World War II, part one
continuing the lecture series
As our history of the 20th century moves on to World War II, I had Claude produce three lectures: the political and diplomatic history; the military history; and American society at war. The first two lectures are necessarily about international events, not limited to America. And they cover developments that are very familiar to those of us who have read about the topic. But I don’t think that we can assume that someone born in the 21st century is nearly as familiar with these events as are us older folk.
The Unmaking of the Peace
America and the World at War — Lecture 4.1
Opening: A Vote at Oxford
On the ninth of February, 1933, the undergraduates of the Oxford Union — the debating society of the oldest university in the English-speaking world, the nursery of the men who would run the British Empire — took up a motion for the evening’s argument: That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. They debated it with the wit and the seriousness the Union prided itself on, and then they divided, and the motion carried, two hundred and seventy-five votes to one hundred and fifty-three. The cream of English youth had resolved, on the record, that there was no cause for which it would take up arms.
Nine days earlier, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany.
The coincidence was not lost on anyone. In London the newspapers thundered; Winston Churchill, then a backbencher whom no one in power was heeding, called the vote an abject and shameless avowal, and worried aloud about how it would read in the chancelleries of the dictators, who were busy teaching their own young men the opposite lesson. Whether the boys at Oxford truly meant it, whether a debating motion settled anything, whether the dictators read English student journalism at all — these are fair questions, and the honest answer is that the vote probably changed nothing directly. What it captured was a mood, and the mood was real and it was general across the democracies: a deep, principled, and entirely understandable exhaustion with war, in a generation that had grown up counting the names on the memorials. The trenches of the last war had killed the better part of a generation of young Europeans and had taught the survivors that such a thing must never be permitted again. Out of that conviction, the finest and most decent conviction of the age, the democracies would spend the next six years doing almost everything except the one thing that might have prevented the catastrophe, which was to arm and to stand.
The men rising in Rome and Moscow and Tokyo and Berlin had drawn the opposite conclusion from the same war. That divergence — between nations that had resolved never to fight again and nations that had resolved to fight and win — is the political story of how the peace came apart.
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Part One: A Skeleton of the War
Before the narrative, a bare frame to hang it on — the dozen turning points, in order, so that the elaboration that follows has a spine to attach to.
October 1922 — Mussolini’s March on Rome; the first Fascist government in Europe.
September 1931 — Japan seizes Manchuria; the postwar order’s first open breach.
March 1936 — Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, and the democracies do nothing.
September 1938 — Munich; Czechoslovakia is dismembered to buy a peace that lasts a year.
August 1939 — the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; the two great ideological enemies divide Eastern Europe, and Poland is doomed.
September 1939 — Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war.
June 1940 — France falls; Britain stands alone.
March 1941 — the United States, still neutral, passes Lend-Lease and becomes the arsenal of democracy.
June 1941 — Germany invades the Soviet Union.
December 1941 — Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; the war becomes global, and American.
September 1943 — Italy surrenders.
June 1944 — the Allies land in Normandy.
May 1945 — Germany surrenders.
August 1945 — atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders.
Twenty-three years from the first line to the last, and most of the damage done in the final six. The narrative now doubles back to the beginning to explain how a continent of exhausted, peace-loving democracies arrived, step by reluctant step, at the largest war in the history of the species.
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Part Two: A World Out of Joint
The peace that came apart in the 1930s had been badly made and was, by then, badly kept. To understand why the strong men rose, begin with the disorder they rose to answer, because a great deal of what followed makes sense only as a series of adaptations to an environment that had lost its shape.
The settlement of 1919 had satisfied almost no one. Germany emerged from it humiliated, disarmed, saddled with guilt and reparations, and convinced — with more justice than the victors liked to admit — that it had been promised a fair peace and handed a punitive one. Italy had fought on the winning side and come away feeling cheated of its reward, nursing the grievance its nationalists called the mutilated victory. Japan had fought on the winning side too, and had been denied even a clause affirming racial equality in the founding covenant of the new League, and had watched the United States a few years later slam its immigration gates specifically against Japanese, an insult that the earlier lectures of this series traced and that Tokyo never forgot. The new states of Eastern Europe were fragile, quarrelsome, and full of stranded minorities. And the one power with the industrial weight to underwrite the whole arrangement, the United States, had built the League of Nations at Versailles and then, as the lectures on Wilson’s defeat described, refused to join its own creation and retreated across the ocean into a normalcy that was really a withdrawal.
