WHEN World War I was at its height, it must have seemed probable that the victor would be either the Kaiser or the leaders of the western powers. But the true political winners from that terrific holocaust were three men who were little known, even in their own countries, when hostilities began.

IT WAS the announced purpose of the Treaty of Versailles to replace the state of war by a “firm, just and durable peace.” But the peace settlements with Germany and its allies were neither firm nor just nor durable. A century elapsed between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the next general European conflict. But there were only two decades of uneasy armistice between the First and Second World Wars.

THE BRITISH and French alliances with Poland brought only disaster and suffering to all the partners. The Polish Army, courageous but poorly trained in methods of modern warfare and scantily supplied with tanks and airplanes, was overwhelmed by the invading Germans during the first weeks of September, The defense of Poland was handicapped by the irregular frontiers of the country, by the location of important industrial centers near the borders, and by the obstinate determination of the General Staff to defend every inch of the national soil.

NO PEOPLE has ever been led into war with so many soothing promises of peace as the Americans received from their Chief Executive in 1939 and 1940. The national mood after World War I had become one of profound disgust and disillusionment. It had become increasingly obvious that America’s First Crusade had not made the world safe for democracy.

ROOSEVELT was elected President for a third term by the votes of isolationists who trusted his dozen or more specific pledges to stay out of war and of interventionists who did not believe he meant what he said. The latter had far more reason for satisfaction. Once assured of four more years in the White House, Roosevelt set the ship of state on a much more militant course.

BY 1941 the United States had become deeply involved in the Pacific, as well as in the Atlantic theater of World War II. The Roosevelt Administration was striving to block and discourage Japan’s expansion by a variety of measures short of war: economic discrimination, aid to China, diplomatic warnings, display of naval force.

Why Hitler kept this promise, when he broke so many others, is a question to which no positive answer can be given, in the light of available information. Perhaps he regarded it as a matter of prestige, and of revenge for the undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. The Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, shrewdly appraised the significance of what was to happen at Pearl Harbor when he wrote in his diary on December 3, after the Japanese Ambassador had told Mussolini of his government’s intention:

THE SECOND conference of the Big Three, held at Yalta in February 1945, represented the high point of Soviet diplomatic success and correspondingly the low point of American appeasement. This conference took place under circumstances which were very disadvantageous to the western powers.

ONE MIGHT have supposed that an alert public opinion would have warded off some of the moral inconsistencies and political blunders which have been described in preceding chapters. Of course, complete freedom of speech is never maintained in time of war. Father Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, for example, was harassed into extinction. There were a few convictions for sedition, notably of some members of a Trotskyite group in Minneapolis and of a few obscure and politically illiterate anti-Semitic fanatics.

THE QUESTIONS are not: Shall Poland’s eastern border be shifted westward? Shall she lose her eastern territories or, losing them acquire in their place western territories at the expense of Germany?

“The question is: Shall Poland exist?

One wonders what would have happened if the British Government, when offering its guarantee against aggression to the Polish Government in the spring of 1939, had said: