By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

US hesitancy in joining WWII

As we have seen in the previous part between the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, five days passed during which the future of those disconnected struggles was decided, and every significant power was forced to commit to one of two camps. This interval was the crucible for a new global alignment that would dramatically alter the course of deadly conflict and reverberate far beyond the war. If for Hitler the die was cast, things were still very much uncertain in Washington and London.

In the United States, the initial uncertainty about presenting the war other than as a war of defense was replaced by an internationalism driven by Roosevelt’s view that the wider world should enjoy defined liberties after victory. His moral commitment to creating a better world was already in place well before the United States was forced into war. In January 1941, he defined what he saw as essential freedoms. The Four Freedoms became the foundation stone of the public American wartime narrative about why the war was fought. The Charter itself was a list of eight statements of the intent expressed in lofty internationalist language consistent with much of Roosevelt’s rhetoric on his hopes for a better world.

Roosevelt nonetheless allowed the Charter to become a central reference point once the United States was in the war. It signaled American commitment to a more moral post-war order that served American interests and had global implications. This did not amount to an endorsement of a post-war international organization since Roosevelt was hesitant to suffer the same fate as Woodrow Wilson. By January 1943, he was convinced that American global interests could best be defended through a new international assembly to promote peace and human rights.

Roosevelt’s object was to ensure that the Allies formally occupied the moral high ground whatever contradictions or ambiguities existed in uniting democracies, imperial powers, and authoritarian dictatorships in a joint endeavor. The call for unconditional surrender made at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 underscored the ethical commitments made in the Charter and the Declaration by making it clear that there could be no agreement with states regarded as morally degraded. In January 1942, Roosevelt had already put on record, in his annual State of the Union address, his conviction that ‘there has never been – there never can be – a successful compromise between good and evil,’ a contrast that allowed the Allies to set aside any moral scruples they might have in the conduct of the war.

As the war turned against the Axis, they made greater efforts to find a way to present their justification for war in more international terms. German propaganda from 1943 onwards argued that the war of self-defence was a war to save European civilization from Bolshevik barbarism. Japanese propaganda sought to portray Japan as the savior of Asia from the return of white oppressors. Neither claim was credible in the face of imminent defeat. By 1945 both states fought a final desperate struggle to avoid what they saw as the real prospect of national extinction. The major advantage enjoyed by the Allies in their public justification for war was the adoption of a language of universal rights, while the Axis claims were always for the defence of a particular people and its right to territorial conquest. This contrast was institutionalized in the military tribunals set up in Nuremberg in 1945 and Tokyo in 1946 (though not in Italy, which by 1945 had become an Allied co-belligerent). Churchill and some of his Cabinet had favoured declaring German leaders to be outlaws who could be executed as soon as they were properly identified.1 But both the United States and the Soviet government wanted a formal trial so that the wartime claims of Axis wickedness and Allied justice could be publicly displayed for world opinion. 

In both sets of trials, the principal charge was the waging of aggressive war. Since waging war was not formally contrary to international law, the Allied prosecutors used the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 which sixty-two states eventually signed, including all the major states later involved in the war. The pact was supposed to commit signatories to abandon war as an instrument of policy or be regarded as an ‘offender against the Law of Nations’.2 Although it was treated more as a statement of moral intent than an instrument of international law, it was considered to be robust enough for the case against German and Japanese leaders. The American chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, opened the Nuremberg Trial on behalf of an undefined ‘civilization’ against defendants who were accused of perpetrating calculated, malignant and devastating crimes against the rest of the world. For all the many procedural and judicial problems presented by victors’ justice, the trials were intended to define wars that were unjust and wars that were just. In December 1946 the principles enunciated at Nuremberg were enshrined in international law by the United Nations Organization, successor to the informal wartime United Nations, as a set of seven ‘Nuremberg Principles’, which are still in force in the twenty-first century.3 

 

Axis states understood they occupied the moral low ground

The Axis states understood that in the eyes of most world opinion they occupied the moral low ground. But they were sceptical of the Allied assertion of moral ascendancy. In April 1945, shortly before German defeat, Hitler poured scorn on the ‘puerile’ claims of the United States to superiority, ’a moral vade mecum, which is based on lofty but chimerical principles and so-called Christian Science.’4 Japanese commentators contrasted the democratic rhetoric of the West with the reality of colonial oppression or domestic racism and delighted in reporting every act of imperial repression in India and every lynching or race riot in the United States as evidence of British and American hypocrisy. One newspaper expressed a common view in Japan of American’ barbarism’: ‘If one considers the atrocities which they committed against the American Indians, the Negroes and the Chinese, one is amazed at their presumption in wearing the mask of civilization … ’5 Critics on the Allied side were equally dismissive of what was regarded as special wartime pleading to cover over the moral ambiguity of Allied rhetoric. W. E. B. Du Bois, the veteran campaigner for civil rights in the United States, claimed after the war that ‘There was no Nazi atrocity – concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood – which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world.’6 Above all, the Allied insistence that the post-war trials were a showcase for Axis crimes against humanity and crimes against peace raised the awkward question of how the Western states could make common cause with the savagely repressive dictatorship in the Soviet Union which had conspired with Germany to tear up the post-1919 settlement in Eastern Europe. The apparent incompatibility of an alliance between the two major capitalist states and the one communist one nourished Axis fantasies until the end of the war that the Grand Alliance would fall apart. 

One of the remarkable consequences of the unexpected alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was the capacity of all three major states to set aside for the duration of the conflict the profound political and moral differences between them. Until the deep political and moral differences outbreak of the German-Soviet weather than Hitler’s Germany, and regarded communism, at home and abroad, as a profound threat to the democratic way of life and to democratic values. The German–Soviet Pact of August 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September, and then aggression against Finland in late November 1939, reinforced the view that the dictators were two of a kind. Although there was sympathy for the Soviet experiment in both Britain and the United States among circles regarded as progressive, the prevailing view deplored a regime that could indulge in mass terror, commit acts of aggression, and collaborate with the fascist enemy. With the invasion of Finland, the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, observed a ‘frenzied anti-Soviet campaign’ among public and politicians. ‘The question,’ he wrote in his diary, is ‘who is the No. 1 enemy? Germany or the USSR?’ 7 He watched the angry parliamentary debate about the armistice forced on Finland in March 1940 during which MPs displayed ‘fury … vivid, seething, overflowing fury’.8 Finland proved a turning point for Roosevelt too, and for many pro-Soviet liberals. Stalin’s Soviet Union, the president told an audience late in 1939, was a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world’, and he called for a moral embargo on American export of arms and equipment to meet Soviet needs. He deplored what he called ‘the dreadful rape of Finland’.9 A brief ‘Red Scare’ revived in the United States, but popular hostility to communism was directed more at the Soviet system and at Stalin himself, who was, claimed the Catholic archbishop of Washington, ‘the greatest murderer of men the world has ever known’.10 The international community signalled its moral disapproval by expelling the Soviet Union from the League of Nations on 14 December 1939. There was serious planning in the spring of 1940 in London and Paris for the possibility of conflict with the Soviet Union alongside its new German ally. Roosevelt worried that a German–Soviet victory in Europe would imperil civilization.11

