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The Axis: World War II

The ten-year pact, signed in 1940, whereby Japan, Italy, and Germany pledge to go to the aid of any one of the others if he is attacked.

The plot which instigated the greatest holocaust in history was conceived and nourished in Germany, with collusion in Japan. This is proved by overwhelming evidence. It is further established by the fact that the democracies were caught unprepared. They had failed to heed the advice: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

Self government was placed in the hands of the Germans by the new Republic following the First World War. They elected as their first president, not a Prussian Junker, not one of the old ruling class, but a humble saddler and son of a tailor - Frederick Ebert (1919-25). During those years, the old military clique with their armament makers and groups which profited by war, were insidiously working to regain control of Germany. Behind them were international money-lenders and investors seeking to share in the profits. Taking advantage of the struggles of the new Republic, its economic problems in reconstruction on a basis of peace, the unparalleled inflation, unemployment and hunger, they were again waiting Der Tag.

When the world-wide depression gripped Germany, as it did the rest of the world, the people were led to believe it was the plot of foreign powers to heap suffering and indignity upon them as a result of their defeat in World War I. They were told that they "were not defeated and must rise again to protect their homeland."

The stage was being set for World War II. The German people had fallen into the trap; now they must pay the penalty. Hitler proceeded to rouse them to fever heat. As their Fuehrer he would "right all their wrongs, remove unemployment, rehabilitate them as a prosperous nation, and restore them to their former position as a world power."

The ruination of Germany by the Nazis is one of the blackest pages in history. Partially owing to their distress, then under fear of death, the German people were led and coerced by their military masters, until they fell instinctively back into the goose-step.

The Hitleriarn method, in collusion with militarists, backed by industrialists with both domestic and foreign capital, is simple to decipher: to rouse the people by stirring up their hatreds, to make everything but Nazism their enemy. This was his first "secret weapon" which he turned against his own people.

The Nazi regime began with a reign of terror. They desecrated, tortured, killed, and enslaved without conscience and without mercy, prompted by the lowest motives of greed and bloodthirst. They held nothing holy, and respected neither human life nor divine teachings. They overthrew and made a farce of all the social institutions of civilization, the Church, the schools, and the courts.

It is a deplorable fact that the democracies watched this grow and allowed it to continue for six years without interfering, a mistake for which they paid in blood and sacrifice. At first it was only Germany which saw its religions persecuted and its people murdered, but other nations soon followed. It was the same Heinrich Himmler, who had persecuted and tortured in Germany, who later undertook to wipe out the entire Polish nation. It was the same Himmler who had charge of prisoners of war. Free speech, free press, and religion became heresies whose advocates were branded and treated as criminals. Arrest, seizure of property without payment, trial in secret, and conviction without evidence became the ordinary functions of the police and courts.

Goebbels was the minister of propaganda; Goering the minister of war; von Schirach the minister of youth; Heinrich Himmler became the head of all German police, the Gestapo, and the Schutzstaffel (SS), also organizer and chief of the concentration camps, executioner, inciter of pogroms and mass murder.

It was Himmler who organized the butchery of thousands of party men in the purge of June, 1934. He called the Jews "the true creators of all suffering" and promised to wipe them out. As soon as Hitler came to power he began to fight the Catholics, under the pretense of fighting "political Catholicism." The Catholic Zentrum Party was dissolved on January 5, 1933. Ludwig Mueller took the place of the anti-Nazi Bishop Bodelschwing as head of the Protestant Church, and decreed the suppression of self-government in the churches, instituted German racial theories as a teaching of the church and disciplinary punishment against anti-Nazi clergy.

Hitler declared war on all political opposition. The procedure was arrest, secret and unexplained, by the Gestapo or the SS, and trial in secret, without defense. Mobs were incited to riot by constant needling through the press and other propaganda sources.

The Nazis took great care to hide the true conditions in their concentration camps. When a prisoner was released, he was inspected carefully for signs of mistreatment. If any were too obvious he was never released. Others were required to sign a document which stated that they had never been mistreated, acquired no infectious diseases, and received all their personal belongings. They were threatened with reprisals if they told the truth, and were then released without any assistance for their return home. Officially none of the atrocities occurred, When prisoners were driven to death, their families learned that they were "shot trying to escape," "committed suicide," "died of illness," or they were just never heard from again.

This is what Nazism meant in Germany. The indictment would require many legal volumes. Germans whose hearts revolted against these Nazi practices were unable to lift their voices in protest. Bewildered and helpless, they must remain silent. Against the might of government and military power, the price of protest was death.

