Inferno - Max Hastings [417]
The United States was the only belligerent which emerged from the war without a sense of victimhood. Most of its people took pride both in their contribution to Allied victory and in their new status as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. It was characteristic of American romanticism that a war which the United States joined only because it was attacked by Japan evolved during the ensuing forty-five months into a “crusade for freedom.” Thanks to Pearl Harbor, fewer of Roosevelt’s people questioned the justice of their cause than in any other war their country has fought. “It was the last time most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualification,” said Pfc. Robert Lekachman.
Americans sustained a highly effective operational relationship with the British, a notable achievement given the difficulty of sustaining alliances, together with mutual suspicions and differences of national outlook. The partnership worked best at the bottom, where British and American personnel collaborated amicably, and worsened progressively towards the summit of commands. Americans nursed a repugnance towards imperialism which intensified when some witnessed it at first hand in Egypt, India and Southeast Asia. They cherished a hubristic belief in their own virtue, and consciousness of their own dominance. In 1945, Congress’s brutally abrupt closure of Lend-Lease reflected an absence of sentimentality about Churchill’s nation; opinion polls showed Americans more willing to forgive Russia’s Lend-Lease debt than Britain’s. Relations between the two nations might have deteriorated thereafter, but for new imperatives created by the acknowledged menace of the Soviet Union. The rapidly evolving confrontation between East and West caused the United States to accept the necessity of sustaining its alliance with Britain and other European nations, somewhat to subdue its anti-imperialist scruples, and to offer the stricken Continent a portion of its vast war profits to aid economic resurrection.
Whatever Stalin’s limitations as a military commander and his monstrous record as a tyrant, he presided over the creation of an extraordinary military machine, and pursued his objectives to triumphant fulfilment. In 1945, the Soviet Union seemed the only nation which had achieved its full war aims, creating a new eastern European empire to buffer its frontiers with the West, and securing important footholds on the Pacific coast. Former U.S. secretary of state Sumner Welles reported an alleged 1943 exchange between Stalin and Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary. The Russian leader said: “Hitler is a genius, but doesn’t know when to stop.” Eden: “Does anybody know when to stop?” Stalin: “I do.” Even if this conversation was apocryphal, the words reflected the reality that Stalin shrewdly judged the limits of his outrages against freedom in 1944–45, to avert an outright breach with the Western Allies, most importantly the United States. He kept just sufficient of his promises to Roosevelt and Churchill—for instance, by staying out of Greece and evacuating China—to secure his conquests in eastern Europe without precipitating a new conflict. But the Soviet Union was deluded by its military and diplomatic triumphs into a false perception of their significance. For more than forty years after 1945, it sustained an armed threat to the West at ruinous cost; the economic, social and political bankrutpcy of the system Stalin had created was eventually laid bare.
The Russians emerged from the war conscious of their new power in the world, but also embittered by the colossal destruction and loss of life they had suffered. They believed, not mistakenly, that the Western Allies had purchased cheaply their share of victory, and this perception reinforced