The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Walker understood that chemical weapons could be made much more deadly if dropped by airplanes. Science fiction writers like Jules Verne in his novel Clipper of the Clouds (1886) and H. G. Wells in The War in the Air (1908) foresaw the frightening potential for conventional aerial bombardment in future wars. The world got a small taste of what this would be like prior to World War I: aerial attack from hot-air balloons can actually be traced back to late-eighteenth-century France, and Austria later used hot-air balloons to bomb Venice in 1849. Between 1911 and 1913, Italy, France, and Bulgaria employed aerial bombardment on a small scale in local skirmishes.91 The prospect of using planes to drop chemical weapons was even more frightening.

  World War I provided the first real showcase of air warfare, though it only offered a small glimpse of what was to come. Germany struck first on August 6, 1914. Its zeppelins dropped bombs on Liège, Belgium. Germany was the first country to bomb civilians from the air when an August 1914 attack on a Parisian railway station missed its target and killed a woman. In September, during the First Battle of the Marne, German airmen bombed Paris on several occasions. The first Allied urban aerial bombing came in December, when French airmen bombed Freiburg. By spring 1918, German bombing had injured over four thousand British civilians and left more than one thousand dead. Though used on a limited scale, the potential for air warfare was apparent. British forces had only 110 warplanes when the war began. But Great Britain, along with France, produced 100,000 more before the war was over. Germany produced 44,000.92

  During the 1920s, Great Britain made extensive use of aerial bombardment to defend and police its far-flung empire in places as disparate as Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Yemen, Somaliland, and especially Iraq, which British forces occupied following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Under the euphemism of “air policing,” the Royal Air Force conducted an extensive bombing campaign against Iraqis resisting British colonialism. The commander of the 45th Squadron reported, “They [i.e., the Arabs and the Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full sized village . . . can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines.”93

  In the 1920s, Italian airpower strategist Giulio Douhet argued that aerial bombing now held the key to military victory and differentiating between soldiers and civilians was no longer possible. The United States’ leading advocate of airpower, General William “Billy” Mitchell, was thinking along similar lines. In his 1925 book Winged Defense, he warned, “If a nation ambitious for universal conquest gets off to a ‘flying start’ in a war of the future, it may be able to control the whole world. . . . Should a nation, therefore, attain complete control of the air, it could more nearly master the earth than has ever been the case in the past.”94 Others tried to couch their fascination with aerial warfare in more positive terms. CWS director General Amos Fries coined the following fanciful slogan for his agency: “Every development of science that makes warfare more universal and more scientific makes for permanent peace by making warfare more intolerable” (italics in original).95

  While some planned for war, others planned for peace, fearing that another war augured even greater devastation. Will Irwin’s 1921 book The Next War went through twelve printings that year. Irwin, a journalist who had worked with the Committee for Public Information, painted a bleak picture of future prospects. He reminded readers that at the time of the armistice, the United States was manufacturing lewisite gas. He described the qualities that made it so effective and so terrifying:

  It was invisible; it was a sinking gas, which would search out the refugees of dugouts and cellars; if breathed, it killed at once—and it killed not only through the lungs. Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison which penetrated the system and brought almost certain death. It was inimical to all cell-life, animal or vegetable. Masks alone were of no use against it. Further, it had fifty-five times the “spread” of any poison gas hitherto used in the war. An expert has said that a dozen Lewisite air bombs of the greatest size in use during 1918 might with a favorable wind have eliminated the population of Berlin. Possibly he exaggerated, but probably not greatly. The Armistice came; but gas research went on. Now we have more than a hint of a gas beyond Lewisite. . . . A mere capsule of this gas in a small grenade can generate square rods and even acres of death in the absolute.96

  Chemists, the most conservative segment of the scientific community and, not coincidentally, the one most closely tied to industry, took pride in their contribution to the war effort. That contribution didn’t go unnoticed by others. The New York Times announced that chemists’ efforts “should be gratefully acknowledged by the lay public. Our chemists are among the best soldiers of democracy” and “the most effective of our national defenders.”97

  Chemists joined with their military and industrial allies in resisting postwar efforts to ban future uses of chemical warfare. In 1925, the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Protocol, outlawing the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. The Coolidge administration supported it. Veterans’ groups, the American Chemical Society (ACS), and chemical manufacturers led the opposition. Meeting in Los Angeles in August, the ACS council unanimously resolved to go “strongly on record against the ratification of the Geneva protocol on poisonous gases, as against both National safety and on the grounds of humanity.” The chemists, five hundred of whom were still in the Chemical Warfare Officers’ Reserve Corps or the CWS, tried to convince the public that chemical weapons were actually more humane than other weapons, that the United States needed to be prepared for their use in the next war, and that the treaty might place the League of Nations in control of the U.S. chemical industry. Senator Joseph Ransdell of Louisiana hoped that the resolution would “be sent back to the Committee on Foreign Relations and buried so deep it would never appear before us again.”98 He got his wish. The committee never released it for a floor vote. In the ten years that followed, forty countries—including every great power besides the United States and Japan—ended up ratifying the treaty.99

  Italian, British, and German bombers. Militaries first bombed targets, including civilians, during World War I. Germany began to do so in 1914, over Liege, Belgium. By spring of 1918, German bombs had injured over 4,000 British civilians and left over 1,000 dead.

