Column no. 64
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS, - June 9, 2005, Modified 7-19-08
This is the third in what has grown to be an at-least four-part series on this subject. (I’m having perverse fun with this one. Thanks, Pat). It’s right up my alley, like the scenario for “The 15% Solution” was. It may go more than four. However, it will also likely be suspended for a bit, due to the press of my time and the need to deal with other matters.
This writing and the series of which it is a part focuses on the subject of a book Patrick Buchanan published about a year ago. He got some more publicity on it recently in the context of Bush’s remarks that “Yalta was worse than the Nazi-Soviet Pact.” Buchanan has postulated that things could have been better in the world than they became had other paths been followed, especially for the US, given that there was a World War II. His principal focus is on the evils of the Soviet Union, following its victory over German Nazism in World War II. This series postulates that World War II as it did occur historically was not fought, as per Patrick Buchanan’s wish. Given the imperialist designs of both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan at the time, another war was, however.
In this scenario, I lay out what the world, and especially our country, might well have looked like over time, had indeed World War II not occurred. The scenario postulates, however, that certain other events that really did happen, events that either occurred independent of World War II or, given what we know about the real world, well could have occurred had there been no World War II, did take place. The latter two types of events are summarized within parentheses.
At the end of the scenario set forth in last week’s column, the Republican candidate for President, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, a strong anti-New Dealer, a moderate isolationist, no anti-Semite, but tolerant of both of those wings of his party, easily defeats the last-minute substitution for a totally demoralized, retired, and soon-to-be dead Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one Sen. Harry Truman. The Nazi German and Japanese Empires rule much of the globe, allowing truncated empires of Great Britain (India and parts of Africa) and France (parts of Africa) to continue in existence. The Germans control almost all of the world’s then-known oil reserves outside of the United States, having captured the Caucasus through their defeat and demolition of the Soviet Union, having set up a puppet Shah (the real one, Reza Pahlavi) in Iran, and having moved unopposed into Saudi Arabia. The Japanese are quite content with the oil of the former Dutch East Indies, as they continue to develop their Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (their real goal of World War II). Absent United States help, the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang-Kai-Shek has collapsed. The Chinese Communists, with no allies anywhere, struggle on in Szechuan Province, but with no hope to overcome the Japanese stranglehold on their country.
The U.S. is in an uncertain state. One Prescott Bush (in the real world, and this one, too, as we will see in later installments, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush) and his colleagues had provided major funding for Nazi Germany. (This was real. In fact, into February 1942, Bush was still providing funding for Germany after Hitler declared war on the US, on December 8, 1941. He did not want to do so at the time, but was obliged to do by certain treaty obligations to Japan. [Hitler was not the only ruler who abided, or indeed abides, by the rule of law selectively.] At any rate, in Feb. 1942 FDR threatened Prescott Bush with prosecution under the Trading with the Enemy Act and he stopped being a banker for Hitler.)
In the 1930s major elements of American society either supported or at least tolerated Nazi Germany (as they had done in the real world right up to December 8, 1941). For example, Charles Lindbergh was an admirer. Henry Ford was a traditional anti-Semite and actually an early financial supporter and literary colleague of Hitler. Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith were rabid anti-Semites. The German-American Bund of course flourished. (These were all real people and a real organization.) However, the US as a whole was wary of the Germans and the Japanese as well. While the country felt that it was protected by its oceans, there were some noises about re-armament, for “protecting our shores.” They were not heeded by the governing powers in Washington.
Nazi Germany regarded the US warily as well. Hitler knew of the American traditions of Constitutional Democracy and guaranteed rights, freedoms and liberties. Similar provisions constituted major elements of the Weimar Constitution of his own country that he had overthrown upon taking power on January 30, 1933. He was also wary of the potential of American industrial might. He was concerned about what the reaction might be of the American Jewish community, should what had happened to European Jewry ever become known. By 1944, the Germans had triumphed over the Soviet Union in a one-front war and demolished the country, literally as well as figuratively. They found themselves at peace. They then proceeded to finish methodically killing virtually every Jew in Europe.
No one believed the wild stories of the few who escaped (just as in the real world, no one would believe them as they started coming out as early as 1940, until it was too late to stop the mass murders in what came to be known as The Holocaust). American Jewry was not nearly as powerful as the virulent anti-Semites of both Hitler and his American clones believed and stated repeatedly, but they did have some political influence. Hitler was determined to deal with the Jews in the US, but he wanted to that without having to invade. German industry was making increasingly profitable deals with such anti-Semitic American industrialists as Henry Ford, pro-Nazi bankers such as Prescott Bush, and the leading-edge American petroleum and other extractive industries. He did not want to rock any boats, if he could avoid so doing.
The Nazis openly demanded that the Roosevelt Administration “repress” the American Jewish community, starting with rounding them up and putting them in camps (just as FDR did in the real world with the Japanese-American community on the West Coast). However, the Nazis did no more than make demands until the end of 1944 because they were still militarily involved securing their control over the whole of what had been the Soviet Union. With the election of Dewey, the Nazis demanded and got negotiations on the “resolution of the Jewish question.” Dewey entered these negotiations with trepidation, and they proceeded slowly. A protest movement began to develop over the issue of American cooperation with Nazi Germany and any form of it with Imperial Japan. Not wanting to stir up trouble at home, Dewey responded in a desultory manner.
