First in War--Last in Peace

» Are we the best fighters and the worst peacemakers in the world? In the light of our fraternization in Germany and the new wave of suspicion and isolationism here at home, the question is honestly in doubt.

by DAVID L. COHN

1

WE ARE losing the peace. We are losing the respect of the world. If we should look honestly at ourselves it might be difficult to keep our self-respect. Physically the world’s most powerful nation, we are hysterically divesting ourselves of our physical power even before the formal peace has been made. Much given to lecturing others on their moral shortcomings, we are drifting toward moral bankruptcy.

Exalting our own prowess, we are nonetheless inclined to blame the troubles of the post-war world on others: the British are too shrewd, the Russians too ruthless. Ferociously energetic, we are intellectually lazy. Brilliantly competent technically, we tend to be politically inept. Tough in war, we are soft in peace. Girdling the world with our living and our dead, we do not yet know our place in the world. Creating such miracles of military engineering around the earth that other peoples regard us with awe, we have behaved as if we were in a political vacuum, not knowing how to relate cause and effect. Outwardly internationalist, we are yet inwardly isolationist.

Having won a war which we entered not out of conviction, but out of compulsion, neither during the war nor since have we acquired enduring convictions about the peace. It is not that we do not want peace. It is that, being intellectually adolescent, we do not realize that if we want peace we can have it, but only at the price, however high, that if demands. Facing the atomic age which we inaugurated, we seem unable or unwilling to face up to its staggering consequences.

If we are, as we say, the world’s mightiest people, we should not shrink from ruthless self-analysis; the more so since self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. If we are, as we say, a hardheaded people, then we are given to the maxim that while a man is permitted to make one mistake, only a fool makes the same mistake twice. I do not know what you would call a man or a nation that makes the same error three times. But far from using our mistakes of the past as evidences of what to avoid in the future, we seem bent upon making bigger mistakes than before, as though we were deliberately courting the risks of a third world war, although the nature of that war, if it should come, is known to all of us.

It is clear in retrospect that the two world wars in which we have fought were, however great our losses in lives and treasure, luxury wars. They were luxury wars because we were able to send our young men to fight on the soil of other nations, leaving the life of the homeland to function, if not normally, in great security. That day is gone forever. If we should become involved in another war, men will look back nostalgically upon the good old days of 1941-1945 when we merely shed blood in France, Germany, Belgium, North Africa, and the Pacific islands.

Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who has been credited by the War Department with “achieving the implementation of atomic energy for military purposes,” flatly told the nation of the perils it faces. “There are,” he said, “no specific countermeasures against the atomic bomb and there never will be.” A new war, he continued, might begin with forty million Americans dead in the first few hours, because of this country’s high degree of urbanization. The atomic bomb has actually “weakened the military position of the United States.”

Professor Oppenheimer scoffed at the illusion that the bomb will remain our secret, and made this allimportant point to a nation which smugly believes that it incontestably leads the world in scientific research — namely, that in fundamental research, the basis of any new weapon, we made no advances whatsoever during the war. “For the most part,” he said, “what happened during the war was not in any sense scientific work. It was the exploitation of skill, techniques, fundamental knowledge, and even, to some extent, of the human relations between scientists, all of which had been cultivated in the days of peace.”

It is clear from Dr. Oppenheimer’s testimony that we are basing our security upon a so-called secret which will soon become common property; that in the event of war we shall be fortunate to survive as a people. If we cannot understand that the past as we have known it is dead, that the future is fraught with perils so awful the mind is staggered by contemplating them, that civilization—if not humanity—must henceforth live on probation pending good conduct or die, we shall perish for lack of adaptability as the dinosaurus perished, its bulk being disproportionate to its brain.

Never since the founding of the Republic has this nation made up its mind about its relations with the world. We merely wanted to be let alone. But that is scarcely a policy; it is at best an evasion. The Indians who inhabited this continent merely wanted to be let alone. The very manner in which Dr. Oppenheimer’s statement was given to the public indicates that we are still living in a dream world. Charged as it is with an importance to the nation which cannot be exaggerated, since it deals with facts having to do with our stark survival, what weight was given it by the press? It appeared on page twenty-five of the New York Herald Tribune and on page five of the New York Times.

