Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Counterfactual history hovers on the fringes of history, half fiction, half serious scholarship. At its best, it can dramatize the importance of events, or justify or condemn controversial actions. All too often, however, counterfactual histories start with an event as the writer thinks it should have been, then extrapolates to end up with a world better than the one we actually live in. We don't drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese seek peace anyway, we avoid the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Unicorns and rainbows cover the earth.
The real world is full of unanticipated twists and turns that no fiction can emulate. Who would imagine that the long freeze between the United States and China would begin to thaw during a ping pong tournament? Here are two exercises in how doing the right thing might well have led to consequences totally opposite to their original intent, and history might have turned out worse.
The ink was still damp on the treaty granting the Lakota their traditional sacred lands in the Paha Sapa when rumors began to circulate about gold in the streams. As prospectors poured into the Black Hills, President Grant ordered the Army to restore control and prevent whites from entering the area. Since the total strength of the Army was less than 30,000, and the number of gold seekers was in the thousands, the likelihood of the Army actually accomplishing its mission was near zero. Soon there were occasional skirmishes between the Army and prospectors, with fatalities on both sides.
Frustrated by the Army's inability to suppress lawlessness, Grant took the extraordinary measure of issuing an executive order authorizing the Lakota to form militias and arrest whites who encroached on their land. The rules of engagement specified that white trespassers could not be attacked without warning, were not to be harmed if they surrendered, were to be turned over to the Army, and were not to be mutilated if killed. The Lakota, astonished and delighted at a white leader actually following the terms of a treaty, followed the rules scrupulously. The arrested gold seekers expected to be lectured sternly by the Army and then released, but were rudely shocked when they were shipped by rail to stockades at Fort Pierre and Fort Snelling.
White settlers in the Plains were infuriated by the Federal government siding with Indians against whites. The Nebraska State Legislature passed a resolution authorizing the governor to offer aid to the Dakota Territory and raise a militia if necessary. Informal militias began forming in the Dakota Territory, with the twofold aim of freeing the prisoners at Fort Pierre and then seizing the Black Hills. Since these efforts lacked any overall coordination or chain of command, interest in attacking the stockade at Fort Pierre quickly took a back seat to the lure of striking it rich in the Black Hills.
In short order, gold-seekers had set up a fortified camp in the northern hills and called it Deadwood. Spoiling for a fight, they sought out the nearest Lakota encampments and attacked, massacring everyone unlucky enough not to escape. Grant ordered the Army to destroy Deadwood and arrest its inhabitants. Brash Colonel George Custer volunteered for the job. He regarded the miners as an unruly rabble and was firmly convinced a proper display of real soldiering would break the spirits of the mob. On June 25, 1876, he marched on Deadwood with 276 men. Characteristically, and unfortunately, he failed to take into account the fact that Deadwood lay at the bottom of a steep sided canyon. The miners, of course, were completely informed about Custer's movements. They spread out along the cliffs and waited, many of them Confederate veterans itching for a chance at revenge. Custer rode up to the stockade wall guarding the north side of the camp and demanded the gate be opened and the miners come out and surrender. When he was met by a resounding jeer, he ordered a small field piece brought up and loaded in full view of the camp. He warned the miners that the first shot would blow a hole in the wall and later shots would be grapeshot. After five minutes of silence, he gave the order to fire.
Then all hell broke loose. The shot blasted twenty feet of wall to splinters, killed four miners and wounded thirty others. Then the miners on the cliffs, each with a soldier long since sighted in, opened fire. The opening salvo had less effect than expected because so many miners had their sights on Custer. He was hit fourteen times and killed instantly. The cannon crew was cut down and so were eight additional troopers. The remainder rallied around the nearest surviving officer or sergeant. Some dove for cover and attempted to return fire. One enterprising lieutenant reasoned that an attack on the camp might disorient the miners, discourage the snipers from firing into their own camp, or at the very least create some friendly fire casualties. Those farthest from the camp attempted to retreat northward down Deadwood Creek.
