FDR

Inching Towards War: Military Preparedness in the 1930s

Photo of FDR from 1933 (via Wikipedia)

The 1936 National Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a coronation of sorts for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who faced little serious opposition in his pursuit of a second nomination. The convention program was full of articles and photographs that talked up the president’s programs and achievements during his first term. However a closer look at the working drafts found in the program printer’s archive, stored on campus at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center, shows that the administration grappled with presenting the political issues of the day to the public. Of particular note are essay drafts related to America’s role in the world, and specifically how Roosevelt sought to justify military investment to a skeptical public.

The printer’s archive includes original artwork, photographs, advertisements and party leader biographies from the 1936 convention program. In addition, it boasts a set of fully annotated typed essays written by Roosevelt’s Cabinet members and other officials. Those essays—including entries for the State and Treasury departments, the National Park Service, and the Works Progress Administration—comprise the bulk of the program’s content.

The program represented a chance for the Roosevelt administration to project its philosophy, policies, and achievements upon both the convention and the upcoming general election. The essays’ many edits point to the ways that Roosevelt’s ideas and activities were deeply contested at the time within the Roosevelt administration, the Democratic Party, and the wider American public during the 1930s.

George Dern, United States Secretary of War from 1933-19336 (via Wikipedia)

George Dern’s essay is more annotated than most. The former governor of Utah was Roosevelt’s secretary of war from 1933 until his death shortly after the convention. Like the staunch anti-war campaigner, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye, Dern was a western progressive. His essay reflects this, emphasizing that American foreign policy “contemplates no aggressive action: it is entirely defensive. We are a peace-loving people.” And yet, unlike Nye, Dern advocated for upgrading the military’s capabilities to create a force – neither “dangerously small” nor “menacingly large” — that could respond rapidly in a crisis. Treading lightly, Dern remains pointed in his criticism of the Republican controlled Congresses of the 1920s, accusing them of underfunding the Army, which left it lacking in both equipment and personnel: “The President and the [now Democratic] Congress have taken steps to remedy at least in part this serious defect.” However, he is quick to add that America remains “considerably behind the armies of other countries.”

It’s a point that Dern reiterates again and again, but, intriguingly, Roosevelt’s communication strategists omitted many of these assessments. Whole paragraphs alluding to America’s unpreparedness for war are crossed out, including references to needing more soldiers and rifles and the Army being “very much smaller than that of any of the nations of comparable importance.” Roosevelt operatives—aware that the president’s internationalist leanings were stronger than those of the American public as a whole—were as keen as Dern to stress the practical rather than idealistic reasons for military investment. However, they appear to have thought Dern went too far and risked making America appear weak. In a world stalked by Hitler and Stalin, during a decade that had witnessed Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, that would be an understandable concern. In any case, Dern’s essay employs another motif to broker consensus for military investment: the Army as an agent of social and economic progress.

Essay by Dern with edits (via the Dolph Briscoe Center)

Dern states that the Army had been a “vital creative force that is closely identified with the growth and progress of our country.” Not only was it instrumental in pioneering preventative medicine and radio transmission, it was Army engineers who had “surveyed the routes of the early canals and the first railroads.” In addition to placing the Army within America’s glorious, trailblazing past, Dern emphasizes its nonmilitary achievements in the present. He highlights the Army’s work in disaster response and flood mitigation, as well as in training, equipping, and feeding members of the Civilian Conservation Corps. which employed nearly 3 million unemployed American youths in a variety of conservation programs such as trail maintenance and tree planting during its nine-year existence. Dern’s point was to show that the Army could “serve the people as well in the exigencies of peace as in the travails of war.” This was aimed at cultivating consent for an enhanced and enlarged military during a period when the public remained on the fence about internationalism and the prospect of upgrading America’s role in world affairs.

