A simple moral dilemma:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This post is intended to be along the lines of Mahnmut's What Would You Do posts, with a slight difference.

For this OP, there is no "Don't make any choices" option.



The choice is this one: you are FDR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi Empire has just invaded the Soviet Union, rightly despised by anyone who loves liberty. What do you do?

1) Do you simply sit on your hands and hope both destroy each other, avoiding also siding with the arch-colonialist timewarped Victorian, Churchill? This option means that while the USSR won't be destroyed, the result will be Europe from the Rhine to Vladivostok will resemble either Somalia or the DRC right now. Both regimes are gone, but what replaces them is total and complete chaos.

2) Aid the UK without aiding the USSR, in the hopes that democracy will survive and that the totalitarians destroy each other? The primary difference between this option and Number One is that the USA and UK prepare to fight a long, vicious, savage war without any certainty of the kind of opposition that would be faced. This assumption also leaves unsolved the problem that the USSR will be extremely angry about this and have something of a moral justification for its evil system spreading.

3) Sign full, official treaties with the USSR ratifiying its possessing spheres of influence in Europe, in attempts to moderate the USSR and to ensure a society that is dedicated to the wholesale subversion of all other states has to act like a regular state. Recognize the claims of the Soviet Union to the Baltic States and the Curzon Line, as well as the 1940 borders with Finland, as well as establishing a postwar mutual division of Germany.

4) What was done historically, give the USSR what it asks for in Lend-Lease, and wait for the other shoe to drop and the real face of the Georgian Devil to be revealed, however given that the atomic bomb is not a certainty, bargain with the USSR to avoid an endless, prolonged land war in Asia. When the Bomb shows up, use them twice to cut the war short and force the USSR to accept limits with what it's gained.

5) Something else.

Personally I think the historical actions of FDR were as good as was reasonably possible. When the British were driven out of France, Greece, Crete, and into the interior of Egypt there was no reasonable chance either the UK or USA would have enough troops in Europe before the USSR made most of its major gains. The best pattern was to try to contain the USSR and win against it without fighting, as this meant that by any ordinary measure one evil will be the big winner against another evil, meaning there must be other means to contain it short of a new major shooting war. Short of magic powers, this could not be changed. However it's not a choice I'd want to be in a position to make, which is why I excluded any such option out of the starting gate.



What would you do in FDR's position?

Comments

[koken23.livejournal.com]

Historically, the war would not have been won by the Allies without Soviet involvement. As distasteful as Stalin was, as problematic as the system was...Hitler would not have been defeated by 1945 if not for getting trapped in the clusterfuck that was the entire Russian front. He might have been defeated later, but that's no certainty, and getting to that point would have been an utter bloodbath on a scale unlike anything we've ever seen.

Like it or not, the Allies would have to work with the Soviets somehow or else bear the full brunt of everything that had been thrown at the Russian front descending on them instead. Britain and its commonwealth certainly couldn't have held up under that after the preceding two years. I doubt very much that the Americans could either, certainly not while trying to wage major Pacific campaigns against Japan as well. The war itself is relatively simple - work with Stalin, keep the Russians fighting for as long as possible or Hitler gets exactly the eastern lebensraum he wanted, he gets access to the Russian oilfields/heavy industry/farmland, he gets pretty much all of Europe and a hefty chunk of Asia...and can use that to fuel his war machine pretty much indefinitely and throw it at anyone he likes.

The real difficulty comes AFTER the war, when the internally-recognised authority and to a certain extent international goodwill from winning the "Great Patriotic War" gave Stalin and his mates the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted in territories under their control. The period of so-called High Stalinism dated from post 1945, and relied very much on the memories of WW2 to make the personality cult at its centre survive.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The UK and USA *could* have done it if they were willing to take casualties vastly higher than they did historically and to develop the massive armies needed to do it. Or like the British just saturate Germany with anthrax. The Pacific War was lost by Japan very early on as the USA would have spammed them to death with just the production from the Two Ocean Navy Act alone.

However the problem is that while Hitler's politics were Blood for the Blood God Stalin's were in a sense more dangerous as there was a man that knew how to wheel and deal his way into a lasting variety of evil. So if Hitler wins, Slavs survive......to face God knows how long (from the 1940s POV) under a regime that was known to be rather distasteful and evil even before the M-R Pact. And unless the Republicans want to shell out the money to go marching into Siberia to crush the USSR and liberate the Gulag, the USA and UK have to face the reality that by the time either are in Europe enough to matter the USSR's in a position to win most of the territorial space that's there to win. And that is far from a simple matter, as historically it took almost no time at all for Moscow to revert to its old tricks when the Cold War was over.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Historically, the war would not have been won by the Allies without Soviet involvement

Yeah, I agree 100 percent.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To be sure, but for all that this is so, Stalin and the USSR were still totalitarians and still dedicated to using the Comintern to foster global revolution. Thus democracy is presented with the unpalatable fact that unless it actually decides to fight a huge ground war (which it had no logistics to support) the real winner of WWII will be Communism no matter what it does. And from a 1940s POV, nobody like Commies before WWII, and if they get much of Europe after it.....