When two dictators meet to divide the world between them in a Bacchanalian feast, there is bound to be trouble ahead. Behind the "love feast" is a clash of inordinate ambitions. The dictators stick together only because they do not wish to "hang together." Behind the thin disguise, Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the imitation Ceasar behind whose twentieth-century chariot the Italian people were to be lashed and dragged into World War II, detests the other.

Italy, once the seat of the mighty Roman Empire, had for generations been a nation of liberty-loving people. Garibaldi was their emancipator. Proud of their traditions, its more than 45,000,000 people lived under sunny skies at peace with the world, except when driven into wars by intriguing men in power.

The record of Mussolini, in whom the Italian people placed their trust, is one of treachery and tragedy. The pompous dictator, whom they vociferously cheered as he stood on the balcony overlooking the excited throngs, his chin and chest thrust out in emulation of a modern Ceasar.

Prime Minister Benito Mussolini While acting before the world on the dimly lighted European stage the part of the head of government of the Kingdom of Italy, statesman and diplomat, he increased the strength of his Black Shirt legions to about half a million, thus outnumbering the regular army. He organized a powerful secret murder organization, the existence of which he continually denied, although he could not deny the pile of corpses of its victims, until 1926, when he "legalized" it as the OVRA, Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo. He boasted that he had destroyed the other three underworld organizations known as Mafia, Camorra, and Black Hand. He closed up their private business and "nationalized" it by putting their members, so efficient in racketeering, blackmail, and murder, in the service with the OVRA.

Having accomplished this, he went ahead with "launching the laws for the defense of the regime." He abolished the free press; crushed the organizations and institutions of the Socialists, Catholics, and Freemasons; dissolved all other non-Fascist groups; abolished universal suffrage and Parliament.

Mussolini at last had a program. He suppressed free speech; abolished the liberty of teaching and liberty of the magistracy. He "Fascistized" law courts; abolished the inviolability of private homes and private correspondence; abrogated the right of non-Fascists to choose or exercise a business or a profession. He suppressed municipal liberty; cut down wages and pushed up taxes. He militarized the entire population from the cradle to the grave - all this "to make of Fascism the sacred religion of every Italian."

Mussolini's aim was, in the beginning, a comparatively modest one: aggrandizement of Italy, with a vision of restoring the ancient, allpowerful Roman Imperium. Hitler's megalomania was nothing less than, world conquest. To attain their ends, both men resorted to the totalitarian method as a means first to dehumanize the people ruled by them and then mold them into a robot-like war machine.

Mussolini had an eleven-year start when Hitler climbed to power. The conqueror schemes of the two did not match at all. They were rivals - suspicious of each other. Mussolini considered Hitler a poor rival in the struggle for power in Europe, an "upstart" trying to imitate him. To check Hitler's ambitions, Mussolini attempted to take over Austria by making it a Fascist protectorate of his; that also would protect his back against Hitler.

As Hitler's power grew, Mussolini meanwhile was busily raiding Ethiopia. Il Duce gave the whole situation a second thought. He became not only afraid of his rival, but he saw Hitler's value as an equally ruthless and treacherous accomplice. With the destruction of Austria, Hitler gained the "missing link" with his brother-in-thievery, later to be known as Berlin-Rome axis.

JAPAN'S partnership with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy formed a despotic triumvirate for world control. Secret documents indicate their plans to set up a reign of terror and throw civilization back into medieval barbarism. When they conspired to turn back the clock of human progress, they failed to reckon, however, with the power of the democracies when once roused to action. They failed, too, to comprehend the inherent instinct in the human race for freedom.

The Japanese Empire, with its medieval structure, comprises more than 105,000,000 people in a territory of 260,770 square miles - about the size of the state of Texas. A Japanese is not a Japanese by mere accident of birth. He is the sublimation of mythological, historical, religious, hereditary, and political power designed through the centuries to impress upon him the unalterable conviction that as a descendant of the Sun Goddess, he is born to rule the earth. This he declares to be the "way of the gods."

The Mikado's realm throughout its history has struck first and declared war later, if it felt such a formality were necessary at all. Actually, wars begin long before the first shot has been fired. Economic rivalries, inordinate ambition for wider dominion, and sordid court intrigue have all sown the seeds of war.

In the case of Japan it is possible to argue plausibly that foundations for the war were laid as far back as 2,500 years ago. There is a measure of truth in the argument that when, according to the Japanese legend, Izanago and Izanami, the male and female gods of desire (Kami), thrust their spear into chaos and created the eight islands of Nippon, Japan's entry into world conquest became inevitable.

