Fear Itself (55 page)

Looking ahead in October 1945, Oppenheimer was asked about the future of atomic weapons. “If you ask: ‘can we make them more terrible?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘can we make a lot of them?’ the answer is yes. If you ask, ‘can we make them terribly more terrible?’ the answer is probably,” a projection that was to prove too modest.
¹⁶⁶

VI.

B
Y COMBINING
military know-how with scientific research and business leadership, the United States mastered the art of unrestricted war. Demonstrating that democracies could, in fact, solve the biggest problems, the country learned to act as if it were one great unified corporation, a cohesive company that superintended economic, social, and military mobilization on an almost unimaginable scale.
¹⁶⁷
In all, the means that were utilized to propel the wartime effort to confront “the militaristic totalitarianism of the Roosevelt period”
¹⁶⁸
spurred the economy, brought about remarkable advances in weaponry, and established a tightly constrained civil capitalism and a firmly directed national security state, which reinvigorated the early New Deal’s emphasis on planning. The Soviet armed force was larger at the close of the war—the largest ever in global history—but America’s was “the mightiest in the world.”
¹⁶⁹

In critical ways, the war years interrupted normal lawmaking. During the conflict, the country fashioned an emergency polity whose various enabling acts, concentration of executive power, censorship, propaganda, surveillance, violations of due process, suspicion of disloyalty, planning and corporatism backed by coercion, and unrestrained violence resembled rather more the public policies of the country from which Italo Balbo’s air armada had come to the United States than the early New Deal country where they had disembarked in 1933. The wartime national security state that built unprecedented military power and effectively mobilized civilian society began to fuse the United States into “one unified technical enterprise” in order to advance the well-being of liberal democracy across the globe. Preoccupied by danger, devoted to planning, and organized by “specialists on violence,” this aspect of America’s political order operated with vastly reduced constraints. So doing, it projected irresolvable and persistent tensions inside America’s own democracy.
¹⁷⁰
When Earl Michener, a Republican member of the House, announced in February 1942, “Under no condition would I vote to grant these additional powers if I did not realize the condition the country is in today,” he and his colleagues in both political parties could not have anticipated either the full extent of the concentration of power over the course of the war or that an emergency sensibility would persist long after the Allied victory.
¹⁷¹

Pursuing victory, the United States adopted a span and depth of executive power that surpassed those of prior wartime emergencies or the New Deal’s first one hundred days. The war thus raised significant questions about the U.S. separation of powers system under crisis conditions. It also generated uncertainly about the proper balance between Washington and other units of government in the federal system, and between the federal government and the operation of markets in capital, labor, and ideas.

The war, however, did not simply challenge traditional democratic and constitutional rights and ideas. Central aspects of American democracy persisted. A robust press carried on. The House and Senate continued to meet, legislate, and, frequently clash with the president, especially after the 1942 elections produced significant Republican gains (the party won a majority of votes cast for the House, but a minority of seats, 209 of 435, and gained 8 Senate seats, thereby increasing to 38 members).

There was nothing in the United States that came close to the degree of mobilization, repression, and murder practiced over the course of the war by the governments in Berlin and Moscow. Total war in the United States was a good deal less total. The assaults on the civil liberties of Japanese-Americans, African-Americans, and persons tried under the Smith Act were not the rule, but targeted exceptions. The broad assaults on freedom of assembly, speech, and person in the name of loyalty and security that had characterized the Civil War and World War I were not reprised. Nor did state governments pass their own sedition acts as many had in 1917. Patriotism did not again become a reason to target German-Americans or dramatically enlarge the scope for charges of betrayal. Dissent was not made to disappear. In all, measured against other countries and times, “problems of civil liberty were . . . comparatively easy to solve” during World War II, as Clinton Rossiter observed, in part because the war was so broadly popular.
¹⁷²

Though he often pushed the Department of Justice to be more assertive in rooting out subversives, President Roosevelt established a tone that valued the freedoms that had been lost “in other continents and other countries.” He made this point when, less than two weeks before Pearl Harbor, he announced that December 15, 1941, would be “Bill of Rights Day” to mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
¹⁷³
With the period’s attorneys general even more committed to maintain as much liberty as possible under emergency conditions, the government promoted self-policing rather more than repression.
¹⁷⁴
The Office of Censorship’s Code of Wartime Practices was administered by the radio and press industries, not by executive authorities. Unlike Britain, moreover, the United States cancelled no elections. Further, in light of the central role played in the war by the Soviet Union, Washington suspended its restrictions and assaults on the civil liberties of American Communists.