[koken23.livejournal.com]

Actually, this is not strictly true. Before the war, most of Europe had at least one socialist-leaning party active and enjoying a certain degree of popular support (especially from urban workers) in the domestic political scene. Most European states had several, from vaguely Marxist leaning-but-not-really social democrats right up to the red-flag-waving Internationale-singing Communist movement itself. The amount of success these parties enjoyed varied considerably by the year, where they were and the hot button issues of the day, but it's not by any means accurate to say that nobody liked the commies at all.

America =/= everyone.

As I said, the problem is not the war itself. Teaming up with the Soviets for what remained of the war was not in itself a bad thing. The Soviet Union had been in a constant state of flux from the moment it was formed, and it's authoritarian tendencies had waxed and waned considerably depending on circumstances - in one decade, you could see it go from the New Economic Policy and almost a free market with some state protections...to mass collectivisation, complete state control, the Five Year Plans and the first of the Great Purges. By 1941, even the purges had begun to wane again, and it wouldn't be completely unthinkable for them to drift back to an acceptable middle-ground in the near future. This is not so unpalatable after all, is it?

The problem is the power and prestige that winning the war gave Stalin and his totalitarian cronies, which allowed them to set up a personality cult based around the "strongman" figure and basically shut down most of the things that might have acted to soften the harshness of the regime. As I say, High Stalinism was a strictly post-war phenomenon, relying very heavily on Stalin's prestige as the victor of a "great patriotic war" to make itself work.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, and Moscow spent that time extending its Purge into those countries and doing things like trying to wreck the Social Democrats. Who understandably didn't like the Soviet Union very much either. The Soviets of course were also despised from the simpler view of the Right that "Stalin is evil", so outside those intent on selling their souls to the Soviet Mephistopheles there really was a very limited at best enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

The problem pretty much is the war. There is no way the Nazis can destroy the USSR, there is no way before 1944 the Western Allies have enough troops and logistics in Europe to matter. This is a logistical factor, it can't be changed one way or the other. So no matter what happens, the Allies are Damned If they Do and Damned if they don't. So in any scenario, once Hitler invades, the USSR gets much more unpleasant.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This isn't quite an accurate view. You see there's a certain problem the WAllies faced that the EAllies did not: the democracies had to conciliate public opinion, and to build mass armies from puny foundations. The Soviets had an enormous reserves system (and their losses in 1941 meant they grew as lavish with firepower as the USA is stereotyped as being from necessity as it was) but they were fighting an overland war.

The USA won't be able to produce anything as much as it did historically fielding a USSR-sized number of divisions, and neither it nor the UK will be able to use any great number of them initially from shipping issues in a two-ocean war. So it's pretty much impossible to say that the democracies having the ability to do this means they could have actually done this before the 1950s.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

This is just bunk man. Sorry. Usually I don't disagree with your history, but the US and A hardly began to generate it's true production potential, much less start to strain at it. The production capacity of the US an A was hardly getting started when the war ended. Considering that our production base was safely out of harm's way, I think it's pretty clear that an uninterruptable base of supply and production factors in very heavily to the equation.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The key phrase was "and produce a USSR-level number of divisions." We did what we did with our industrial base because we imposed a manpower cap that enabled us to retain a great number of trained workers to use *with* an undamaged industrial base. Whether this was equally possible with the kind of manpower conscription required to do this *and* wage a war with the USSR at the same time is an interesting question. It's also useless because the USSR's exhaustion and overstretch would destroy it before anything of that production really mattered.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Oh, well I wasn't talking about fighting the USSR, just Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, where I was referring to the actual nature of that war where the USSR had no choice but to raise a massive army and sustained irreparable losses doing so, where the democracies had a choice, made it, and it worked quite well for them. The WWII numbers game tends to be a wee bit deceptive in some ways.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

So how many divisions of troops is on A-bomb worth?

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

one A-bomb**

[telemann.livejournal.com]

You'll have to ask DOD that.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Somehow I doubt they'd respond to my inquiry.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Bigger fish to fry, ATM.
It was intended as food for thought.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Mmmm irradiated food for thought

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

I think that it's worth more than that.
There's a valuable psychological factor in the A-bomb that is more than it's mere destructive capacity.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Depending on the yield, not as much as you'd think. Hydrogen bombs were by themselves worth armies, but they wouldn't exist until the Cold War and the Balance of Terror was established.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

"What would you do in FDR's position?"

Maybe something like... this

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I think I would have taken a little better care of myself so I could play a stronger hand at Yalta and still be alive for Potsdam and he endgame of the war. Maybe peel off Hungary or Czechoslovakia from the Soviets. Other than that, I think he played his cards pretty well.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Cut/tag, Sir?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Done.