It is equally possible to find the roots of Japanese lust for conquest in the story of its first ruler, Hikoho no Ninigi (Rice-Ears-of-Ruddy-Plenty) who became "the heavenly sovereign" sometime between 800-850 B.C. The perpetuation of Japan's mythological origin has been impregnated into the people for centuries - the divine descent of the Mikado and the heavenly kinship of all his subjects in the cult of Shintoism; the stout and martial defense of all that Shinto represented by monobe, the warrior families (uji) who were the progenitors of the bushi and their bushido. These, with the development and tenacious power of the samurai, all played a part in bringing Japan into World War II.

For every practical purpose Japan's part in World War II can be said to have started on September 18, 1931, when Toyko declared that Chinese soldiers had blown up the South Manchurian Railway track five miles north of Shenyang (Mukden). This was the famous "Mukden Incident." It was a trial balloon sent up by aggressor nations to test the reactions of the rest of the world. When these reactions proved to be nothing more than words - diplomatic notes, statements, resolutions of protest - Japan, Germany, and Italy saw they had nothing to fear. Mukden went unpunished.

Four months later, Japanese marines landed at Chapei in Changhai, setting alight flames that were to devour China. Then Italy dared to invade Ethiopia; in quick succession followed the Saar "plebiscite"; the Franco revolution in Spain; Hitler's defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Locarno Pact, and League of Nations by reoccupation of the Rhineland; annexation of Austria by Germany; seizure of Albania by Mussolini; and the other steps leading through the Sudetenland and Munich to the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Japan's "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 was a logical climax to the alleged bombing of a railroad track in Mukden ten years and a few months before.

The history of Japan, in its broad outline, is a determined effort to keep the nation with its face toward Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami (the Sun Goddess), its soul consecrated to Kami-no-michi, and its feet dedicated to conquest of the world for the greater glory of the Mikado. The Japanese thus have been deluded for some 2,500 years, and it is too much to expect that the crushing defeat suffered in World War II will, of itself, eradicate the influence of two and one-half millenniums. We must understand these influences to follow the course of the war in the Pacific and as a guide to help prevent a next war.

In 1921, at the Washington Conference it had been agreed that all decisions were to be unanimous, thus the "dissenting opinion became the prevailing opinion." Japan effectively controlled all decisions reached on the Pacific and Far East because she knew that the other nations would rather yield to her than admit the Conference had proved a failure. The inconsequential results were solemnized in various instruments. The world soon forgot everything but the "Five-Power Naval Treaty" because Japan, having had her way on the other points, immediately set out to bring about a revision of the naval agreement either by joint action or by secretly ignoring the terms.

The best-known feature of the naval treaty was the so-called 5-5-3 provision calling off all capital ship-building programs and saying: "The total capital ship replacement tonnage of each of the contracting Powers shall not exceed in standard displacement, for the United States, 525,000 tons; for the British Empire, 525,000 tons ... for Japan, 315,000 tons:" But the 5-5-3 ratio applied only to capital ships and airplane carriers. So Japan concentrated upon building cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliary vessels, much as Nazi Germany did on "pocket battleships:' Only the United States and Britain destroyed their naval protection and cut their new construction to fit the specifications.

In return for a seeming acceptance of the 5-5-3 program, Japan won two highly significant strategic victories which were to strike back at the United States in World War II. In the first place, by agreeing to settle amicably the controversy over cable rights on the little island of Yap, she finally obtained the approval of the United States for her mandates over all the Pacific islands. Great Britain and the United States agreed to maintain with her the status quo "with regard to fortifications and naval bases" in the Aleutians, all American islands west of Hawaii, and at Hongkong and other British possessions east of 110 degrees east longitude, except off the Dominions. The status quo was defined: "No new fortifications or naval bases shall be established in the territories and possessions specified; that no measures shall be taken to increase the existing naval facilities for the repair and maintenance of naval forces, and that no increase shall be made in the coast defenses of the territories and possessions above specified."

In other words, the United States was forbidden to fortify Guam or build up the defenses of Manila and the Philippines. That is why Japan was able to walk quickly into both those places and into Wake Island and the Gilberts at the outset of the Pacific War.

Baron Tanaka declared: "For the sake of self-preservation and of giving warning to China and the rest of the world, we must fight America some time. The American Asiatic Squadron stationed in the Philippines is but within a stone's throw from Tsushima and Suichima (straits off Japan)." The Baron conveniently ignored the Japanese victory at Washington when Article XIX stopped the United States from further fortifying the naval facilities of the Philippines.

This is the blueprint of the Japanese plot to conquer China, destroy the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, establish rule over the islands of the Pacific and the Asiatic continent, and strike at the western coast of the United States. These are the events which led up to the notorious "Manchurian Incident," and Japan's undeclared war on China that was merged into World War II, when Japan threatened to take into captivity more than half the population of the world.

Miller, Francis Trevelyan; with a Board of Historical and Military Authorities. . Riverside Book & Bible House Iowa Falls, Iowa. 1945.

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