None made it. The attack on the camp was cut down as soon as it entered the breach in the wall. There was absolutely no safe cover on the canyon floor and every trooper was eventually picked off. The retreating soldiers may have only been attempting to reach safety, but they were still armed and in good order, and they could have just as easily been attempting to find a flanking route. They were ambushed by the guard force posted at the mouth of the canyon. For only the third time in American history, an American military force was defeated with no survivors.
After the battle, which has come to be called Custer's Last Stand, the prospectors took sober stock of what had happened. These were, after all, fellow Americans, whites, and good soldiers merely doing their jobs. Couldn't there have been some way to get at least some of them to surrender? There was a very real chance they would all be tried for treason and murder, if the Army didn't merely come back with a far larger force and deal with them first. The die was well and truly cast. The settlers hastily set up a government and declared the independent Dakota Republic.
Instead of flags and fireworks, the United States celebrated its Centennial by mourning the loss of nearly three hundred soldiers and facing a second, if so far smaller, Civil War. Not only was public opinion in the former Confederacy seething, but the fury in the West over the Army marching on white civilians in defense of Indians was white hot. Kansas, Nebraska and the newly admitted state of Colorado boiled with rage. California, Oregon, and Nevada had all been remote from the Civil War, but that had changed with the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad. All three states angrily denounced the Federal government. Minnesota, a loyal Union state, had had its own Sioux uprising in 1862 and was in no mood to support the Federal government in this conflict. Angry mobs rioted outside Fort Snelling and shots were exchanged between soldiers and citizens. The vast majority of the United States Army was in the West and was pinned down by white settlers furious at their perceived betrayal. Troops who attempted to move by rail found tracks ripped up. The Federal government found itself facing a potential rebellion by a coalition of states far larger in area than the loyalist states.
The war, when it came, was more a coup d'etat than a civil war. A hastily assembled force of Confederate veterans mustered in Virginia, swarmed across the Potomac into Washington and that was that. Maryland, which had only been kept in the Union by brute force, applauded. A military tribunal was set up to govern Washington until a new civilian government could be created. Suppressing their desire to exact vengeance on their erstwhile conqueror, the tribunal convicted Ulysses S. Grant of treason and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Dry Tortugas, the same prison island where Jefferson Davis had been held. Like Davis, Grant was freed a few years later.
The new Congress completed the dismantling of Reconstruction. The Civil War had been over long enough for it to be generally agreed that slavery was dead. Slavery had been an embarrassment for the United States, and anyway, fully functional substitutes had been found. So the Thirteenth Amendment stood. However, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were repealed and a number of new amendments passed. The power of the Federal Government within the States was sharply curtailed and restricted solely to powers explicitly granted by the Constitution. The Federal Government was further prohibited from retaining ownership of public lands when territories were admitted as states. States within and outside the Confederacy enacted laws restricting citizenship and voting to whites, and Congress had neither the power nor the inclination to oppose them. The Confederacy had finally won the Civil War.
In What If? 2, Robert Katz contributes a chapter called Pius XII Protests The Holocaust. He pictures a papal denunciation as strengthening the anti-Nazi underground and inspiring revolts among Jewish ghettos and concentration camps, and as he envisions it, "some of the uprisings succeed." He argues that up to 90 per cent of the people killed in the Holocaust would have survived. Much of this is pure pipe dream. If a ghetto or concentration camp in Nazi controlled territory had "successfully" revolted, what then? Where would they have gotten food? Where would they have gotten ammunition, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons? Where would the escaped prisoners have gone? What was to prevent the Nazis from simply bombing any center of resistance into powder, or using poison gas? An outcome like the one below is at least equally likely.
June 1942: Pius XII is alarmed at the horror stories coming from the Reich, and furious at the Nazi retaliation against the bishops of Holland. The bishops had denounced the roundup of Dutch Jews, and in retaliation for their opposition, the Nazis had ordered the arrest of Dutch Catholics of Jewish origin. After agonized weighing of the costs of speaking out versus silence, Pius XII issues a heated denunciation of Germany's treatment of the Jews. He stops short of exhorting German Catholics not to serve in the army, a call that would have been certain to fail, and also of exhorting German Catholics to oppose the regime, another measure that would certainly have failed, as well as being suicidal to anyone who heeded it.
