Читать книгу Winged Peace - William Avery Bishop - Страница 16

Table of Contents

After Germany had been defeated in 1918 the Allies set about dismembering her for the purpose of making her too weak to fight for long years to come. Bits and pieces of country rich in natural resources, but largely inhabited by Germans, became parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Austria was given its independence. Danzig, Memel, and the Saar were mandated to the League of Nations. The Allies occupied the Ruhr and gave Malmédy and Eupen to Belgium, another area to Italy, and annexed Alsace-Lorraine to France, including even those sections which are preponderantly German. At the same time we took Germany’s navy away from her, disbanded her army, seized her colonies, and convinced ourselves that we had so weakened our enemies that never again would they be able to rise against us. In which way of thinking we counted without the spirit of a consistently war-like and ambitious people and at the same time completely neglected to put curbs on the selfishness of greedy traders in our own ranks who soon would be establishing cartel arrangements with our industrially and scientifically brilliant erstwhile enemies.

Almost before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s geographers were trying to ascertain why the Reich had lost the war and laying plans to win the next one. As a first step they organized a great geographical research institute to explore the problem and find a solution. While the educators of the democracies continued to teach the young the bare rudiments of flat geography and discontinued even this elementary procedure when the child left the primary school, the Germans were making home geography, world geography, and geopolitics the hubs about which their whole educational system from kindergarten to university—and indeed their entire national life—revolved.

The story of Germany’s renaissance during the postwar years needs no retelling. Even before Hitler came to power, the Reich was making ready for a new war of conquest by conserving her own resources, developing substitutes for those she lacked, creating great new industries, acquiring enormous stocks of materials from the outside world, mobilizing her entire population to work for the Fatherland, and finally, leading the whole world in the development of aviation—all with our assistance.

Industrialists and financiers in the democracies saw in association with Germany the possibility of profitable trade and gave no thought to the uses to which the goods they sold would be put. Hence the great intercontinental cartels, presently under the fire of liberal political leaders. In other words, some of our own people, in their blindness to the nature of the German plan, assisted our enemies to prepare for a new war. That they should do so and that democratic political leaders encouraged them, clearly indicates that we knew nothing of the world’s political geography and still believed that oceans are fortifications which render us impregnable even to the extent of making it “safe” to sell the matériel of war to those who await only the opportunity to strike us down. No more fallacious idea ever governed the thinking of otherwise intelligent people.

The next great step toward German re-establishment came through her correct assumption that little difficulty would be encountered in attempting to tear up the Treaty of Versailles for the purpose of reuniting the German peoples in Middle Europe. In this ambition Germany found a sympathetic ear at her disposal in high places, because, with the war forgotten, reasonable men guilelessly accepted the thesis that members of the German family could not be blamed for all wanting to live under the same roof. Soon, however, the Germans showed their hand by letting it be seen that their ideas of a greater Germany did not begin and end with the repatriation of Germans living outside the border of the Reich, but that the true objective was to obtain military resources. You know what happened then—the democracies launched the policy of Appeasement, because they wanted to trade, not fight. Finally even the 100 per cent Appeasers in Britain and France realized that the game could not go on. Already Austria had been absorbed and Czechoslovakia overrun. Now pledges were given to Poland and when the Germans poured their air armadas across the borders Britain and France declared war. Poland fell in three weeks. She fell, not because her people refused to fight, but because Germany thrust five great mechanized spearheads, operating under a canopy of airplanes which virtually blackened the skies, against an unprepared nation. That was the physical beginning of World War II. Actually it had begun on the day when Germany’s political geographers began to ask each other why World War I had been lost, while we blandly assumed that the bucklers and bastions of other days still were valid defenses.

The war went on. Britain and France still believed that a combination of naval blockade and the Maginot defenses, which ended in the air at the Franco-Belgian border, ultimately would enable us to starve Germany out. Suddenly the Germans moved into Denmark and the conquest of that neutral country was effected by the simple process of occupying its airfields. Then Germany darted across the Kattegat and the Skagerrak under the widely spread umbrella of the Luftwaffe and Norway was occupied. The Royal Navy had to withdraw from that engagement because it had no parasol over its head. Then came Holland. The Dutch cut their dikes and flooded their country, so the Germans simply flew over the flooded area and conquered Holland’s cities from the air. So too with Belgium, where the German air force, covering the Wehrmacht, reduced another gallant but unprepared nation to pulp in a matter of days. France came next and France in turn was conquered because she had been thinking in national, or regional, geographical terms and had made no preparation for the type of warfare her conquerors launched. Again, it was the Luftwaffe cloud, covering the spearheads of the ground forces, which rolled over a helpless people who had pinned their hopes on ground fortresses and were virtually without aerial defense. Fortunately for the British (and I would like to remind all good democrats again of our tendency to rely on the help of God Almighty when our enemies assail us) heavy fogs in the English Channel saved the Expeditionary Forces from annihilation and enabled the greater part of it to escape from Dunkirk aboard a nondescript fleet of small naval craft, tugs, fishing boats, motor launches, pleasure steamers, and every imaginable sort of conveyance capable of moving over the water. It was one of the greatest examples of human heroism in all the grandeur of arms. But its roots were embedded in the stupidity of leaders whose eyes were blind to a changing world. Germany’s drive to the West had been successful.

