Empire of Reason
e-Article No. 7
June 18, 2021
From: Connecticut Committee of Correspondence
(Committees of Correspondence were early revolutionary cells, specifically organized for revolutionary reeducation, for the manipulation of opinion, so to lay the groundwork of resistance to the globe’s greatest imperialist power, the British Empire. “Sam Adams was the promoter of the first local committees on November 12, 1772, and within three months, Governor Hutchinson reported that there were more than eighty such committees in Massachusetts.” Committees of Correspondence formed the basis for the soon to follow Committees of Public Safety, as the road to revolution unfolded. See page 217, “Committees of Correspondence,” Concise Dictionary of American History, Editor, Wayne Andrews.)
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Herald of a New World Order
By Mark Albertson
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“Herald of a New World Order,” was originally accepted for publication by World War II History magazine in 2016.Instead it is published on Empire of Reason as e-Article No. 7.
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A mere cursory look into American history and one is immediately struck by a curious
commonality: that rash of causation of a maritime nature which has preceded America’s
entry into war. Recall that prior to the War of 1812, seaman construed as being English
nationals were being snatched with impunity from the decks of American vessels by
arrogant captains of His Majesty’s Navy; while on the high seas, both British and French
men-‘o-war were taking in prize American merchantmen engaged in trade with either
combatant, as the Great French War raged across the Continent. A conflict that would lead to
the demise of the Bonapartist dictatorship; which in turn, would foster a tenuous balance of
power that would lead to the eventual extinction of that closed, yet archaic clique of European monarchs by 1919.
Remember the Maine! proved to be a battle cry against Spanish perfidy and deceit at the
loss of the armored cruiser[1] in Havana Harbor. Of course, it was later established that the
American warship had fallen victim to an internal explosion as opposed to Spanish sabotage.[2]
Nevertheless America went merrily off to war to transform Manifest Destiny from an agenda of
continental expansion to that of a program for globalism; in other words, America joined the
ranks of the imperialist powers.
Unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany has often been viewed as the primary
justification for Woodrow Wilson to implore Congress to issue a Declaration of War; which the
august body would do on April 6, 1917, after four days of deliberation.
1937, Japanese warplanes bombed and sank the Panay, while the American gunboat was
patrolling the Yangtse River. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident deepened America’s foothold
into that quick sand known as Vietnam. 1987, an Iraqi Mirage missiled the USS Stark in the
Persian Gulf. Interesting aspect about the last named is that it comes fifty years after the attack
on the Panay. Yet in both instances, this nation will go to war with the antagonists, Japan in
1941 and Iraq in 1991, with each response just four years following the provocation.
This brings us to the Day of Infamy, seen by many as America’s official entrance into what
is commonly referred to as the Second World War. Yet the Navy had already been at war for
months. U.S. destroyers and German U-boats had been swapping depth charges and torpedoes
since April 10, 1941, when USS Niblack (DD-424) depth charged a sonar contact near Iceland.
On June 20, Rolf Mutzelburg, skipper of U-203, sighted a battleship and destroyer. The
big boy was USS Texas (BB-35). Together with New York (BB-34) and Arkansas (BB-33), Texas formed a temporary naval patrol assigned to assist the Royal Navy in sealing off passages near Iceland and Greenland so as to prevent the German raider Lutzow from breaking out into the convoy lanes. Mutzelberg dogged the zigzagging battlewagon before at last giving up the chase.
July 7, 1941, Task Force 19 steamed into Reykjavic harbor. The 1st Marine Brigade (Reinforced), 194 officers and 3,714 men, relieved the British garrison in the occupation of Iceland. Five months before Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval task force had ferried an American occupation force for foreign service for the first time in World War II.[3]
On September 4, USS Greer (DD-145) squared off with U-652 near Iceland. “It was the first U-boat attack on an American warship in the war.”[4] On September 11, FDR made his “shoot on sight” speech over the radio waves. He told the American public, . . . “our patrolling vessels and planes will protect all merchant ships—not only American ships but ships of any flag—engaged in commerce in our defensive waters. From now on, if German and Italian vessels of war enter the waters of protection of which is necessary for American defense they do so at their own peril.”[5]
October 17, U-568 torpedoed USS Kearny (DD-432), killing eleven bluejackets and wounding 22 others. Two weeks later, some 300 miles south of Iceland, U-562, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Erich Topp, torpedoed and sank the Reuben James (DD-245). Only 45 men were plucked from the sea. America had its first naval loss of the war.
