Eighty years ago, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote a cable informing his superiors, “the mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, May 7th, 1945.” The mistaken date is the only indication in that understated message that Germany’s surrender was an enormous moment. The war in Europe, which Nazi Germany started in 1939 when it attacked Poland with the connivance of its Soviet allies, had finally ended. The Soviets paid heavily for their sins when the Hitlerites turned on them less than two years later, but they were far from the only to suffer. The war cost about 60 million human lives.
Victory in Europe Day has thus earned a prominent place in America’s mythology. The conventional wisdom is that 1945 marked America’s entry into the harsh world of geopolitics. Some murmur darkly about the wartime conferences in Yalta and Potsdam that, in their view, damned tens of millions of Europeans to a life of misery under the heel of the Soviet boot. More recently, a gaggle of podcasting revisionists have argued that Adolf Hitler was driven to war not by his frequently expressed desire to cleanse Europe of non-Aryans, but by his fear of stern condemnations from English backbenchers. In their view, the whole war was a mistake.
Ike’s note announced one of the most important accomplishments in America’s history. But it was neither America’s cotillion nor its betrayal of Europe. It was the most important step in the American effort to save their country and the world from the consequences of Europe’s great failure.
In some respects, World War II was the culmination of the ideological turmoil begun by the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille fired the imaginations of Americans and Enlightenment intellectuals, who later saw their dreams for constitutional government hacked to pieces by the Parisian mob. As massive, ideologically-motivated conscript armies poured out of France, toppling monarchs and storming capitals across the continent, they invented a new form of warfare that irrevocably altered Europe. Nationalism would have its moment in the sun.
Americans quickly soured on the French Revolution and its horrors, but they cheered on the next generation of nationalists. Their nation was vigorous and free, and they wanted others to enjoy similar blessings. The first war of national independence after Waterloo, the Greek rebellion, was a cause célèbre on the other side of the Atlantic. Americans later received the losers of the liberal revolutions of 1848, such as Hungary’s Lajos Kosuth, Ireland’s Thomas Meagher, and Germany’s Carl Schurz with rapturous applause.
But in Europe, the causes of liberty and national independence diverged. Some countries were able to impose a national identity quickly. But the empires of Central and Eastern Europe, particularly the Austrian and Ottoman ones, could not mold their various ethnic and religious groups into one people. Many of their subjects preferred to live only among those who shared their language and customs. The others? Clearly, they had to find somewhere else to live.
Most of Europe’s small monoethnic states were thus born in century-long orgy of rape and murder. Millions were slaughtered in their own homes or driven from them, often to die in desolate places. Some of the new nation states had parliaments and offered their citizens a fair degree of freedom, but these were by no means Jeffersonian republics.
This barely troubled the great and the good in the rest of Europe. Their civilization produced beautiful cities, great art, and advanced science. They even took measurements of forehead slants and other facial features to discover which races were best, and which would lose out in the Darwinian struggle. The Anglo-Saxons, Latins, and Teutons could not quite agree on which of their races was the superior one, but doubtlessly this would be sorted out in due course. Many believed that their societies were too refined to descend into the sorts of horrors that they read about in newspaper accounts of faraway lands.
More perceptive thinkers saw the moral decay. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the narrator Marlow remarks that “all Europe contributed to the making of” the gifted yet savage Kurtz. The Congo is a dark place; so is the Thames. When cosmopolitan Vienna elected as mayor the antisemitic Karl Lueger—one of Hitler’s heroes in Mein Kampf—Theodor Herzl realized that the Jewish dream of assimilation had failed. Hitherto his life had been a charmed one, but he devoted the rest of it to finding a new home for his people.
The resurgence of Jew-hatred, and the pseudoscientific sheen Wilhelm Marr gave it by popularizing the term “antisemitism,” boded ill for all Europeans. Jew-hatred twists souls and warps minds, as do most bigotries, but the murderous paranoia that antisemites developed over the millennia is an especially potent poison. Europe was about to drain it to the dregs.
When a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a series of events that historians still dispute vigorously carried Europe into war. The Europeans threw all their art and their science on the pyre. This “War to End All Wars” yielded some of mankind’s greatest wartime poetry and some of its most infernal inventions. It was an ordeal on a scale the West had never before seen.