If the Western world regarded the Soviet Union as morally beyond the pale, Soviet leaders were equally harsh in their judgement of the capitalist world beyond Soviet borders. The moral universe they inhabited was divorced from the values of the liberal West, veiled in a language that inverted historical reality. Stalin for years before the outbreak of war in 1939 assumed that at some point the capitalist states were bound by historical necessity to try to destroy the Soviet experiment. Repeated war scares, irrational though they proved to be, kept alive the idea that capitalism was the principal threat to peace and bourgeois leaders the agents of an immoral class repression.12 From this perspective the regime could justify the pact with Hitler in August 1939 as the means to frustrate bourgeois plans to turn German aggression against the Soviet Union, just as the conclusion of the war with Finland was explained to the Communist faithful as ’a victory for the Soviet Union peace policy’ because it pre-empted alleged British and French plans for a global war against the Soviet–German alliance.13 The war in the West was presented as an imperialist war waged by the British and French ruling classes. The British Communist Party was informed from Moscow that it was not fascist Germany but ‘anti-Soviet England, with its enormous colonial empire, which is the bulwark of capitalism’. The ‘liberation’ of the working people of eastern Poland in September 1939 showed, by contrast, that the Soviet Union was a mighty bulwark for all peace loving forces’. During the period of the German pact, the Soviet line consistently maintained that the major enemy was British imperialism, while Germany was regarded as a cause for peace, forced into defensive aggression by the imperialist powers. In late 1940 Stalin even considered the possibility that the Soviet Union might adhere to the Three Power Pact, signed by the Axis powers in September.14 Communist parties everywhere toed the Party line. The British Daily Worker, on the day before it was closed down by the government in January 1941, celebrated the fact that the masses everywhere were ‘seeking the way out of the imperialist war’ through the means of Leninist class struggle.15

The moral condemnation expressed by both sides evaporated with the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Maisky noted a few days after the attack that the British public was bewildered by the change: ‘only recently “Russia” was considered a covert ally of Germany, all but an enemy. And suddenly, within 24 hours, it has become a friend.’16 Churchill famously broadcast on the evening of 22 June his support for the struggle of the Russian people, though he added the caveat that he would take nothing back from his long and consistent opposition to communism. For Churchill, as for many in the West, Hitler was the world’s greatest menace: ‘Any man or State,’ Churchill continued, ‘who fights against Nazism, will have our aid.’ Roosevelt shared the view that the German threat was immediate and greater and set aside his moral concern with Soviet aggression. In one of his regular ‘fireside chats’ to the American radio audience, he claimed that no insoluble differences separated the United States and the Soviet Union: ‘we are going to get along with him [Stalin] and the Russian people very well indeed.’17

In Moscow, the outbreak of war brought an immediate end to the campaign against imperialist capitalism. On the day of the invasion Stalin told the head of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, that the new line was a matter of routing fascism’ and all mention abroad of socialist revolution was to be abruptly ended. By turning the war into a defensive war against fascist barbarism’, Soviet leaders hoped that the powerful wave of Western anti-fascism would immediately identify with the Soviet struggle and lend support.18 In the end, both sides were prepared to use Beelzebub to drive out the German Satan. The resulting collaboration was never easy for either side, but it was driven by military necessity, and by the hope that perhaps communism and capitalism could find some common ground in building a peaceful post-war order.19 The Soviet view of the West was soured by arguments over a Second Front in Europe and the pace of Lend-Lease deliveries; Western goodwill was tested by the many petty restrictions placed on their personnel in the Soviet Union and by the growing evidence that Soviet leaders intended to introduce ‘democracy’ in Eastern Europe on communist terms. Neither side entirely trusted that the other would not reach some agreement with Hitler. But Western leaders turned a blind eye, at least in public, to the record of Soviet aggression between 1939 and 1941 and to Soviet political repression at home and abroad because the central moral imperative shared by all three was the defeat of Germany. 

The willingness of Western leaders to embrace the Soviet Union as a partner and ally was underpinned by a wave of popular support in both Britain and the United States for the Soviet war effort. Some of that enthusiasm was generated by official propaganda, both Western and Soviet. In Britain, this raised awkward questions about how to popularize the Soviet war effort without endorsing its ideology. This was achieved, as Churchill had done in his speech of 22 June, by talking of ‘Russia’ rather than As British Political Warfare Executive, in chargthis was achieved e of political propaganda, was instructed to speak ‘whenever possible of the “Russian Government” instead of the “Soviet Government”’ and to ensure that exhibitions and speeches stressed Russian history, arts, and character, but avoided Russian politics.20 In the United States, the Office of War Information, staffed by liberals generally more favourable to the Soviet experiment, created an idealized, sentimental image of the Soviet Union for the American public, reinforced by feature films that played on Russian heroism – The North Star, Counter-Attack, Song of Russia – and by the mass media. Life magazine in March 1943 told readers that the Soviet people ‘look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’, and made Stalin’ man of the year.’21 The Soviet propaganda effort in the West played on this sentimental view of Russia and the image of Stalin as a man committed to peace and democracy, a view swallowed uncritically by the Western public whose knowledge of Soviet realities was gleaned entirely from the propaganda image. When the bishop of Chelmsford, president of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity, opened a congress in London in November 1944, he talked of the Allies as the ‘three great democracies.’ A second churchman at the congress spoke of the ‘truly religious achievements of the Soviet Government’ and the great contribution the Soviet regime had made ‘to the ethical side of life’.22

