Successful businessman working together with his wife. They established a very Generous Foundation which we are the beneficiaries of, not the only, but one of the beneficiariebene. What he gave to us before he passed away was to endow a special series and bringing the best and the brightest historians to share their works and insight with. So a sincere thanks to the mason family including the mason son and to their foundation. So im very pleased to have the opportunity here to introduce our next presenter as one of the most distinguished historians and in the world on the subject of world war ii. David kennedy received his under graduate at stanford and graduate training at yale. And founding director of the bill of the American West at Stanford University where he talk ta taught for more than 40 years. It is more than we have time for today. You have information on your program so i encourage you to look at that as well. He is much admired and loved by his students, by his peers and administrators he worked with in Higher Education over the years. As research and writing focused on 20th century American History he has got numerous Award Winning books including over here, the First World War and American Society was nominated as a finalist. He actually won the prize for another book, freedom from fear, the American People and depression and war 1929 to 45. He has been a professor at oxford, flor eence and American History taught at other universities and around the world. He has spoken on several occasions at this museum. We count him as part of the family. He was one of the first speakers on World Affairs in 2008. So we are delighted to have him back. Join me in welcoming dr. David kenne kennedy. Thank you very much for that introduction. Thanks to all of you for your interest in this subject. We are talking about 1946 as a year of transition, transformation. Well take a little bit of liberty with that calendar year and back it up a bit into the end of 1945. Thats my starting point. I should tell you at the outset there is a premise that underlies my remarks here today and theres a proposition i will try to argue and persuade you is the proper way to think about this passage. The premise is that world war ii was by many many measures a transformative event in the history of this republic and in the history of the International Order and in this countrys relationship to the International Order. Thats my premise. The proposition that i want to try to argue here this afternoon this is grand strategy that the United States pursued in the world war ii era. So how transformative was world war ii . I will take as my text a remark by Winston Churchill to be precise. First to put you in the mood lets look at a few images when it was indeed unconditional jubilation. I like this image so much that i use it as the cover for my book on the subject. Here are g. I. s in france celebrating the announcement that the japanese were about to surrender. Here is probably one of the most famous and jublated from this period. Here is the man who started it all. I want to begin with a remark by Winston Churchill on august 16th, 1945, the day after the world learned the japanese emperor signalled japan to surrender. On that occasion Winston Churchill said many things. It was a speech that aimed to educate his country men what he thought the consequences, the downstream effects of this would be. It says a lot of things. A lot of it is delivered in the fashion but there was one sentence in that address that when i read the transcript of it when i was doing research, one sentence leapt right off the page at me not least of all far grammatical reason but he the United States as a plural noun. Before the civil war the United States were and after the civil war the United States was. It was a plural nouchblt it is the first thick that quickened my attention. August 16th, 1945 he says at this moment the United States stand at the summit of the world. August 16th, 1945 Winston Churchill the United States stand at the summit of the world. The implications of that are what i would like to develop with you here this afternoon and i would like to call your attention, if i can spool your recollection back fourth 1940, the nice full peacetime year for the United States in world war ii and just ponder for a minute how improbable that statement made in 1945, the United States stand at this moment at the summit of the world, how improbably it would have been to Say Something like that in 1940. It was the 11th year of the great depression, one Hoover Administration and two Roosevelt Administrations failed to find a proper exit from that great economic crisis. 1940 unemployment was still about 17 in the crisis 2008 and 2009. It was stuck there as of 1940. Historians looking back and using later diagnostic techniques to gauge the level of poverty in the United States estimated in 1940, 40 of households were below the poverty line. This was a country that was still after a decade of this deeply blinded by the greatest economic crisis of modern times. Anyone who had said that five years over the horizon of the future this country and much of the world would stand on the cusp of a generation long or two generation long economic expansion. So great and so pervasive that by the end of the 30 20th century people would be using a newly coined term to describe this incredible Economic Growth. The word would be globalization. Anybody who said such a thing would be removed. If we look at the International