Dern was succeeded as secretary of war by Harry Hines Wooding, who continued his predecessor’s cautious modernization. Likewise, Roosevelt’s internationalism remained tempered, and domestic issues still dominated. However, events were to evolve rapidly. America’s perceived lack of response to Nazi aggression from 1938 on drew national and international criticism. After Paris fell to Hitler in 1940, the United States quietly pivoted toward Britain, as it had in World War I, supplying materials and later armaments in the war against Germany. Wooding was forced to resign and was replaced with Henry Stimson, who echoed Roosevelt’s now-increasingly hawkish tone and practice.

Sections concerning military nixed in this draft (via Dolph Briscoe Center)

Congress, however, remained divided even as late as the fall of 1941. Efforts to dilute the neutrality acts of the previous decade were successful, but the legislative opposition, led by Nye and others, was vociferous. Indeed, an extension to the military draft in August 1941 (from one to two and a half years) passed in the House by only one vote — that of Speaker Sam Rayburn from Texas. (Rayburn is pictured behind Roosevelt, right). But the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December proved to be the tipping point, outraging American public opinion and leading to a swift congressional declaration of war. Even Nye voted aye. Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on America in the days following. The United States was now at war both in the Pacific and the Atlantic. As in 1917, policy had edged forward but then seemed to turn on a dime. More than 16 million Americans went on to serve in World War II. Partially, gradually, emphatically, intervention had prevailed over isolation.

Hatton Sumners and the Retirement of Supreme Court Justices

We are especially pleased to post this essay by a long-time supporter of the UT Austin Department of History. Josiah M. Daniel III, of counsel at the international law firm Vinson & Elkins, LLP, received his J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law in 1978 and his master’s degree in History from UT in 1986. In 2011, Mr. Daniel was elected to membership in the prestigious American Law Institute. He is an inaugural member and former Chair of the UT History Department Visiting Committee.

By Josiah M. Daniel, III

Working this month in historical archives and observing the news of the April 10, 2017 appointment of Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, have reconfirmed for me that history (if known) can illuminate current events.

Appointments of Justices of the Supreme Court are matters of high public interest. Presidents appoint individuals for that office, with “advice and consent” of the Senate, because their nominees share the president’s views on key public issues. After all, the final word on constitutionality and interpretation of legislation and executive actions resides with the Court as part of the Constitution’s checks and balances. And, as mandated by Article III, Supreme Court justices, and all federal judges, serve lifetime appointments “during good Behaviour” with “compensation . . . not [to] be diminished during their continuance in office.”

The Supreme Court Building (via Wikimedia Commons).

Presidents are attuned to the age and health of each serving justice in anticipation of vacancy, whether by death, resignation, or retirement. On the other side, the decision of any justice of advancing years to leave office, rather than to serve until death, has often been a difficult personal choice. For the past 80 years, that decision of aging justices has been eased by an enactment sponsored by a Dallas congressman, Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962).

Sumners’ statute, the 1937 Retirement Act, guarantees undiminished lifetime salaries to retiring justices and it authorizes them to continue in the adjudication of federal cases in the lower courts, if desired. Sumners had been appalled when, early in the Great Depression, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, aged 90, resigned after thirty years’ service and had his pension immediately halved in a penny-pinching measure. The Retirement Act prevented that situation but is also noteworthy because of its role in the “court-packing crisis” of 1937.

Sumners’ definitive biography remains unwritten, but he was a significant Congressman over four decades of the 20th century. In 1894 Sumners moved from Tennessee to Texas and quickly became a lawyer. In 1912 he won the at-large seat for the U.S. House of Representatives and two years later he won a seat in Dallas’ Fifth Congressional District, which he held until 1946. His papers reside in the archive of the Dallas Historical Society, where I have been reviewing them.

Congressman Hatton W. Sumners in 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Sumners was devoted to his work and old fashioned in dress and speech. One woman who lobbied him in the late 1930s described him as “the epitome of the Southern conservative [who] even wore a frock coat. . . . a relic of the past.” From 1932 until he left office, Sumners chaired the House’s Judiciary Committee, a position he used, among other things, to block anti-lynching legislation based on his spurious and degrading view of African Americans. This did not prevent President William Howard Taft from calling him “the best lawyer in Congress,” or a 1939 LIFE magazine poll rating him most highly for integrity among all Congressmen (a video clip of Sumners speaking in 1937 can be found here).