Much popular support was nevertheless spontaneous, an exuberant celebration of Soviet resistance to the Axis invasion in contrast to the limited military successes of British and American arms. The recapture of Stalingrad was treated as if it had been a Western victory. Maisky noted in his diary in February 1942 ‘rapturous admiration’ for the Red Army, ‘fervent Sovietophilia’ in June that year, and after Stalingrad universal delight, ‘unreserved and unrestrained.’23 In Britain committees and groups for ‘friendship and aid’ were established across the country from 1941 onwards; by 1944 there were more than 400 of them, organized under the umbrella of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity. It was estimated that around 3.45 million people were represented by organizations working for the Soviet war effort and Soviet amity.24 In the United States the Committee for Soviet–American Friendship played a similar role in mobilizing popular enthusiasm, expressed across America with flag days, traveling exhibitions, and fundraising committees. In both countries to be anti-Soviet was now treated as an act of bad faith, even treasonable. The House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities, established in 1938 under Congressman Martin Dies principally to root out communist subversion, continued its work during the war to a chorus of hostile criticism and accusations of sympathy for fascism. Anti-Sovietism moved from the mainstream before 1941 to the fringes of wartime politics.25

The moral gloss placed on the Soviet Union and its struggle against fascism, both official and unofficial, did not exclude continued mistrust or hostility towards communism, particularly the home-grown movements. In Britain, MI5 (F Branch) continued its close surveillance of the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Soviet Union became an unexpected ally. In 1943 Douglas Springhall, the Communist Party national organizer, was charged with procuring secret information and sentenced to seven years in prison. Herbert Morrison, the home secretary, warned Churchill that extra vigilance was required because of the ‘current sympathy’ for the Soviet cause. Communists, he continued, ‘had no obligation of loyalty to a “capitalist state”.26 Churchill needed little encouragement. Maisky recorded an after-dinner conversation in April 1943 in which Churchill expressed his admiration for Russia but his loathing for its current system: ‘I don’t want communism … If anyone came here wishing to establish communism in our country, I would fight him just as ferociously as I’m fighting the Nazis now.’27 Even the Labour Party, generally more sympathetic to the Soviet cause, published a wartime pamphlet on ‘The Communist Party and the War: A Record of Hypocrisy and Treachery to the Workers of Europe’.28 In the United States, where the Communist movement increased membership to around 100,000, supporters of the Soviet war effort were more wary of the threat that communism might pose at home. Anxious to be perceived as good patriots, the party abolished itself in 1944 and then re-formed as the Communist Political Association, but by then active support for domestic communism was on the wane, as it was in Britain. 

By the last year of the war, on both sides, Western and Soviet, the pre-war view of communism and capitalism as morally incompatible began to resurface. For Soviet leaders, the alliance was always what John Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow, called ’a marriage of expediency’.29 In Moscow there had never been much moral distinction made between the fascist and democratic states, since all were regarded as ultimately tarred with the same capitalist brush. With the imminent defeat of Germany, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov claimed ‘now it is easier to fight capitalism.’ Although Stalin hoped that some form of peaceful co-existence might be possible after the end of hostilities, he assumed by early 1945 that future conflict after the defeat of the fascist faction would be ‘against the faction of capitalists,’ returning the Soviet Union to a familiar confrontation.30 In autumn 1946, Nikolai Novikov, sent to Washington as ambassador to assess American intentions, reported back to Moscow that preparation for future war in the United States is being conducted with the prospect of war against the Soviet Union, which in the eyes of American imperialists is the main obstacle in the path of the United States to world domination.’31

In the United States, the evidence of Soviet unwillingness to establish genuine popular democracy in the states of Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army alienated essential sections of liberal and progressive opinion, which had previously accepted that Soviet rhetoric about peace and democracy was sincere. Louis Fischer, an editor on the left-wing journal The Nation, resigned in May 1945 in protest at his colleagues’ determination to see Britain and the United States as ‘the devils’ and Stalin as ‘the archangel.’ Fischer supplied a long list of Soviet violations of the principles enshrined in the Atlantic Charter as justification for his decision.32 Although Roosevelt reminded his critics that no one had signed or ratified the Atlantic Charter, its spirit was invoked regularly in arguments against uncritical cooperation with the Soviet Union. In 1944 ex-President Herbert Hoover complained that the Charter had been ‘sent to the hospital for major amputation of freedom among nations.’ Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s last ambassador in Moscow, and once a keen advocate of collaboration, warned his chief in 1945 that the Soviet programme ‘is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.’ A few months later, he asked Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, to do what he could to avert a ‘barbarian invasion’ of Europe.33 In the last months of war and the first months of peace, the popular Western honeymoon with the Soviet Union evaporated as both sides understood how difficult it would be to sustain the ‘marriage of expediency.’ 

The blind eye to Soviet violations of peace and human rights nevertheless had to be sustained through the founding of the United Nations Organization and the post-war trial of the major German war criminals, in both of which the Soviet Union played a full and equal part with the other wartime Allies. The Soviet government refused to allow any discussion that touched on the pre-war record of unprovoked aggression against Poland and Finland, or the forcible annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the northern provinces of Romania. The secret protocol to the German-Soviet Pact that divided Poland between the two dictatorships was known to the American prosecution team (it had been supplied to the American ambassador in Moscow in 1939 by a German diplomat), but it was filed away with the word ‘aggression’ scribbled across the top and never used during the trial.34 The Soviet team wanted the crime of conspiracy to wage aggressive war to apply only to the instances of German aggression, not to a universal principle, and the Western prosecutors reluctantly agreed. A special security unit was sent to Nuremberg from Moscow in November 1945 to try to ensure that there would be no mention of Soviet international crimes. So sensitive was the regime that references to German aggression against Poland was eliminated from the Soviet prosecutors’ opening address at the trial, in case it prompted awkward questions. The former Soviet procurator general, Andrei Vyshinsky, ordered Soviet lawyers during the trial to shout down any attempt by the defense or the defendants to raise Soviet complicity in the territorial seizures in 1939–40. The one mention of the Soviet–Finnish war duly brought a noisy Soviet intervention.35 The Allies also agreed, despite Soviet reluctance, to charge the German defendants with ‘crimes against humanity’ to include in the indictment the terror the regime practiced against the German people and the crimes committed against non-Germans, including deportation, forced labor, and mass killings. Here the West was not only blind to the inhumanities of the Stalinist regime but had very little hard information, since an almost impenetrable veil was drawn over the natural treatment meted out to all those deemed to be hostile to or incompatible with the Soviet system, both in the Soviet Union and in the areas occupied in Eastern Europe, and both before the war and at its end. Except for systematic genocide, the Soviet repressive apparatus had engaged in almost all the other crimes against humanity listed at Nuremberg:

Mass deportations to labor and concentration camps on a vast scale.

