“and
•Germany had LOST the war. The truth is, Germany had been utterly defeated, but again, no German believed it.”
They had good reason to believe so, since the allies decided not to invade. Rightly so, in my opinion. No need to carry on death and destruction when the enemy is ready to surrender. However, even if those who surrendered knew they lost, it doesn’t follow that it felt like a loss to the German people. How could we lose, they’d think, if we laid waste to France and Russia all those years while no foreigner touched our soil? Nonsense!
Come to think of it, does it really feel like we lost the Vietnam War? I know we did, intellectually. But in my gut I know that aside from the 57,000 or whatever people who died, the lost prestige, and all the money wasted, we didn’t lose much. Relatively speaking. That is to say, it wasn’t like what happened to Germany and Japan in the recent past. That’s what losing a war is supposed to look like. earth is salted, your women raped, etc.
Ours was a limited war with limited aims. North Vietnam had no way to hurt us except insofar as we sent people over into harm’s way. Normally, you don’t get to go on as if nothing happened. Germany was in one of those kind of wars, or so it thought. They had reparations to pay in the end, of course, and ended up foolishly wrecking its economy over them. But in 1918 their national monuments weren’t demolished. Their leaders weren’t hung. How easy it was to pretend as if their loss somehow wasn’t real. Because in many ways, it wasn’t.
Thanks for a great post -- well said!
I would only quibble, if that's the right word, with your analysis of our defeat in Vietnam. I'd say it was a real defeat and had real consequences that we suffer from to this day. Indeed, we may not yet have seen the worst of it.
How so, you ask?
Oh, how quickly we forget... First of all, Vietnam was only tangentially about the Viet Cong, the NVA, Ho Chi Mihn and all that. That was just the military battle, which Americans had finally won, by the early 1970s.
But what Vietnam was primarily about was the political war: radical leftist Democrats declaring war against America and winning!
Vietnam was lost to America when our radicals took over Congress and cut off all funding to support the South Vietnamese. Well, duh! With unlimited support from Russia and China, the NVA soon mounted a conventional invasion -- with tanks and all -- which overran the South.
And what were the consequences? Well aside from millions who died or fled the countries, there were revolutionary outbreaks in many other countries of the third world.
More importantly, Americans in our disgust next elected Jimma Carter the Elder (we now have Jimma Carter the Younger), as our Apologizer In Chief, and he spent four years on his knees apologizing to every two-bit tin-horn dictator he could find -- i.e., in Panama.
But arguably Carter's most important apology went to the mullahs & ayatollahs of Iran, and that brought down the Shah. And soon we will be facing the nuclear weapons that are ayatollahs' natural response to Carter's apologies.
So, just as we continue to benefit today from the courage and leadership of America's "greatest generation," we will continue to pay and pay for our defeat in Vietnam.
One more point:
"They had good reason to believe so, since the allies decided not to invade. Rightly so, in my opinion."
I'm sure you know there were voices at the time which warned direly against letting the Germans off the hook too easily. Among Americans the most notable was General John J Pershing, who (iirc) predicted in 1918 that unless the allies marched all the way to Berlin, the Germans would come back for round-two in twenty years. He was only off by a few months.