A Rhineland Fantasy

...Jacqueline R. Kasun has taught at the University of Arizona and is presently an associate professor of economics at Hum-boldt State College...

...Savage aggression by Italy in Ethiopia and Japan in China had only re-enforced the American conviction that peace and love would find a way...

...Scholars would issue protests...

...This is, of course, something that cannot be known...

...and would of course discover that boys die in wars...

...To ensure the continuation of platitudinous non-violence on the part of the United States, Congress was providing in a series of Neutrality Acts that this country would neither give nor sell arms to any party to any dispute anywhere in the world...

...The massive destruction, the awesome costs, of total war permit us to see ourselves as tragic heroes, wading through the carnage of an inescapable tragedy, perhaps even settling some great issue in the process...

...If we had succeeded in avoiding World The Professor's Lament I doubt that I shall ever see A textbook flyer cliche-free...

...To be able to picture oneself as a tragic hero is often quite as satisfactory as being able to justify or rationalize one's actions...

...In an atmosphere in which Winston Churchill was barred from BBC as "too controversial," a British Rhineland action was unthinkable...

...Some unfortunate incidents involving American troops and Rhineland civilians would exacerbate matters...

...Visiting senators digest with difficulty the contrast between American boys dying in field hospitals and the local citizens (whom we're supposed to be saving from totalitarian aggression) off-handedly getting fat on the inflow of dollars...

...The paradoxical consequence is that it is easier for moderns to justify total war than limited war...

...She is the author of Change and Choice: An Overview of Economics...

...The 1920s had been spent in second thoughts, mainly of revulsion and remorse, over the first World War...

...Amid the general civilian prosperity, the refugees and orphans and the wounded are a stark reminder of war's grim costs, which are total for the individuals concerned...

...But the Americans might very well have been joined by some of Germany's other neighbors: Czechoslovakia, for example, might have had premonitions of what lay in store for her, and so might Austria...

...One can imagine the headlines about the 'Trier massacre...

...Casualties in a total war are above all vindicated by their staggering numbers...

...Peace vigils would be held to read the names of the war dead...

...A limited war, however, offers no such handy escapes from guilt...

...Many of the Rhinelanders, like -many of the Vietnamese now, would have never had it so good...

...In countries ravaged by World War II, all semblance of normal economic life disappeared not only during the war but for years afterwards...

...There would not have been enough gore for it to appear that any great issue was being settled or to dramatize our involvement as an "inescapable tragedy...

...For their part, the French would have responded with a series of emergency cabinet meetings followed by the resignation of the government and a succession of political crises, precluding any coherent foreign policy...

...World leaders would urge the president to stop bombing and negotiate, even though Germany might have indicated no interest in negotiations...

...The boys commute to the front and spend money like a swarm of tourists between assignments...

...But the peace forces had not let down their guard just because war had been outlawed...

...Mothers, and others, would march for peace...

...World-wide fascist propaganda would continue to denounce the American "aggression" in the Rhineland...

...This means, however, that the contrasts of a limited war are especially cruel: though casualties as a whole arc light, some of the soldiers die and some are maimed for life...

...the fact that the carnage is so massive "proves" that it is necessary...

...Casualties on all sides would be light, and controversial in inverse proportion to their numbers...

...By the time it is entirely clear that one has to fight, a limited war is no longer likely to be one of the options...

...One of the greatest conveniences of a total war...

...The British would of course have stood aloof from American interventionism...

...Hitler would be pinned down, but he would not be defeated or discredited...

...Indeed, the war would strengthen support for him in numerous quarters...

...Whatever then could we have answered to the daily nagging guilt...

...Had one of the erstwhile Allies, for example, decided in 1936 to respond with limited force to Hitier's reoccupation of the Rhineland, this might have prevented World War II...

...senators would vow "no more Rhine-lands...

...Nevertheless, the temptation to make such speculations is well-nigh irresistible...

...At home there would have been none of the exhilaration of total war, with the girls learning to weld and the old men busy in civil defense and the ladies collecting blood...

...Population declined in East Europe and the Soviet Union...

...Many hawks would turn dove with dramatic announcements of the fact to the media, especially during pre-election maneuvers...

