Refuting Liberal Propaganda Myths About World War Two

Churchill FDR & Stalin meeting for the Yalta Agreement which established the demarcation line for post war Europe which Churchill later referred to as the Iron Curtain. Having studied World War II in great detail over the course of my entire lifetime I have discovered that there is no other war in recent military history which is so little understood and about which there are so many major myths and misconceptions. As an avid historian this is frustrating because if our policymakers fail to learn from history they are much more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. What follows are more than a dozen of the biggest and most easily disprovable myths about World War II the greatest and most horrific war in world history. The origin of many if not most of these myths lies in the attempts by liberal historians to paint the war as a Good War" fought against tyranny and in defense of freedom democracy and Western Civilization. However the truth is that arguably taken as a whole no war did more to reverse the cause of world freedom and Western Civilization than did World War II given the fact that we allied with the Soviet Union and that during the war and its aftermath assisted them directly or indirectly in the Communization of half of Europe and East Asia. During the war Allied leaders including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman went out of their way to portray Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his Evil Soviet Empire as noble allies in a grand crusade to advance democracy in Europe. After the war ended liberal journalists and professors who had always viewed Soviet Communists in a positive light were all too willing to assist in furthering this knowingly false wartime propaganda narrative. In the process they collaborated in attempting to excuse and justify a number of otherwise unjustifiable unnecessary and morally reprehensible decisions of liberal historical icons such as Roosevelt Churchill Truman and General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower to appease murderous Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Even worse they worked to cover up the killing of millions of innocent civilians and surrendered prisoners of war by the Western Allies in the years immediately following Germanys surrender.

1. If we hadnt fought World War II we would all be speaking German right nowOf all the myths about World War II this by far is the most absurd yet perhaps most repeated by the historically uninformed. The Germans couldnt even cross the English Channel to invade England which was a mere thirty miles away from continental Europe. This was due to the fact that the German Navy in 1940 was less than one-tenth the size of Britains Royal Navy measured in capitol ships and far less powerful than that in actuality given the fact that German battleships were woefully under-armed and no match for any of their British equivalents. Accordingly how could they be expected to invade the United States of America--the mightiest naval power in world history? Americans may enjoy pretending that Nazi Germany was some unstoppable military force but the truth is that Germany lost the war in AugustDecember 1941 when they failed to capture Moscow and pressure Stalin to accept an armistice before the US had even entered the conflict and the outcome of the war was never truly in doubt thereafter.
2. The Allies were fighting in defense of freedom democracy and Western Civilization-That might have been true had U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill not decided to ally with the Soviet Union which had invaded occupied and or annexed six countries between 1939 and 1940. In fact the U.S.S.R. was with Germany one of the co-aggressors that started the war but stopped being the case after they concluded their Unholy Alliance with the Soviet Union in June 1941. Nowhere was this fact more underscored then by Churchills decision to meekly surrender Poland to permanent Soviet Communist control and Red Army occupation at the Moscow and Yalta Conferences. This after Britain had initiated a world war with Germany merely to prevent it from annexing the independent German city of Danzig and reuniting Germany by annexing a narrow strip of land known as the Polish Corridor which had divided Germany in two under the terms of the punitive Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War. One war crime which made a mockery of claims by Allied leaders that they were fighting for freedom and tyranny was aptly named Operation Keelhaul." As part of this operation two million anti-Communist East European freedom fighters who had fought to liberate their people from Soviet tyranny during the war were rounded up along with their family members and shipped back to the Soviet Union to face certain death at Soviet hands dealing a death blow to future hopes that the Allies would support the cause of freedom in Soviet-occupied territories.