  Gas warfare scored its greatest successes against the poorly equipped Russian troops on the eastern front, who suffered 425,000 gas-induced casualties and 56,000 deaths.100 For Russia, with 2 million dead and 5 million wounded, the war proved disastrous in all regards. Finally fed up with the tsar’s indifference to their hardships, the Russian people overthrew Nicholas II’s regime in March 1917. But many felt further betrayed when, with Wilson’s support, the reformist government of Alexander Kerensky opted to keep Russia in the war. The Russian masses demanded a sharper break with the past.

  On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power, dramatically changing the course of world history. They were inspired by Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectual who believed that class struggle would eventually result in an egalitarian socialist society. Marx, ironically, had doubted that a successful socialist revolution could occur in economically and culturally backward Russia. Ignoring Marx’s warnings, the Bolsheviks set out to reorganize Russian society at its roots, nationalizing banks, distributing landed estates to the peasants, putting workers in control of factories, and confiscating church property. Lenin’s Red Guard ransacked the old Foreign Office and brazenly published what it found: a web of secret agreements between the Allies from 1915 and 1916 that divided the postwar map into exclusive zones of influence. Much as the United States would react to the WikiLeaks publications of its diplomatic cables in 2010, the Allies were outraged at this brazen violation of the old diplomatic protocol, which now exposed the hollowness of Wilson’s call for “self-determination” after the war. Among the treaties was the Sykes-Pi
cot Agreement, which divided up the Ottoman Empire among Great Britain, France, and Russia. Carving out new nations with little regard for historical and cultural affinities, it planted the seeds of future conflict in the oil-rich Middle East.

  Not since the French Revolution some 125 years before had Europe been so profoundly shaken and changed. Lenin’s vision of worldwide Communist revolution captured the imagination of workers and peasants around the globe, posing a direct challenge to Wilson’s vision of liberal capitalist democracy.

  U.S. soldiers undergoing anti-gas training at Camp Dix, New Jersey. Despite being proscribed by civilizations for centuries, chemical warfare became widespread during World War I. Thousands died from poison gas attacks.

  Wilson’s Anglophile secretary of state Robert Lansing reported disappointedly that Lenin’s Communist message was resonating with workers. He warned Wilson on January 1, 1918, that Lenin’s appeal was directed “to the proletariat of all countries, to the ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged to become masters. Here seems to me to lie a very real danger in view of the present social unrest throughout the world.”101

  Wilson decided to make his own bold move in an attempt to steal Lenin’s thunder. He announced his Fourteen Points on January 8, 1918. This liberal, open, anti-imperialist peace plan endorsed self-determination, disarmament, freedom of the seas, free trade, and a League of Nations. Only such an exalted mission would justify continuing “this tragical and appalling outpouring of blood and treasure.” “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants,” he declared in what later would turn out to be a boldfaced lie.102 But suddenly two competing new visions for the postwar world were on the table.

  Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia on November 7, 1917, dramatically altering the course of world history. Lenin’s vision of worldwide Communist revolution would capture the imagination of workers and peasants around the globe, posing a direct challenge to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of liberal capitalist democracy.

  Lenin again caught the capitalist world off guard. On March 3, eight months before the armistice, he signed a peace treaty with Germany, pulling Russian troops from the war. Lenin was so desirous of peace that he acceded to the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk even though it meant relinquishing Russian control over Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia, and more—over 300,000 square miles of territory and 50 million people. Wilson and the Allies were furious. They reacted quickly.

  The conservative counterrevolution against the Bolsheviks was ferocious. Separate armies attacked the new Russia from all directions—native Russians and Cossacks, the Czech legion, Serbs, Greeks, Poles in the west, the French in Ukraine, and some 70,000 Japanese in the Far East. In reaction, Lenin’s co-revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky ruthlessly put together a Red Army of approximately 5 million men. The outspoken ex–Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill spoke for capitalists everywhere when he said that Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle.

  An estimated 40,000 British troops arrived in Russia, some deployed to the Caucasus to protect the oil reserves at Baku. Though most of the fighting would be over by 1920, pockets of resistance persisted until 1923. In a foreshadowing of what was to come some sixty years later, Muslim resistance in Central Asia lasted into the 1930s.

  President Woodrow Wilson speaking at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, September 1919. Reelected president in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson entered World War I in 1917, hoping to give the United States a hand in shaping the postwar world.

