Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [21]
Stalin had the same internal problems other dictators had, and he sought the same kind of solutions. Potential rivals accused of “Trotskyism” were put on trial late in 1936. Throughout the next year possible rivals were arrested and tried in a series of affairs that were called the “Purges.” They reached their height in June when Marshal Michael Tukhachevski, the victor of the Polish War, was executed after a secret court-martial. He and other top officers were accused of plotting with the Germans and the Japanese. The purges eventually did away with most of the higher echelons of the civil, diplomatic, and military service—and most of the men who might have challenged Stalin for power. These affairs seriously discredited Russia abroad; they also politicized the army, which would really pay the price for them in 1940 and 1941.
They further added to the difficulty for western observers in assessing Russia, so that by the time Hitler was ready to move, Russia remained a question mark. Nobody knew what she was worth, or how much she might be counted upon. In central Europe there was an added complication; from the Baltic to the Balkans, they were as scared of the Russians as they were of the Germans.
No one, on the other hand, was scared of the United States. She was far away from the center of things viewed by European eyes, and except for her navy was practically unarmed. Americans spent about 1 percent of their annual budget on all their military forces. There was no conscription for the army and no independent air force. In 1936, the U. S. Army consisted of 110,000 men. The War Department believed it could mobilize for war and call up what reserves it possessed in a month. If it had done so, the force would have been short of trucks, tanks, scout cars, antiaircraft equipment, machine guns, and machine-gun ammunition. In short, the United States hardly had an army.
This was no more than the reflection of the recent past. The United States had probably been the one state to benefit unequivocally from World War I. She had successfully resisted pressure to join overtly in it until 1917. Before then the Americans had produced masses of military material for, and invested large amounts of money in, the Allied cause. In 1917, mostly because of German strategic mistakes about their ability to win the war with submarines, the United States had entered the war. American troops did not reach the front until late in 1917, and they did not fight in large numbers until 1918. The U.S. sustained 109,000 battle deaths, about the same as Bulgaria, and less than half those suffered by Belgium. In 1918, they arrived in France in a flood, and they and their wealth were enough to tip the balance, and give victory to the exhausted Allies.
There were paradoxes in this situation that would come home to haunt the next generation. The Americans believed they had won the war, and in a sense they were right: without the contribution they made, partly in manpower but more in matériel, the Allies almost certainly would have collapsed before Germany did. Yet the Americans had won the war only because Britain and France—and Russia—had fought so hard and so long. World War I was like a tag-team match in which all of the opponents were staggering on the ropes, some of them already beaten, when a fresh player leaped in at the last moment, knocked out the enemy, and then having done little of the work, threw up his hands and shouted, “I won!”
Having won, the Americans went home again.
This was all right as long as the euphoria of victory lasted. Europeans were glad of American help, they recognized its significance, and after it was over, they were glad to have the Americans out of the way so they could return