Roosevelt’s first term, from 1933 to 1937, generated a surge of innovative legislation, commonly known as the “New Deal,” that tackled the deep economic and social problems of the Great Depression with innovations such as Social Security, relief for the poor and unemployed, reform of the financial system, and economic recovery.

A scene of destitution during the Great Depression (via Wikimedia Commons).

But virtually all of those new federal laws were challenged in the federal courts on constitutional grounds including the argument that the legislation violated “substantive due process,” the predominant constitutional theory typified by the famous Lochner v. New York decision of 1905 that generally vindicated private-property rights over other interests and policies.

On the Supreme Court, the “Four Horsemen,” Justices Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, and George Sutherland, were committed to that doctrine; and, at the start of the series of overturnings of New Deal enactments in 1935 and 1936, their ages ranged from 69 to 76 (at the time, male life expectancy was 60). The newest justice, Owen Roberts, appointed by President Herbert Hoover in his final year in office, joined them frequently for the 5-4 majority in those cases. FDR was outraged and after winning reelection by a landslide in November 1936, the President announced his so-called “court-packing plan” to overcome this roadblock to his legislative agenda by increasing the Supreme Court’s membership from nine to a maximum of fifteen if justices reaching the age of 70 declined to retire.

Sumners had joined the New Deal legislative team when Roosevelt took office in 1933, but he was more conservative than the President, often seeking to steer a middle-of-the-road course on the various issues of FDR’s legislative program.

‎President Roosevelt signing New Deal legislation, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

After a preview of the court-packing plan at the White House on February 5, 1937, Sumners made a pithy comment that was misquoted, then and subsequently, as “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips,” interpreted to mean he was departing the FDR team because he disagreed with its tactics.

But as a letter in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive shows, Sumners had not spoken the last two words, “my chips,” and what he meant was “to go in and to do what I could to help straighten things out.” Sumners helped defeat FDR’s plan to pack the Court with more progressive justices; but in the same letter, written after the defeat of the plan, he added that in the future “it will be generally agreed that I have been able in this matter to render a service of value to the President, the party, and the country, especially when considered in connection with the other legislation which I sponsored.”

That last reference was to Sumners’ efforts, prior to Roosevelt’s unveiling of the court packing plan, to accomplish the President’s desired result—the addition of new, more progressive members to the Supreme Court—by other paths. On one hand, he was close to and in communication with Van Devanter and the Chief Justice, Charles Evan Hughes, urging calm and patience about the court-packing plan.

Sumners to Charles Evans Hughes, March 22, 1937 (Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society, via author).

On the other hand, the congressman sponsored a bill to incentivize the older justices to retire by assuring the continuity of their salary if they were to do so. On January 11, 1937, he had introduced H.R. 2518:

Justices of the Supreme Court are hereby granted the same rights and privileges with regard to retiring, instead of resigning, granted to [all other federal] judges . . ., and the President shall be authorized to appoint a successor to any such Justice of the Supreme Court so retiring from regular active service on the bench, but such Justice . . . so retired may nevertheless be . . . authorized to perform such judicial duties, in any judicial circuit . . . as such retired Justice may be willing to undertake.

Sumners’ bill sailed through Congress, and on March 1, 1937, the President signed it into law.

H.R. 2518, enacted as Public Law No. 10, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 375 (via Legisworks).

The court-packing plan was defeated in the Senate, 70-20, on July 22. Most historians credit the defeat, not to Sumners’ Retirement Act, but to the “Switch in Time that Saved Nine.” That is, the youngest justice on the court, Owen Roberts, who had been voting with the Four Horsemen in those 5-4 reversals of first-term New Deal programs, suddenly voted to sustain the constitutionality of the minimum wage law in a decision issued by the Court on March 29, 1937. Commentators have noted, for instance, that Roberts cast his vote in that case before the advent of the court-packing plan, and some have perceived a jurisprudential shift already underway.

But the most recent scholarship substantially credits Sumners, who obtained an initial draft of the Retirement Act from FDR’s team, for pushing it through quickly, which did in fact induce several rather quick retirements. These retirements gave Roosevelt vacancies to fill, assuring the survival of New Deal legislation and enabling FDR to shape the Court for a long time.

Justice Van Devanter on his last day before retirement, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (via Wikimedia Commons).

First, Justice Van Devanter took advantage of Sumners’ enactment and retired on June 2, 1937 at age 78, which vacancy FDR filled with one of most consequential justices of the twentieth century, Justice Hugo Black. Then Justice Sutherland retired on January 17 the next year, replaced by Justice Stanley Reed.

In the decades since, only five justices have resigned, most recently Abe Fortas in 1969, but 24 have retired with the benefits of the Retirement Act. Some retired justices have elected to continue to adjudicate cases. Justice Tom Clark sat, after his 1967 retirement, in the lower courts for ten years, and more recently Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2006, has joined judicial panels deciding scores of cases in the Courts of Appeal in almost all federal circuits.

Today, two sitting justices are in their 80s, and one is 78. Will the Retirement Act encourage any of them to retire and provide an additional appointment opportunity for the current administration?

Sources:Hatton W. Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society.Elmore Whitehurst, “Hatton W. Sumners: His Life and Public Service: An Extended Biographical Sketch,” n.d., Web

William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995)

Marian McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937 (2002)

Burt Solomon, FDR v. the Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy (2009)

Judge Earl Glock, “Unpacking the Supreme Court: Judicial Retirement and the Road to the 1937 Court Battle,” Mar. 2017, Web

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity

Originally posted on the blog of The American Prospect, January 6, 2017.

By Laurie Green

For those who believe Donald Trump’s election has further legitimized hatred and even violence, a “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for January 21 offers an outlet to demonstrate mass solidarity across lines of race, religion, age, gender, national identity, and sexual orientation.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (The Center for Jewish History via Flickr)

The idea of such a march first ricocheted across social media just hours after the TV networks called the election for Trump, when a grandmother in Hawaii suggested it to fellow Facebook friends on the private, pro-Hillary Clinton group page known as Pantsuit Nation. Millions of postings later, the D.C. march has mushroomed to include parallel events in 41 states and 21 cities outside the United States. An independent national organizing committee has stepped in to articulate a clear mission and take over logistics. And thousands of local organizations, many of them formed just in the last month, have already chartered buses to bring demonstrators to the National Mall region, where the march is scheduled to kick off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd Street SW.

Despite its “Women’s March” moniker, the national organizing committee’s striking diversity signals an increasing emphasis on defending “human rights, dignity, and justice,” as the event’s official website states, by unifying across difference. The organizing committee includes four national co-chairwomen—Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland—who are African American, Latina, Palestinian American, and white, and who all have extensive backgrounds as social justice organizers and professionals with local, national, and global experience.

Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory serve on the Women’s March national organizing committee (via Huffington Post).

Still, neither the march, scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, nor its organizers can pretend to possess perfect harmony and clarity on the direction of this nascent movement. For example, the initial organizers dropped the original moniker, the “Million Women March,” in response to criticism that it was disrespectful to African American women who had participated in a Philadelphia march by that same name in 1997. The latter had taken place two years after the iconic Million Man March. This year’s initial organizers also faced criticism that the name “March on Washington” failed to show deference to the historic role of black activists in the 1963 March on Washington, recognized as a high point of the civil rights movement. The new national committee explicitly describes its mission as one that builds on earlier movements for social justice.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (via Idealistic Ambitions).

Such internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

By contrast, some historic marches on the Capitol demonstrated racial unity against all odds. The largest convergence on Washington prior to 1963 was the 1932 Bonus Army March, which brought together World War I veterans at the height of the Great Depression. In 1924, these veterans had been honored with the promise of an old-age “bonus” redeemable in 1945. But times were desperate, and the men wanted their bonuses early. An estimated 20,000 unemployed veterans hopped freight trains, caravanned in automobiles, or walked to the capital from as far away as California, and vowed to stay put until the government delivered. Their protests placed them in a direct confrontation with President Herbert Hoover. Things came to a head on July 28, 1932, when General Douglas MacArthur ordered soldiers wielding machine guns, bayonets, and tear gas to evict the veterans from their encampment and torch their tents. The debacle, which featured news coverage of government troops attacking unarmed veterans, is thought to have helped Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover by a landslide that November.

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the surface, the Bonus Army March may appear to have little relevance for organizers of this month’s march. But the gathering was actually a show of unity that brought together both men and women, both whites and blacks. In 1932, not only the veterans but also their wives and children poured into Washington, forming a genuine community. And despite the fact that the U.S. military had maintained racially segregated units during World War I, white and black veterans caravanned to the capital together. For two months, they and their families squeezed in beside one another as their children played between the rows of tents. They experienced MacArthur’s onslaught together, an early demonstration of racial and gender solidarity not unlike what the Women’s March expects to deliver this year.

The Bonus March was still fresh in the minds of another group of protesters, this time comprised only of African Americans, who used the threat of a mass demonstration to pressure the government for racial justice in 1941. It was the eve of the nation’s entry into World War II, and a labor organization known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters initiated a March on Washington Movement that threatened to bring 100,000 African American protesters to the capital on July 1 unless President Roosevelt moved to desegregate the military and order an end to racial discrimination in the burgeoning defense industry. Anxious that reports of racial injustice would damage his credibility with the Allies, Roosevelt blinked on June 25, and this march never took place. In the end, Roosevelt failed to desegregate the military; but he did prohibit discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to mediate disputes.

After Roosevelt desegregated the armed forces, Howard Perry became the first African American US Marine Corps recruit in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The role of women in this World War II–era movement holds a lesson for the women rising up to oppose Trump’s presidency today. It may be widely known that the 1941 protest was a direct precursor of the 1963 March on Washington. But less well-known is that the full, official name of black union in question, led by A. Philip Randolph, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. The avid participation of maids, as well as of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, which included porters’ wives, enabled Randolph to up his original participation projection from 10,000 in January of 1941 to 100,000 just a few months later.

Just as significantly, even though Randolph ended up canceling the demonstration, it spawned a March on Washington Movement, with chapters across the country, that persisted until 1946. Women continued as leaders in both the local and national organizations, and drew particular attention to discrimination against black females in the defense industry and other employment sectors. Women organizing this month’s demonstration at both the local and national levels are drawing on the historic organizing role of women—even those who have been forgotten—to create a lasting movement.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

Perhaps the most famous march on Washington in the 20th century took place in August of 1963, when a quarter of a million people united to demand black civil rights. The march brought together white liberals who turned out to support African Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, in an extraordinary show of unity against racial oppression.

Nevertheless, yearly commemorations of this historic march fail to note unsettling backstories involving women leaders, whose important roles have been largely forgotten. Its top organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, did not invite a single woman to speak, not even Rosa Parks—despite strong criticism from prominent black female civil rights advocates, including the one woman on the central organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Ultimately, organizers did arrange for six women, including Parks, to sit on the dais and be honored as women. But as the program shows, none of the ten keynote addresses heard that day was delivered by a woman.

Most Americans remember only one: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Often forgotten is the full name of the event: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Photographs of the event show hundreds of women bearing signs calling for everything from higher wages and jobs for all to better schools and voting rights. Many are union members. Female domestic and agricultural workers, the backbone of Southern activism since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also marched, at a time when federal law excluded them from minimum wages, Social Security, and from union-organizing protections.

Those photographs are testament to the role of women workers in organizing public protests. One thread running through all of these major 20th-century marches is the way civil justice issues involving race, gender, jobs, wage equity, and immigration all tended to intertwine. In the wake of the bitter election of 2016, post-election analyses have focused disproportionately on “the white blue-collar worker,” “the middle class,” or “the 1 percent.” Overlooked are the economic security and job concerns of Latina, black, and other women who toil in service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs, at wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Such women would be devastated by the social-services restructuring proposed by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.

As women and men march on Washington once again, the demonstrations of 1913, 1932, 1941, and 1963 hold important lessons. The outward show of “unity” at the Woman Suffrage Procession masked its racism. The 1932 Bonus Army March speaks to the potential for diverse groups to come together in the face of extreme adversity—just as progressives are unifying today in the face of Trump. The 1941 march illustrated how organizing for a demonstration can plant the seeds for a sustained movement. And the solidarity celebrated in 1963 hid the relegation of women leaders to second-class citizenship. Ideally, the Women’s March on Washington will both avoid some of these pitfalls and help women forge new alliances that will last well beyond the event itself.

More by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

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The Second World War by Antony Beevor (2012)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor’s recently published The Second World War is a masterful account of the worst conflict in human history, when truly the entire world became engulfed in the flames of war. Having written previously on various aspects of the era, Beevor’s work attempts to synthesize his prior research into a detailed narrative of World War II.

Consisting of over 800 pages, The Second World War is primarily a military and diplomatic history of the war. Beevor provides a brief introduction discussing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and creation of the Nazi totalitarian state in Germany, as well as Japan’s invasion of China, in the 1930s. The book covers the entire course of World War II, beginning with Nazi Germany’s preparations during 1939 for invading Poland and concluding with American use of atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender. Beevor skillfully describes the military strategies employed by both the Allied and the Axis Powers during the war. He focuses on the particular generals from each country, such as Rommel of Nazi Germany, Zhukov and Chuikov of the Soviet Union, Montgomery of Great Britain, and Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton of the United States, contemplating how their individual personalities affected their planning and the course of the war. The author gracefully moves his story from one sphere of the war to another, whether it be Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, China, or the Pacific islands.Hitler attending a Nazi rally (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The leaders of the great powers serve as the major actors in The Second World War. Beevor especially gives much attention to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and fittingly so, as the vicious battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were of central importance in World War II. The author vividly depicts how both dictators possessed excessive vanity and extreme paranoia. Such characteristics contributed to creating brutal totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin bitterly hated each other, and their mutual loathing influenced the course of the war, according to Beevor. Hitler became obsessed with conquering Stalingrad, believing that the loss of his namesake city would humiliate the Soviet leader. This proved disastrous for the German armies. After Hitler’s suicide at the war’s end, Stalin ordered his men to find his corpse and bring it to the Soviet Union as a final punishment for the Nazi leader. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt also receive much attention from the author. Churchill possessed dogged determination to ensure Great Britain’s survival, even in the darkest hours of the war. Roosevelt’s pragmatism and moderation helped keep the Allied Powers focused on winning World War II, especially when Churchill and Stalin clashed on matters of military strategy and postwar Europe. Beevor also examines their often complicated relationship with allies Chiang Kai-shek of China and Charles de Gaulle of France, and illustrates the significance of the Emperor to the Japanese people.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin pose for photographs during the Yalta Conference. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)Representatives from the Allied countries meet in Tehran in December 1943. Standing outside the Russian Embassy, left to right: unidentified British officer, General George C. Marshall, Chief of staff of USA, shaking hands with Sir Archibald Clark Keer, British Ambassador to the USSR, Harry Hopkins, Marshal Stalin’s interpreter, Marshal Josef Stalin, Foreign minister Molotov, General Voroshilov. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Stalingrad ablaze (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The author vividly depicts the unprecedented violence and cruelty of World War II. Soldiers fought to sheer exhaustion in harsh climates. Civilians in China, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany suffered from widespread rape, looting, and murder at the hands of enemy armies. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees and prisoners of war. Starvation affected millions around the world. Bombing raids devastated cities and countryside. Atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities and radiation caused lasting health problems for many people in Japan. Stalin’s paranoia led to vicious purges of both real and imagined enemies. And most infamously, Hitler and Nazi Germany conducted genocide against Jews in Europe. Beevor fully describes this horror, discussing concentration camps, sickening medical experiments performed on Jews, and how virulent anti-Semitism and propaganda caused most Germans to ignore these crimes against humanity perpetrated around them. Beevor’s accounts of the brutalities of World War II, especially the Holocaust, reminds readers how hatred can lead to sadism and true evil.