By autumn 1941, war was coming uncomfortably close to America’s shores. Yet it was apparent, too, that it was going to take more than the drowning of a hundred American sailors to jolt their countrymen out of the isolationist sentiment which still gripped the land. But the incident when it came, five weeks after the loss of Reuben James, was overt, stunning and massive.
Yet the significance of December 7, 1941, goes beyond recalling a sneak attack upon a sleeping American fleet; a staggering blow that claimed 2,403 American lives and galvanized a nation. The underlying essence of Pearl Harbor, though a defeat, is that it joins with the battle of Moscow in not only setting the stage for eventual victory, but in heralding a New World Order.
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Bringing the Eight Corners of the World Under a Single Roof
The Japanese agenda for conquest as grounded in the concept of Hakku Ichiu; or, “Bringing the Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof” . . . a Japanese roof; an Oriental program for domination not too unlike the Teutonic brand known as Lebensraum or “Living Space.” Hakku Ichiu served as a basis for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, AKA the Japanese Empire.[6]
On July 24, 1941, the Japanese moved to complete their occupation of French Indochina.[7] This rendered Douglas MacArthur’s position on the Philippines untenable. Vietnam as a jump off point for a Japanese invasion of the American colony meant that American and Filipino forces would be flanked from the west, together with the Imperial Navy’s ability to be able to blockade the islands from the east so as to prevent their relief by the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
In the face of continued Japanese encroachments on the Asian mainland, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, two days after Tokyo decided to occupy the whole of French Indochina, froze Japanese assets stateside. Suddenly Tokyo’s access to American crude was cut off, denying Japan upwards of 80 percent of its oil imports. London and the Dutch Government-in-Exile followed the American lead. Dutch oil interests on the Dutch East Indies agreed to supply Japan with crude. But with many of its assets now inaccessible, a cash-flow dilemma certainly became a concern for Tokyo.
FDR’s actions taken on July 26, 1941 should have come as no surprise to Tokyo. Per the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan, signed on February 21, 1911, was an accord which guided much of American-Japanese trade.[8] According to Article XVII of the treaty, the parties were obligated to give their fellow signatory a six month notice of abrogation. In response to continued Japanese belligerency, Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, informed the Japanese Government, on July 26, 1939, that the United States “gives notice hereby of its desire that this treaty be terminated, and, having thus given notice, will expect the treaty, together with the accompanying protocol, to expire six months from this date.[9] And on January 23, 1940, the Japanese ambassador was duly notified that the treaty would expire on January 26, nearly two years before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
But Japan, like Britain, was an island kingdom. And like Britain, Japan relied on naval power to preserve its empire. For the Imperial Navy was the Sword of the Emperor. But on July 27, 1941, the Combined Fleet had little better than eighteen months supply of crude. This placed Tokyo in an unpleasant predicament. Again like Britain, Japan needed to import every drop of oil. This meant that Japan needed access to Western sources of crude; which meant capitulating to Western demands to halt its agenda for conquest in the Far East; a submission that would have been tantamount to committing political suicide, a course of action the Japanese militarists were unwilling to take. It is at this critical juncture of the narrative, that history comes to our aid to offer a better understanding of Japanese intentions.