The operation of camps with a record of abuse and routine death matched the worst camps in the German Empire.

Intolerance to all forms of religion.

None of the liberal freedoms of speech, association, or respect for the rule of law.36

While the Nuremberg tribunal was expressing outrage at the concentration camps of the defeated enemy, the Soviet security apparatus in the Soviet zone of Germany set up an isolation facility in a former German camp at Mühlberg on the river Elbe, where 122,000 German prisoners were sent without trial, of whom 43,000 perished or were killed.37 Between a German camp and a Soviet camp, wrote Anatoli Bakanichev in a private memoir after his experience in both, ‘the differences were only in the details.’38 

The one instance that the West was fully aware of was the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in April 1940 in and around the Katyn forest, because German propaganda had made much of the discovery of the mass graves in 1943. Unknown at the time, the Soviet chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Roman Rudenko, had actually been sent by Stalin to supervise the murder of Polish officers in Kharkhov, because the local NKVD officers proved to be squeamish about committing the crime. The Soviet authorities stuck rigidly to the story that this was a German atrocity. Although the British were almost certain that their ally had committed the offense, it was felt to be politically prudent not to interrogate the evidence too closely (and indeed, the unassailable truth only emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990). Western reticence on this and all the other evidence of Soviet crimes against humanity or war crimes was essential to prevent the German defendants from exploiting a growing rift between the former wartime Allies. Even by 1948, when the split was explicit and the Cold War unavoidable, the Soviet leadership maintained the fiction that they represented a uniquely humane system. In arguments in Paris in 1948 about the drafting of a United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, Vyshinsky suggested that it was an irrelevance as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, since the communist system as the primary agent of popular liberation represented ‘human rights in action’.39 

None of the Western Allies matched the Soviet Union in the brutal way territorial aggression and mass repression were practiced, and in the moral inversions used to justify it. Still, the Axis taunt that they failed to live up to their democratic self-image because of race exposed one of the major fault lines in the moral position assumed by the West, and particularly by the United States, which, in contrast to Britain, placed particular emphasis on defending democratic freedoms. The principal racial issue in America was the long history of discrimination, segregation, and violence directed at the African American minority. The absence of full civil rights and the social endorsement of racial segregation by white communities, predominantly in the southern half of the United States, were issues that the Roosevelt administration avoided in the decade before the war, not least because the president depended on support in Congress from Southern Democrats who resolutely opposed any concessions to the black minority. The call for national unity and defense of freedom, was understood by black leaders as an opportunity to express their frustration with existing inequalities and their hope that war to protect ‘democracy’ would mean their liberation too. The war, declared an optimistic Du Bois, was a ‘war for Racial Equality’.40

In January 1942, the same month that the first wartime lynching took place in Sikeston, Missouri, where 300 spectators watched as a black suspect was doused with five gallons of petrol and burnt to death, the Pittsburgh Courier published a letter from a young black canteen worker, James Thompson, calling on black Americans to fight for ‘the double VV for a double victory.’ He explained that the first V was for victory over America’s external enemies, ‘the second V for victory over our enemies from within.’41 For many, black and white, who opposed the second-class status of African Americans, the war to defend democracy against the dictatorship was hollow without recognizing that democratic ideals had not been extended to non-white minorities. ‘I believe in democracy, so much /That I want everybody in America / To have some of it / Negroes … They shall have some of it’, wrote the poet Rhoza Walker in September 1942.42 Black activists understood that unflattering comparison could be made with German racism at a time when the Roosevelt regime was pledging allegiance to the ‘Four Freedoms’ and the promises expressed in the Atlantic Charter. A wartime civil rights pamphlet in St Louis had the headline ‘LET’S STOP WOULD-BE HITLERS AT HOME – Let’s practice democracy as we preach it, a sentiment echoed throughout the civil rights movement.43 When opinion polls run by the African American press asked if black Americans identified with the lofty ideas expressed by Roosevelt and his government, 82 percent said no.44 The opportunity presented by the war to exploit the moral contrast between official wartime propaganda and the reality for millions of black Americans resulted in a substantial increase in black activism. The circulation of the black press increased by 40 percent during the war; membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Walter White, grew tenfold across the war years; a more radical March on Washington Movement, founded in 1941 by A. Philip Randolph, spread branches across the country.45 The demand for equality long pre-dated the war, but wartime provided an appropriate context to challenge more openly and extensively white assumptions about race. 

The results of the growing activism were mixed. While black protest increased, white intransigence in many cases only hardened. Southern congressmen believed the rising demand for civil rights and economic equality to be a disaster for the country – ‘no greater menace,’ as one put it.46 In Southern states, black voters were kept away from the polls, while efforts were made to tying black rural labor to serve on white-owned farms. In some areas, black men were forced to carry a badge with them wherever they went with the name of their employer and their work schedule or face the prospect of arrest. The ‘work or jail’ culture was calculated to suppress any prospect of black militancy.47 For many black Americans from the North, wartime drafting into the armed forces, or work in the growing defense sector, exposing them to an unfamiliar level of segregation and discrimination. When employers relented to market pressure for labor, black workers were commonly given only unskilled laboring jobs, whatever their qualifications. In the armed forces, segregation was widely enforced. Black recruits were given poorer living conditions and made to carry out roles as mess attendants or laborers, and in parts of the South, they even risked lynching if they were caught outside the camp in uniform.

‘If it ever been slavery, it is now,’ complained one soldier in a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, writing from a camp where black draftees had to sleep on the floor and use buckets as latrines.48 The different treatment of black soldiers was reinforced by the prejudiced views of the administration. The United States Army, wrote another disillusioned recruit, is ‘about as Nazi-like as Hitler’s.49 In 1944, the Office of War Information issued a confidential manual to white officers on ‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro’, which included the following: ‘gregarious, extrovertive [sic] … hot-tempered … mentally lazy, not retentive, forgetful … ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason … keen sense of rhythm … evasive … lies easily, frequently, naturally’.50 One black soldier writing back from the European theatre at the news of racial violence in the New York district of Harlem claimed that black fighters were asking themselves, ‘what are we fighting for?’51 