At issue was not whether the United States would become a dictatorship, but, rather, what kind of democracy it would elect to possess during and after the war. The very nature of the wartime coalition made it difficult to address this issue frontally. When, two days after Pearl Harbor, FDR declared the war to be a “united effort by all of the peoples of the world who are determined to remain free,” Leningrad was under siege and a German counteroffensive was under way outside Moscow. As the war did not crisply line up a democratic alliance against an alliance of dictatorships, the phrase “determined to be free” was charged with ambiguity—free from conquest or free more substantively? The Big Three coalition coalesced on the same basis, a “united front against fascism,” that the Communist movement had adopted as its policy stance in the mid to late 1930s.
¹⁷⁵
This basis for collaboration obscured how the partners radically differed with regard to the liberal and democratic commitments that had been announced as Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter. The urgent high stakes of the war dictated that such questions be suspended.

It was the USSR, not Britain or the United States, that turned the tide against Hitler. Fighting on the eastern front took the lives of four out of every five German soldiers who perished in the entire conflict, and it was the Soviet army that pushed the Nazi force back to Berlin. It is an uncomfortable fact that when Germany’s unparalleled invasion force of 2,758,000 soldiers, organized into 103 divisions, poured across the border on June 22, 1941, the Soviet capacity for endurance was galvanized by the brute authority of its relentless dictatorship.
¹⁷⁶
Civilian life in the USSR simply ceased to exist in any normal sense, which was not the case in other Allied nations. Mixing appeals for the motherland with ruthless pressure, Moscow rallied the war effort by imposing conditions that the democracies would not have been able to enforce, first to resist, then defeat the Wehrmacht. In mobilizing the country as a single war camp, the Soviet government did not hesitate to use the unrestricted powers of its Party-led state to deport, jail, and kill as it enforced a tight regimen of censorship, austere rationing, and harsh labor conditions. Even for elites, it forced radical changes to daily life, as when, in 1942, Stalin commanded the full complement of scientists from the country’s scattered seventy-six research institutes to come to Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, under the aegis of a compulsory State Science Plan.
¹⁷⁷

Much as the Axis forces failed to coordinate strategy between Germany and Japan, the Allies proceeded separately and unevenly. The Combined Chiefs of Staff of the United States and Great Britain planned grand strategy together, while Stalin and his generals separately coped with, then pushed back against, the massive German assault. But the two wars were interdependent. With the United States grappling with Japan, devoting immense resources to the war in the Pacific, and joining the British to do battle in North Africa and Italy while delaying the cross-Channel invasion in Normandy until mid-1944,
¹⁷⁸
it fell to the Red Army to confront the central thrust of German military power directly. It was widely understood that only with a Communist victory, representing a Faustian bargain with enormous implications, could the United States and Britain succeed in Europe, and that only with Soviet forces freeing up resources could the democracies devote the means that were required to push back Japan’s spectacular gains in the Pacific and on the Asian mainland.