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Challenge From Asia and,
The Triple Intervention
Middle of the 19th century, more and more Occidental sailors and whalers were making landfall in Japan, opening up the archaic and reclusive islands to the modern world. Quickly sensing the inroad made in Asia by the materially superior Western colonial powers, the Japanese decided to modernize and industrialize. The military structure of nobility known as the Samurai was humbled and in its place arose a conscript army. But to become a major player in the world’s largest ocean, naval power was an absolute must. And to insure their primacy as an Asiatic power, Japan opted for a British-trained navy and a Prussian-trained army.[10]
Tokyo embarked on the road to empire with the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Navy easily defeated the outmoded Chinese fleet; while Japanese land forces drove Chinese troops out of Korea, pushed into Manchuria, grabbed the Liaotung Peninsula, Port Arthur and threatened Peking. The Chinese sued for peace. Per the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China turned over to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula, Pescadore Islands and Formosa (Taiwan); and, Japan was accorded most favored nation status as well as reaping navigation rights on the Yangtse and Woosung Rivers. Peking was forced to hand over a large indemnity.
Chinese influence in Korea came to an end. However the Land of the Morning Calm had been cursed with a strategic location that left it “a shrimp among whales,”[11] between China, Czarist Russia and Japan. The latter two would square off on the strategically located peninsula in 1904; with the Japanese emerging as the victor. Tokyo saw fit to annex Korea in 1910, holding on to same until 1945.
But Japan’s victories over China caused her colonial competitors to sit up and take notice. Known to history as the Triple Intervention, France, Germany and Czarist Russia intended to curb the appetite of this upstart contender from the Orient. The trio forced Japan to renounce all claims to the strategically significant Port Arthur and the Liaotung Peninsula.
The national indignation and public backlash in Japan at this loss of face was fierce. In response, the Japanese added 234,000 tons of warships to the Combined Fleet and doubled the size of its army.[12] And in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, the Combined Fleet destroyed Russian naval power in the Far East.
Unlike in 1897, there was to be no loss of face in 1941. As the Imperial Navy thirsted for crude, Burma, Malaya and especially the Dutch East Indies—which in 1941 was the globe’s fourth largest producer of crude—were going to have to be absorbed into the Japanese Empire. This would certainly mean war with the United States. Therefore the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor would have to be destroyed to prevent any interference with Tokyo’s plans for expansion.
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European Civil War
On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, with Joseph Stalin’s connivance, steamrollered Poland.[13] After which, targeted nations fell like ninepins to the Wehrmacht: Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and Cyprus. North Africa was invaded and the Atlantic became infested with Hitler’s U-boats. . . By the fall of 1940, Hitler virtually controlled Europe from the English Channel to the Soviet frontier, and from the North Cape to the Mediterranean. Thus far, the only real setback to the German agenda for conquest had been the Luftwaffe’s defeat at the hands of the Royal Air Force during the battle of Britain. Despite this victory, Britain did not pose a threat to Nazi Germany. So a quick campaign in the East would be the only active front in Europe . . . provided it was over quickly. So on June 22, 1941, Hitler tore up the nonaggression pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union.
Operation: BARBAROSSA opened the greatest land war in history; a titanic clash which would decide the course of the land campaign for the entire Second World War; an issue not decided in the Pacific, North Africa, Sicily, Italy or in France. Even after Normandy, France was a secondary front.
Hitler hurled 139 divisions, 3,300,000 men against the Soviet colossus. The first day, the Luftwaffe destroyed 1,400 Soviet aircraft, 600 the next. In forty-eight hours, the frontline strength of the world’s largest air force had been eradicated. The first day, three Soviet infantry divisions had been wiped out and another five cut to pieces. One-hundred thousand troops were gone from the Soviet order of battle. In a week, Heinz Guderian, the great German armored theorist was one-third the way to Moscow, some 200 miles deep inside the Soviet Union. In two weeks, the Soviets have more dead than America will lose in the entire war. In a month, the Germans had captured an area twice the size of their own country.
By November, Hitler’s frozen legions were besieging Moscow, slowly closing their pincers round the historic capital. But on the night of December 4-5, 1941, General Georgi Zhukov unleashed a massive counterattack against Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s exhausted Army Group Center. On a front that would eventual extend some 600 miles across, and in temperatures trending some 35 to 40 degrees below zero, the Red Army threw the Germans back, in some areas more than 100 miles from the spires of the Kremlin. Two days later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Up to this point, the war, for the most part, had been a European Conflict. True, Japan had invaded China in 1937, a conflict largely confined to the vastness of China. The European conflict had been on a far grander scale, waged on land, sea and air. Yet the European conflict did not start on September 1, 1939; rather, August 4, 1914.