3. World War II was inevitable. As noted in Patrick Buchanans excellent treatise Churchill Hitler and the Unnecessary War" Hitler made clear he never wanted a war with Britain France or even Poland. He actually sought to make Britain and Poland allies in his planned invasion of the Soviet Union which is why he did not ask for one square inch of Polish territory but merely the return of the independent German city of Danzig and a road/rail corridor connecting Danzig and East Prussia with the rest of Germany. In fact Hitler ordered an elevated highway be designed to accomplish that exact purpose. If he had truly wanted war with Poland he would have asked for the return of all of Germanys lost eastern territories including Posen West Prussia and Eastern Upper Silesia and a return to Germanys 1918 borders--demands which he knew Poland would never accept. When Hitler found out that Britain had declared war on Germany on September 3 1939 accounts indicate that he was so shocked and surprised that he turned ashen white and fell into a depression. Subsequently he made a series of peace offers to the Allies to end the war beginning in October 1939 when he offered to withdraw from Poland except for the Polish Corridor in exchange for peace with Britain and France and then subsequently to Britain alone in June 1940 and May 1941 immediately prior to his invasion of the Soviet Union. Not only was war between Germany the western Allies not inevitable but Hitler himself desperately wanted to avoid it so that he would have a free hand to carry out his planned international crusade against Soviet Communism.
4. Hitler was a madman who wanted to conquer the worldIn his book Mein Kampf and in subsequent writings and speeches Hitler made clear that his sole ambition was to reunify Germany (including the Germans in his native Austria and the Sudentenland) and then to fight an international crusade against Soviet Communism in order to carve out a new German Empire at the expense of western Russia and Ukraine. This fact is underscored by the fact that on September 2 1939 the day after he had invaded Poland he offered to withdraw from all of Poland except for the Polish Cooridor that split Germany in two and constituted scarcely more than 4 of Polish territory to prevent the outbreak of war with Britain and France which nevertheless declared war on Germany the following day. Even greater evidence of Hitlers limited aims was his May 1941 peace offer hand carried to Great Britain by Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess in which he offered to withdraw from all of western Europe all except for Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine (including France Belgium the Netherlands Denmark and Norway) and from Greece and Yugoslavia as well in exchange for an end to the war and a commitment to benevolent neutrality on the part of Great Britain in the event of any future conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
5. Nazi Germany started World War II so we had to declare war on Germany to stop them from conquering Europe. Actually both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 and the USSR subsequently invaded and occupied part or all of Finland Estonia Latvia Lithuania and Romania from 1939-1940. In addition an increasing number of mostly former Soviet authors have written that Stalin planned to invade Germany western Poland and Romania in July 1941 and was only prevented from doing so by Hitlers invasion of the Soviet Union two to three weeks earlier which caught the Red Army massed at the front line with no significant defensive preparations. Soviet defector Victor Suvorov first revealed this in a series of books beginning with Icebreaker" based on uncovered Soviet archives yet the US and UK still chose to ally with the Soviet aggressors to fight the German ones. The title of his book Icebreaker" refers to Stalins view that Hitler would prove to be the Icebreaker" of the Soviet Communist revolution in what he referred to as the Second Great Imperialist War. Suvorov referred to Stalin as the Chief Culprit because it was Stalin who had long plotted to goad Germany to fight another war with Britain and France in the hopes that the great powers would exhaust themselves after which the Red Army would occupy all of continental Europe without serious opposition. It was for this reason that Stalin signed on to the infamous Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact to force Hitler whose territorial ambitions had been exclusively eastward to fight Britain and France instead of the Soviet Union. Many conservative statesman in both Britain and especially in France wanted to fight the Soviet invaders especially in defense of Finland from 1939-1940 and were willing to consider declaring war on the Soviet Union over their international aggressions rightly viewing Soviet Communism as the greater threat to world freedom. However it was decided that it would be too impractical to fight a war against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously. Thus unlike Germany the Soviets suffered nothing more than diplomatic protests in response to their invasions of six countries from 1939-1940.