A bombed Hiroshima (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki before the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki after the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Antony Beevor’s The Second World War is a most welcome addition to the vast historiography on World War II. With great skill Beevor narrates the military and diplomatic events of this war while also examining the terrible human suffering of these years. Readers interested in World War II, military history, and international relations will benefit from reading this fine book about the most consequential event of the twentieth century.

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Lend-Lease

by Charters Wynn

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated. During the Cold War, the Russians minimized its impact and the West exaggerated it. While it is obviously impossible to know what would have happened without the aid, it is clear that Lend-Lease came too late to be the decisive factor in the Soviet victory. But it is equally clear that when aid began to arrive on a massive scale, it significantly increased the speed with which the German Army was pushed out of the Soviet Union. Without Lend-Lease, the Soviet people would have had to make even greater sacrifices and would have suffered even more deaths.

The American Lend-Lease aid program was passed by the United States Congress in March of 1941 originally to support the war effort in Great Britain. American public and congressional opinion at first resisted the idea of extending the aid to the Soviet Union. Many Americans shared the views of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who argued, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.” But aid was offered to the Soviet Union in October 1941 and when Hitler incautiously declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the de facto American-Soviet alliance became a reality.

Most of the early aid arrived on the dangerous “Murmansk run.” In raging seas and Arctic temperatures, convoys carrying American war materials and basic goods ran a gauntlet of German air and U-boat attacks, from Great Britain to the Soviet Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. One convoy lost 70 out of 80 ships. Later in the war, the Pacific route, a short voyage across the Bering Straits from Alaska to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, made up nearly half the shipments, and one-third came over the mountains into Soviet Central Asia via the Persian Gulf.

The main American motive was self-interest, not generosity. While remaining suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, President Roosevelt believed the United States could lose only if Germany emerged victorious on the Eastern Front. With Germany controlling the continent of Europe from the English Channel to Central Russia, it was in the western Allies’ interests to help the Red Army fight the German forces.

Nor did the Russians see Lend-Lease as charity. They saw themselves as carrying the war on their shoulders in its most critical phase. As late as the end of 1942, the Red Army faced 193 German divisions, while Anglo-American forces in Africa faced only four. To Stalin and people in the Soviet Union, the western Allies’ failure to open a second front in Europe until June 6, 1944 was deliberately intended to let the Soviet Union bear the brunt of the fighting and casualties.

Lend-Lease aid was slow to arrive. During the most crucial period of the war on the Eastern Front it remained little more than a trickle. Only following the Battle of Stalingrad (August 19, 1942-February 2, 1943), when the Soviet Union’s eventual victory seemed assured, did American aid began to arrive on a significant scale – 85% of the supplies arrived after the beginning of 1943. Although the vast majority of the Red Army’s best aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition continued to be manufactured in the Soviet Union, its mobility and communications, in particular, came to rely on Lend-Lease.

The Soviet ability to mount massive and overwhelmingly successful offensives against the still formidable German forces depended on the more than 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 32,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones, 2.5 million belts and 14 million boots produced in the United States, as well as large amounts of other equipment. Soldiers also depended on American food supplies, including hundreds of thousands of tons of Spam and other canned meat. Red Army troops advanced into Berlin driving American trucks and wearing American boots. As Stalin told Roosevelt, without Lend-Lease “victory would have been delayed.”

Ironically, although the Soviet Union would have won the war on the Eastern Front without Lend-Lease, American aid facilitated the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe before Anglo-American forces, which set the stage for the beginning of the Cold War.

You may also like:

Russian newsreel video about Lend-Lease on our blog

Transcript of the Lend-Lease Act (1941)

“One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943)

To read more about the war on the Eastern Front:

Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945 (1997)
Roger Munting, “Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19 (1984), 495-510
Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. (2004)

Photo Credits:
American Douglas A-20 bomber, provided through Lend-Lease, is loaded on to a ship bound for Allied ports, ca. 1943. Photo by Gruber for U.S. Office of War Information, via Wikimedia commons
Graphs from “One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease”

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