The contradictions exposed by the war finally prompted a wave of racial violence. White workers engaged in so-called ‘hate strikes’ directed at the employment of a growing number of blacks in the early war years. White segregationists were involved in violent confrontations in defense of all-white neighborhoods or schools. As wartime labor mobility brought a million black migrants to be northern and western cities, so racial tension was heightened, reaching a violent peak in 1943. That year, an estimated 242 racial confrontations were counted across 47 American cities.52 Riots and street battles occurred in Mobile, Alabama, Port Chester in Pennsylvania, Centerville, Mississippi, Los Angeles, and Newark, New Jersey. The deadliest occurred in summer 1943, first in Detroit, then in Harlem. The violence in Detroit exploded on 20 June from the simmering resentment by white workers at the influx of new black labor; the riots left 37 dead (25 of them black) and 700 wounded before order could be restored. On 1 August, rioting erupted in Harlem, leaving six dead and 1,450 stores burnt down or ransacked. Roosevelt was persuaded to make no public statement about the race issue, partly from concern for white opinion in the South, partly to avoid stoking further racial tension by admitting that the fault line existed. Instead, increased intelligence-gathering on potential crisis points was used to anticipate other violence, while local means were devised to defuse any social conflict before it disrupted the war effort.53

Roosevelt’s subdued response to the evidence of mounting racial tension was indicative of his approach to the broader issue of civil rights and racial equality. Southern Democrat support in Congress was essential for his political position, and he was reluctant to offer anything to the black opinion that might jeopardize that support. The one concession he made, in 1941, before the war, was to issue Executive Order 8802 founding the Fair Employment Practices Commission to try to erode race discrimination in the defense sector following lobbying by civil rights leaders (or as his press secretary Stephen Early put it, after a ’long howl from the colored folks’). Black wartime employment in the defense industries increased from 3 percent in early 1942 to a peak of 8 percent in 1944, but black household incomes still averaged between 40 and 60 percent of white earnings. In 1942 the new Fair Employment agency was absorbed by the War Manpower Commission, limiting the prospects for using the agency to combat racial inequality. In the South, the administration offered subsidies and training programs to help raise the productivity of white farms while turning a blind eye to the increased control over black workers that wartime reforms made possible.54 On the paradox presented by his rhetoric of freedom and the survival of racial segregation and discrimination at home, the president remained largely silent. The same held for Roosevelt’s view of racism in the British Empire, which was prudently cautious about undermining the wartime alliance, despite his private view that the colonial empires were morally bankrupt and ought to be brought under international trusteeship or granted independence. When the British authorities arrested Gandhi in August 1942 and thousands of other Indian supporters of his ‘Quit India’ campaign, Roosevelt made no public statement condemning the decision or the violence that accompanied it. Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, canceled a speech he was to make on behalf of the Office of War Information in protest, and sent a telegram to Roosevelt linking the civil rights movement to the broader world struggle for emancipation from Western imperialism: ‘One billion brown and yellow people in the Pacific will without question consider ruthless treatment of Indian leaders and peoples typical of what white people will do to colored people if United Nations win.’55

 

Previously:

 

The critical factor for Japan, Italy, and Germany was territory. Control over a domain, exercised in various formal and informal ways, lay at the heart of the empire. The model for 'territoriality' was the forty years of violent territorial expansion and pacification that preceded the 1930s and were still going on. In this more extended context, the decisions taken in Tokyo, Rome, or Berlin to wage their local wars of aggression make historical sense. The discourses of 'race and space' that had supported empire since the late nineteenth century had lost none of their explanatory force for the generation that came to power in the 1930s. Though this form of imperialism appears anachronistic, even delusional, the paradigm of empire seemed familiar and near. The results of the redistribution of territory in 1919–23, or the consequences of the economic catastrophe after 1929, only strengthened rather than weakened the belief that seizing more territory and resources was an indispensable means to save the nation. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II.

 

It is not clear when Hitler decided that living space in the East could be found more usefully in Poland. Until 1938, the Poles were regarded as potential allies in a German-dominated anti-Soviet bloc. They would hand back the German lands they were granted at Versailles and voluntarily became a German satellite. Only when the Polish government repeatedly refused the German request for an extra-territorial rail and road link across the Polish Corridor and the incorporation of the League-run Free City of Danzig back into Germany did Hitler decide to launch against the Poles the small war he had been denied in 1938, and to take Polish resources by force. Poland now contained the vast former German coal and steel region in Silesia and promised vast areas for German settlement and an agricultural surplus to feed the German population. At the meeting on 23 May 1939, when Hitler presented to the military leadership his intentions against Poland, he claimed that 'Danzig is not the object in this case. For us, it involves rounding off our living space in the East and securing our food supplies.' Food supply could only come from the East because it was sparsely populated, continued Hitler. German agricultural proficiency would raise the productivity of the region many times over. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II, part two.

 

The calculation that Hitler would be deterred by the sight of the rapidly rearming British and French empires or by the wave of anti-fascist sentiment washing across the democracies was not entirely misplaced. A weaker hand had forced Hitler to climb down from war in 1938. Intelligence sources suggested a severe economic crisis in Germany, even the possibility of an anti-Hitler coup. Even after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September, Chamberlain allowed him to withdraw his forces rather than face a world war. The idea of a conference was briefly mooted by the Italian leadership on 2 September, echoing Mussolini's intervention in September 1938. Still, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax told his Italian counterpart Ciano that the British condition was 'the withdrawal of German troops from Polish soil,' which ended any prospect of peace.60 Historians have searched for convincing evidence that Chamberlain wanted to wriggle out of his commitment even at this late stage, but there is none. Only a complete German capitulation to British and French demands for an end to the violence would have averted world war, and by 1 September, that was the least likely outcome. Neither containment nor deterrence had in this case worked. Chamberlain announced a state of war on the radio at 11.15 on the morning of 3 September; Daladier announced a state of war at 5 p.m. that afternoon. A temporary alliance of imperial elites and democratic anti-fascists had made possible a new world war. 'We can't lose,' observed the British army chief of staff in his diary. When the war of empires started in Manchuria not included Western Europe.