Soviet agony dominated Allied suffering. The Red Army’s resistance was achieved at an appalling price. After just seven months of fighting, the Soviet Union had lost 2,663,000 soldiers, with 3,000,000 captured. This was a ratio of twenty Soviet soldiers killed for every German. By war’s end, fully 84 percent of the 34.5 million persons the USSR mobilized for war service, of whom 29.5 million were soldiers, had died or endured injury or detention. By contrast, of the 16,112,556 people who had served the United States during the course of the war, 405,399 died, and 671,846 were wounded, according to official figures. Moreover, the war never reached the North American mainland.
¹⁷⁹

Commencing on September 8, 1941, the Soviet Union experienced the longest siege in human history, in the once-fabled city of Leningrad. Over the course of nine hundred days, one million of the city’s three million Russians perished, most by starvation. The country also endured the most punishing campaign in the long history of war, a 162-day battle for Stalingrad. During this turning point of the European war, the German army lost 200,000 men, but the victors paid a higher price. In pushing the Wehrmacht back, 479,000 Red Army soldiers and airmen were killed or captured, which amounted to much the same thing.
¹⁸⁰
Overall, nearly 9 million Red Army soldiers were killed, and estimates of civilian wartime deaths range from just under 17 million to 24 million.
¹⁸¹
This rate was fully two hundred times higher than the combined civilian death toll for the United States and Britain, and twelve times higher than the pooled American and British military loss of life.
¹⁸²

Within the Soviet Union, censorship masked the true costs. Pain was excised from public speech. Starvation was transformed into heroism.
¹⁸³
The alliance that had been formed between London and Washington on one side and Moscow on the other required the Allies to set aside conventional ethical standards. Thus, Stalin’s command to massacre nearly 22,000 Poles at the Katyn Forest in April and May 1940 was treated in the indictment at Nuremberg as if it were a German war crime.
¹⁸⁴
At Nuremberg, no mention was made of the Soviet Union’s 1939 pact with Nazi Germany, or how Ribbentrop had been welcomed at the Moscow airport with swastika flags flying (taken from movie sets where anti-Fascist films had been made). Nothing was said about the massive Soviet territorial gains the agreement sanctioned in the Baltic states and in Poland, approximately half of which was taken over by the one million Soviet troops who arrived in mid-September 1939. Nothing was mentioned about the deportation of some 2,000,000 Polish families and 230,000 Polish soldiers to Siberia, or about the kangaroo courts organized by the NKVD secret police to try people accused of nationalist resistance and anti-Communist excess. While German leaders were being executed, a stone of silence was place on Soviet complicity with German anti-Semitism in the first phase of the war. Jews fleeing the Nazis in Poland had been summarily returned to face death, as had many who had come to the USSR in the 1930s. Within Poland, Stalin had ordered the repression of Jewish religious and cultural life. The Sabbath and the holidays as well as kosher slaughter were banned.
¹⁸⁵

Comradely amnesia succeeded in putting out of mind the regime of terror the USSR imposed on Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which led to the deportation of more than 120,000 and the murder of thousands after 500,000 Soviet soldiers entered in June 1940. There was no Allied commentary on the growing Gulag prison camp network and its brutal conditions of wartime forced labor, or the persistent acts of repression within the Soviet Union by the NKVD and Party authorities. The other Allied nations also took no notice of the relentless maltreatment of German prisoners of war and ethnic Germans in western Russia, or Stalin’s Order 227 and Order 270, which authorized executions of Soviet soldiers thought to have hesitated or retreated. Nor was any fuss made about the widespread looting, mass rape, and wanton killing that characterized the behavior of Red Army troops in zones they liberated from German control. Barbaric reprisals echoed Nazi cruelty.
¹⁸⁶

Here lay the war’s greatest irony. To ensure a future for Western democracies, and to pursue the war aims first announced in their Atlantic Charter, Britain and the United States could proceed only by ignoring, even shielding, the full range of action by their most important ally, thus compromising core tenets of liberal democracy. “Whenever anyone is heard saying . . . that we dare not trust Russia much, it is well to remember this is Nazi propaganda,” the
Dallas Morning News
warned in October 1943. “No matter how honest and patriotic the American who repeats such statements, he proves himself gullible and a victim of enemy wiles.”
¹⁸⁷
The war’s crusade thus was compromised by an ethos of unaccountability, especially when it concerned the Soviet Union. Whether this troubling pattern would prevail after the war was a question of paramount concern to the Allied powers.
¹⁸⁸