born. The "complete military defeat of Germany" produced FDR's policy of "Unconditional Surrender" which resulted in the effective removal of Germany from the diplomatic chessboard. The "balance of power" recommended by Marshall led to the post-war division of Europe between America and Stalin's Soviet Union. West European countries prospered under loose, and for the most part benign, American leadership, while Eastern Europe rotted beneath the dead hand of Soviet Communism. The important point, from Washington's perspective, was that the strategic danger to America of a united Europe was averted.

General Marshall's confidential cry for war was publicly echoed by a book entitled You Can't Do Business With Hitler by Douglas Miller, the former Commercial Attaché to the US Embassy in Berlin. FDR not only praised this book, which appeared in May 1941, he made Miller an assistant to his spymaster, William Donovan, months before America entered the war. There can be no doubt then that FDR agreed with the contents of Miller's work, which is actually a blueprint for America's role in the war and beyond. It is obviously one of the most influential works of the 20th century, central to an understanding of the Second World War and its aftermath. It is all the more baffling then that the book, like its author, is virtually unknown today. What though did Miller have to say?

In his book, which was published six months before America entered the war, Miller argued that Hitler's policies posed such a threat to America that the United States should attack Germany at once "from the West" (i.e. Normandy); secure a total American victory (i.e. unconditional surrender): and then rebuild Europe after the war (i.e. the Marshall Plan). Miller assured his American businessmen readers that if his policies were followed; the United States had "a world to gain".

In the last chapter of his book, Miller makes it crystal clear that he was talking about a world that would be designed and run by the United States:

• •

  "In thinking about the post-war world, after an American victory, we must imagine Europe almost completely stripped of peacetime production, her peacetime industries shattered. . . and blown to bits by aerial bombs and land artillery. Only one great country will possess the mechanical equipment, the raw materials, the finances, and the energy to rebuild a post-war world. America alone will have the strength, the resources, and the leadership which are needed ..."

Miller also told his readers that they were not to worry about British war aims because the British were so weak that we "could undoubtedly secure the British assent to any and all peace proposals that we had in mind." As I show in my book, Roosevelt did not even bother to consult Churchill in advance about America's policy of unconditional surrender. At a press conference at the end of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and with an unsuspecting Churchill seated beside him, he simply announced it to the world. Churchill was so embarrassed by this that he later "altered" the official documents. (There are photographs in my book to prove this.)

By the above process, I have come to realize that I was born one of "Roosevelt's children". I wonder though if I will die one of his "Children?". The "balance of power" which FDR (and his successor, Truman) set up with Stalin vanished with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The subsequent drift of the continent towards some sort of political union is withering the fruits of America's victory in the Second World War. America's role in Europe, indeed the world, is being openly questioned and the "mindset" of the current Washington administration must concern every thinking person on the planet. George W. Bush may be many things, but he is no Franklin Roosevelt.

What the world will be like when I leave it is anyone's guess. All that can said with certainty is that countries do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests and that the end of history will come only with the end of Man himself.

Thomas ToughillGibraltar