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World War I, AKA the Great War, was for all intents and purposes a European civil war. It was fought for European issues. Colonialism for one, since most of the major actors were White, Christian, colonial powers from Europe. There was also the great naval race. In 1914, most of the major naval powers were again European. And the weapon of choice was the battleship. The Great Battleship Race, from the mid-1890s to the maturation of the aircraft carrier, was the world’s first modern strategic arms race; for the battleship was the epitome of weaponry at this stage of the Industrial Revolution.
Another catalyst for conflict was the competition among the monarchs of Europe; a closed club of royal relations linked by marriage, among which were the Hanovers, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, Romanovs . . . For instance, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was cousin to Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who in turn was married to Alexandra of the German House of Hesse-Darmstadt; and they were related to Edward VII and later George V of England. In fact, Queen Victoria was Wilhelm II’s grandmother; a restricted clique of aristocratic inter-breeding which spawned among them, bastardized offspring who indulged their imperialistic whims by playing Monopoly on a real map board with real buildings, deciding the fate of millions. A Mafia-style arrangement which, in the end, proved lacking as a prophylactic to the Guns of August.
But in 1918, this princely house of cards collapsed. Dynasties which had existed for centuries suddenly vanished; the resulting voids filled by such despotic regimes as the Bolsheviks of Russia; the Fascists in Italy; the Nazis in Germany; Spain would eventually fall to Franco and his Fascists; the Hapsburg Empire dissolved, producing in Eastern and Central Europe states rife with nationalist grievances. Like the royals of Europe, the Ottoman Empire died miserably in a 20th century world in which it did not belong; and from its decrepit bones would rise a Middle East sired by the colonial avarice and greed of the British and French, bequeathing to us the tragic consequences of the murderous upheaval which plagues us today. While in the Far East militant Fascism tightened its grip on Asia’s member of the syndicate of imperialists, Japan.
The controversial covenant by the Big Four in 1919 proved woefully deficient. More than that, ineffectual as a firewall to future conflict. Indeed, it is not an injudicious thing to say that the Versailles Treaty is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on modern Man. Creating that incubator of grievances that would feed on a host of perfidy and deceit until it festered into mutations of the most violent type. That hiatus known as the interwar period would come to an ignominious end on September 1, 1939, when that vulgar Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, jumpstarted the European civil war, with, of course, the connivance of Joseph Stalin.
But Hitler would lose his bid for victory in the European civil war before the frozen gates of Moscow; which together with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, transformed the conflict fought chiefly on the European continent into one which would become a global struggle; a titanic clash which proved beyond the means of Germany, Italy and Japan. For the Axis Powers were armed for breadth not depth.
From 1942 on, the war became dominated not by the old line European colonial powers as in 1914-1918, but by outsiders, the United States and the Soviet Union. The two great powers—both ostracized from European politics in 1919, the United States because of the overwhelming sentiment to indulge the popular American pastime known as isolationism; while Russia had been shunned because it had fallen prey to godless Communism. But it would be, in the end, these two monoliths which had in abundance the three ingredients necessary to wage modern conventional war on a mammoth scale:
1) Large Populations: A requirement necessary to recoup staggering losses. The was particularly true with regards to the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, the U.S.S.R. began the war with a population of some 196.7 million. By May 7, 1945, upwards of 25,000,000 were dead. Compare this with the United States which began the war with 132 million people and go on to incur 405,399 dead. These statistics are all the more relevant when one understands that it was the Soviet Army which decided the land campaign by destroying the German Army. 12.7 percent of the of the Soviet population had been consumed in this maximum effort; while the American rate of loss was mere one-third of one percent of its total population. And considering what America got out of the war, many generals and admirals would certainly exchange one-third of one percent of their population to advance their nation from the status of being a global power to that of a superpower.
