Brave New World
As dawn broke on 6 June 1944, 5,300 Allied ships came into view off the Normandy coast. The Germans who beheld the scene could hardly believe their eyes. The ‘full might of the English and the Americans’ was drawn up, wrote one, ‘limitless ships small and great assembled as if for a parade’. One hundred and thirty thousand British, American and Canadian troops came ashore in the first wave. By dusk, despite heavy American casualties on Omaha Beach, they had secured a perimeter between half a mile and 3 miles deep. Over the coming days, they would link up and push inland. Bayeux was captured on D-Day +1, Cherbourg on 26 June. Over the next two months, little progress was made and much blood spilt as the Germans took advantage of
the dense Normandy countryside – the bocage – and Allied caution to mount a stubborn defence. In late July, however, the American 1st Army broke through the German defences south of Saint-Lô and were soon racing across open country. Paris was liberated on 25 August, Brussels on 3 September. By the middle of the month, Eisenhower’s forces were on the doorstep of Germany, having advanced 400 miles and destroyed eight German divisions in just three weeks.
The outcome of the war had not been in doubt since the winter of 1942–3 – arguably since Pearl Harbor – yet the breakthrough in the west, which coincided with major advances in Belorussia and in Italy, allowed the Allies to pay increasing amounts of attention to the world that would emerge once victory had been achieved. The issues were multifarious and intertwined but broadly fell into three categories: international security and the structures for its maintenance; empire and the future of colonies; and economics and trade.
At the centre of the security question loomed the problem of Germany. All three main Allied powers agreed that this great, industrious nation should never be able to wreck the peace of the world again. All three agreed that she should be disarmed and broken up. The differences were ones of emphasis and detail. As he had made clear at the Tehran Conference, Stalin favoured only the harshest treatment for his erstwhile collaborators. The Germans, he argued, were an ingenious people. In the space of just twenty-one years, they had recovered from their defeat in 1918 to renew their pursuit of European hegemony. Disarmament was not enough: German industry must be gutted; the country occupied; the state dismembered. Of the democratic nations, the Americans were closest to this perspective. Believing that the word ‘Reich’ should be ‘stricken from the language’, Roosevelt favoured the division of Germany into at least five separate states. Harking back to the Europe of the eighteenth century, he recalled how Germany had been less dangerous ‘when divided into 107 small principalities’. The British were more circumspect. Whilst the Labour Cabinet Ministers – Attlee, Bevin and Dalton – were enthusiasts for partition, the Foreign Office considered the proposal impractical and counterproductive. Churchill was somewhere in between. Although he supported the excision of Prussia, his natural magnanimity, combined with the desire to maintain a barrier against the Soviet Union, caused him to shrink from wholesale vivisection. In his opinion, the war had largely been the fault of Hitler and his henchmen and whilst ‘during wartime no distinction could be made between the leaders and the people . . . nevertheless, with a generation of self-sacrificing, toil and education, something might be done with the German people’. Less than a year later, however, he initialled a paper calling for the complete destruction of German industry: a plan to reduce Bismarck’s creation of blood and iron to a pastoral state.
The author of this radical proposal was Henry Morgenthau. Appalled by War and State Department plans to revive the German economy so that she could pay reparations, the Treasury Secretary devised a scheme to ‘divide Germany up into a number of small
provinces, stop all industrial production and convert them [the 438 Allies at War Germans] into small agricultural landholders’. ‘Just strip it,’ he instructed his chief economic adviser, Harry Dexter White, refer-ring to the Ruhr and the Saar. ‘I don’t care what happens to the civilian population . . . I would take every mine, every mill and fac-tory and wreck it . . . Steel, coal, everything . . . This is the cauldron which gives forth war and I don’t know any other way to stop them from making war other than to shut down this area completely.’ Although he did not say so officially, knowledge of the Holocaust contributed to this diluvial proposal. ‘It seems inhuman,’ admitted Morgenthau to Treasury colleagues. ‘[But] we didn’t ask for this war. We didn’t put millions of people through gas chambers. We didn’t do any of these things. They
have asked for it.’