For a few years in the middle 1920s the disorder seemed to be healing. Then came the event the last several lectures have anatomized: the American slump that became the Great Depression that became, with terrible speed, a global collapse. The same catastrophe that filled the Hoovervilles and blew the topsoil off the Kansas plains did its work in every industrial country at once, and everywhere it discredited the men and the systems in charge. Where liberal, parliamentary government was young and shallow-rooted, it did not survive the discrediting. The Depression is the solvent in which the interwar order finally dissolved, and the dictators are best understood as what rose out of the solution — hard answers offered to frightened peoples by men who promised order, work, bread, and national greatness, and who were believed because the alternative on offer had so plainly failed.
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Part Three: The Strong Men
Four regimes drove the story, and they were not variations on a single thing. They shared a contempt for parliaments and a cult of the leader and a taste for the mass rally, and they differed profoundly in their aims and their crimes.
Italy came first, and gave the age its word. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaperman with a genius for theater, assembled the discontented veterans and the frightened middle class of a country terrified of Bolshevism, dressed them in black shirts, and in October of 1922 threatened to march on Rome unless he were given power — whereupon the King, rather than call out the army that could easily have scattered the marchers, handed him the government. Mussolini spent the 1920s inventing Fascism as he went: the one party, the corporate state, the suppression of the free press and the free union, the endless choreography of strength, and the cultivation of a personal myth as Il Duce, the Leader who made the trains run and drained the marshes and restored to Italians the imagined grandeur of Rome. His regime was brutal but, by the standards of what was coming, almost restrained; its deepest cruelties in this period were reserved for its colonial war in Ethiopia, where Italian forces used poison gas against tribesmen with spears. Mussolini was the prototype, admired and imitated, and he would end the decade as the junior and increasingly nervous partner of a pupil who had far outgrown him.
The Soviet Union was the terror the others defined themselves against, and was itself a terror on a scale the others had not yet reached. Joseph Stalin, having maneuvered himself into sole command of the Bolshevik state by the end of the 1920s, set out to drag a peasant country into industrial modernity in a single decade by main force. He collectivized the farms, breaking the independent peasantry as a class, and when the countryside resisted he let famine do the disciplining; in Ukraine and the grain regions several millions starved to death, in the early 1930s, inside a state that went on exporting grain while its own people ate seed and worse. Then, from 1936, he turned the terror on his own party and army and people in the paroxysm called the Great Purge — the show trials in which the old revolutionaries confessed, after torture, to fantastical crimes and were shot; the midnight arrests; the quotas of enemies to be found and liquidated in every district; the vast archipelago of slave-labor camps that swallowed millions. He decapitated his own officer corps on the eve of the greatest war in his country’s history, shooting the marshals and generals who would shortly have been needed. This was the regime that the Western democracies would, within a few years, be obliged to take into their arms as an indispensable ally, and the moral vertigo of that embrace is part of the story still to come.
Japan followed a path that fit no European template. It had modernized faster than any non-Western nation, built a first-class navy and army, and then run into the wall every industrial power without an empire ran into: it had almost no oil, no iron, no rubber of its own, and depended for them on trade with powers — the British, the Dutch, above all the Americans — that Japan increasingly regarded as a ring of Western colonizers penning it in. The Depression, which shattered Japan’s export trade, discredited its fragile civilian parliamentary politics and delivered the initiative to a nationalist officer corps that had come to regard assassination as a legitimate instrument, murdering the prime ministers and financiers who counseled restraint. In September of 1931 that army, acting very largely on its own, manufactured a pretext and overran Manchuria, the resource-rich Chinese province, converting it into a puppet state — and when the civilian government in Tokyo proved unable to stop it, the lesson taken was that boldness paid. By 1937 Japan was in a full and horrific war to subdue China proper, its rationale a fusion of hard calculation and grand idea: the calculation that a great power must command its own resources and markets, and the idea, sincerely held by many, that Japan was destined to lead Asia out from under white colonial rule into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere — a liberation that in practice meant Japanese domination as absolute as anything it replaced.