6. Allied mass killing of innocents were justified because Germany & Japan started the warSome apologists for Allied leaders have argued that our mass terror bombings of Germany and Japan which killed an estimated one million German and one million Japanese civilians and all other atrocities or mass killings of innocents committed by the Western Allies were acceptable and not as bad as mass murders committed by Germany and Japan because they started the war. Of course this idea is absurd. The deliberate killing of innocent non-combatants was outlawed under the Geneva and Hague conventions prior to World War One and can never be justified by any means. Which country is responsible for starting the war does not make the mass murder of innocents by firebombings or atomic bombings or any other terroristic means justifiable let alone morally acceptable. If Hitler was wrong to mass murder over five million Jews for the accident of their birth due to their supposed collective guilt over the Communist revolutions in Germany from 1918-1919 that were partially responsible for knocking Germany out of World War One then the Allies were certainly wrong to mass murder millions of innocent Germans and Japanese merely because their leaders chose to start wars of aggression.
7. We had no choice but to ally with Stalins Evil Soviet Empire in order to defeat HitlerIn fact the US and UK never had to ally with the Soviets due to the fact that Soviet military and military-industrial might was superior to that of Nazi Germany not to mention the fact that they had twice as many troops available to mobilize. Once Hitler stopped his generals from capturing Moscow in the summer of 1941 German defeat was inevitable with or without an alliance with the Soviet Union. The Allies only needed to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin and race the Red Army for control of Europe to ensure a peaceful end to the war and guarantee the defeat of Nazi Germany. Many Allied statesman including Churchill himself prior to 1937 had correctly viewed the Soviet Union not Nazi Germany as the biggest threat to democracy and world freedom and had no misgivings regarding Soviet plans for crushing freedom and forcibly Communizing every country the Red Army would overrun after the war ended. Of these statesmen only Churchill seemed willing to delude himself into believing that Stalin would keep his promises to guarantee free and fair democratic elections in the nine Eastern European countries he occupied but did not fully annex.
8. The U.S. and U.K. had to give the USSR massive amounts of military aid to prevent Germany from defeating itFrom June 1941 to May 1945 the U.S. and U.K. shipped approximately 22000 tanks over 15000 artillery pieces nearly 18000 combat aircraft and 430000 jeeps and trucks to the Soviet Union. While it is true that the hundreds of thousands of trucks we provided to the Red Army helped them overrun and defeat the Germans more quickly they had a marked numerical superiority in tanks and combat aircraft over the Germans sufficient to guarantee Germanys defeat at Soviet hands. The tanks combat aircraft and trucks so generously provided at no cost by FDR and Churchill were subsequently used by Stalin to overrun and Communize East Europe northern Japan (southern Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands) mainland China and North Korea as well. Had the U.S. and U.K. not given the Soviets such a vast amount of tanks trucks guns and aircraft the Allies could have easily captured Berlin Prague and Vienna as General George S. Patton asked to do and likely liberate most of the nations of eastern Europe before the Soviets could overrun them and then the Cold War might have been fought on much more favorable terms.
9. An ailing FDR was duped by Stalin to surrender nearly 140 million innocent people in thirteen East European nations to Communist enslavement at YaltaActually it was Churchill not FDR who was responsible for drawing the Iron Curtain which he later railed about in his January 1946 speech at Fulton Missouri in his infamous Percentages Agreement with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin at the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944 which FDR did not attend. Under the Yalta Agreement Churchill and FDR agreed to allow the Soviet Union to keep all of its territory it annexed as a result of its aggressions against Poland Finland and Romania including all of three of the Baltic States of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania. In addition it allowed the Soviet Union to annex parts of Germany and Czechoslovakia while permitting Soviet occupation of eastern Austria East Germany Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Romania and Bulgaria with Yugoslavia and Albania becoming Soviet Communist client states in the greatest appeasement of evil dictators in world history. Churchill for his part continued to vilify his predecessor Neville Chamberlain for trusting Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler when he agreed to allow Germany to annex the German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia while saying that he trusted Stalin would keep his promises to allow democratic elections in Eastern Europe which he surrendered to the Soviets. Ironically Churchill surrendered forty times more people to an evil dictator under the Yalta Agreement than did Chamberlain in his Munich Pact and yet even to this day most Americans continue to revere Churchill as a mythical champion of freedom and opponent of appeasing evil tyrants in contradiction to the historical record which proves the polar opposite while vilifying Chamberlain who at least attempted to preserve the peace and avert the outbreak of the Second World War. At least the ones Chamberlain agreed to allow Germany to annex actually wanted to become part of Germany whereas the same cannot be said for the 140 million East Europeans which Churchill surrendered to Stalin to undergo half a century of Soviet occupation and terror. It is indeed ironic that Britain fought a war which cost the lives of over fifty million people to prevent the return of 4 of Polish territory back to Germany only to meekly acquiesce to the transfer of eleven East European nations to Soviet Communist totalitarian control before the war had ended.