In the meantime, the Germans had been working on developing the atomic bomb. Under the influence of the isolationist “anti-militarists” and the open German-collaborationists, of course the US Manhattan Project never took shape. By the spring of 1945, the Germans had the bomb. (In the real world, absent the destruction of Germany caused by the war, they probably would have had it a lot sooner, and probably would have beaten the US to it, even if there had been a Manhattan Project.) They secretly tested it in their portion of Siberia. They also developed a four-engine bomber capable of reaching the United States from Germany and returning safely. (Such a bomber really was under development by the Germans in the early days of the war, and several prototypes were built and flown. Development was stopped when the real war demanded the concentration of resources elsewhere.) With the negotiations on the “Jewish Question” moving very slowly and the increasing anti-German protests in the United States, Hitler decided upon a different course of action. He decided to rock the US boat.
On August 6, 1945, with a monopoly on the bomb that lasted until the Japanese developed theirs 10 years later, without warning Hitler’s four-engine “American Bomber” drops one on New York City. New York City was Hitler’s personal choice as the first target. While the financial center serving many of Germany’s American corporate partners went up in flame, so did the largest concentration of Jews still surviving in the world. (Anti-Semitism did run policy in the real world of Hitler, even when it went against his nation’s best interests. For example, as they were losing the war to the Soviet Union in 1944-45, they still diverted resources from their war effort to murdering as many Jews as they could in the time remaining.) The Nazis did forewarn many of their corporate allies in New York City that “something was going to happen,” and it might be a good idea for those who had not already left on vacation to do so. None of them bothered to let the Dewey Administration of this development.
Three days later, Boston was obliterated. Not expecting anything like either strike, of course, no American fighters rose to respond to the presence of a German bomber in American airspace. It was thought to be simply a surprise good will visit. Had interceptors intervened, however, they would have been shot out of the skies by the elite Japanese fighter force flying off the decks of the four elite carriers standing off the East Coast, the Hiryu, the Soryu, the Kaga, and the Akagi (which of course were not sunk at the Battle of Midway, because, in this version of history, there was none.) In a “good will gesture,” they had been allowed to transit the Panama Canal by the Dewey Government two months earlier, and had refueled and refitted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some of the antiquated Army Air Corps fighters did manage to scramble from the Worcester Army Air Base in Massachusetts, but they were all destroyed by the Japanese. Since there had been no modern weapons development going on in the US under the control of the isolationists and German sympathizers, the American craft were no match for the fourth-generation Zeros flown by the top Japanese pilots (pilots who, with no Battle of Midway in which, in the real world, the cream of the Japanese fighter pilot crop was killed, were still very much among the living).
In the face of the German possession of this monstrous weapon, the von Ribbentrop-Lodge negotiations proceeded very quickly. The US was allowed to continue as an independent country. In order to meet German demands and avoid any further atomic devastation, under what he claimed to be his inherent Commander-in-Chief powers (which in the real world a number of Presidents have claimed and used, e.g., Lincoln, FDR, and G.W. Bush, even though they nowhere appear in the Constitution), Dewey moved extra-constitutionally to crush the protests. He imprisoned tens of thousands of protesters in hastily built camps. The Republican-isolationist-pro-German Congress quickly ratified the Von Ribbentrop-Lodge Treaty and quickly offered its assent for the Dewey policy.
Ties between American and German corporations were strengthened, with a German “overseer” being put on every American corporate board of directors of any consequence. Reinhard Heydrich arrived in the US with three elite SS divisions, to undertake the Final Solution for American Jewry as well. (In the real world, Heydrich was the architect of the Final Solution for Europe. He was killed by Czech partisans, called “terrorists” by the Nazis, who in the real world then proceeded to wipe out the male population of the Czech village of Lidice in a display of the doctrine of “collective responsibility” used by a number of governments around the world to this very day.)
A Constitutional Amendment depriving Jews of the equal protection of the law guaranteed to all Americans under the 14th Amendment (much like what the current “Protection of Marriage” Amendment would do to the homosexual population in the US) was quickly passed by Congress. Under not-too-subtle German threats of further atomic bombings, it was quickly ratified by the states. The SS, with the eager collaboration of American anti-Semites (just as happened in the real world in Eastern Europe and France), moved quickly and efficiently. Some American Jews managed to flee and it was rumored for years that small colonies somehow managed to survive among the Inuit in Labrador, the Quechua in Patagonia, and high in the Southern Alps in New Zealand. However, within two years, under assault by the new Masters of America and their acolytes, using highly efficient, third-generation extermination equipment, the American Jewish community as it had existed since the first Jews landed in New Amsterdam in the early 17th century, was no more.
Next on Hitler’s list was the Afro-American population, for whom he had shown open enmity at the 1936 Berlin Olympics during the four-gold medal domination of the sprints by the US track star Jesse Owens. For these policies he found so many American allies that the Germans had to engage in a variety of lotteries of different types to determine who would get in on the campaign. We will turn to the history of that era next time.