Try as they might, the Americans could not escape Europe’s great conflagrations. Britain’s desperate attempts to cripple Napoleon’s war economy through blockades infuriated the Americans who sought to profit from both sides of the war. Eventually, Washington declared war on Britain in 1812 and barely eked out a draw while London was preoccupied with France. Nearly a century later, Germany’s attacks on American shipping and ham-fisted schemes for Mexico to annex American territory forced the United States into the next great European war.
America’s intervention completely changed the war. Kaiser Wilhelm’s gambit of sending Vladimir Lenin and his motley crew of Marxists to Saint Petersburg helped knock Russia out of the war and solve his two-front problem. German forces surged westward while resupplying from their gains in Central and Eastern Europe, but were too late. Like one of Zeus’ lightning bolts, the Americans blasted down into Europe. Hitler later lamented that many of the best Germans had immigrated to the United States over the previous century and a half, and they returned gun in hand.
Woodrow Wilson hoped to find a just and lasting peace. He thought that permitting national self-determination and establishing a League of Nations would resolve the sources of international disharmony and that the European powers would relinquish their colonies. Much to his disappointment, however, the US Senate rebelled at the League of Nations and the Europeans at decolonization. The attempt to found a righteous postwar order also backfired geopolitically–Germany’s reparations were just enough to smart, but not to cripple, and its eastern flank was now full of small, weak states. German fanatics claimed that Jews doomed the Second Reich, and they were determined that a Third Reich would not suffer the same fate.
Gradually, a new consensus emerged in American foreign policy. After losing 53,000 Americans in less than six months of combat, and another 63,000 to disease, Washington would not send in the troops again. Instead, it would rely on arms control, diplomatic inducements, and some financial statecraft to keep the peace. Paper, white and green, was better than red blood and cold steel.
They were wrong. The depths of Hitler’s dark and twisted soul are hard to fathom, but some things are clear. He wanted the Germans to enslave and dominate Europe. He wanted to cleanse the world of Jews. He hated and feared American power. And he thought that a great war would cleanse and purify the Germans.
Although he got the war he wanted, it did not establish the thousand-year reich of his fevered dreams. By May 1945, much of his country was overrun and more than twelve million Germans had lost their lives. Berlin was in ruins. Even before the allied armies moved in, American and British bombers had wrecked 20 percent of Germany’s housing. As defeat drew closer, many Germans fled westward to avoid the Red Army. By 1950, 14 million Germans had left their homes, often unwillingly. At the end of World War One, many Germans claimed that their armies had not been defeated but stabbed in the back. No one had such delusions in 1945. Hitler’s defeat unmade Germany, which was partitioned for the next 45 years.
Winston Churchill once conferred with Franklin D. Roosevelt about what to call the next great European conflagration. “I said at once ‘the Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”
Churchill was right. If the great powers had enforced the Treaty of Versailles and prevented Germany from rearming or occupying the Rhineland, Hitler would have been exposed, emasculated, and expunged. Or at Munich. Even after the invasion of Poland forced London and Paris to declare war, the British and French dawdled for eight months until Hitler knocked out France in six weeks.
Today’s podcast bros agree that the war was unnecessary, but they seek to absolve Hitler rather than condemn him. Like them, many Americans in the 1930’s were skeptical of foreign intervention. They believed that their country only entered its last great war because of lies told by the financial elite, war profiteers, and Jews, and they wanted to steer clear of the next one.
These arguments resonate with some critics of America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, who often blame the same groups of people for America’s current troubles. Their views would be comical if they were less hideous. If Jews were as powerful as they claim, why did they let the Holocaust happen, and why did they pin their hopes on Winston Churchill, who in 1938 was primarily known for overseeing the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and the failed postwar return to the gold standard? Shouldn’t they have picked a better puppet than a back-benching has-been?
The fall of France completely upset American defense plans. The Americans had hoped that British naval power and France’s ground forces would keep Germany in check. That failed. As the news about France reached Washington, Congress nearly doubled the Navy.
They needed every ship. The building program warned Tokyo and Berlin that the Americans had realized that they could no more avoid this war than the last two. After Japan’s sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war too. For a time, his U-boats feasted on vulnerable American ships. The Americans first had to win the Battle of the Atlantic before the battle for Europe could commence.
Meanwhile, American and British air forces damaged Germany’s war machine. For a time, it was statistically impossible for American bomber crews to complete their tour of duty. But they were effective: American long-range fighters effectively destroyed the Luftwaffe in the skies above Germany while the bombers they escorted flattened city after city.