10. The Holocaust was inevitable because Hitler was determined to mass murder the Jews from the start. In his book Mein Kampf Hitler made clear his desire to deport the Jews from Europe not mass murder them. In fact in his May 10 1941 peace offer to Great Britain referenced earlier in this article Hitler offered to deport all European Jews to Palestine or Madagascar but Churchill refused and threatened to sink any German ships attempting to transport the Jews from continental Europe. Ultimately once he realized that Churchill would never allow him to deport the Jews and after all hope of Germany winning the war had been lost Hitler signed off on his infamous Final Solution" Directive in December 1941 in which he ordered the mass murder of over five million European Jews.
11. Japans attack on Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. by complete surpriseActually as convincingly proven by acclaimed World War II historian Robert Stinnett in his excellent book Day of Deceit FDR had waged a fourteen month campaign to deliberately goad Japan to attack US forces as a back door to war against Germany culminating in the Pearl Harbor attack. In July 1941 FDR imposed a crushing U.S.-U.K.-Dutch oil embargo on Japan which he correctly deduced would force them to stage a pre-emptive attack upon U.S. naval forces. Shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack Japan offered to withdraw from all of China except Manchuria and Jehol province as well as Indochina in exchange for the US ending its oil embargo in a final attempt to avoid the outbreak of war but FDR refused. Furthermore by November 1941 U.S. cryptologists had successfully cracked the Japanese naval codes providing FDR advance warning of the Japanese attack. In fact the front page of the November 30th 1941 edition of the Hilo (Hawaii) Tribune Herald newspaper warned preciently Japan May Strike Over Weekend suggesting that there might have been a leak in U.S. Naval intelligence. In response FDR sent a war warning to all U.S. Pacific commands except for Pearl Harbor where he hoped the Japanese would inflict maximum damage upon our battleship fleet based there to goad the American people into righteous indignation and demand U.S. entry into the war 80 of them had previously opposed. At the same time he made sure the more important three aircraft carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were deployed elsewhere and safe from harm.
12. The atomic bombings were necessary to get Japan to surrender end the war and save the lives of one million US soldiersIn fact Japan had been trying to surrender conditionally since July 1944 when the US conquered the Marianas Islands first through Soviet mediation and later directly to General MacArthur in January 1945 when they offered terms of surrender identical to those the US imposed on them following the atomic bombings. General MacArthur passed on these surrender offers to President Roosevelt in what came to be known as the MacArthur Memorandum recommending our acceptance of their surrender but FDR rejected their surrender attempts. Furthermore the evidence indicates that it was not the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 6^th and 9^th 1945 respectively but rather the Soviet declaration of war and Operation August Storm defeat of Japans Kwangtung Army in China and its occupation of Korea southern Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands which threatened Japans northern home islands themselves with Soviet invasion that caused Japanese leaders to surrender unconditionally to the U.S. Japanese leaders had seen the mass rapes that the Red Army had inflicted on tens of millions of German women and greatly feared and wished to avoid a Soviet occupation of Japan. Furthermore seven out of eight US five star generals and admirals including Generals of the Army MacArthur and Eisenhower and Fleet Admiral Leahy Chief of the Chiefs of Staff stated that the atomic bombings were unnecessary to produce the surrender of Japan and/or were morally reprehensible. Leahy declared that the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan." MacArthur having personally received the earlier Japanese surrender offer stated that the Japanese would have surrendered several months earlier if the U.S. had told them they could retain the Emperor as their head of state. Fleet Admirals Nimitz King and Halsey agreed as did General of the Army Arnold. Finally a report published by the US Army at the time estimated that the US would only suffer 44000 dead in an invasion of Japans home islands which is a far cry from the bogus and arbitrary 250000 500000 and 1000000 dead figures that President Truman used to justify his barbaric atomic bombings of the Christian center of JapanHiroshimaand Nagasaki.
13. The German surrender of May 8 1945 ended the warActually it is a little known fact that unlike the case with Japan no peace treaty was ever signed between the Western Allies and Germany. After the Allies captured the post-Nazi German leaders that had succeeded Hitler after he committed suicide on April 30 1945 they proceeded to divide and dismember Germany into six partsincluding the three western zones that later were merged into West Germany the Soviet zone that later became East Germany and those German territories that were annexed outright by Poland and the Soviet Union. Allied leaders made the decision to deprive Germany of a central government and govern Germany with an iron first until the Berlin Airlift in 1949. It was at this point that the Allies relented and decided to combine the Allied zones of occupation into what became known as West Germany and finally permit democratic elections to be held. The reason that the Allies deprived Germany of a government is due to the fact that Truman Churchill and Eisenhower had decreed that the German people must be made to suffer for the war crimes of Hitler and that accordingly the war against Germany would continue to be waged many years after their surrender. It seems that they did not want to be held accountable for their lawless and criminal actions. Eisenhower wrote that U.S. soldiers had not come to liberate the German people from Nazism but to make them pay. German civilians were driven from their homes deprived of their property decimated by famine and disease raped robbed and enslaved in what Time Magazine rightly referred to as historys most terrifying peace." In furtherance of the infamous Morgenthau Plan and as a matter of official policy codified in JCS. 1067 Allied leaders banned international food shipments to the conquered Germans and made it a crime for anyone including Allied soldiers to give food to surrendered German soldiers causing over six million German civilians and prisoners of war to die from starvation between 1945-1949. It also led to an increase in the newborn infant mortality rate in Germany to 90 within the first two months. This Allied holocaust perpetrated upon defeated Germany was first exposed in the book Gruesome Harvest" in 1947 and along with previously mentioned immoral Allied policies made a mockery of claims by Allied leaders that they were fighting for freedom from tyranny. At the same time Eisenhower ordered millions of German books to be burned in an attempt to systematically destroy German nationalism and patriotism and rob them of all their heroes while re-educating them to believe every German born and unborn was collectively and individually guilty of Hitlers Holocaust of the Jews in order to transform them into a more docile and pacifistic society. Even as late as 1951 the Allies continued to steal German industries while they continued to plunder German natural resources until 1957 but at least their policy of starving millions of innocent Germans to death was brought to a merciful end in 1949. Then in 1955 they allowed the German armed forces to be reconstituted as a national self-defense force and join NATO at which point Germany effectively ceased to be an occupied nation. However the Western Allies remained technically in a state of war with both West and East Germany until the German re-unification agreement was signed in 1990.

In conclusion liberal foreign policy experts often refer to the peace established at the conclusion of World War Two by the Allied powers as a new liberal international order under the United Nations that favored U.S. dominance and the spread of democracy. However an increasing number of libertarians and America First conservatives have come to view it in a very different light as one that favored Sino-Soviet dominance and allowed for the spread of Communism. They rightly conclude that the fact that it directly and indirectly led to the Communization of one-third of the worlds population as evidence that the world it created was far more dangerous and threatening to US national security than the one it replaced. Today the successor states of the peace established in 1945Russia and Communist China which became formal military allies in June 2001 along with North Korea pose a far greater existential threat to the U.S. and its allies than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ever did. That is the most notable legacy of U.S. involvement in the Second World War. © David T. Pyne 2018 David T. Pyne Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as a Vice President of the Association of the United States Armys Utah Chapter. He can be reached at [email protected].