WWII Mythologies, East and West

Each nation that fought the war has its own nationalistic mythology about WWII. The Anglo-American good-versus-evil mythology of Studs Terkel’s The Good War gets more complicated the further east you look.

It’s imperative to critically examine nationalistic mythology on both sides of the east-west divide, since the war’s outcome divided Europe and left Poland not fully independent until 1989. Millions of Eastern Europeans experienced both German and Soviet occupations, giving their citizens a very different view of what victory over Nazism meant.

A realistic overall picture requires deconstructing nationalistic mythology country by country: America, the world’s savior; the Soviet Great Patriotic War; Britain’s heroic 1940–41 stand-alone against Nazi Germany; France’s anti-Nazi resistance and Italy’s 1943–45 resistance. Here we start with the US and the USSR.

This Writer’s Perspective: Both Western and Eastern European

I’ve lived in several of these countries — Italy, France, Latvia — and visited friends and relatives in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Finland several times over the last 47 years. I learned Italian in Turin in the house of an Italian family whose parents were teenagers at the end of the war. The parents of the Italian family I lived with near Lecco, too, lived through the 1943–45 German occupation as teenagers. Since 1973 I’ve had hundreds of conversations with locals about their country’s role in WWII.

But since I’m American, we’ll begin our tour of blinkered war mythology there, before moving on to the Soviet allies America was so ambivalent about.

Randomness vs Inevitability in Nationalist War Mythology

Humans in general abhor randomness — we’ve evolved as order-seeking practitioners of pattern recognition. But humans’ pattern recognizing cognition fits human history’s randomness like a badly cut cheap suit.

Nationalist mythology loves inevitability, though history doesn’t; during the war German and Japanese civilians clung, beyond all reason, to the fantasy of inevitable victory.

An essential part of our framework is showing how nationalist mythology about a global war ignores both the randomness of events, and how random events in the Pacific shaped the European war and vice versa.

Anglo-American ignorance of the eastern front is nearly total; European ignorance of the Pacific War, similar. Conversations with Russians in Russia and Latvia about the Soviets’ Great Patriotic War reveal a euro-centric mindset similar to Anglo-Americans’ western-centric view that is shocked when informed how events on the other side of the world drove outcomes in their own countries.

(Source: Wikipedia)

America Never Had Better Enemies: WWII, Right and Left

Before Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, America never had enemies that made it look so globally beneficent and generous. From 1939 to 1941, Roosevelt didn’t want to involve the US in a war to defend a British Empire that occupied 25% of the planet: in May 1940, only 7% of Americans favored entering the war against Germany, while 85% favored aiding Britain when it fought on alone after June 1940.

Watching the Gremlins from the Kremlin in their airborne battle with Hitler and Goering in the cartoon Russian Rhapsody helps in understanding how the Nazis and the Japanese offered Americans a perfect cartoon caricature of evil. Their genocidal barbarism offered unique cover for geopolitical ambition, framed as an American exceptionalist mission to spread freedom worldwide. The xenophobic right could fight its racist war in the Pacific, while American liberals and socialists could fight their antifascist crusade in Europe in alliance with the Soviets. Two fronts, two separate wars and a transformational wartime economic boom kept the deep fissures in depression-era American politics under wraps.

Victory Through Hare and Duck Power (Source: Wikipedia)

This carefully constructed facade of unity, which squared the circle Roosevelt faced in 1939–41, is at the root of the American mythology about WWII. The United States was the only western (or Asian) combatant country whose political system was not shaken to its core and fundamentally transformed by WWII. The documentary The War, by my Hampshire College classmate, Ken Burns, and Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan are loaded with this unifying mythology -and illustrate it. It is as deeply felt as it is inaccurate, as we’ll see by listing the key events for Russians that Americans simply ignore.

But Americans’ selective memory is far from unique. No nationality is free of the human preference for mythology over history and facts. But the biggest victors of WWII, the Americans and Russians, are particularly susceptible to it. Contrasting what’s salient and what’s ignored on each side of this east-west divide exposes the mythmaking on both.

It’s a Shame Both Sides Can’t Lose

(Source: 9gag)

Harry Truman had a clear view of the choice between bad and worse. In 1941, after Germany invaded the USSR, the then-U.S. senator said:

If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.

In short, Truman said, in essence, “it’s a shame both sides can’t lose”, which is how this quote is often paraphrased.

Dueling Mythologies, Western and Eastern

Most Americans are ignorant of a few basic facts:

Churchill said it was the Red Army that “tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine”.

7 of 8 German soldiers killed in WWII were killed on the eastern front.

3. D-Day was not among the 10 biggest battles of WWII. The key to allied success in France after D-Day was the Soviets’ Operation Bagration as much as the Battle of the Falaise Gap. Bagration yielded an 800-kilometer advance that brought the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, just as Kursk was the key to allied success in Sicily.

4. The Pacific War against Japan was a sideshow compared to Europe, though Pearl Harbor was essential to getting the USA into the war against Germany. FDR and George Marshall understood this and crafted a Europe-first war strategy.

5. The USA did not declare war against Germany: it’s the opposite. Had Hitler, in a fit of Nazi racial ideological delirium, not declared war on the USA, the US would have fought a one-front war against Japan well into 1942, postponing D-Day by a year. As a result, there would have been no East and West Germany, just a single Soviet-occupied Germany with at least one German city bombed with one of the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons.

6. In October 1941 the Soviet spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, gave Stalin the information needed to move 400000 fresh troops and 2000 tanks from the Amur River to the gates of Moscow in time for the December 5 counterattack against the Germans. Without Richard Sorge and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on December 7, the Soviet counterattack of December 5, 1941 would have never happened.

7. The ratio of Americans to Soviets killed in the war was about 1:65.

8. The percentage of Americans who responded affirmatively to a 1946 Gallup poll question, “have you had to make significant material sacrifices for the war effort?” was 36%. A German submarine captain was two miles offshore from Miami in December 1944 while the Battle of the Bulge raged when the War Dept allowed Miami Beach’s hotels to reopen for the time first time since Pearl Harbor. He saw through his periscope the lit-up streets with the cars, the bars, restaurants, partying politicians, Wall Street bankers, mafia, and the babes, and told his crew, “we’re bombed and starving and these people are having a party. Time to go home.” (America, Democracy at War, William L. O’Neill) Compared to the rest of the world, the US fought a luxury war that drove away the 1930s depression and brought prosperity to new heights.

9. Who rode in the back of the bus or trolley in Dallas and New Orleans in 1945 — German prisoners of war or black citizens of those cities? The answer to that is — Black Americans. While hitchhiking across Germany in August 1973 a Lutheran minister who had been German prisoner of war in Dallas, Texas gave me a ride. He said the day he was captured by the Americans was the happiest day of his life, including his wedding day — because he knew he would live. Millions of people with similar experiences were the foundation of American soft power in the postwar and cold war periods.

Basic facts Russians and former Soviet citizens don’t know or ignore:

1. 2/3 of the trucks, 2/3 of the radios, 2/3 of the jeeps, 2/3 of the new railroad ties, and the American Mustangs used in Operation Bagration were American-sourced war materiel.

2. American aircraft losses amounted to 96,300 and American aircraft production was in the 400,000. Germany’s total aircraft production, in comparison, was 144,000. Where was the Luftwaffe after early 1943? Not over Soviet territory because it was busy chasing American and British targets over German, French and Italian cities. Until late 1944, the bombing of Germany was ineffective at reducing German war production. One of my UCLA professors worked for the US Strategic Bombing Survey and studied the effect of the fire bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. His conclusion was that the bombing helped German war production by closing down all the theaters, clubs, and brothels. No more fun, so people worked harder. The American and British air force’s role was to put targets over Germany and Italy and keep the Luftwaffe away from the eastern front. But you couldn’t tell the air force its main role was to give the Germans targets to shoot at.

3. At the Allied summit in November 1943 Stalin raised his glass in a toast to “American war production, without which the war could not be won.” Evidence for Stalin’s toast: A 70-year-old German visiting professor at UCLA I interviewed in 1979 told me of his experiences as an interpreter at interrogations of downed allied airmen in 1944–45. The Gestapo and Volksturm (Home Guard) would loot their backpacks and find real coffee, chocolate bars, fresh fruit, apple pie, and ice cream (it’s cold enough for ice cream in unpressurized cabins). Then they’d ask, dumbfounded, where on the black market the captured airmen would get this stuff. The answer always caused the color to go out of their faces: “we fly it all over from the States.” The Nazi interrogators then understood they were at war with an enemy with limitless resources and their cause doomed. All the Stephen Ambrose books will not change the fact that Germans, whose units were composed of soldiers from the same home town, unlike the Americans’ random unit assignments (REPLDEPL, or Replacement Deployment), were better soldiers. Nor did they change the equally important fact that that superiority was meaningless in a war against American industrial capacity.

4. Without the USA as a refuge for German, Italian and Hungarian Jewish physicists, Germany would have developed an atomic bomb. Imagine Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Einstein working for the Germans instead of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The Man in the High Castle becomes more than just a counterfactual sci-fi fantasy. A German atomic weapon launched on a V-2 rocket against Moscow or London becomes less counterfactual fiction than real possibility. Of course, a Nazi regime not possessed by obsessive anti-semitism that denigrated “Jewish physics” is not a real possibility.

5. About the American sanctions on Japan and the Battle of Moscow in December 1941: had FDR not provoked the Japanese into going south instead of north to Siberian oil fields, Stalin would not have had the additional armies to defend Moscow and launch the December 5 counterattack. Again, the Soviets fought and died, but their victory was assured by an American target diverting the Axis attention away from the real prize.

6. The Japan vs USSR Battle of Khalkin Gol in August 1939 mauled the Japanese army and convinced the Japanese they didn’t want to fight the Red Army in Siberia. This unknown full scale war lasting four months started in May 1939 when a small group of Mongolian soldiers grazed their horses in a disputed part of the Mongolian-Manchurian border.

Butterflies flap their wings, cause typhoon at the gates of Moscow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Background

“The incident began on 11 May 1939. A Mongolian cavalry unit of some 70–90 men had entered the disputed area in search of grazing for their horses. On that day, Manchukuan cavalry attacked the Mongolians and drove them back across the river Khalkhin Gol. On 13 May, the Mongolian force returned in greater numbers and the Manchukoans were unable to dislodge them.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Background)

Defeat at the hands of the Red Army in this four month engagement moved Japanese imperial ambition from north to south, from Siberia to Southeast Asia and Hawaii:

“The battle earned the Kwantung Army the displeasure of officials in Tokyo, not so much due to its defeat, but because it was initiated and escalated without direct authorization from the Japanese government. This defeat combined with the Chinese resistance in the Second Sino-Japanese War, together with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact (which deprived the Army of the basis of its war policy against the USSR), moved the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo away from the policy of the North Strike Group favored by the Army, which wanted to seize Siberia for its resources as far as Lake Baikal.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Background)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Background The Japanese Army plan defeated by the Red Army

Displacing the Japan army’s northbound expansionist fantasies with the navy’s southbound ambitions freed up the resources that defeated the Germans at the gates of Moscow in December 1941, which makes those Mongolian soldiers the most influential horse grazers in history.

7. History Fooled by Randomness #1: Midway. If the Japanese had won this battle, the road to Hawaii would have been open and American resources bound for Europe would have been diverted. D-Day would have come a year or more later and all of Germany would be occupied by the Soviets. Thanks to random luck, and the American pilots who found four Japanese carriers and sank them in 12 minutes.

8. History Fooled by Randomness #2, Giuseppe Zangara’s failed attempt to assassinate FDR on February 15, 1933, 17 days before his inauguration. Had Zangara not failed in his assassination attempt due to Lillian Cross’ handbag deflecting his gun, a constitutional crisis would have occurred. Thank you, Lillian Cross.

The mayor of Chicago sitting next to Roosevelt in the car, Anton Cermak, was killed. He told Roosevelt while dying in his hospital bed, “I’m glad it was me and not you, Mr. President.”

And he was right. The US constitution has no provision for presidential succession in case of the assassination of a president-elect during the transition of power. FDR’s assassination would have produced a constitutional crisis. What would Hoover have done? Would VP elect John Nance-Garner, of “the vice presidency is not worth a pot to piss in” fame, have claimed the presidency? There certainly would have been no New Deal, further economic collapse, no war-winning infrastructure (no WPA, CCC, NRA agencies) built during the 1930s, no War Production Board led by JK Galbraith, no Lend Lease ships going to Murmansk… the list of critical pieces of the war-winning puzzle goes on and on. Zangara’s successful assassination of FDR is justifiably the premise behind The Man in the High Castle. I’ve yet to meet a Russian or Latvian who knew about Zangara before I mentioned him. Of course, most Americans never heard of him either because he challenges the inevitability of FDR’s New Deal recovery and wartime leadership to certain victory.

9. The Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and the Katyn massacre of 10000 Polish army officers in May 1940. A war started over Polish independence accepted by neither Germany nor the USSR left Poland without true independence until 1989.

10. The Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939-March 1940, in which the Soviets’ post-June 22, 1941 allies, Britain and Gaullist resistance France, would align with Germany’s future ally, Finland, against the Soviets. Stubborn Finnish resistance in the Winter War fooled Hitler into a fatal sampling error: the Red Army would be a pushover. The Japanese knew better, but Hitler either didn’t know about Khalkin Gol or ignored it.

11. The Red Army as a bystander during the Polish Home Army’s anti-German uprising of August-October 1944. The concurrent, parallel and differing fates of an intact Paris liberated as Warsaw burned are subjects the mythology of May 9 prefers to avoid (Gregor Dallas, “1945”).

History’s Ugly Choice: Bad vs Worse

The only workaround to overcome mythology is to acknowledge the tragic nature of the choice at hand in 1941–45: between bad and worse. Churchill framed it correctly: “I would make a pact with the devil himself to defeat Hitler”. We know the result we got: the mostly peaceful death in 1989–91 of one of the two totalitarian monsters of the 20th century. Communism died peacefully, an end impossible to imagine for Nazism and imperial Japan had the Germans and Japanese emerged victorious.

The Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Primo Levi, understood this fundamental difference between Nazism and Communism. He said there is a theory of Communism apart from the horror of its Stalinist practice that allowed Communism to die peacefully (Romania excepted). There is no theory of Nazism apart from its genocidal practice, which makes a peaceful end to Nazism utterly unimaginable.

We’ve seen how nationalist mythology has erected a curtain of delusion between the Good War and Great Patriotic War of popular imagination in the USA and Russia and its real history. Next we’ll move on to the same process at work in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands and France.