Germany was the engine of the catastrophe, because its leader wanted the catastrophe. Adolf Hitler rose on the wreckage of the Depression, which turned his fringe party of cranks and street-fighters into the largest in the Reichstag as unemployment climbed toward a third of the workforce, and in January of 1933 the conservative politicians who thought they could use him and control him made him Chancellor. Within months the controlling was over and the one-party state was built — the other parties dissolved, the unions crushed, the opponents and the merely inconvenient sent to the new camps, the first of which, Dachau, opened that spring. Two convictions sat at the center of Hitler’s mind, and he had stated both openly years before, in a book few of his future victims had bothered to finish. The first was Lebensraum, living space: the doctrine that the German people required vast new lands in the East, in Poland and Ukraine and Russia, which would be conquered, cleared of their inhabitants, and colonized by Germans, a project of racial empire on the European continent itself. The second was that the Jews were the racial poison at the root of every German misfortune, a people to be stripped of rights, driven out, and — the logic of the rhetoric pointed here from the beginning, however few believed he meant it literally — ultimately eliminated. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship; the organized pogrom of November 1938 that came to be called Kristallnacht burned the synagogues and looted the shops and shipped tens of thousands to the camps. The machinery of mass murder itself belongs to a later lecture. What belongs here is that its blueprint was ideological, was announced in advance, and was the actual purpose of the regime rather than an incident of the war it launched.
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Part Four: The Tired Democracies and the Empty Chair
Against these four stood the democracies, and the democracies were tired, divided, and — in the case of the strongest of them — absent.
Britain in the 1930s was a nation that wished above all not to repeat 1916. The memory of the Somme, where twenty thousand British men had died in a single morning, sat under all its politics, and it produced a foreign policy of appeasement that later generations have found it easy to despise and that deserves, from this series, a fairer hearing. The men who practiced it, Neville Chamberlain foremost, were not cowards or fools. They governed an over-extended empire they could not defend everywhere at once; they faced the appalling arithmetic of a possible war against Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously, with no reliable ally, since the United States had withdrawn and the Soviet Union was an ideological horror; they knew Britain’s rearmament lagged and needed time; and they carried the sincere moral conviction that another great war would be a crime against their own people that must be averted almost at any cost. Appeasement was the policy of decent men reasoning from real constraints toward a catastrophe. France was worse placed still: bled white in the last war, its birth rate too low to replace the dead, its politics fractured between a revolutionary left and a right whose bitterest partisans preferred the thought of Hitler to the thought of their own socialists, its governments falling every few months, its whole strategy poured into a defensive concrete line and a defensive frame of mind. Two exhausted democracies, each hoping the other would supply the resolve neither had.
Over them all presided the League of Nations, the machinery of collective security that was supposed to make aggression impossible by uniting the world against any aggressor — and that failed its two great tests in succession. When Japan seized Manchuria, the League appointed a commission, which traveled, deliberated, and eventually reported that aggression had indeed occurred; Japan responded by walking out of the League, keeping Manchuria, and suffering nothing. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the League voted actual economic sanctions — and then Britain and France, terrified of driving Mussolini into Hitler’s arms, left the sanctions toothless, declined to close the Suez Canal to his troopships, and were caught scheming in secret, in the leaked Hoare–Laval Pact, to hand Mussolini most of Ethiopia outright. The scandal destroyed what credibility the League had left. The lesson every dictator drew was identical and correct: the machinery would grind and report and resolve, and it would not fight, because the great powers that alone could give it force would always find their own interests on the other side of the ledger.
And the chair that might have changed the arithmetic stood empty. The United States, which Wilson had meant to be the keystone of the whole security structure, had refused to join it and remained outside it, a spectator with the largest economy on earth. Its absence was felt in every calculation, and its presence, when it finally came, would decide everything.
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Part Five: The Slide to September
From 1935 the descent has a terrible momentum, each step teaching Hitler that the next could be taken.
He rearmed openly, repudiating the Versailles limits, and nothing happened. In March of 1936 he sent his still-weak army into the demilitarized Rhineland, his own generals sick with fear that the French would march and end him — and the French, paralyzed and leaderless, did not move, and the greatest gamble of his early career paid, and he learned that the democracies would flinch. That same year he and Mussolini found each other, intervening together on the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, which became the proving ground for German tactics and aircraft and the forge of the Rome–Berlin alignment they called the Axis; Japan was drawn toward them by a shared hatred of communism in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In March of 1938 Hitler annexed his native Austria, the Anschluss, marching in to cheering crowds. And then he turned on Czechoslovakia, demanding the German-speaking borderlands, the Sudetenland, and threatening war to take them.