2) Large Industrial Infrastructures: The economic dynamo that was America was certainly without equal . . . that is, once the conversion from a peacetime to a wartime economy had been achieved. For what other nation in the world could pump out—from landing craft to flattops—71,062 naval vessels; 295,429 aircraft; 102,371 armored fighting vehicles; 2,455,964 trucks; 5,425 cargo vessels. To go on would be redundant, for the label Arsenal of Democracy was not an empty phrase.[14]
However it is certainly a mistake to sell the Soviet Union short. Stalin understood that in 1914, when Czar Nicholas II went to full mobilization, that Czarist Russia, of all the major powers that had blundered into the Guns of August, was the least industrialized, least organized, least prepared for war. This, Stalin thought, as not going to happen on his watch. For he understood the limitations of the Versailles Treaty, and, knew more war was on the horizon; and when it dawned, the Motherland would be ready. So in 1927, after having defeated Leon Trotsky in the duel to become Lenin’s heir, he began his program of forced industrialization.
Stalin brought in engineers from the United States, Britain and France. He mercilessly squeezed the peasants for their grain and livestock for export in an effort to raise hard currency, as he sought to transform the Bolshevik agenda of Proletarian Revolution to that of a Stalinist Revolution of State Capitalism. Focus was on heavy industry, such as tractor factories to modernize Soviet agriculture. Tractor factories, of course, could be transformed into producing the tractors of war, tanks. However by 1941, Stalin had transformed the Soviet Union from a backward peasant economy to a major industrial power. And this is borne out by statistics:
In 1942, Nazi Germany produced 5,997 tanks and assault guns.[15] Meanwhile a torrent of armor poured off Soviet assembly lines. In 1942, 24,668 tanks and assault guns, 13,500 of which were the effective T-34/76,[16] had more than replaced the staggering losses of 1941. Like the United States, much of the Soviet industrial production was beyond the range of the Luftwaffe, concentrated as it came to be in the Ural Mountains and beyond.
3) Indigenous Supplies of Oil: Oil revolutionized warfare during the 1914-1918 chapter of the global conflict; but, came to dominate war in 1939-1945. The United States and the Soviet Union were largely self-sufficient with regards to crude; as opposed to the Axis Powers which were starved by comparison.
The United States was literally awash in crude. So much so that it supplied six of every seven barrels of oil burned by the Allies during the war.[17] Rarely is this ever mentioned when weighing and measuring the Arsenal of Democracy. For the Soviets, in 1941, production amounted to 33 million tons. Hitler’s invasion of the Caucasus did adversely impact Soviet production. Just under 22 million tons was produced in 1942, followed by 18 million tons the following year. 1944 saw a slight uptick to 18.3 million tons with 19.4 million tons available in 1945. The decline from 1941 was obvious; but still, the Soviets managed to pump enough oil for their war effort.[18]
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The Great War
1914-1922; 1931-1945
Historians have seen fit to separate the global struggle waged in the first half of the 20th century as World War I and World War II; when in reality, they are one in the same conflict. And since this is so, the phrase,” Great War,” is appropriate, spanning as it does the years 1914-1922; 1931-1945.[19] Historical precedent is at work here with the Great French War, comprised as it was by the French Revolutionary Wars, 1792-1802, followed by the Napoleonic Wars, 1803-1815. The Hundred Years War provides an additional perspective; featuring Britain and France engaging in numerous bouts of bloodshed for control of the French throne; the result of which was a locust-like devastation of the French countryside and centuries of enmity aggravated by almost every British monarch laying claim to the French throne till the 19th century.
The Great War of the 20th century did not last 100 years, as opposed to dominating much of the period spanning 1914 to 1945. But unlike the Continent-wide conflict of the 14th and 15th centuries, the modern-day struggle began as a European civil war before escalating into a global struggle. A global struggle which saw to the demise of the British and French colonial empires. France, as a formidable player on the world scene, was not humbled at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 or in Algeria in 1962. Rather in June 1940, when Hitler’s panzers shocked the world by humiliating Germany’s historic foe in just six weeks; and in so doing, bringing an end to the Third French Republic. The end of France’s days of glory was epitomized in the infamous railway car at Compiegne in 1940, not the Geneva Accords in 1954.
