WW II last war won by the "Good Guys*

[D-Day_Dodger]

As I'm currently reading J.F.C. Fuller's "Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence Upon History" here is something to mull over. To Fuller's way of thinking, wars should be fought to obtain peace not just victory and as such the Allies lost both the First and Second World Wars. In both wars the Allies had committed themselves to total victory, which precluded the possibility of a negotiated peace.

In the previous century Britain had been the arbiter of peace in Europe by the application of her policy of Pax Britannica. The basis of Pax Britannica was that England stood back and influenced events to maintain the status quo on the continent, without having to spend all its wealth and manpower in costly European wars. This policy had helped defeat Napoleon and had kept the peace in Europe for the next century.

But by becoming embroiled in a continental war of such ferocious intensity which totally consumed all of Britain's economy and manpower Pax Britannic became one of first casualties of the Great War.
When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 the chance for a negotiated peace disappered as America was the last major power that could act as an arbiter in the conflict. The result was the punishment and humiliation that the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany and which created the conditions necessary for the rise of Nazism.

In the Second World War, Fuller argues that Churchill committed a major blunder at the beginning of the war by declaring that the total defeat of Germany was England's sole aim and that England would ally herself with any nation that fought against Hitler's Germany. If Churchill was to have declared the removal of Hitler and his Nazi regime as his prime war objective Britain could have worked at establishing contact and collaborating with groups of Germans disaffected with Hitler. But by making the country itself the focus of victory Churchill ended up strengthening the resolve of the German people. Roosevelt's "Unconditional Surrender" declartion at the Casablanca Conference was an endorsement of this policy and a further nail in the coffin for any hope for a revolt in the German High Command.

Also, by adopting "the friend of my enemy is my friend" approach to Stalin, Churchill helped pave the way for one form of dictatorship in eastern Europe to replaced by another. Churchill realized his mistake as the war went on and this explains his interest in a major Balkan campaign which would rescue these states from eventual Soviet domination and help form a buffer with Stalin's Russia after the war. However the American approach, as expressed by Roosevelt, was to get to Berlin by the fastest possible method and with the least amount of American casualties. This is the strategy that the Allies ended up following and it did lead to the utter destruction of Germany. However, because of these diplomatic and strategic blunders, total victory just ended up setting the table for the Cold War.