Munich, in September of 1938, is the name that came to stand for the whole policy. Chamberlain flew to Germany — an old man in his sixties boarding an aircraft for nearly the first time, so far outside the normal order of things was the errand — and at a four-power conference from which the Czechs themselves were excluded, Britain and France agreed to give Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for his promise that he wanted nothing more. Chamberlain came home to London waving the paper and telling the cheering crowds it meant peace for our time, and he believed it, and much of a relieved Britain believed it with him. Six months later, in March of 1939, Hitler marched into Prague and swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, a country with no German grievance attached, and the promise stood revealed as worthless and the policy as dead. Chamberlain, at last, drew a line: Britain and France guaranteed the independence of Poland, which everyone could see was next.
The guarantee needed the Soviet Union to mean anything, since only Russia could put an army on Poland’s eastern flank — and here came the thunderclap that scrambled every assumption. Through the summer of 1939 the democracies negotiated half-heartedly with Stalin, distrusting him, while Stalin, distrusting them more and reading Munich as proof that the West meant to point Hitler eastward and stand aside, made his own calculation. In August, the dismissal of his Jewish foreign minister signaled the turn, and on the twenty-third the world woke to the news that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — the two regimes that had defined themselves as each other’s mortal enemy, whose propagandists had spent a decade promising to destroy one another — had signed a pact of non-aggression. Ribbentrop and Molotov had raised their glasses in the Kremlin over a secret map that divided Poland between them and parceled out the Baltic states and Finland to Stalin as his price. The pact freed Hitler from the fear of a two-front war. On the first of September his armies crossed into Poland; on the third, Britain and France, their bluff called and their guarantee owed, declared war. Two weeks after that, Stalin’s armies came in from the east to take their share, and Poland ceased to exist between them.
The three aggressor powers would formalize their partnership the next year in the Tripartite Pact, the Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It is worth marking how loose and mistrustful that partnership always was: they never seriously coordinated their strategies, never shared their real plans, and pursued three separate wars for three separate sets of aims that happened to point at the same enemies. It was an alignment of appetites, and its incoherence would matter.
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Part Six: The Reluctant Republic
Across the ocean, the country this series is actually about watched the peace come apart and wanted, more than it wanted almost anything, to stay out of it.
American isolationism in the 1930s was not a fringe sentiment or a failure of nerve. It was a considered national conviction, resting on hard experience, and it had built itself into law. The experience was the last war: a widespread and bitter conviction, by the 1930s, that the country had been maneuvered into the trenches of 1917 by British propaganda and by the greed of bankers and arms-makers, a conviction a Senate committee under Gerald Nye spent two years documenting to the nation’s satisfaction, fixing in the public mind the image of the war profiteer, the merchant of death, who had sold the Republic’s blood for his dividends. Out of that conviction Congress passed the Neutrality Acts, a series of laws designed to lash the country to the mast in advance — forbidding Americans to sell arms to, or lend money to, or sail on the ships of, any nation at war, so that the paths by which the country believed it had slid into the last conflict would be closed by statute before the next one could pull it in. The mood ran so deep that in 1938 an amendment to the Constitution requiring a national popular referendum before any declaration of war — save in case of direct invasion — came within a couple of dozen votes of clearing the House of Representatives. A country that would seriously consider stripping its own Congress of the power to declare war, and handing it to a plebiscite, is a country whose determination to stay out is difficult now to overstate.
In Pawnee County, Frank held that determination as plain common sense: the quarrels of Europe had cost the country dearly once for nothing anyone could name, his own boys were now of an age to be sent, and he could see no earthly reason to spend them on another round of it. His instinct was the instinct of the great middle of the country, and it found its voice, in 1940, in the America First Committee, a genuine mass movement, millions strong, that spanned the political spectrum and counted among its members people of every kind of decency. Its most famous voice was the most admired man in America, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who argued with real force that the country’s interest lay in an armed neutrality behind its two oceans and no business in Europe’s war. And its cause was gravely wounded from within when Lindbergh, in a speech at Des Moines in September of 1941, named the groups he said were pushing America toward war — the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews — and the movement could not scrub the stain of that from itself, because the thing he had reached for in that sentence was the same poison that was loose in Europe.