[lai-choi-san.livejournal.com]

4) with a small difference. Big American corporations made a pact with the other devil. In order to pull the rug from under their feet, I would not have recognized the occupied countries' governments (except the ones in exile). The ambiguous game that was played at this level has more benefitted to people like Allen Dulles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Welsh_Dulles#Financial_ties_with_Nazi_Germany), Robert Murphy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Daniel_Murphy) who helped the worst collaborationnists, or the father of venture capitalism Georges Doriot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Doriot) (a mole of pro-nazi financial circles of Vichy) and sadly has contributed to destroy what Roosevelt had built.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that the USSR made a deal with that exact same devil, too. This also neglects the problem of Poland, whose government was in exile, and who in 1939 was invaded by the USSR and put through Soviet, in addition to Nazi, massacres. What does the USA do about this, short of replacing the war against Nazism with a longer atomic war against the USSR? How can it afford to scrap one of the very first Allies to fight Nazism? How can it not afford to do so if the USSR wants Poland?

[lai-choi-san.livejournal.com]

How can it afford to scrap one of the very first Allies to fight Nazism?
This is why I said "except the ones in exile".

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And now the vicious circle: short of following the ugly, grinding, sordid war against Hitler and Tojo with another, even longer one against Stalin, how does one help that government in exile?

[lai-choi-san.livejournal.com]

Do you think it was wise to help Vichy ?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Given without General Juin the Allies would have been held out of Rome until May of 1945, there was some actual benefit from it. Poland's nationalists, unfortunately, proved too trusting of Stalin and paid the price for it.

[lai-choi-san.livejournal.com]

It worked because Juin was not a true collaborationist. As for the Polish, many of them were successful pilots.

My above remark isn't related so much to the military but rather to the financial world of those times and to two-edged strategies of infiltration.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my problem with this post is the choice comes too late--it ignores the fact that U.S. elites helped finance and build up quite a bit of what became the "Soviet problem" all the way from Bolshevism up (see Anthony C. Sutton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_C._Sutton)), which forces a bad situation and thus bad choices to react. Now interesting question is if U.S./U.K. would have had the strength to deal with Nazi Germany if the Soviets had not been so supported and that may indeed have been unlikely, but then again, on the other hand, you have to ask who contributed a great deal toward the buildup of the Reich as well and wonder if that was really necessary either? Three guesses.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Stalin, from ensuring that the KPD and SPD would work at cross purposes, paving the way for Hitler's assuming the plurality of the vote, and in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact partitioned Eastern Europe with Hitller, invading Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for that purpose, allowing Nazi ships to use Soviet ports to evade the Allied blockade, and giving the Nazis the resources they needed to negate said blockade?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Er, quite a few of those corporate elite — Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, IBM's Watson, etc. — built up Hitler, even continuing to support him after war was declared.

Why? Because Hitler really hated the commies, and US corporate types shared that opinion (http://rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of_the_europ.htm).



Re: The above picture: In 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle as a birthday present from Adolph Hitler. He was given the medal in his office in Michigan by two officials from the Third Reich. . . . Ford never returned this medal, even after WWII.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Well apparently, at least in the case of Ford from among those names, the allure of money was greater than their hate for the "commies".

"Up to 1968 the largest motor vehicle plant in the USSR was at Gorki. Gorki produced the chassis for the GAZ-69 rocket launcher used against Israel. Gorki produced the Soviet jeep and half a dozen other military vehicles. And Gorki was built by the Ford Motor Company and the Austin Company - as peaceful trade. In 1968 while Gorki was building vehicles to be used in Vietnam and Israel further equipment for Gorki was ordered and shipped from the U.S."

A.E.G., General Electric. and Metropolitan-Vickers were also all too happy to build up Soviet infrastructure. And Fretz-Moon, Salem, Aetna Standard, Mannesman supply the piping.

Once more Sutton's massive study which he testified of before Congress, "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development" is recommended for further scrutiny, which lists several more key parties.

And then there's the banking interests which contributed to the rise of Bolshevism.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And of course Germany in its "democratic" phase also traded with the USSR, giving it the first steps needed to build its vast tank park and other modern weapons of war. While also engaging in economic trade with it as well. Which is both hilarious and horrifying in hindsight.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Haha, yes indeed!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The savage irony is that the Commies also built up the Nazis, both in terms of smoothing their rise to power and partitioning Europe with them, while ties of re-armament between the Weimar Republic and arming on the part of the USSR went back to 1922. Any argument focusing on US corporations must surely apply moreso to the Treaty of Rapallo and the 1939-41 partition of Europe. It's one thing to trade, but another thing entirely to invade a country together with Hitler and create your own mass graves along with him.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Well...true yes. But the people who knowingly supplied or helped supply a party with the means to create that mass grave are almost just as culpable. They knew what they were doing and who they were doing business with.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

History is not a series of rational choices designed from an abstract set of goals. History is largely being pushed about by circumstance and reacting to shit you never wanted to deal with. So my choice would be: "Whatever I could've done for whatever reasons I came up with at the time, to make me feel like I was in control or had a choice."

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Same.

[404.livejournal.com]

I would have secretly supported each side (USSR/Nazi) until they wound themselves down enough to pick both off when it was the best opportunity to do so.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem is that this means defeating the Nazis (which historically required years and the USSR doing most of the bleeding bit) *and then* going off on an invasion of Russia *after* the first go-round with the Blood For the Blood God-style manchildren. Whatever else could be said about Stalinism, it was not as clumsy and bumbling as Nazism, and actually conquering European Russia alone would be a bitch and a half.