Winter War Lessons

In his narrative nonfiction masterpiece, “In the Garden of Beasts,” Erik Larson writes about the rise of Hitler in 1933-34. He delves into the life of the new American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, who slowly comes to realize that something treacherous is afoot. Even though Dodd and a few others began to see Nazi evil quickly taking root, their observations were muted, ignored, and even rebuffed.

It’s hard to imagine, knowing the terrible cost of what was yet to come – a war that dragged in most of the world.

As the Great War had only ended a little more than a decade earlier, the world would not tolerate another war; however, it slowly slid again towards it. The United States turned a blind eye to the Nazis and recognized the USSR on November 16, 1933. When Nazi Germany teamed up with its ideological nemesis, the Soviet Union, in August 1939 to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the fate of much of Europe was sealed. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Soviets followed from the other direction 16 days later.

There are lessons to be learned from this naivety, helplessness, and ignorance. One is the case of Finland in 1939, and the other is what we’re seeing in Ukraine today.