Against all this leaned the President, who had concluded early that a world dominated by Hitler was intolerable to American security and who had to move a reluctant country toward that conclusion faster than it wished to go and slower than the crisis demanded, feeling always for the edge of what the public and the Congress would bear. The shock that moved opinion fastest was the fall of France in the spring of 1940 — the sudden, stunning collapse of the great continental democracy in six weeks, leaving Britain alone under the German air assault, the Blitz, whose nightly bombing of London came into American parlors through the calm, grave broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow from the rooftops, the first time a European catastrophe had reached American living rooms live, as it happened, in a human voice. Roosevelt found the room the emergency gave him. He traded fifty old destroyers to Britain for bases; in a fireside chat at the end of 1940 he told the country it must become the great arsenal of democracy, the workshop that would arm the nations fighting Hitler so that American boys need not fight him themselves; and in March of 1941 he pushed through Congress the Lend-Lease Act, which let him lend and lease the matériel of war to Britain and, soon, to anyone whose defense he deemed vital to America, tearing a great hole in the neutrality laws in the name of keeping the country out by keeping others in the fight. That summer he met Churchill secretly aboard warships off Newfoundland, and the two men issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of the war’s purposes — self-determination, free trade, a peace of security for all nations — proclaimed by one nation at war and one nation still officially at peace, a set of aims for a postwar world the United States had not yet entered. By the autumn American destroyers were escorting convoys and shooting at U-boats in an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic; a German torpedo sank the destroyer Reuben James with most of her crew five weeks before Pearl Harbor. The country was, in every way but the formal declaration, already fighting. It took a blow from the other side of the world to make it admit as much.
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Part Seven: The World Set Alight
The year 1941 turned a European war and an Asian war into a single war around the globe, in two strokes six months apart.
The first was Hitler’s. On the twenty-second of June, 1941, having conquered or cowed the whole European continent west of Russia, he tore up his pact with Stalin and launched the largest invasion in history eastward into the Soviet Union — three million men on a front of a thousand miles. This was the war he had always meant to fight, the war for living space, and he meant it to be a war of annihilation without precedent, in which the Slavic populations would be starved and enslaved and the Jews of the East murdered wholesale behind the advancing front. It transformed the strategic map at a stroke. The Soviet Union, the terror-state, was now fighting Germany for its life, which made it overnight the ally of Britain and the beneficiary of American Lend-Lease, and confronted the democracies with the permanent moral discomfort of a war in which their indispensable partner in the destruction of one mass-murdering tyranny was itself a mass-murdering tyranny.
The second stroke was Japan’s, and America was its target. Japan’s war in China had stalled into a bottomless quagmire, and its decision to occupy French Indochina in 1941 brought down upon it the response Washington intended as a deterrent: the United States froze Japanese assets and cut off the oil, and since Japan imported the overwhelming bulk of its oil from the United States, this confronted Tokyo with a strangling clock. The deterrent produced the opposite of deterrence. Faced with the choice of backing down in China — unthinkable to the men in charge — or seizing the oil of the Dutch East Indies before the fuel ran out, Japan resolved to seize it, and calculated that it must first cripple the one force that could stop it, the American Pacific Fleet. On the seventh of December, 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft struck that fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, and the long American argument about whether to enter the war ended in a single Sunday morning. Isolationism did not so much lose the argument as evaporate; America First dissolved within days. Four days later Hitler, under no clear obligation to do so, declared war on the United States as well — perhaps his single most consequential blunder, for it resolved Roosevelt’s hardest problem, freeing him to throw American weight first against Germany, the enemy he had always judged the graver, in the strategy the Allies called Germany First.
One thing must be said plainly here and developed later. As this global war took shape, and through every conference and campaign that followed, the deliberate extermination of Europe’s Jews was underway, and the rescue of the Jews was not adopted as an Allied war aim and was not permitted to compete with the single overriding goal of military victory. That failure, and what was known of it and when, belongs to the lecture on American society at war, where it can be given the weight it demands.
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Part Eight: The Grand Alliance and the World to Come
The war that America now entered it would fight in two capacities at once: as a belligerent bent on winning, and as the emerging architect of whatever should come after. The military story runs in the next lecture. The political story is the story of the Grand Alliance and the peace it planned while the war still raged.