Arena in 1940 and this countrys relationship to it the contrast with whats coming just a few years over the horizon is of anything more dramatic. It was a country that had refused to join the league of nations even though it was the brain child. This was a country that twice were the decades past a high protective of 1922 in 1930 effectively closing off the United States from all foreign vendors trying to sell into american markets. It was imposed numerical limits on how many immigrants could enter the country in any given year, roughly 120 or 130,000. It was a country that insisted on the repatriation of loans during world war i, a practice that badly disrupted internationally capital flows. And it was a country that passed no fewer than five socalled neutrality statutes. And it would be located not over there in geneva, switzerland but in our principal city of new york and we would be chief funder and patron for many years in the future. And this same country that insisted on repay traiting all those allied deaths would step forward in the marshal plan, that this counted sealed itself off from international markets, would institute something called the International Monetary fund which would work to stabilize International Exchange rates. And that it would enter into its first peacetime military alliance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and so on. It would also be the chief sponsor of the general agreement on tariffs and trade. What defines the difference between 1940 and 1945 . The short answer is world war ii. In that four or five year period, 1940 or 41 to 45, things happened that actually transformed this countrys relationship to the world and its own the character and shape of its own society. I hope it will be the notion that the result we got, the contrast between 1940 and 1945, the accuracy of that statement that at this moment the United States stand at the summit of the world in 1945 did not just happen. It was the result of some very shrewdly taken and followed premises of grand strategy that the Roosevelt Administration developed early on. And was lucky enough to be able to stick to right to the wars conclusion and deposited the United States at the summit of the world in 1945. When hitler heard the news of the attack on pearl harbor, we have an ear witness to what he said, what he thought for the implications of the japanese attack. He said, now it is impossible for us to lose the war. We do have his written account in the volume of his great memoirs written after the war. Its volume called the grand alliance when he tries to make the reader understand what was his frame of mind when he heard the pearl harbor news. He said, the United States was in the war up to the neck and into the death. So we had won after all. England would live. I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. What east interesting to me is the comparison between hitlers reaction and churchills. Here are two leaders locked in mortal combat for the fate of europe and the fate of the world. Im going to read you a sentence or two from a memorandum that he wrote for his furor, hitler, in mid december 1941 in which he tried to make some sense out of what would be the implications that america was a formal belligerent. Its a very lengthy, detailed, thoughtful memorandum. Its shrewdly analytic. Here are the important two sentences for our purposes. He wrote the following. We have just one year to cut russia off from her military supplies. If we dont succeed and the munitions potential of the United States joins up with the man power potential of the russians, the war will enter a phase in which we shall only be able to win it with difficulty. Turns out again we understand that that was a much more Accurate Appraisal of what would be the implications of american belligerency than hitler had made when he said we cannot lose the war because we have an ally thats never been vanquished. I wanted to share with you a sentence or two from another document written in 1940, september of 1940, by this man, the commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial fleet, admiral yamamoto. This is september 1940. The u. S. japanese relationship is starting to go seriouslily bad. And yamamoto prepared a memorandum for his Prime Minister and he said the following. If i am told to fight regardless of the consequences, i shall run wild for the First Six Months or a year. But i have utterly no confidence for the second or third year. I hope therefore, mr. Prime minister, that you will endeavor to avoid a japanese american war. Now thats the man who is eventually tasked with the job of starting the war, the Master Planner of the pearl harbor attack and later the less wellfated midway attack. Again, the striking thing to me looking back on this historically is that yamamoto knew something that apparently hitler didnt know. The first rule of warfare laid out many hundreds of years ago. He said the first rule of warfare is know your enemy. What yamamoto knew was that the United States had industrial and Financial Resources at such a depth and on such a scale that if they could be fully mobilized in a certain period of time, that the fate of the axis power of japan and germany was sealed. This was the great contribution that the americans could make to the war effort. Roosevelt said something very similar to this in that famous address when he said, we shall be the great arsenal of democracy. Note what he did not say. He did not say well be the sword of