Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [92]
Nor did American military power ever reach full strength. Ironically, in one of the richest and most populous countries of the world, the actual burden of combat was borne by a relatively small percentage, not just of the population, but even of the armed forces. In 1941, the U. S. Army estimated that global war would require it to produce a total of 213 combat divisions. The army never came near it. The demands of navy, air force, support services, and domestic war industry prevented the ground forces from mobilizing more than ninety-one divisions in the course of the war. Germany mobilized 300, Russia about 400, and even Japan produced more than the United States did. On the United States’ side, the hard business of doing the real fighting in the war was done by a surprisingly small number of men.
With all this, the Americans still, toward the end of the war, surpassed the waning strength of Great Britain, and usurped her dominance of the western alliance. As late as mid-1944, there were more British troops than American fighting in Europe, but by the end of that year, it was the Americans, and American views of what the end of the war should bring, that were taking over.
There has been a great deal of argument over American leadership and war aims, and one of the earliest commentators on them, the Australian writer Chester Wilmot, set the stage by charging that American naivete and shortsightedness gave away the victory. Wilmot in The Struggle for Europe accused the Americans of being babes in the wilderness, and of allowing Stalin and the Russians to carry off all the prizes of the war. The argument does not seem wholly tenable a generation later; much of what Wilmot said the Americans gave away now looks like things that the Russians had already taken anyway, and because of the dictates of strategic geography could hardly have been prevented from taking.
Even setting all that aside, two things told against American handling of the political aims of the later part of the war. One was the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was pre-eminently a domestic politician; in spite of his favoring the Allies before the United States became a belligerent, in spite of his growing interventionism, he still thought largely in American terms, and appeared somewhat simplistic in his view of world affairs. He believed imperialism was undesirable and therefore was not disposed to spend any effort on recreating the British Empire. He may have been right, but he also believed the Russians at bottom were not much different from the Americans, and that they could be dealt with. His background was such that he had little in common with Joseph Stalin.
The second fact was that as the United States assumed increasing leadership, Roosevelt was a dying man. He had for many years waged an exhausting and courageous battle against polio, but by 1944 his illness and the incredibly heavy burden of office were perceptibly wearing him out. In few other states of the world would a political leader in his condition have continued to function as actively as Roosevelt did, and he compounded the difficulty by confiding very little in his potential successor after 1944, Vice-President Harry S Truman.
One of Roosevelt’s problems was that of producing credible, acceptable war aims. The United States was not in acute danger of invasion—though after Pearl Harbor it thought it was. The enemy was distant, and until Pearl Harbor most Americans had a hard time believing that the Japanese, or even the Germans, were a real threat to them. After December 7, most Americans wanted to jump in with both feet and beat up the Japanese, and then go on to the Germans. As noted earlier, the government had already decided that Germany should be defeated first, and then Japan. Though this was not a major problem, it was certainly a minor complication to American strategy. For overall war aims, however, Americans, dealing with a distant war, were forced to generalize what they wanted to achieve. It was not enough to defeat Germany and Japan militarily, they must be destroyed so they