It was fitting, though, that the last power standing was Britain, the sole European power of consequence by 1945; yet whose ranking amid the Grand Alliance was of a limited variety at best, and one that would certainly would not have been possible without the Big Two, the United States and the Soviet Union. It other words, Britain was little better than a penny waiting for change.
Britain’s tragic freefall from that of the preeminent arbiter of power to the penurious circumstances of an also-ran, showcased the demise of European imperialism, fast receding in the wake of America’s meteoric rise from global power to superpower; a status which had enabled Americans to reap a balance of payments bonanza resulting in more than three-quarters of the world’s gold, some $29 billion by 1945. And Britain? Still one of the prestigious powers in the world in 1940; yet a creditor nation of $16 billion became a debtor nation of $12 billion by 1945, with a paltry $12 million in gold reserves.[20] This set in motion an America ready to embark on an agenda of foreign policy befitting a nation which had emerged from Man’s greatest conflict virtually untouched and intact; and, chomping at the bit to exact its over-preponderance of political, economic and financial power. As foreign policy guru George Kennan observed in 1948 . . .
. . . The U.S. has about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6% of its population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction . . .
. . . We should dispense with the aspiration to be “liked” or to be regarded as the repository of high-minded altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brother-keeper and refrain from, offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.[21]
The other big winner of the Great War was in a less advantageous position. Her industry tucked neatly into the Urals had emerged intact; but the population had been grievously wounded. Of the estimated 25,000,000 dead from forty-seven months of the most horrendous bloodletting of the war, most were males. For instance, in 1941, the ratio of men to women in the Soviet Union was 9.1 to 10. By 1946, the proportion stood at 6.5 to 10,[22] the result of which saw 10.2 million more women than men in the Soviet Union by 1946.[23] The prime age group of males required to rebuild the country and regenerate the population had been savagely mauled. In addition, it is estimated that upwards of 70,000 hamlets, villages and towns that had existed on June 21, 1941, had been wiped from the face of the earth by May 7, 1945.[24] World conquest, then, was a top priority of the Soviet Union on V-E Day? Hardly, but security was. Hence the Georgian chieftain’s intransigence about withdrawing the Soviet armies from Eastern and Central Europe. For Stalin, like Mr. Putin today, understood history, something which seems beyond the cognitive powers of many Americans. Note the brief progression below:
1) In 1914, Hohenzollern Germany invaded Romanov Russia.
2) A newly-minted Poland invaded Bolshevik Russia during the 1919-1921 Russo-Polish War.
3) And then the big one, June 22, 1941, Operation: BARBAROSSA.
In the course of 35 years, Russia lost more than 30,000,000 people from incursions through Eastern and Central Europe.[25]
The final words rest with Stalin, per Milovan Djilas in his Conversations With Stalin:
This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. Then the generalissimo added, If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not even a finger! . . . Stalin then concluded with thoughts on the Germans, . . . they will recover, and very quickly. That is a highly developed industrial country with an extremely qualified and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on their feet again. And this is why the unity of Slavs is important. . . [26]
* * * * *
The battle of Moscow and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were the harbingers of an irrevocable change in the global dynamics of power. As the champion practitioners of Total War, the United States and the Soviet Union bounced back to utterly destroy their antagonists and go on to forge a New World Order. The results of this transformation were ably summed up by George Kennan and Joseph Stalin. The former penned, with accuracy, the post-1945 Washington agenda of Pax Americana; while the latter was able to fulfill, at the expense of his neighbors, the age-old Czarist agenda of security and empire. Such is the strategic essence of Pearl Harbor and Moscow.
Endnotes
[1] Maine at 6,682 tons and Texas at 6,315 tons were not battleships, rather armored cruisers. The first actual battleship of the United States Navy was Indiana, 10,288 tons and was commissioned on November 20, 1895. Indiana was the first American pre-dreadnought battleship.