...Statement of the House of Bishops, 1939...

...We believe that war will never achieve peace, but only sow the seeds of future wars...

...It hardly needs to be said that American intervention in the Rhineland in 1936 was not merely impossible but unthinkable...

...The staging of a limited war is thus utterly different from the grim back-drop of a total war, with its leveled cities, the miles of smouldering rubble where factories and homes once stood, the cries of the buried-alive, the starving survivors amid the scorched farmlands and ruined villages...

...In contrast to the chaos wrought by World War II, it is difficult to find evidence of war in the economic data for Southeast Asia, except in export figures...

...The daily war news would not have aroused patriotic commitment on the home front, as in a total war, but instead doubt, controversy and, most difficult of all to bear - guilt...

...One can scarcely conceive of twentieth century history in which Roosevelt and Churchill were not heroes of one of the most destructive wars of all time, in which twenty-five million people were killed, but in which instead Roosevelt was a bumbler who got us involved in a Rhineland mess which took several hundred thousand lives on all sides...

...and pray for them that despitefully use you...

...But these cannot be the only considerations...

...As late as 1939, the Episcopal bishops intoned "...War as an instrument of national policy is a hideous denial of God and His condemnation rests upon it...

...So, as limited wars have a way of doing, the Rhineland thing would drag on, and on...

...leaders are heroes in proportion to the size of the casualties...

...John Shelton Reed War II, we would have had no way of knowing what we missed...

...We could hardly have claimed to be defending our lives or our national existence in the Rhineland...

...The smaller the casualties, the more likely it is that the leaders are villains...

...United Nations, World Economic Report, 1948...

...And there might have been small troop contingents and other assistance from the not-yet-utterly-Balkanized Balkans, and perhaps from others as well...

...In progression, the American crusade to defend the world against fascism would have come to appear not merely over-reactive, but quixotic, counterproductive, imperialistic and, finally, positively criminal...

...The liberal American press of the 1940s, grieving over the "inescapable tragedy" of World War II, may not have been exactly justifying a certain kind of war in quite the analytical way of Thomas Aquinas, but a moral question does not always require a direct answer...

...It is characteristic of a limited war, of course, that it's pretty much business-as-usual everywhere except in scattered pockets of action...

...It is rationally unjustifiable, morally indefensible, and religiously irreconcilable with the love of God and our neighbor...

...We believe that the teachings of Jesus Christ - 'Love your enemies...

...do good to them which hate you...

...Moderns are more reluctant than their forbears to accept even self-defense as a vindication, on the grounds that modern weapons are so destructive that nothing can justify their use...

...What kind of a war might this have been and what might have been its results...

...A Rhineland intervention might indeed have averted World War II, but no lessons would have been learned from this...

...what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history...

...As a result of vigorous American urging, most countries of the world finally signed it, including Germany, Japan and Italy...

...But the smaller casualties are, the more difficult it is to justify the fact that there are any...

...Civilized men have agonized over the moral question of war for centuries...

...There are many similarly fascinating possibilities for exercising our proclivities for "if only" fantasizing...

...in which the front is too dangerous for visiting luminaries, is that the fact that people are being killed is never discovered until it's all been done...

...Relevance" to his "concerns" - Who cares what the beggar learns: Taking place within this fog Is - "student-teacher dialogue...

...The very character of limited war - its light casualties, its way of dragging on and on without any definite conclusion, its marginal effects on most participants - exacerbates the question of why there should be a war at all...

...Senators and bishops would visit the front, a thing which is impossible in total war...

...Although war critics are certain that the alternatives to American involvement in Vietnam would have been infinitely preferable to our present state of affairs, and they may be right, in fact once an action has been taken, knowledge about the alternatives and their consequences is forever foreclosed to us...

...These judgments would be re-enforced by concern for the plight of Rhineland refugees, indignation over corruption in the governments of our allies and anxiety over the fate of American prisoners of war in German Hands...

...Campus strikes would be organized...

...Senate had in months of well-publicized hearings established to its own satisfaction, and that of most of the public, something that everyone already knew - that World War I had had as its chief purpose the enrichment of the bankers and the munitions manufacturers, better known as "Merchants of Death," about whom school children were reading in a best-seller of the same name...