The news value of the statement was apparently less than these items to which the two great dailies devoted their first page the arrival of the Fleet in New York; the mayoralty campaign in New York; the dock strike in New York; political troubles in the Argentine and the Netherlands Indies; increasing the speed of demobilization of the Army; dropping our opposition to Balkan regimes. Under these circumstances it would be too much to expect that words having to do with our survival should be disseminated by the newsreels, where they would have to compete in interest with the annual football game in the Sugar Bowl, bathing beauty girls at Miami, and shots of looms weaving nylon stockings.

There is, I submit, something terrifying and bewildering in the spectacle of a nation whose physical might is so great as ours, whose intentions are so good, but whose political blindness is so dense, whose political tenacity is so feeble, whose resolution is so wavering, that neither we nor the world can be certain at any given moment of the direction we shall go. Contrast our pretensions with our actions. During the war we vowed that we would remain the world’s mightiest power; we would occupy enemy countries forever if necessary; we would organize a system of collective security in terms of the Atlantic Charter. Never again would we repeat the mistakes of the First World War.

As against these pretensions, we are demobilizing our armed forces in a rush which is little short of hysterical. Our demobilization is far more hasty than that of the hard-pressed British, who are still living on wartime rations, or of the Russians, who know that the most devastating war in history does not end with the innocent and clear-cut finality of a ballet. We have only one urge — to get the men back home. Our greatest effort is to forget the troubles of the rest of the world and retire into normalcy here — with nylon stockings, new cars, platinum lipsticks, and perfumes at $75 an ounce. We are running true to form. When other peoples see that we talk big but act little, how are they affected? Russia, well aware of what we are doing, is taking up where we leave off, moving into vacuums we have created. As she does so, we blame our troubles on her; we begin to fear her; and, fear breeding fear, we put ourselves on the road to the next war. Incomparably the world’s mightiest people at this moment, enjoying a prestige and good will greater than that of any other power, if we moved in the world strong, magnanimous, and purposeful, force engendering respect, magnanimity breeding affection, and purposefulness inspiring the will to follow, many of our troubles which we attribute to others would soon vanish.

2

THE failures of our occupation of Germany are illustrative of our failures as a people. They are, it may be said, continuing characteristics of our national temperament, which played their part in our withdrawal from the world after the First World War and which, if not changed, will bring us to disaster in a third war. We have taken into Germany little knowledge of the German people and even fewer convictions as to our reasons for remaining there.

Instead we have taken onto German soil our yokel naïveté, our puppy friendliness, our good-time-Johnny proclivities, our Main Street desire to be popular, our easygoing small-town ways, to deal with a people whose ruthlessness, tenacity, power, and cunning are so great that twice within a generation, and at incalculable cost, it took nearly the whole world to defeat them. This error stems from our mental laziness, from our failure to teach our soldiers lessons about the nature of the enemy, the long-range political aspects of the war, and America’s place in the world.

According to news dispatches from Germany, Germans are bossing youthful American soldiers. Our officers are being luxuriously entertained by Nazis. Our men are asking permission to marry their German mistresses before their children come. Raymond Daniell, in the New York Times, makes the pointblank statement that “Germans have begun to direct from the bottom up the American occupation of their country.”

The mistakes of our army of occupation in Germany cannot, unfortunately, be attributed merely to the Army. If they were, they could be rectified merely by making changes in Army personnel. Their source is deeper; they spring from elements of our national character and are therefore much more difficult to rectify.

In the south of France a year ago I saw a striking illustration of fear on the part of the French that our easygoing ways and our dismal ignorance of the Germans would lead us to commit in occupied Germany (we had not then conquered it) the same errors we made after the last war. Normally it would seem an impertinence that the French should publish a magazine whose sole purpose was to teach Americans about Germans; this should have been an American function, but the French, well aware of our naïveté, and being more intent upon clinching a real victory than clinging to a hollow protocol, nonetheless published in English a magazine called News Real. Its editor frankly stated that since Americans knew little about the true nature of the Germans and might easily be deceived, he would attempt to tell them the facts of life in text and photographs. How well his fears were justified is borne out by a dispatch to the New York Times from Sergeant Joseph E. Ray which appeared just about this time.

