New Boundaries for the World: The Visions of Eight World War II Leaders

The eight most important leaders of World War II – Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles DeGaulle, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt – had quite different views about the future borders of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. It was to a large extent out of the actions and arguments of the war’s winners that today’s boundaries emerged. One cannot help wondering how people today would see some of the projects anticipated by the losers. What was to happen when German settlers met on the other side of a globe controlled from Germania, the renamed Berlin? What would Fidel Castro have thought of Cuba being included in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and of being saved from that fate by the Yankees? A look at the past may help.

– Gerhard Weinberg, Ph.D.