...The economic and demographic costs are clearly less for limited war...

...Street demonstrations in many parts of the world would show widespread sympathy for Germany, seen to be struggling for her life and dignity against an imperialistic United States...

...In consequence, worldwide Nazi propaganda would be able, with a fair approach to accuracy, to denounce the operation as American-inspired and American-manned, an operation of the Roosevelt imperialistic clique and its foreign clients...

...Columnists and candidates would explore and explain our Rhineland "mistake...

...There would be no victory celebrations, no CQnfetti in the streets, no tearful crowds thronging and embracing...

...Doubtless this would have soon become an extremely controversial operation...

...For even if some magic dispensation had allowed us to know that our policy had averted a global disaster, as Hegel has said...

...Fools like me can write bad verse, But no Ed...

...A couple of summers before Hitler's move to reoccupy the Rhineland, the Nye Committee of the U.S...

...The Pact had been promoted in the United States by the New York Times, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a number of university professors...

...Agonizing reappraisals of the Rhineland debacle would conclude that the war was eroding the moral fiber of the nation...

...Insights" (more than might be prudent) "Meaningful" for every student...

...data indicate that rice production, industrial output and electric energy production are vigorously increasing in South Vietnam...

...But if this had been done, and if it had worked, no one would ever have known that a holocaust had been prevented...

...Not with the bang of a Hiroshima but with the whimper of withdrawal from limited war...

...The president who presided over our final withdrawal would be re-elected, those who had first committed our troops having been assigned to ignominy...

...Two years after the war many Europeans were getting only 1900 calories of food per day, barely enough for survival and fully a third less than they'd had in the 1930s...

...D. could make this worse...

...The Nation and the New Republic could characterize it as an American attempt to surround Germany with enemies and to reward countries for hostility toward Germany...

...for food and feed crops the percentage was seventy...

...The population explosion is proceeding apace in both North and South...

...bless them that curse you...

...It would take more than a hundred years of Vietnam size casualties to equal the killings of World War II...

...These national musings found expression in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1929 which pledged its signers never to resort to war as a means of settling international disputes...

...In 1947, European output of metals was only seventy-five per cent of the pre-war level...

...Nevertheless, for a moment, imagine the unimaginable - that the United States had actually decided to counter Hitler's move into the Rhineland in 1936 with a limited resistance...

...Flotsam on each postal tide Touts "approaches" which privide: "Real involvement" for the class, "Participation" tout en masse...

...It's hard to imagine a twentieth century without the battles of North Africa and Sicily and Normandy Beach, without Stalingrad, without Dachau and Buchenwald and Landsberg...

...But whether any great issue is settled or not, the sheer magnitude of the destruction enables us to dignify our role in the great drama...

...There is always the nagging possibility that the whole thing may be simply a dreadful mistake...

...European industrial production fell to a fraction of pre-war levels and did not recover for years after the war...

...These helpers would of course have required American aid to finance their operations...

...And the more successful a limited war is in preventing a total war, the less likely it is that this fact will be evident, or even believable...

...A limited, "preventive" action in the Rhineland would have had to be fought while we were still in the dark about Hitler's real intentions, before he had had the chance to develop his capabilities for total war and to solidify his alliances with Italy and Japan...

...Awkward questions would have been raised about what we were doing on German soil...

...In a word, in direct proportion to our success in pinning Hitler impotently down at an early point in his expansion, it would have appeared unnecessary to do so...

...are not mere counsels of perfection, but sound, sober, practical common sense...

...In time, perhaps a very long time, the thing would have ended...

...One necessarily enters a limited war before it's entirely clear that one should...

...In short, we were a nation of pacifists...

...If we had succeeded in frustrating his expansion before he acquired the industrial strength of middle Europe, it would necessarily have appeared that Hitler was no threat to our security, or anyone else's either...

...American newspaper correspondents would discover and report that the occupants of the area were predominantly German and were for the most part sympathetic to Hitler and wanted nothing so much as to be left alone by Americans...

...Death rates reported for Southeast Asia are lower than in many other underdeveloped areas which are not at war...

...The Rhineland Veterans for Peace would sit in at the War Department...