This American soldier said that the Orientation Branch of the Army gave soldiers no adequate knowledge of the political events that led up to the war, nor did it keep them informed as the war continued. Lecture assignments in orientation usually fell to second lieutenants who were generally characterized by “an abysmal ignorance of the subject, together with a cynical indifference to the whole matter, the result being that the lecture period becomes a joke and rear, or sleeping, seats quickly go at a premium.”

It is not that Washington did not undertake the task of orientation. It is that, as I myself saw in the field, Washington’s efforts were often stultified because orientation courses could not succeed unless the officer commanding an area was convinced of their need. Frequently he saw them as a waste of time, as academic exercises which had nothing to do with war. He appointed as orientation officer a young man incompetent for this or any other task, and so made the effort futile in the eyes of soldiers, who fight or study best when led by an officer whose abilities they respect. Yet the ultimate authority in this democracy even in war is not the Army but Congress. While Congressional committees investigated and criticized the military conduct of the war in many phases, they were at no pains to see that our men went armed with conviction as well as tanks and rifles.

3

THE results of our failure in this all-important field are striking. In American-occupied Germany, Gladwin Hill, a New York Times reporter, could not find a single soldier “who could recall having received any elucidation, stimulation, or encouragement about his present chores. Confidential Army investigations . . . have disclosed in some groups a lack of comprehension of some of the elementary facts about the Germans. ... If the soldiers assigned to the occupation have nothing more than an ‘I wanna go home’ outlook, this is likely to be the keynote for opinion at home and to result in the same kind of futile occupation that followed the First World War.”

It is not surprising, then, that many of our officers and men already spout the German propaganda line, including the favorite allegation that Germany had no choice but to go to war, while at the same time they speak derogatorily of the British, the French, and our other allies. It is a natural consequence of our ignorance of the Germans, and of the political aspects of the war, that General Patton, former Military Governor of Bavaria, could see no greater differences between Nazis and anti-Nazis than those prevailing here between Republicans and Democrats; or that, in the Main Street way, he believed he could convert Nazis to democracy by showing them “what grand fellows we are.”

Throughout most of the world our soldiers applied as a criterion of civilization, in the countries where they moved, the state of the plumbing. On this basis, all peoples east of Suez were barbarous and the contemptuous term “wogs” was applied to them. West of Suez most of the countries have little plumbing in the grand mother-of-pearl American manner, and what they have is affected with disturbing caprices. Consequently, while our Western allies were not regarded as barbarous, neither were they prize winners at our civilization fair.

But Germany has excellent plumbing and broad highways; the people work hard and they respond, more than any others, to our materialistic criteria of what is meet and fit among decent people. They are, moreover, extremely polite. There is no one to tell our men that this politeness is merely a reflection of a national temperament which proceeds without psychological distortion from a horrifying sadism when the Germans are on top to a bootlicking masochism when they are on the bottom.

Since one does not want to make it too difficult for a fallen foe whose civilization in the eyes of some of our densely ignorant officers is so like ours, many of our soldiers lived under canvas in Bavaria while Germans luxuriously entertained these officers in homes they were permitted to retain. Meanwhile large numbers of our officers and men are, in the Army phrase, “shacked up” with their German mistresses. Some of these ladies were former mistresses of high-ranking Nazis and they have simply changed their beds for those of high-ranking Americans.

Our Military Government in Germany reports that young German women, far more than the men, are unreconstructed Nazis; they yearn for a “strong new Führer”; they say Hitler was a good man surrounded by “bad advisers,” and they regard our denazification program as too harsh. Commenting upon this report, an Army chaplain said that these girls, knowing their children would be brought up as Germans, are still willing to follow the Nazi concept of breeding children for the fatherland. Such women, lying in the arms of our soldiers, are spreading Nazi propaganda among them and doing it, according to observers, extremely well.