Hitler exploded. He wanted the Vatican bombed; then, after cooler heads explained the situation, he demanded that Mussolini have the Pope arrested. Mussolini wavered and stalled, and Hitler, furious at the delay, ordered Otto Skorzeny's commando team to kidnap the Pope and bring him to Germany.
Meanwhile, a major in the Ministry of Propaganda saw tremendous potential in the situation. After hacking his way upward through several echelons of red tape, he finally presented his idea to Goebbels. Goebbels didn't believe the situation could be exploited in a decisive way, but it could be exploited, and the major had offered a good way to make the best of a bad situation. Goebbels finally sold Hitler on a propaganda campaign. He persuaded Hitler to hold off on striking at the Pope for a few months to see how the propaganda campaign succeeded.
Basically the plan was to exploit the theme that Pius had confirmed what Germany was saying all along: that the war was all about the Jews. Radio broadcasts aimed at England and occupied territories poured out the message. Meanwhile the Nazis began cultivating contacts with anti-Semitic groups in the occupied countries. Many had already been eagerly collaborating. Some of these groups had contacts in England who began agitating there. Most people, of course, saw through the Nazi ploy, but people already disposed to anti-Semitism now had a rationale for cooperating or at least sympathizing with the Nazis. Sporadic attacks on Jewish targets became more frequent, even if the former occupants had already been deported. Local mobs "broke in" to concentration camps to attack inmates. Attacks on Jews in England became more common. Pro-German British politicians, most of them out of office since the war began, began questioning why England was shedding its own blood to protect the Jews.
In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, emboldened by the Pope's denunciation, mentioned the Jews among the victims of Nazi aggression in a radio broadcast. German sympathizers had a field day. Anti-Semitism had always been rife among the upper crust of society and soon there was quiet but pervasive talk that Roosevelt was mismanaging the war effort on behalf of Jewish interests. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been in low profile because of its pre-war association with a number of pro-German groups, began to stir in the South and Midwest, spreading the message that Americans were being sent to die for the Jews in Europe while the real menace was in Asia. Attacks on Jews began to increase. So did attacks on Asians, with little distinction being made between Japanese and other Asians.
Here and there, Americans began resisting the draft unless they could be promised that they would fight Japan instead of Germany (That was an empty gesture, since volunteering for the Marines all but guaranteed duty in the Pacific and anyone in any other service could easily volunteer for Pacific duty as well.) Matters came to a head in the late summer of 1942 when a mother in Georgia refused to permit her son to be drafted. A standoff ensued with the family barricaded in their home and local law enforcement outside.
As the confrontation made the newspapers, Major General George Patton from nearby Fort Benning decided to take the matter in hand. Acting without orders, he took a platoon of soldiers and went to get the reluctant draftee by force. The exact course of events remains unclear, but it appears that Patton, a sergeant-major, and three enlisted men confronted the mother on her front porch, along with the sheriff and two deputies. Patton admired the woman for standing up to authority and shared her disdain for fighting for the Jews, but considered her boy beneath contempt for not accepting his duty and hiding behind his mother's apron strings. As a heated discussion dragged on, Patton lost patience and ordered his sergeant-major to seize the woman's shotgun. The gun discharged, wounding a corporal. Patton whipped out his pistol and shot the woman between the eyes, whereupon the sheriff immediately did the same to Patton. The sergeant-major attempted to react, but was killed by a deputy. The enlisted men opened fire on the lawmen, but a fusillade from neighbors watching the spectacle cut the soldiers down. The three lawmen also died; whether from military or civilian fire has never been determined. The remaining soldiers, reluctant to fire on civilians, retreated.
The fact that southern lawmen had been killed by the U.S. Army caused a tidal wave of outrage across the Deep South. There were still people alive who remembered the Civil War, far more who remembered Reconstruction, and millions who remembered the horror stories of Reconstruction. Rumors swept through the South that black soldiers had killed and raped civilians during the fight - completely false, it turned out - Patton, of all people, had the sense to take only white soldiers along. Military commanders throughout the South prudently closed their post gates and restricted troops to garrison, but even so, racial violence flared at many posts. Civilian suppliers to the armed forces began finding truck tires slashed and warehouses burned. Drivers were shot at. By September, the military had to provide armed escorts to rail and truck shipments, and frequently had to repair sabotaged rail lines. Protest marches occurred in more and more cities, with protesters chanting "Hell, no, we won't go." In Congress, bills of impeachment were introduced against President Roosevelt. None looked likely to pass, but Roosevelt's ability to govern was deeply undermined.
