"Finally the navigation officer...told us we were to make a surprise
attack on Hawaii...At last Japan would be at war with Britain and the
U.S.A....A dream come true! What will the people at home think when they hear
the news? Won't they be excited!"
Not, it turned out, as excited as the Americans were. In the succeeding
four years they mobilized 14,000,000 men, built 4,900 merchant ships, sent
76,000 planes overseas with 2,000,000 tons of bombs.
Soon Japan's sun--and Hitler's--began to set. Already Montgomery's Eighth
Army had captured the song Lilli Marlene from the Afrika Korps. At Stalingrad,
Guadalcanal, Sicily, the dictators took the road back. The German generals who
had been amazed at Hitler's political successes of the '30s, amazed again at
their own easy victories of 1940-41, were amazed once more that their
invincible troops could not hold their ground. Hitler was even amazed at the
best-advertised fact in military history: Russian winters are cold.
Poison & Guilt. When his Atlantic Wall was breached, Hitler's only
hope was a rift between his Eastern and Western enemies. They held together--at
the stiff (and probably unnecessary) price to the West of a compromise of moral
principle at Yalta. Stalin might have taken Manchuria and Poland without the
Yaltese benison; but at Yalta he got something more important than territory:
proof that the West did not have enough sense to distrust him.
So Hitler, with his blowzy mistress, died in a Berlin bunker and the first
half of the 20th Century survived its greatest scourge. The man had used the
most novel weapons of science and persuasion to revive the oldest and darkest
human passions. He was the awful, ultimate answer to 1900's smug belief that
change always moved in an upward direction. He was the proof that progress is
poison as well as food, that evil is ineradicable and that safety is the most
foolish of all foolish human hopes.
After he died, it became the fashion to think of Hitler and the Nazis as
some inexplicable variation from normal mankind. The fact was that Germany
stood near the peak of Western civilization, and Hitler, every inch a German,
carried the bulk of his people with him into crime. The depths to which Germans
had descended would not be impossible for Russians, Britons or Americans--if
they managed to achieve sufficiently bad political leadership and a
sufficiently reckless disregard of moral law. Hitler systemically,
scientifically slaughtered 6,000,000 Jews, a fact which the world learned after
the war. But before the war, he had clearly shown that he would do this if he
got a chance--and most of the world, German and non-German, had received these
tidings with no great indignation. War guilt was not confined to the
aggressors, and not all of the guilty were tried at Nurnberg.