Their success is the greater because we have brought home from Germany so many of our combat troops who had a chance to learn the true nature of the enemy and to see what he had done in occupied countries. They have been succeeded by callow youths from the villages and farms of America, who have no standards of comparison and are furnished with not even the most elementary information about the Germans’ characteristics or any convictions about the importance of their own task. A simple principle of which we do not seem aware governs fraternization. It has been trenchantly stated by the Russians. They said that a ban on fraternization is foolish unless it proceeds from the heart.

Similarly, we appear to be largely dependent in Germany upon German interpreters for the transaction of our business. The situation with respect to the apparently unrelated tasks of mistresses and interpreters has become so scandalous that, according to a dispatch in Time (October 15, 1945), “by Germans, and by many a discerning G.I., the U.S. occupation rule of Germany and Austria was being called ‘the government of interpreters and mistresses.’”

4

THE antidote to all this — if it is not too late to apply it — is contained in words of Mr. Justice Holmes which, in the light of our dilemma, would seem to have the force of a maxim: “To fight out a war you must believe something and want something with all your might.” This is just as true of keeping the peace, since the aggressive instinct among men is as great now as it was in the days of tooth and claw, while modern arms have made it infinitely more destructive, and since men are still fear-ridden, jealous, greedy, irrational, touched often with paranoia. The very nature of man, the eternal struggle within him between good and evil, his dynamism, his restlessness, his hospital-obsession to have his bed now near the door and now near the window, dictate a never ending struggle for peace.

Consequently there will never be a time when we must not —whether we like it or not — be concerned with the great and small affairs of the world: with quarrels between warring Moslem sects in Iraq, Communists and anti-Communists in China, Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Moslems, Hindus, and English in India, Rumanians and Hungarians, Dutch and Indonesians, French and Annamites, Russia and the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Far East. For we know now, or ought to know, that a war may begin anywhere, and that wherever it begins, it will ultimately threaten the peace of the United States. Fate, by making us a mighty people, has decreed that we shall either lead the earth toward peace or face the penalty of destruction.

For the role of leading the world toward peace we are magnificently equipped in everything but perhaps the one essential thing— the will to do it. We are incomparably fitted for the physical task by virtue of our huge natural resources, our skills, our energy, our inventive genius, our numerous population, our industrial and agricultural plants intact and capable of almost limitless expansion. Out of our resources and our skills we performed within three years a feat without parallel. During this time we built the world’s largest navy, air force, and merchant marine; superbly equipped twelve million men and deployed them all over the face of the earth; provided staggering quantities of food and munitions for our allies and superimposed upon an unprecedented military production so great an output of civilian goods that retail sales reached an all-time high during the war years.

Skilled as we became in fighting, superbly courageous and devoted in action as our men were, the characteristic American genius in war was our ability to produce and distribute war goods on a scale that no other nation could hope to match. One need not labor the point that this ability, determining in war, is just as important in a world that desperately needs rebuilding.

Morally we are equally well fitted for the task because of the enormous prestige and good will that we have everywhere on earth; because, in general, the nations do not fear us or look upon our designs as suspect; because it is clear that we have no extracontinental ambitions. Yet even our physical might and moral authority—an authority which depends for its perpetuation upon its exercise — are not enough if they are merely attributes of a delightful companion and a good guy. The only way to lead is to lead. The pains of leadership are onerous, as the British discovered in the nineteenth century, but the penalties of failure to lead are greater and may even be catastrophic.

It is sickening and shameful in a stricken, impoverished, fearfully blighted world to hear Americans, in this richest of countries, still blessed by geography as others are cursed by it, bewailing their fate, wondering what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. Our actions in this war demonstrate that there is little the United States cannot do if its people can imagine themselves wanting to do it enough to do it. Internally we have not yet even begun to grow. We have only brushed the fringes of our potentialities. The horizons of the American future are limitless.

But we shall never begin the endless march toward them until we settle the one question that we have never settled in our life as a nation: the question of our spiritual and material relations toward the rest of the world. Time does not wait. Destiny moves with the sun. We have been called to the hill of the Lord to lead the weary nations to peace, but if we do not heed the call we shall perish in the sands of the desert before reaching the promised land.