The alliance rested on three men who trusted one another very little and needed one another entirely: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, the Big Three. They coordinated first at a distance and then face to face. At Casablanca early in 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting without Stalin, announced that they would accept nothing short of the unconditional surrender of the enemy — a doctrine meant to reassure the suspicious Stalin that there would be no separate peace, and to ensure that no postwar Germany could claim, as it had after 1918, that it had been tricked rather than beaten. At Tehran, in the last days of 1943, the three met together for the first time, and the political shape of the endgame began to harden: the Western commitment to a cross-Channel invasion that would open the second front Stalin had demanded for two years, and Stalin’s own pledge to enter the war against Japan once Germany was beaten. The operational bargaining over the invasion belongs to the military lecture. What belongs here is the human texture of it — Roosevelt’s vast confidence that he could charm and manage Stalin as he had managed a hundred domestic politicians, and the gaunt, dying figure of Harry Hopkins at his elbow, the former relief administrator now serving as the President’s own emissary between the capitals, keeping the improbable partnership alive on personal thread.
At Yalta, in the Crimea, in February of 1945, with Germany’s defeat now certain and the shape of the postwar world the real business, the bargains grew harder and their consequences longer. The Red Army already stood on the ground of Eastern Europe, and possession, as always, set the terms. Stalin conceded, on paper, free elections in a liberated Poland and the other occupied countries; he conceded a voting formula for the new world organization; he confirmed his promise to strike Japan within months of Germany’s fall, for a price in Asian territory. Roosevelt, visibly failing — he had two months to live, and the photographs from Yalta show it — judged that Soviet goodwill was worth courting because he believed the postwar peace depended on it, and took Stalin’s paper promises as the best obtainable from a man whose armies already held the ground the promises concerned. When those promises about free elections proved worthless, and Eastern Europe disappeared behind what would soon be called an iron curtain, Yalta became a word of reproach in American politics, a supposed betrayal for which Roosevelt’s memory would be arraigned by men who rarely explained what leverage he was thought to have declined to use. That quarrel opens onto the Cold War, and the lectures that will follow it.
Alongside the bargaining over borders ran a quieter and, in the long run, perhaps a weightier labor: the construction, this time, of a postwar order the United States would actually inhabit. The memory of 1920 hung over all of it — the memory of a President who had built the League and then watched his own Senate refuse to enter it, leaving the structure of peace standing hollow. The men of the 1940s were determined not to repeat the withdrawal. In the summer of 1944, at a resort in the New Hampshire mountains called Bretton Woods, the financial delegates of forty-four nations designed the monetary architecture of the postwar world — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a system of fixed exchange rates anchored on the American dollar — in a negotiation that was, beneath its technicalities, the formal passing of financial primacy across the Atlantic. The intellectual giant of the conference was the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, arguing brilliantly for a more balanced system on behalf of a Britain that was bankrupt and knew it; the man who won was the American Treasury official Harry Dexter White, whose dollar-centered plan prevailed because the power to underwrite the world now lay in Washington and no longer in London. That same autumn, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, the framework of a new world body took shape, and the following spring, at San Francisco, the delegates of fifty nations wrote the Charter of the United Nations. Its patient American architect was the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, a Tennessean of Wilsonian faith who had carried the internationalist cause from the isolationist battles of the 1930s all the way to this, and who is remembered as the father of the organization. This time the structure would not stand hollow. This time the United States would join, and would house the thing in its own largest city, and would remain — the great reversal of the interwar retreat, the moment the Republic decided to stay inside the world it had done so much to remake.
Roosevelt did not live to see it finished. On the twelfth of April, 1945, at the small Georgia cottage where he had gone to rest, the President who had led the country through the Depression and most of the war died of a stroke, and the Vice President, a plain-spoken former haberdasher and senator from Missouri named Harry Truman, who had been told almost nothing of the great secrets of the war, learned that the whole weight of it had fallen on him. Less than a month later Germany surrendered, and the war in Europe was over. What remained was Japan, and the weapon that Truman now learned existed, and the terrible closing act that opens the next lecture — where the American way of war, and the two flashes of light over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended it, must be reckoned with directly.
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End of Lecture 4.1