Now the Nazi horde turned southeast and occupied the north coast of Africa by ferrying a huge army and its mechanized equipment across the Mediterranean under a dense air blanket. Once again German air-power had enabled her to by-pass the bottlenecks. She drove into the Balkans and quickly crushed organized resistance in Yugoslavia by bombing its cities into rubble. German dive-bombers drove us out of Greece and we retreated in ships to the island of Crete, where the Germans descended on us by parachute and glider and again we had to make our escape over the water—because we were still living in the Sea Age and had allowed the coming of the Air Age to catch us napping. So goes the grim story of Germany’s subjugation of western and southern Europe, spearheaded by the airplane.

No change of tactics or strategy occurred when the Nazis turned on Russia. Again the series of ground-borne spearheads drove forward under a blanket of aircraft. The Western powers still assumed that the whole German strategy related solely to the conquest of the Eurasian land mass. Isolationists in the Americas still called it a European squabble, an imperialist brawl, but never the first round of a death struggle for world domination. When Mussolini’s legions moved into the French Riviera they saw it only as a “stab in the back” of helpless France, not as part of a closely knit plan of world conquest. I am quite sure that when the United States was bombed into the war at Pearl Harbor, the American people were convinced, as many of them still are, that the bestial Japanese were simply taking advantage of the existing preoccupations of the Western Democracies to wrest for themselves new power in the Pacific, possibly to deflect American aid from the nations involved in the “shooting war.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Every act of aggression of our enemies has been part of their overall plan of world conquest and, as such, has been closely integrated with every other move, no matter in what part of the world it has taken place. Thus the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was simply one facet of the plan designed in Germany by the Hitler geographers, part of the master plan of world conquest, and it was made when Hitler gave the signal. What was the plan?

After disabling the United States Pacific fleet, Japan would move huge armies southward over the sea, under the protection of great air-power, conquering the Orient, then quickly turning west to overrun Burma and India. Meanwhile Germany would drive east through South Russia, across the Black Sea and through Turkey to Iraq, where the Japanese and Germans were to meet by fixed appointment. Success of this phase of the plan would have resulted in driving the British out of the Indian Ocean. It came close to succeeding. But for Russia’s continued resistance, it would probably have done so. Meanwhile Japan, deploying other forces into Eastern Siberia, was to cut Russia off from supplies from the American continent through her Siberian entry. In the meantime the blockading of Murmansk would have cut off the Soviets’ Atlantic supply route. If complete success had attended this program, as it nearly did, Russia and China would soon have been choked into submission.

Let me stress here for the benefit of those North Americans who insist on regarding Japan as their Number 1 Enemy, that the senior partner in all this enterprise was, is, and always will be Germany. Japan and Italy were never more than satellites fighting for the German geo-planners. Had the German master plan been able to maintain its timetable, it would have given the Axis so great an industrial potential that its members could have taken their own good time to polish off the Americas. The partners would have enjoyed a superabundance of natural resources to build up inexhaustible heavy war industries. Endless streams of oil would have flowed to their refineries and from them to airfields, naval bases, and military establishments. Virtually all the world’s rubber would have been in their possession. If Britain had not already been overwhelmed it would have been no trick to knock her out of the war by air and seaborne invasions, or perhaps by the less costly device of starving her. Africa would have become an Axis continent and the Germans would have been looking across the narrow waters of the South Atlantic from Dakar, ready to pounce on the Americas at the opportune moment. The Japanese, of course, would have been in Australia by this time and Germany’s air-arm would have subjugated the northern stepping stones to America, Iceland, and Greenland. So went the master plan. If time were needed to prepare for the final phase, the subjugation of America, it could be secured through a negotiated peace.

If it is necessary to present any further evidence to establish our blindness to Axis infiltration, let me point out that the ground work for the attack upon the United States and Canada already had been laid in South America (discussed in a later chapter) where the work of preparing for conquest was going full blast. If it is necessary to point out even more strongly the geographical blindness of our people, let me refer you to the policies of appeasement in which we persisted in South America, choosing to act as if political manifestations in the Argentine were none of our business while the obvious and fully known policies of those who governed that country constituted direct threats to the safety of the North American continent and to our whole free way of life. No doubt, had the Germans been successful, we should have come alive to the real implications of world conquest by the time the war had reached the phase at which Germany could have taken full advantage of its South American infiltration, but by then it would have been too late. The Germans and their satellites would have been poised to strike and their power would have been invincible. They would strike from South America while the Japanese moved with massed airplane carriers from the Pacific islands and other forces descended upon us from the north through Alaska. Another great German air armada would have leap-frogged through Iceland and Greenland to attack our northeast coast. The United States and Canada would then become the final battlefield and the scene of the greatest and bloodiest drama in the history of mankind.

That is what our enemies had planned. To you who read these pages, steeped as you have been in ideas of security which have been solely continental, it will have all the qualities of a nightmare the victim of which awakens and soon is laughing at his own fears.

That is because we still accept the flat-map geography which gives rise to the smug conclusion that “it-can’t-happen-here.” Our weird beliefs have direct relationship to the fervent North American idea that we are impregnable behind our ocean barriers, and its corollary which holds that one North American can lick his weight in wildcats. Perhaps he can when he is better armed than the wildcats. If he is not, the wildcats ultimately are going to win a war. If the wildcats are so fortunate as to arrive by airplane and parachute while others crash through our doors simultaneously from the sea, then it is not going to be much help to be standing firm in midcontinental Kansas City or Des Moines without a gun.

Such was the Axis program of conquest. Fortunately it encountered unforeseen resistances which set back the timetable. Thank God Hitler blundered. Thank God he underestimated the common people of Britain and Russia! That was our good fortune, not the result of our good sense. The German plan was a plan for world conquest, nothing else. It was a plan founded on a knowledge of geography and one which took advantage of geography and its development as a science in the global Air Age.