 

While the collapse of resistance on the northeast front continued in late May, the significant Allies began to consider the awful capitulation scenario unthinkable two weeks before. Weygand, despite his apparent resilience and energy, told the French Cabinet on 25 May to think about abandoning the fight, and Reynaud was the first to pronounce the word 'armistice,' though it was an ambiguous term, as the Germans had discovered in November 1918. According to a commitment made on 25 March 1940, this had to be agreed with the British that neither ally would create a separate peace. On 26 May, Reynaud flew to London to explain to Churchill that France might consider giving up. Unknown to him, the British War Cabinet had begun to discuss a proposal from the foreign secretary, Halifax, presented to him by the Italian ambassador, for a possible conference convened by Mussolini. Italian motives remain unclear since, by now, Mussolini was also preparing to declare war to profit from what seemed to the Italian leadership a ripe opportunity for exploiting the imminent conquest of France. After three days of debate, the British decided against any initiative. Though often seen as a turning point at which the appeasers might nearly have triumphed, some discussion of the consequences of a comprehensive defeat was inevitable, and not even Halifax had favored any settlement that compromised Britain's primary interests. Eventually winning support from Chamberlain, who kept a seat in the War Cabinet, Churchill carried the debate to reject any approach to Mussolini. British leaders were already contemplating war without France. 'If France could not defend herself,' Churchill told his colleagues, 'it was better that she should get out of the war. The war in the West deepens while at the same time it spread further into the western colonies.

 

The British Empire did not collapse or accept defeat in 1940, but the year was a turning point in the long history of European imperialism. Failure and occupation in Europe undermined the claims of the other metropolitan powers, France, Belgium fatally, and the Netherlands. Fatally undermined For the British Empire, the crisis raised awkward questions about the future. Nevertheless, the British government refused to confront the paradox of emphasizing the value of the empire to Britain's war effort while at the same time using force to stifle demands for greater political autonomy in India and running Egypt under virtual martial law. The priority was the survival of the home islands. Neither side, German nor British, could find a strategy capable of undermining the other's war willingness or achieving a decisive military result. Still, it seems almost certain that with an army of 180 divisions and the spoils of much of continental Europe, Germany would have found a way in 1941 of bringing the war in the West to an end if Hitler had not turned to the East. Britain, by contrast, had no way of achieving victory over Germany. Expelled from Europe twice in Norway and France, facing a crisis in Africa, economically weakened, desperately defending its access to the broader world economy, Britain faced strategic bankruptcy. The war Britain waged for a year after the fall of France was the one prepared for in the 1930s – air defense, a powerful navy, and lesser imperial conflicts. This was the war Chamberlain had prepared for, but Churchill was the one forced to wage it. War almost lost.

 

The two major campaigns against British Malaya and the American Philippines protectorate began on 8 December. Pilots with specialized training for extended overseas flights attacked the Philippines, flying from Japanese Empire bases on Taiwan; as in Oahu, they found American aircraft lined up on the tarmac at Clark Field and destroyed half the B-17s and one-third of the fighters. Amphibious landings began on the 10th on the main island of Luzon and made rapid progress towards the capital, Manila, which surrendered on 3 January. The United States commander, General Douglas MacArthur, appointed earlier in the year, withdrew his mixed American–Filipino force south to the Bataan peninsula. The staff was doomed with no air cover and only 1,000 tons of supplies shipped by an American submarine. MacArthur was evacuated to Australia on 12 March to fight another day. Bataan was surrendered on 9 April. On 6 May, after a grueling and tenacious defense of the island fortress of Corregidor, the surviving American commander, General Jonathan Wainwright, gave up the fight.

The Japanese Fourteenth Army captured almost 70,000 soldiers, 10,000 of them American. They were marched along the Bataan Peninsula to an improvised camp; ill, exhausted, and hungry, they suffered beatings, killings, and humiliation from Japanese Empire forces. The geopolitical transformation of Asia and the Pacific.

In 1942 the new Fair Employment agency was absorbed by the War Manpower Commission, limiting the prospects for using the agency to combat racial inequality. In the South, the administration offered subsidies and training programs to help raise the productivity of white farms while turning a blind eye to the increased control over black workers that wartime reforms made possible. The president remained largely silent on the paradox presented by his rhetoric of freedom and the survival of racial segregation and discrimination at home. The same held for Roosevelt’s view of racism in the British Empire, which was prudently cautious about undermining the wartime alliance, despite his private view that the colonial empires were morally bankrupt and ought to be brought under international trusteeship or granted independence. When the British authorities arrested Gandhi in August 1942 and thousands of other Indian supporters of his ‘Quit India’ campaign, Roosevelt made no public statement condemning the decision or the violence. Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, canceled a speech he was to make on behalf of the Office of War Information in protest and sent a telegram to Roosevelt linking the civil rights movement to the broader world struggle for emancipation from Western imperialism: ‘One billion brown and yellow people in the Pacific will without question consider ruthless treatment of Indian leaders and peoples typical of what white people will do to colored people if United Nations win. How the various countries justified WWII.

 

Previously:

 

The critical factor for Japan, Italy, and Germany was territory. Control over a domain, exercised in various formal and informal ways, lay at the heart of the empire. The model for 'territoriality' was the forty years of violent territorial expansion and pacification that preceded the 1930s and were still going on. In this more extended context, the decisions taken in Tokyo, Rome, or Berlin to wage their local wars of aggression make historical sense. The discourses of 'race and space' that had supported empire since the late nineteenth century had lost none of their explanatory force for the generation that came to power in the 1930s. Though this form of imperialism appears anachronistic, even delusional, the paradigm of empire seemed familiar and near. The results of the redistribution of territory in 1919–23, or the consequences of the economic catastrophe after 1929, only strengthened rather than weakened the belief that seizing more territory and resources was an indispensable means to save the nation. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II.

 

It is not clear when Hitler decided that living space in the East could be found more usefully in Poland. Until 1938, the Poles were regarded as potential allies in a German-dominated anti-Soviet bloc. They would hand back the German lands they were granted at Versailles and voluntarily became a German satellite. Only when the Polish government repeatedly refused the German request for an extra-territorial rail and road link across the Polish Corridor and the incorporation of the League-run Free City of Danzig back into Germany did Hitler decide to launch against the Poles the small war he had been denied in 1938, and to take Polish resources by force. Poland now contained the vast former German coal and steel region in Silesia and promised vast areas for German settlement and an agricultural surplus to feed the German population. At the meeting on 23 May 1939, when Hitler presented to the military leadership his intentions against Poland, he claimed that 'Danzig is not the object in this case. For us, it involves rounding off our living space in the East and securing our food supplies.' Food supply could only come from the East because it was sparsely populated, continued Hitler. German agricultural proficiency would raise the productivity of the region many times over. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II, part two.