  Japan, France, Great Britain, and several other nations sent tens of thousands of troops to Russia, in part to assist conservative White Russians attempting to overthrow the fledgling Bolshevik regime. The United States initially hesitated to join them but finally sent over 15,000 troops to eastern and northern Russia with the hope of maintaining a limited eastern front against Germany and limiting Japanese gains. Wilson rejected proposals by British cabinet officer Winston Churchill, commander in chief of the Allied armies, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and other Allied leaders for a direct military intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Wilson resisted Foch’s ongoing entreaties, explaining “any attempt to check a revolutionary movement by means of deployed armies is merely trying to use a broom to sweep back a high tide. Besides, armies may become impregnated with the very Bolshevism they are sent to combat.”103 Still, U.S. troops remained in the country until 1920, long after the original military rationale had ceased to exist. U.S. participation in this operation poisoned its relations with the new Soviet government from the start.104 It also deepened mistrust toward Wilson and his motives on the part of a crucial group of mostly midwestern progressive senators—a mistrust that would come back to haunt him when he struggled to achieve his crowning vision, a league of nations.

  These “peace progressives,” as Robert David Johnson and other historians have labeled them, held differing views of Russia’s new revolutionary government, but they all recoiled at the notion of a U.S. military intervention. California Republican Senator Hiram Johnson took the lead. He argued that the United States should deal with the issues that had given rise to Bolshevism—“oppression, and poverty, and hunger”—rather than intervening militarily to overthrow the new government, an undertaking he saw as part of Wilson’s “war against revolution in all countries.” He desired “no American militarism to impose by force our will upon weaker nations.” Mississippi Senator James Vardaman charged that the intervention had been conducted on behalf of international corporations that wanted to collect the $10 billion that the imperial Russian government had owed them. Robert La Follette deplored it as a “mockery” of the Fourteen Points—“the crime of all crimes against democracy, ‘self-determination,’ and the ‘consent of the governed.’ ”105 Idaho Senator William Borah reported that people who returned to the United States after spending months in Russia were telling a very different story about conditions there than the Wilson administration was presenting. Borah had been hearing “that the Russian people very largely support the Soviet Government.” And, he continued, “If the Soviet Government represents the Russian people, if it represents 90 percent of the Russian people, I take the position that the Russian people have the same right to establish a socialistic state as we have to establish a republic.”106 Johnson introduced a resolution to stop funding for the intervention, which gained strong support, deadlocking at 33–33.107

  While growing numbers were beginning to question aspects of Wilson’s diplomacy at home, he still seemed to offer a beacon of hope for war-weary Europeans. Adoring crowds mobbed him when he arrived in Europe on December 18, 1918, for the Paris Peace Conference. H. G. Wells recalled, “For a brief interval Wilson stood alone for mankind. Or at least he seemed to stand for mankind. And in that brief interval there was a very extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the earth. . . . He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”108

  The Germans had surrendered on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, believing that they would be treated fairly. One German town greeted returning troops with a banner reading “Welcome, brave soldiers, your work has been done; God and Wilson will carry it on.”109 The Germans even deposed the kaiser and adopted a republican form of government as a sign of good faith. But the ill-defined Fourteen Points proved a weak foundation on which to base negotiations. And Wilson mistakenly failed to get his allies to concur during the war when he had more leverage. He had naively told Colonel Edward House, “When the war is over, we can force [England and France] to our way of thinking, because . . . they will be financially in our hands.”110

  Despite their indebtedness, the Allies balked at Wilson’s terms. Having paid such a high price for victory, they had little interest in Wilson’s lofty rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy, freedom of the seas, and “peace without victory.” They wanted revenge, new colonies, and naval dom
inance. Wilson had already betrayed one of the central tenets by intervening in the Russian Civil War and maintaining forces in the country. More betrayals would follow. The British made it clear that they had no intention of abiding by Wilson’s call for freedom of the seas, which would have limited their navy’s ability to enforce British trade routes. The French made it equally clear they would not accept a nonpunitive treaty. France had lost well over a million soldiers and Great Britain just under a million. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George noted that in the United States “not a shack” had been destroyed.111 The French also remembered their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, further fueling their desire to debilitate and dismember Germany.

  Twenty-seven nations met in Paris on January 12, 1919. The task ahead of them was enormous. To varying degrees, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires were collapsing. New countries were emerging. Revolutionary change was encroaching. Starvation was rampant. Disease was spreading. Displaced populations were seeking refuge. Visionary leadership was desperately needed. But Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando found Wilson, who considered himself the “personal instrument of God,” to be absolutely insufferable.112 Clemenceau supposedly commented, “Mr. Wilson bores me with his 14 Points; why, God Almighty has only ten!”113 Lloyd George took great pleasure in Clemenceau’s response to Wilson: “If the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: ‘Here he is off again.’ I really think that at first the idealistic President regarded himself as a missionary whose function was to rescue the poor European heathen.” Lloyd George applauded his own performance under the difficult circumstances, “seated as I was between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.”114