Victor Davis Hanson: Lies, betrayal and incredible surprises marked start of World War II 80 years ago
by Victor Davis Hanson at Fox news:
Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.
The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.
Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.
After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.
Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.
During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.
Communism then easily would spread to the Atlantic amid the ruins of European capitalism. Unlike Czarist Russia in 1914, this time around the Soviets wanted to stay out of a German war. Instead, Stalin rearmed during the non-aggression pact with Hitler.
Stalin, of course, had no idea he had created a Nazi monster that would quickly devour all of Continental Europe — and turn to its rear to eye a now-isolated Soviet Union. Much less did Stalin realize that the battle-hardened German war machine would soon overrun his country in a surprise attack beginning on June 22, 1941, a little less than two years after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The non-aggression pact in a way had also ensured that a European war would soon turn into a global massacre that left roughly 65 million dead. At the time of deal, imperial Japan was fighting the Soviet Union on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. The Japanese were de facto allies of Nazi Germany. They had assumed that Stalin’s fear of an aggressive Germany meant the Soviet Union would have to worry about a two-front war against both Germany and Japan.
But now, the surprise agreement stunned the Japanese, who saw it as a German betrayal. It left them alone against the superior forces of Russia’s eastern armies.
Japan quickly withdrew from its losing Russian war. In time it signed its own non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, in April 1941 — ironically, just months before Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” the massive invasion of Russia.
Japan correctly concluded by the betrayal that Hitler’s Germany could not be trusted and deserved tit-for-tat duplicity. So Japan never joined Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia. Instead, the Japanese turned their attention to the Pacific and especially the vulnerable British and American bases in Singapore, Burma, the Philippines — and Pearl Harbor.
In sum, the August 1939 non-aggression pact ensured the German attack against Great Britain and Western Europe. It also convinced Hitler that Russia was vulnerable, gullible and appeasing, and could be overrun in weeks following an invasion.
Finally, the deal ended all Japanese ideas of fighting the Soviet Union on the ground from the East in partnership with Nazi Germany invading from the West. Instead, Japan turned toward the vulnerable British and American eastern forces.
In sophisticated times, we sometimes forget that time-honored concepts like the balance of power and military deterrence — not good intentions and international peace organizations — alone keep the peace. When the pact destroyed fragile alliances and encouraged German adventurism, war was certain.
The final ironies? The Soviet double-cross of the Western democracies eventually ended up almost destroying Russia, which bore the brunt of an empowered Germany.
The redirection of Japanese war strategy to target America finally brought the United States into World War II, which ensured the destruction of Japan and Germany.
Add this all up, and in some sense World War II really started on Aug. 23, 1939, 80 years ago this summer.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-world-war-ii
Note from ghr: I was 5 when the European part of World War II broke out in 1939.
I became acutely aware of it by the Spring of 1942 when I began able to read the cutlines of the war photos of the Sunday Pioneer Press rotogravure picture section of its Sunday newspapers, and the newspaper’s headlines of the Pacific front that Spring. “Battle at Midway”, was my entry to become part of the war effort , playing serious war games with my neighborhood buddies thereafter until August, 1945 when it all finally came to an end.
I couldn’t read story books, both then and now, but, even then, I could read a lot about real wars, draw maps, read cutlines to pictures available anywhere between the 16th century Spanish invasion of Aztec Mexico to the Korean War. I began collecting American state road maps in 1942….and have about 200 of them still stashed away somewhere.
My dad was 41 years old in 1942…..too old to go overseas. He became one of the local air raid wardens here in St. Paul….and with special helmet and vest practiced safety from air assaults twice a week from April to September that year. Our neighborhood house lights had to be out beginning from dusk on to dark for an hour or two.
We also began our Victory Garden in two empty lots across the alley behind our garage. My dad had agreed with the city to commit our family to be responsible for this national urban effort to support the war effort by providing food for neighbors on our block.
The city would plow the fields for us….My dad signed a contract. We were going to help the war effort. I had two step cousins, sons of my German step grandmother, age 16 and 18 who had joined the navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, and were sent to the Pacific front.
As life moved on that April, after Mom, Dad, and I had done all of the plantings, from radishes to sweet corn, potatoes to peas and even egg plant and okra, lettuce, and tomato plants to kholrabi, you name it, we must have planted it. They treated me as if I were an adult.
Honestly, I loved every minute of it. I loved the exploring, the planting, the learning from and with both my parents. Dad, however, had to work six days a week, pharmacist and manager of a downtown St. Paul Liggett Drug Company store. Mom picked up a terrible rash, so was confined to canning and the cooking world throughout the war.
I became king of the Victory Garden roost…..and in full truth, then and now, loved every moment of it. I weeded, mulched, fertilized, watered, planted, harvested, often thinking I was helping our war effort in a dreamy way. (I’d dive bomb the Colorado potato beetles eating potato foliage with my right hand “Lockheed Lightening” and bury these enemies into dad’s last year’s grease collection from his car….which was by then stored away in the garage until the war was over.
That war made me become a high school teacher of Social Studies, History, and Russian…..until the schools began to collapse as teaching knowledge institutions in the 1970s. I have worked in the plant world ever since….including this very day, next week, next month, and next Spring, Godwilling, at 85 years old!
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