 

The calculation that Hitler would be deterred by the sight of the rapidly rearming British and French empires or by the wave of anti-fascist sentiment washing across the democracies was not entirely misplaced. A weaker hand had forced Hitler to climb down from war in 1938. Intelligence sources suggested a severe economic crisis in Germany, even the possibility of an anti-Hitler coup. Even after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September, Chamberlain allowed him to withdraw his forces rather than face a world war. The idea of a conference was briefly mooted by the Italian leadership on 2 September, echoing Mussolini's intervention in September 1938. Still, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax told his Italian counterpart Ciano that the British condition was 'the withdrawal of German troops from Polish soil,' which ended any prospect of peace.60 Historians have searched for convincing evidence that Chamberlain wanted to wriggle out of his commitment even at this late stage, but there is none. Only a complete German capitulation to British and French demands for an end to the violence would have averted world war, and by 1 September, that was the least likely outcome. Neither containment nor deterrence had in this case worked. Chamberlain announced a state of war on the radio at 11.15 on the morning of 3 September; Daladier announced a state of war at 5 p.m. that afternoon. A temporary alliance of imperial elites and democratic anti-fascists had made possible a new world war. 'We can't lose,' observed the British army chief of staff in his diary. When the war of empires started in Manchuria not included Western Europe.

 

While the collapse of resistance on the northeast front continued in late May, the significant Allies began to consider the awful capitulation scenario unthinkable two weeks before. Weygand, despite his apparent resilience and energy, told the French Cabinet on 25 May to think about abandoning the fight, and Reynaud was the first to pronounce the word 'armistice,' though it was an ambiguous term, as the Germans had discovered in November 1918. According to a commitment made on 25 March 1940, this had to be agreed with the British that neither ally would create a separate peace. On 26 May, Reynaud flew to London to explain to Churchill that France might consider giving up. Unknown to him, the British War Cabinet had begun to discuss a proposal from the foreign secretary, Halifax, presented to him by the Italian ambassador, for a possible conference convened by Mussolini. Italian motives remain unclear since, by now, Mussolini was also preparing to declare war to profit from what seemed to the Italian leadership a ripe opportunity for exploiting the imminent conquest of France. After three days of debate, the British decided against any initiative. Though often seen as a turning point at which the appeasers might nearly have triumphed, some discussion of the consequences of a comprehensive defeat was inevitable, and not even Halifax had favored any settlement that compromised Britain's primary interests. Eventually winning support from Chamberlain, who kept a seat in the War Cabinet, Churchill carried the debate to reject any approach to Mussolini. British leaders were already contemplating war without France. 'If France could not defend herself,' Churchill told his colleagues, 'it was better that she should get out of the war. The war in the West deepens while at the same time it spread further into the western colonies.

 

The British Empire did not collapse or accept defeat in 1940, but the year was a turning point in the long history of European imperialism. Failure and occupation in Europe undermined the claims of the other metropolitan powers, France, Belgium fatally, and the Netherlands. Fatally undermined For the British Empire, the crisis raised awkward questions about the future. Nevertheless, the British government refused to confront the paradox of emphasizing the value of the empire to Britain's war effort while at the same time using force to stifle demands for greater political autonomy in India and running Egypt under virtual martial law. The priority was the survival of the home islands. Neither side, German nor British, could find a strategy capable of undermining the other's war willingness or achieving a decisive military result. Still, it seems almost certain that with an army of 180 divisions and the spoils of much of continental Europe, Germany would have found a way in 1941 of bringing the war in the West to an end if Hitler had not turned to the East. Britain, by contrast, had no way of achieving victory over Germany. Expelled from Europe twice in Norway and France, facing a crisis in Africa, economically weakened, desperately defending its access to the broader world economy, Britain faced strategic bankruptcy. The war Britain waged for a year after the fall of France was the one prepared for in the 1930s – air defense, a powerful navy, and lesser imperial conflicts. This was the war Chamberlain had prepared for, but Churchill was the one forced to wage it. War almost lost.

 

The two major campaigns against British Malaya and the American Philippines protectorate began on 8 December. Pilots with specialized training for extended overseas flights attacked the Philippines, flying from Japanese Empire bases on Taiwan; as in Oahu, they found American aircraft lined up on the tarmac at Clark Field and destroyed half the B-17s and one-third of the fighters. Amphibious landings began on the 10th on the main island of Luzon and made rapid progress towards the capital, Manila, which surrendered on 3 January. The United States commander, General Douglas MacArthur, appointed earlier in the year, withdrew his mixed American–Filipino force south to the Bataan peninsula. The staff was doomed with no air cover and only 1,000 tons of supplies shipped by an American submarine. MacArthur was evacuated to Australia on 12 March to fight another day. Bataan was surrendered on 9 April. On 6 May, after a grueling and tenacious defense of the island fortress of Corregidor, the surviving American commander, General Jonathan Wainwright, gave up the fight.

The Japanese Fourteenth Army captured almost 70,000 soldiers, 10,000 of them American. They were marched along the Bataan Peninsula to an improvised camp; ill, exhausted, and hungry, they suffered beatings, killings, and humiliation from Japanese Empire forces. The geopolitical transformation of Asia and the Pacific.

In 1942 the new Fair Employment agency was absorbed by the War Manpower Commission, limiting the prospects for using the agency to combat racial inequality. In the South, the administration offered subsidies and training programs to help raise the productivity of white farms while turning a blind eye to the increased control over black workers that wartime reforms made possible. The president remained largely silent on the paradox presented by his rhetoric of freedom and the survival of racial segregation and discrimination at home. The same held for Roosevelt’s view of racism in the British Empire, which was prudently cautious about undermining the wartime alliance, despite his private view that the colonial empires were morally bankrupt and ought to be brought under international trusteeship or granted independence. When the British authorities arrested Gandhi in August 1942 and thousands of other Indian supporters of his ‘Quit India’ campaign, Roosevelt made no public statement condemning the decision or the violence. Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, canceled a speech he was to make on behalf of the Office of War Information in protest and sent a telegram to Roosevelt linking the civil rights movement to the broader world struggle for emancipation from Western imperialism: ‘One billion brown and yellow people in the Pacific will without question consider ruthless treatment of Indian leaders and peoples typical of what white people will do to colored people if United Nations win. How the various countries justified WWII.

 

1. Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands (London, 2001), 6–8. 

 

2. International Law Association, Briand–Kellogg Pact of Paris: Articles of Interpretation as Adopted by the Budapest Conference 1934 (London, 1934), 1–2, 7–10. 

 

3. Howard Ball, Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth-century Experience (Lawrence, Kans, 1999), pp. 85–7. 

 

4. Genoud (ed.), The Testament of Adolf Hitler, 108, entry for 2 Apr. 1945. 

 

5. Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford, 1981), 146. 

