FDR and Bush 43

From: Cub Driver warbird@m

He bore a particular animus toward France.

Yes. And he bluntly told DeGaulle that once Germany was disarmed, France would
have no need for more than a token armed force.

Sometimes it seems that his
principal object in a postwar Asia was to ensure that France would
never return to Indochina. (Too bad he didn't succeed!)

Amen. There's no reason that the French couldn't have been booted out of
Indochina in the same time-frame that the Dutch were drop-kicked out of
Indonesia. It's a safe bet that FDR's toe was itching to do just that.

Britain was a tougher nut, given that it was in reality America's only
friend in the world with any potential for carrying a load (rather
like today). Roosevelt was equally skeptical about the British
empire, but he choked it down for the sake of Churchill.

He was, however, cautious about making it appear that the US was fighting the
war to preserve the British Empire--which we were not.

As for Roosevelt's genius at coalition building, recall that it was
the cause of the Cold War that bedevilled the administrations of
Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and
Reagan ... did I leve anyone out? Roosevelt was so afraid that Russia
would make a separate peace with Germany that he handed over half
of
Europe to Stalin.

From some point in 1944 Roosevelt really was a very sick man. He certainly
should not have run again in 1944. Had he been fully in control of his
faculties, we probably would not have seen the war's denoument play out the way
it did. Certainly if FDR had remained vigorous throughout his tenure and until
stepping down (presumably) in 1949, we would probably have seen a very
different world, if only because Roosevelt had a very clear vision of how he
wanted to shape it and position America, whereas Truman did not. Truman grew
into the job. But that took years, just those critical years that were to
shape the decades to come.
But, in any case, short of full-scale war, there was no way to pry the Soviet
Union loose from the territory it had conquered by force of arms. Poland, East
Germany, et al, were fated to endure what they did as long as the Soviet Union
existed.
As far as Roosevelt's ability to build coalitions, during the war, the allies
were allied because they all had common enemies that had attacked them
militarily. After that enemy was vanquished, the alliance could be expected to
melt away. Only the development of the Cold War kept a semblance of it alive
in the West for a further half century.
The worry about the SU dropping out of the war on Germany was of course caused
by Russia dropping out of WWOne, allowing Germany to shift nearly a million
troops to the Western front just as the US was getting its troops onto the
continent. In the spring of 1918 von Ludendorff was able to attack and advance
40 miles in 10 days, inflicting some 300,000 casualties, bringing the British
5th Army to the edge of disaster and opening up a gap between the French and
British. Only the most fearful fighting stopped that German offensive.
Roosevelt did everything he could to ensure that such a thing didn't happen
again, and, of course, Stalin played on that fear.

It is easy to romanticize the leaders of the past, now that their
blunderings have been frozen into history.

True. And easy to forget how contentious were eras that now are depicted as
times of harmony and unified national purpose. FDR's true genius at building
alliances was not demonstrated among foreign leaders, but at home with domestic
political rivals and, especially, industry leaders, many of whom hated him with
a passion for all sorts of New Deal endeavors, not least among them the Wagner
Act. The fact that he turned many of them into dollar-a-year men and got them
to cooperate in building our massive war machine was one of his most impressive
accomplishments. It's taken for granted, but delving into the details of how
it was done reveals astonishing legerdemain by the Roosevelt Administration.

I happen to be reading William Manchester's account of Tarawa atoll.
When the marines went ashore at Betio, it was a typical battalion that
lost half its men. Altogether, for that bit of coral, America gave up
more than three thousand of its sons.

Another oddity of history: MacArthur's masterful, low casualty (after Buna)
New Guinea campaign is neglected or disdained while King's murderously bloody
Central Pacific campaign is hallowed in popular memory. But not for nothing
did Manchester rate MacArthur the greatest soldier in American history.


Chris Mark