After invading North Africa and Italy, the Americans were ready to take the fight to northern Europe. At the division level, D-Day and the ensuing two-month battle for Normandy were more costly than the contemporary Soviet offensive. On average, each day of fighting between D-Day and V-E Day cost over 300 American lives. A bad day on the Western Front cost as much as a bad year in Iraq; more Americans died on D-Day than in Afghanistan.
For some later critics, that was not enough. As they saw it, the Americans let Central and Eastern Europe fall behind the Iron Curtain. This is hard to square with the all-out effort to defeat the Nazis—including the Manhattan Project—and the reality that, after losing tens of millions of people in the war it helped start, the Soviet Union was not about to relinquish its conquests. Moreover, the free world had liberated the industrial heartland of Europe, some of the most strategically important territory on the planet. Should it have traded the Ruhr for the Balkans?
According to conventional wisdom, V-E Day marked the moment when the Americans realized that they could not return to their prewar foreign policy. This view is mistaken. American troops mutinied around the world because of the slow pace of demobilization. In the year after the war ended, millions of industrial workers went on strike, inflation soared, and the stock market lost a quarter of its value. The last thing anyone wanted was an expensive new foreign policy.
There was little consensus about Europe, bipartisan or otherwise. Some hoped that, in league with the Soviet Union, the United States would divest Europe of its overseas colonies. Others wanted Britain and France to serve as a bulwark against the Soviets. Still others wanted to dissolve the British and French empires while also depending on those empires to keep the Soviets in check.
Reality did not suit their preferences. As the Soviets broke agreements, Americans gradually realized the danger. In 1946, the reaction to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was so negative that Harry Truman falsely claimed that he hadn’t known what the aging statesman planned to say. The next year, he announced the anticommunist Truman Doctrine. The year after, the United States reinstituted the draft. In 1949, NATO was founded.
The war also started a new chapter in the debate over nationalism. Although many Americans despise that term, American nationalists like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln maintained that the Americans were one people whose unity advanced the cause of freedom. World War II proved them right. In war movies, it became cliché to include a New Yorker, a Texan, and representatives of other parts of America in any given military unit. These people would not walk into a bar together, but they would fight their way across Europe.
The Europeans saw things differently. In Western Europe, many concluded that nationalism was a dead end. The nation states of Europe either fell prey to fascism or were not strong enough to defeat it: some had fought for God and country long after their homes were occupied, but the majority acquiesced to Nazi rule. The war paused Central and Eastern Europe’s dream for national liberation. Those countries effectively lost their independence to the Russians and only regained their sovereignty after the Iron Curtain fell. For them, 1989 gave them a new chance at life.
This confusion lies at the heart of Europe’s problems today. The Western Europeans largely want the European Union to transcend national sovereignty, but the Central and Eastern Europeans joined to protect it. They don’t much like the fussy bureaucrats in Brussels, but they vastly prefer the pinstriped busybodies to the killers in the Kremlin.
It has also led the United States into a dilemma. American power prevented Communism from overrunning Europe and, after the Soviets collapsed, kept the Europeans from settling their differences the old-fashioned way. But it has also left the Europeans soft-headed and woolly-eyed. They have not thought seriously about their national survival in over three decades, and even the second great Russian invasion of Ukraine has not fully roused them from their slumber. Some of their most prominent thinkers are so strategically inept that the threat of tariffs has induced them to run to Beijing cap in hand.
This sort of intellectual impoverishment helped create Europe’s great failure and subsequent decline. In 1900, nearly every decision of global import was made in Europe. That is not the case today. Understandably, many members of the current administration have decided that the China threat is so great and Asia is so strategically important that Americans must rebalance their resources and attention away from Europe. They hope that America’s pivot to Asia will either jolt the Europeans in a helpful direction or leave the continent in such a state that its fate will not affect the United States.
Others believe that America’s entire foreign policy since World War II has been misguided. As they see it, an America that sorts out Europe’s squabbles and garrisons the continent breeds resentment abroad and corruption at home. Better to let the foreigners sort out their own problems. There is some merit to this critique, but it misses the big picture. The country has suffered defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan since 1945, but neither was as costly as either victory in Europe. Insurgencies are nasty; industrialized warfare is horrific.
America’s realization after V-E Day that no other country could defend its interests, and so the United States would have to do it, created a freer, more prosperous America than would otherwise exist. An America that faced a Hitler-dominated Europe, or a Soviet- or Chinese-dominated Eurasia, would be much less free and open than contemporary society. “Come home, America” is an appealing slogan, but every time the United States has adopted it, its youth have been thrust deep into the heart of darkness.