Rainbow Five
Jim Davies
December 5, 2007
Have you heard of Rainbow Five? Most have not; I had not, until I read Thomas Fleming's masterpiece, The New Dealers' War. I'd say it is one of the most important documents of the 20th Century, and yet to this day it is little known. Such is history; forget its lessons, as Santayana so famously said, and you're condemned to repeat them. The story of Rainbow Five is just such a lesson.
Fleming brings more of an Old Right perspective than that of an outright anarchist, but don't let that stop you buying a copy of the book--it's a treasure-trove of insight into how America was dragged into World War Two and how hundreds of thousands of American lives were sacrificed in the interests of government. His research is impeccable and his style, compelling.
Before encountering the book, I had already concluded from others such as Hamilton Fish's Tragic Deception and Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceipt that FDR deliberately manipulated the United States into that War when no defensive need existed; possibly to distract public attention from his abject failure to end the Great Depression and almost certainly to bid (successfully) for a much more prominent role for the US Government in world affairs when it was all over. Even as late as December 6th, 1941, the American public wanted no part of it; poll after poll showed huge majorities in favor of letting the rest of the world destroy itself at will, with neither help or hindrance from America. That majority reversed itself 24 hours later, after FDR's master stroke brought the destruction of the Pearl Harbor fleet by agents of the Japanese government, of which my own short summary appears here.
In The New Dealers' War, Fleming does not dwell on the way FDR engineered
So to the first of these: Rainbow Five. That was the name the Army gave to waging war on
Rainbow Five proposed shipping a 5-million man army to
Fleming tells of how Major Wedemeyer arrived at his office on
The reason was that a translated copy of the Trib was brought to the desk of Adolf Hitler the next day, and he immediately took counsel with his fellow-thugs. The report, evidently authentic and Top Secret (the
While Rainbow Five was under urgent review in
The other component of Fleming's book that broke new ground for me was the Allies' insistence on "unconditional surrender." This was not just morale-boosting propaganda, it was a policy agreed to first at
Its importance emerged later in the war, when victory became almost certain. Then--late 1944, say--it would have been feasible to negotiate a peace with
Now consider the policy's cost, as Fleming so eloquently counts it: "the Americans lost 418,791 dead and wounded after the breakout from
His success in creating a massive government in a massive nation is universally celebrated to this day in the city where he did it, and I agree; this bloodthirsty megalomaniac is the archetypical government leader.
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