Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [91]
His war aims and those of his country were fairly straightforward: to put down Germany, to restore a balance of power in which the British were conveniently on the top of the heap, and to preserve the British Empire and Commonwealth, in which Churchill was a fervent believer. Doing that would also preserve the moral and ethical systems which Churchill saw negated in Nazi Germany and Hitlerism and which he devoutly believed were embodied in Britain and her empire. He was, perhaps, the product of an old world of politics and diplomacy, but he represented the best of that old world.
The United States too was conditioned by its immediate past history, and by its experience in the Great War. That experience, however, was far different from Britain’s. The Americans had arrived late and faced a German Army that was on its last legs. Though experience of combat in World War I was one of the keys to command in World War II, American soldiers had fought in numbers only when the war had opened up again in 1918. None of them had the soul-destroying, bone-wearying years in the trenches of the British or the French. Europeans tend to stereotype Americans as big, brash, ebullient, outspoken, and energetic. As with most stereotypes, there is some truth in it, and many Americans saw themselves the same way. In 1918, American divisions were twice the size of British or French ones, and General Pershing fondly remarked of his 1st Division that it was “the best damned division in any army in the world!” He was quite possibly right, but if so, it was because no American unit suffered the more than 3,000-percent casualties that some British regiments had in the course of the war. To many Americans then, even to professional military men with experience of European warfare, the way to fight the war was to get to Europe and beat up the Germans, and then as quickly as possible get on and finish off the Japanese who, after all, were the ones to attack the United States. With a quite different historical experience of World War I from that of the British, Americans developed a quite different view of how World War II ought to be fought.
That divergence of view was compounded by their diametrically opposite situations as the years went on. British strength peaked in the middle years of the war, while the Americans were just beginning to get organized. The long grace period from 1939 to the end of 1941 gave the United States time to gear up its industry, and the demands first of Cash and Carry and then of Lend-Lease provided a shot in the arm to American business, but it takes a long time to design a successful tank or airplane, or build a battleship, and the new materials of war were just beginning to come on the line by the time of Pearl Harbor. The United States armed forces were weak in 1942, and given their worldwide demands, were operating on a shoestring even in 1943.
In the long run, the American economy had much more disposable fat than did the British or Russian or German, however, and as American production finally hit its stride, the United States became a veritable cornucopia of the resources for war. American fighting men had a wealth of equipment and impedimenta that astounded the British, as the British themselves astounded some of the east European refugees, such as the Polish troops who fought in the 8th Army.
So great indeed was the strength of the United States that the country never was completely mobilized for war. Industry was neither as fully controlled nor directed as in Britain, labor was not regulated to the extent it was in other countries, and individual freedoms were much less restricted in America than elsewhere. It is quite probable that had the war lasted another year or so government control would have gone further, but in the event it proved unnecessary. At full production, the American economy could produce and equip huge armed forces, its own as well as those of much of the rest of the world, and still generate some surplus for home consumption.