democracy or even the shield of democracy. He said well be the great arsenal of democracy. This is where we begin to get, i think, at the central core assets that the United States could bring to bear in this great conflict. Im going to tell a little story briefly. It has some of the characteristics of a parable about three cities. If we understand what happened in these three cities over the course of the war, i think well have a pretty good understanding of the contours of this american grand strategy. The three cities all share an attribute. They all sit on some great famous river. Thats a little bit incidental, but there they are. And again, you could ive picked these three cities just for purposes because they make my case. I once told a group what i just told you. If we understand its essence well understand the character of american grand strategy. I asked them to guess what the three cities would be. Someone very interestingly said richland, washington, oakridge, tennessee and los alamos, new mexico. The three cities im going to talk about are france on the sein river. And washington, d. C. On the potomac. And the third is a city that changed its name a couple of times over the course of the 20th century. Today we know it by the name of the river on have it sits. Stalingrad. It takes place in a specific period of time between august 1942 and february of 1943. In these three cities things happened that if we understand their essential nature, well understand the basic contours of american grand strategy. Chapter one in our little parable, fran parable, ruen, france, august 15th or 16th, 1942. This is not one of these dates thats inscribed in our historical memory. Its a very, very important date for us to understand grand strategy on the part of this country in world war ii. Why . Lets call it august 15th. I may be off by a day or two. A squadron of one dozen b17 bombers took off from their base in the south of england accompanied by a swarm of spitfire fighters. They crossed the English Channel and dropped their bomb load on ruen, a railroad or switching yard in the city. Same place where the british had burned joan of arc at the stake a few hundred years earlier. Why is this important . Again, its not because of the fact that all the planes dropped all their ordinance on the primary target or they all returned to base without damage or loss of crew. Thats true. Thats unusual in the history of air raids in world war ii. Thats not why i cited here. Its important because on this date we see the implementation of a very deeply consequential strategic decision that was made about a decade earlier in the early 1930s when American Military planners have studied particularly a book by an italian theorist in a book written in the early 1920s called the command of the air. And he argued that there was a new technology that made it possible to revolutionize the character of warfare. And that technology was the airplane. He advocated something thats come to be known as Strategic Bombing. In other words, what he argued was that air power should be used not to support the combat arm on the ground. Thats called tactical air support. He leapt over that and said the real implications of air technology for warfare was to build big bombers that could over fly the traditional battlefield and deliver their blow against the enemys homeland for two purposes. And he was unapologetic about ranking these. The first was to compromise and destroy the enemys infrastructure, manufacturing and transportation facilities, that he would be unable to sustain his force in the field and secondly Strategic Bombing would so terrorize the enknemyn civilian population that they would lose their will to fight and pressure their government to settle things in a hurry. Thats the doctrine. The war Planning Department decided that in the event of a future conflict, this country would place its biggest bet on a Strategic Air arm. That would be the element of forced composition that would receive priority and the greatest share of resources. Beginning in 1935, slowly at first but eventually with phenomenal speed, the United States began to build a Strategic Air force. And that raid on august 15th, 9 1942 was the first time an all American Force had dropped its bombs on nazi occupied europe. I dont believe this photograph is from that raid but here are some of those aircraft just to remind you. And heres something i think is quite instructive. Its something i didnt know when i was writing freedom from fear. I wish id known it. If theres ever a revised edition, ill crank it in there. Its one of these delicious historical facts that tells a big story. The man in the upper left side of that photograph, i dont know if hes recognizable to you, but heres his card and there he is again. I can tell by the murmur that many, if not all of you, know who he was. Hes now deceased. Hes the man who piloted the inola gay and dropped the first atomic bomb on hiroshima. The deliciousness of this is that in this one mans military career, he begins the air war on europe in august of 1942 and he ends the war in the pacific, same man would drop that bomb on hiroshima in august of 1945. Note the spread of those dates, 1942 to 1945. And note the date of d day. D day is in june of 1944, almost two years after this raid on ruen. A reminder that the United States fought against his nazi adversary principally from the air until the last final end game of the war in europe. The air war was the principal means by which