[2] The loss of the Maine has been open to much conjecture. Generally it is accepted that the warship was the victim of an internal explosion as opposed to attack or sabotage; and that includes Cuban insurgents seeking to enlist an American entry into the war as an enemy of Spain.
[3] See pages 74 and 75, Chapter V, “The United States Navy Joins the Battle, September-December 1941,” The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1943, by Samuel Eliot Morison.
[4] See page 560, Chapter Six, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942, by Clay Blair.
[5] See page 144, Chapter VI, “Accepting the Challenge,” The Reluctant Belligerent, by Robert A. Devine.
[6] The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a doctrine championed by Tokyo, an attempt at Oriental unity with a message that was as simple as it was direct, Asia for Asians; that together Orientals must rid the Far East of the accursed White Christian colonial powers. And it would be the Yamato Race that would lead the way to independence. Of course, Japan’s Asian neighbors would, in reality, be trading one overseer for another. Not too unlike the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1945, as Stalinism filled the void left by a defeated Nazi Germany; lending form to the 1846 warning of Czech journalist, Karel Havlicek, “Beware the Pan-Slav flood.” See pages 155-159, Reading No. 17, “Havlicek: “The Danger of Pan-Slavism,” Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, by Hans Kohn.
However . . . let us not abandoned the idea of Asia for Asians. For with the demise of the Japanese and British Empires, plus the eviction of the Dutch and the coming collapse of the French colonial system, Revolutionary Nationalism would go on the march, the poster child expression of which was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh. The potential of this and other agendas was expressed in a confidential 1945 OSS analysis: “Whether or not the Japanese are ever to make another attempt at establishing a GEA [Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere], the dream of a Pan-Asia, an Asia for Asiatics’ will undoubtedly hold a potent appeal for the people of Asia.” Current Intelligence Study Number 35, Office of Strategic Services, 10 August 1945.
[7] Japanese troops first entered northern French Indochina, September 22-26, 1940.
[8] According to Article I, “The citizens or subjects of each of the High Contracting Parties shall have the liberty to enter, travel and reside in the territories of the other to carry on trade, wholesale and retail, to own or lease and occupy houses, manufactures, warehouses and shops, to employ agents of the choice, to lease land for residential and commercial purposes, and generally to do anything incident to or necessary for trade upon the same terms as native citizens or subjects, submitting themselves to the laws and regulations there established.” See pages 406 and 407, “The Validity of Treaties in Japan,” California Law Review, September 1943, by Gordon Ireland.
[9] Abrogation by the United States of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation Between the United States and Japan signed February 21, 1911, The Secretary of State to the Japanese Ambassador (Horinouchi), from Cordell Hull, Washington, July 26, 1939.
[10] “The model first chosen for the Japanese Army was that of France; but following France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870-71, Prussian military instructors took over in the later 1870s. The Royal Navy was chosen as the model for the nascent Japanese Navy, and naval officers, including the future Admiral Togo, were sent to England to study and train, while warships were ordered from British shipyards.” See page 7, “introduction,” The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, by Geoffrey Jukes.
[11] Korean proverb, “a shrimp among whales,” see page 4, II, “The Land of Korea,” Korea: The Land of the Broken Calm, by Shannon McCune.
[12] See pages 96 and 97, Chapter 3, “Rengo Kantai,” Power at Sea: The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918, by Lisle A. Rose.
[13] For an in-depth look into the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23-24, 1939, as a prelude to the demise of Poland, see “Pact of the Devils,” World War II History, June 2015, by Mark Albertson
[14] See pages 88-91, Chapter I, “Industrial Mobilization,” by Alan Gropman, The Big ‘L,’ American Logistics in World War II, 1997.
[15] See page 212, Appendix 3, German Tanks of World War II, by F.M. von Senger und Etterlin.
[16] See pages 64 and 180, “Soviet AFV Production,” Russian Tanks, 1900-1970, by John Milsom.
[17] See page 49, “Our lethal Dependence on Oil,” Lt. (jg.) Douglas L. Marsh, USN, June 2010.
[18] See page 128, Chapter 7, “Hitler’s Last Hurrah: Kursk 1943,” Stalin’s Keys to Victory, by Walter D. Dunn, Jr.
[19] The European colonial powers started the Great War and drew into its swirling vortex, nations from around the globe, including the United States, which assisted Britain and France with removing Hohenzollern Germany from the club of Imperialist Powers. But at the same time, the economic and financial dynamo, the United States, showcased that impending eclipse of global dominance by the New World at the expanse of the Old World.
Armistice Day, November 11, 1918 and the consummation of the Versailles Treaty, June 28, 1919, stopped the fighting only in Western Europe. 1919, German Freikorps were not only cracking down on the Left in Germany, but engaging vengeful Czechs and Poles on the Fatherland’s Eastern frontier. 1918-1921, the Russian Civil War erupted. 1919-1921, the Russo-Polish War, as Poles desired more land from their neighbors than perhaps was to be provided by the Versailles Treaty, while at the same time, acting as a proxy force for London and Paris, hopeful for the destruction of Bolshevism; in addition to the Poles murdering Jewish people by the bushel on their sojourn through war torn Ukraine.
In the Middle East, the demise of the Ottoman Empire led to London and Paris, seeking to fill the resulting political void by adding to their colonial holdings, naturally at the expense of indigenous Arabs by scratching borders through clannish associations, tribal affiliations, religious differences and ethnic passions; therefore, bequeathing to the future generations a Pandora’s Box of antipathy, enmity and malice that has lasted to the present day. In 1919, Syrians rose up to throw off the French overseer. In 1920, Sunnis, Shias and Kurds took up arms in newly-minted Iraq to evict the ubiquitous and parasitic British. In 1919-1922, Turks led by Kemal Ataturk, freed Anatolia from the scourge of a 20th century crusade by such unprincipled Christian powers as the Greeks, Italians, French and British. And at the same time, lanced those boils of imperialist machinations known as Kurdistan and Armenia.
In addition, blocks of Western troops and Japanese were in Russia following the implementation of “peace.” By the early 1920s, they were gone. But the notion of the Great War being over by 1918, not a bit of it. For Japan will invade Manchuria, September 1931. Italy will attack Abyssinia, 1934. Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty, 1936. The tune up to 1939 in Europe broke out in 1936, the Spanish Civil War. Japan invaded China, July 1937. 1938, Hitler absorbed Austria into the new German Reich and sliced the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1838, following up this performance by dismembering the rest of the prostrate Czech-Slovak state in March 1939. Then the Fuhrer invaded Poland, September 1, 1939 . . . and a war that started in 1914 had been jumpstarted in 1939. And Man’s greatest industrialized, corporatized, commercialized war would not end until 1945.
[20] See page 337, Chapter 17, “Global Imperialism,” The Forging of the American Empire: A History of American Imperialism From the Revolution to Vietnam, by Sydney Lens.
[21] See pages 524 and 525, Foreign Relations, 1948, Volume I, Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy Planning Study 23, VII. Far East, Report by the Policy Planning Staff, Top Secret PPS/23, February 24, 1948.
[22] See page 1, “Uncounted Costs of World War II: The Effect of Changing Sex Ratios on Marriage and Fertility on Russian Women,” by Elizabeth Brainerd.
[23] See page 5, Brainerd.
[24] See page 349, Chapter 17, “Global Imperialism,” The Forging of the American Empire: A History of American Imperialism From the Revolution to Vietnam, by Sydney Lens.
[25] To lend additional weight to the Russian argument, there is the Anglo-French incursion into the Crimea during the Crimean War, 1853-1856; and, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Such events are something to which Americans are clueless. However, if the United States’ southwest had been invaded three times in thirty-five years, Mexico today would hardly be a sovereign state. Indeed, the American border would be on the Guatemalan frontier.
[26] See page 114, Chapter II, “Doubts,” Conversations With Stalin, by Milovan Djilas.
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