 

6. David Mayers, ‘Humanity in 1948: the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 26 (2015), 464. 

 

7. Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, 1932–1943 (New Haven, Conn., 2015), 244–5, entry for 12 Dec. 1939.

 

8. Ibid., 258–9, entry for 13 Mar. 1940. 

 

9. Elliott Roosevelt (ed.), The Roosevelt Letters: Volume Three, 1928–1945 (London, 1952), 290, Roosevelt to Lincoln MacVeagh, 1 Dec. 1939.

 

10. George Sirgiovanni, An Undercurrent of Suspicion: Anti-Communism in America during World War II (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 33–4, 36; David Mayers, ‘The Great Patriotic War, FDR’s embassy Moscow and US–Soviet relations’, International History Review, 33 (2011), 306–7. 

 

11. Roosevelt (ed.), Roosevelt Letters, 292–3, letter from Roosevelt to William Allen White, 14 Dec. 1939. 

 

12. James Harris, ‘Encircled by enemies: Stalin’s perception of the capitalist world 1918–1941’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31 (2008), 534–43. 

 

13. Fridrikh Firsov, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern 1933–1943 (New Haven, Conn., 2014), 140–41, 175. 

 

14. Ibid., 153–7, 164. 

 

15. Daily Worker, 21 Jan. 1941, 4. 

 

16-. Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries, 368, entry for 27 June 1941. 

 

17. Sirgiovanni, Undercurrent of Suspicion, 3–5; Buhite and Levy (eds.), FDR’s Fireside Chats, 277–8, broadcast of 24 Dec. 1943. 

 

18. Firsov, Klehr and Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern, 184–5. 

 

19. On hopes for collaboration see Martin Folly, Churchill, Whitehall, and the Soviet Union, 1940–1945 (Basingstoke, 2000), 78–9, 165–6. 

 

20. The National Archives London (henceforth TNA), FO 800/868, Desmond Morton to Lord Swinton, 11 Nov. 1941; Morton to Robert Bruce Lockhart, 15 Nov. 1941. 

 

21. Sirgiovanni, Undercurrent of Suspicion, 3–5; Frank Warren, Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II (Columbus, Ohio, 1999), 181–4. 

 

22. ‘Britain, Russia and Peace’, Official Report of the National Congress of Friendship and Co-operation with the USSR, 4–5 Nov. 1944, 14–15. 

 

23. Gorodetsky (ed.), Maisky Diaries, 411, 436, 475, entries for 15 Feb., 24 June 1942, 5 Feb. 1943. 

 

24. ‘Britain, Russia and Peace’, 3–4. 

 

25. Sirgiovanni, Undercurrent of Suspicion, 49–56. 

 

26. Daniel Lomas, ‘Labour ministers, intelligence and domestic anti-communism 1945–1951’, Journal of Intelligence History, 12 (2013), 119; Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, 2009), 273–81. 

 

27. Gorodetsky (ed.), Maisky Diaries, 509–10. 

 

28. Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organisation in Second World War Britain (Oxford, 2009), 39–40.

 

29. John Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of American Efforts at Wartime Co-Operation with Russia (London, 1947), 319. 

 

30. Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven, Conn., 2011), 23–32; Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Stalin’s wartime vision of the peace, 1939–1945’, in Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (eds.), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination 1928–1953 (New York, 2014), 249–59. 

 

31. John Iatrides, ‘Revolution or self-defense? Communist goals, strategy, and tactics in the Greek civil war’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 7 (2005), 24. 

 

32. Warren, Noble Abstractions, 172–4. 

 

33. Sirgiovanni, Undercurrent of Suspicion, 58, 85–6; Mayers, ‘The Great Patriotic War’, 318–24. 

 

34. NARA, RG 238, Box 32, translation of ‘Secret Additional Protocol to the German-Soviet Pact of 23.8.39’; Mayers, ‘The Great Patriotic War’, 303. 

 

35. Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Show Trials (London, 1990), 259; S. Mironenko, ‘La collection des documents sur le procès de Nuremberg dans les archives d’état de la federation russe’, in Anna Wiewiorka (ed.), Les procès de Nuremberg et de Tokyo (Paris, 1996), 65–6. 

 

36. For two excellent recent accounts of Soviet inhumanity see Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven, Conn., 2017) and Jörg Baberowski, Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror (New Haven, Conn., 2016), esp. chs. 5–6. 

 

37. Achim Kilian, Einzuweisen zur völligen Isolierung. NKWD-Speziallager Mühlberg/Elbe 1945–1948 (Leipzig, 1993), 7.

 

38. Andrew Stone, ‘“The differences were only in the details”: the moral equivalency of Stalinism and Nazism in Anatoli Bakanichev’s Twelve Years Behind Barbed Wire’, Kritika, 13 (2012), 123, 134. 

 

39. Mayers, ‘Humanity in 1948’, 462–3. 

 

40. Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (New York, 2000), 6. 

 

41. David Welky, Marching Across the Color Line: A. Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era (New York, 2014), 86–9. 

 

42. Thomas Sugrue, ‘Hillburn, Hattiesburg and Hitler: wartime activists think globally and act locally’, in Kevin Kruse and Stephen Tuck (eds.), Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2012), 91. 

 

43. Welky, Marching Across the Color Line, 89. 

 

44. Sugrue, ‘Hillburn, Hattiesburg and Hitler’, 91–2. 

 

45. Ibid., 93–4; Welky, Marching Across the Color Line, xx–xxi, 112. 

 

46. Julian Zelizer, ‘Confronting the roadblock: Congress, Civil Rights, and World War II’, in Kruse and Tuck (eds.), Fog of War, 38–40. 

 

47. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (Oxford, 2000), 208–10, 248–9. 

 

48. Takaki, Double Victory, 28–9. 

 

49. Chris Dixon, African Americans and the Pacific War 1941–1945: Race, Nationality, and the Fight for Freedom (Cambridge, 2018), 68. 

 

50. Welky, Marching Across the Color Line, 112. 

 

51. Takaki, Double Victory, 53. 

 

52. Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 3. 

 

53. Ibid, 229–32; Welky, Marching Across the Color Line, 121–2; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (London, 2017), 520.

 

54. Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 208–10; Takaki, Double Victory, 43–4. 

 

55. Kenneth Janken, ‘From colonial liberation to Cold War liberalism: Walter White, the NAACP, and foreign affairs, 1941–1955’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (1998), 1076–8.

 

 

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