In November, 1942, Operation Torch began with landings in Morocco and Algeria. The troops, disturbed by the unrest at home, uncertain about why they were fighting, and led by confused and hesitant officers, put up a lackluster fight, even against the weak French defenses. The landings in Morocco were successful, but the Algerian landings bogged down. Hitler, seeing a golden opportunity, launched a two pronged attack. One prong was an intensive propaganda campaign in France stressing the perfidy of the British and Americans in attacking French troops in Africa. He also promised to release French prisoners of war if they agreed to fight to defend French holdings in North Africa. The more practical prong was to order Rommel to send troops west to support the French. The German "offer" of assistance was "accepted" by the Vichy regime. Rommel dug in on a defensive line to hold the British in Libya and sent a third of his forces to Algeria, where they arrived a week later. The stalled American beachhead at Algiers was encircled by German forces and the American breakout at Oran was easily contained. The Germans pushed on to the border of Morocco and dug in.
Within a week the British saw their universe crumble. With the Germans safely holding Algeria, Gibraltar became just another rock, its strategic usefulness reduced to near zero. It could still prevent hostile naval forces from entering the Mediterranean, but so could the Luftwaffe, now solidly based in Algeria. Malta became just another island, which Hitler decided could be allowed to wither. Montgomery's forces still held Egypt and the Suez canal, but they were isolated. Without Gibraltar, the Suez Canal became merely a roundabout back door. To resupply Montgomery, the British had the choice of either diverting ships from an Indian Ocean already stretched dangerously thin, or sending ships all the way around Africa. Hitler offered Britain an olive branch: an armistice.
Although Germany was also at war with the United States, most of the action so far had been naval. Nothing had really gone beyond the point of no return. With Britain wavering, it was fairly easy to get the U.S. wavering as well, then leverage the two sides into an armistice. Hitler was also able to sell the U.S. and Britain on the possibility of devoting their full efforts to the war in the Pacific. True, it meant betraying the Japanese, but the Nazis had little love for the non-Aryan Japanese anyway.
At this point we get out of the realm of first-order counterfactuals. One school of thought holds that Germany, freed of any need to defend the West, throws its full might against Russia, and wins, or at least throws Soviet forces beyond the Urals, as in the novel Fatherland. Another holds that Russia had just too much manpower and would have eventually prevailed. With no British-American military presence on the Continent, they may well have conquered all of Europe. Either way we have a history much worse than what actually happened. And of course, in neither scenario is there anything to stop the Holocaust.
Let's follow another side track. After seeing how quickly American and British will to fight withered, the Japanese begin to see possible opportunities. So far there have not been any major U.S. offensive actions. There is, of course, that messy business at Pearl Harbor to deal with, and the Japanese understand full well how and why the Americans are enraged. Japanese diplomats in neutral posts like Turkey, Switzerland, and Spain, even Russia, begin gingerly probing for an honorable way to end hostilities. In this case the truth serves the Japanese well; the attack was not intended as a sneak attack, but was the result of an unfortunate delay in the delivery of a declaration of war. The Japanese are prepared to apologize, pay hefty reparations to the United States and to the families of Pearl Harbor casualties. Anyway, the Doolittle Raid and the Battle of Midway were payback. They even offer to return the Philippines to American control and agree not to threaten U.S. interests in the Pacific. In return, since American interests are guaranteed, the Japanese get a free hand in China. Most Americans rationalize that they had always preferred the efficient and disciplined Japanese to the backward, corrupt and moribund Chinese government anyway. The British are bitter over losing the U.S. as an ally in the Pacific, and thereby permanently losing Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaya, and U.S.-British relations turn sour for a long time to come. U.S. isolationists, however, point to the German-Japanese War as yet another example of the folly of becoming involved overseas. Vice President John Nance Garner, as narrow and parochial a politician as America has ever had, unseats Roosevelt at the 1944 Democratic Convention and is elected in November.
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