a shorter time, I think. My father piloted B-17s during the last two years of the war. The need for the massive bombardments that were carried out at that time might have been diminished with an earlier entry. Might is the operative word.

bombings in WWII that closely. However, the lack of supplies and replacement materiel did have an affect after we invaded Europe. That, and the two-front nature of the European war took a heavy toll on Germany's ability to continue the battles.

Second-guessing after the fact, though, rarely creates any better understanding it seems.

...suffered appalling casualties.

for such bombings did not exist. We used them. I asked my father about his feelings in the matter. They were mixed, as are mine.

diminishing it. Now bombing of railroads, highways and factories were useful in diminishing the German militaries effectiveness.

Of course our bomb were not particularly accurate or powerful by modern standards. Some of allied bombing of Germany was specifically targeted at civilians which is not only inexcusable but counter productive. I realize there was a lot of bitterness towards the German bombing of London and other English cities. It is easy for us to say that we should not have succumbed to revenge and targeted civilians.

I would rather call understanding the stupidity of the bombing of civilians as learning from history (and preferably not repeating it) rather than second-guessing the politicians and generals of that era.

...is just really bad history.

Sometimes it makes for good fiction, but it's really bad history. You don't get live things once and then go back and change them and the second guessing is incredibly unfair.

Pretty good movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/

I wanted the Nimitz to stay back in 1941 and watch them take on the entire Japanese fleet, and explore the the changes made to history as a result.

If the Nimitz had been able to wipe out the Japanese Fleet, the whole course of history would have been changed.

So yes we should have entered the war earlier, but political reality trumped "the right thing to do." Hindsight is always so wonderful...so easy to make judgements...

"I do not fault FDR. It was hard enough just to get the Lend-Lease program past Congress. A declaration of war before Pearl Harbor would have been politically impossible."

I don't mean to second guess FDR or anyone else, but to assess what we as citizens would have wanted our government to do.

bankers and industrialists who were busy making money off of the rearmament of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. But, since many of these same plutocrats got a pass from FDR after the "Business Plot" to overthrow the US Government of 1933, I guess the Administration didn't see the point in going after them for a little thing like violating export restrictions.

"...we could end this war quickly." He and Hitler were pals (birds of a feather?) apparently, so Grand-Poppy thought he could talk Hitler out of making war against Europe. Hmmmmm............

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051808.html

The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement
By Robert Parry
Consortium News

Sunday 18 May 2008

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.
If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naive saying "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided," then what should be said about Bush's grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the "Trading with the Enemy Act."

So, perhaps instead of holding up Sen. Borah to ridicule, Bush might have acknowledged in his May 15 speech that his forebears also were blind to the dangers of Hitler.

Bush might have noted that his family's wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labor provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

it was impossible to go to war sooner.

Had that somehow been overcome, a whole bag of unintended consequences could have spilled.

-with the US focused on Europe, Japan may have skipped PH and gone south after the British and French, leaving US territories alone. Japan may have been able to achieve their goals and solidify their empire without US interference. An eventual pacific war would have been against a much better prepared Japan.

-the USSR would have the choice to turn against the Nazis before it happened to them, open the eastern front on the offence. OR given the Stalin was satisfied with his devil's bargain, the Soviets could have lend-leased to Germany in exchange for a free hand against Finland, Turkey or Japan and China...

-a far worse case, the Soviets join the Axis... each side knowing they would eventually turn on their ally

-depending on the timing of US entry, Hitler could go back to his 'we have achieved all of our goals' speech and offered a status quo peace rather than facing the allies backed by direct US support. It is quite likely the European nations would accept the loss of Poland and the Benelux countries as an acceptable price to avoid a repeat of WW1. The US would not have the clout to stop such a movement early on in the conflict.

always is. Politicians and generals may assume that X causes Y which leads to Z but reality is always much more complicated and unpredictable.

so many points of history could have changed, in and out of wars, with very minor differences.

WW2 has volumes of possibilities, from what if France opposed the Rhineland re-militarization to had the third wave been launched at PH to had Hitler not lost faith in Rommel and listened to his assertions the Normandy would be the invasion site...

WWI set in motion everything needed for fascism to thrive in Europe

I agree the seeds for WWII were sown in WWI.

Please, see, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/217

At least in global circles

It was hard enough getting lend-lease agreed. But FDR did an excellent job given the circumstances.

the British.

He knew that Britain would be a total loss. He knew they could be wiped off the map.

I wonder if we would have gotten involved if it was confined to Germany and East Europe?

I think Germany declared war on us anyway, after we declared war on Japan. But if Germany hadn't declared war on us and if this was confined to East Europe, I wonder if we would have gotten involved?

removing the biggest obstacle to joining the war in Europe. After PH, we had only declared war on Japan. There was a lot of resistance to expanding the war farther; it was no sure thing even at that point that FDR would have been able to convince congress to join the war in Europe. By Hitler declaring war, and Benito's 'me too' we were pulling in making the point moot. The Europe First strategy did not sit well with many as people wanted revenge on Japan first. Strategically it made far more sense to fight the Nazi's and eliminate them as quickly as possible.

If we had joined the war in 1939 we could have been tossed from Europe along with the British at Dunkirk. If we had joined after the fall of France, then where exactly would we have engaged the Germans? The Soviets never seemed eager to host allies on their ground, and even if they had you're looking at the possibility of another Dunkirk type scenario or worse if US forces had been there at any point before 1943.


Even after Pearl Harbor, it was Germany who declared war on us. They were eager to be able to wage open war against us rather than having us be able to claim neutrality while supplying their enemies.

soldiers so it is improbable that we could have played any sort of decisive role in the early stages of the war even if we had joined it. While it may have had little immediate effect perhaps entering the war in 1939, let's say, would have kick started our military production a couple of years earlier than actually happened, so the war might not have lasted as long as it did.

The Army, Army Air Corp and to a lesser degree the Marines were grossly un-prepared, primarily due lack of equipment. What equipment they did have was largely obsolete. Only the Navy could really have been considered ready for war. It wasn't until the last 4 months of 1942 were we able to go on the offensive.

Given the information that was public knowledge during 1939-1941, I think most of the country would have objected to the United States joining another European war.

We began our military buildup before we entered WWII. The draft was reinstated in September of 1940, but didn't actually get underway until mid-1941. Our buildup of military equipment started around 1938, but it takes time to build battleships and aircraft carriers, and to design and work the bugs out of airplanes.

Soldiers trained with sticks instead of rifles.

Our airplanes were hopeless obsolete.

Our torpedoes didn't work. This problem didn't get fixed until 1943. Many Japanese ship were hit with duds.

Look at this video, sometime between 1937-1940. The Calvary is still riding horses. The tanks in the video were already outdated. The artillery is being pulled by horses. The rifles are 1903 models, even though the M-1 Garand had already been adopted. (When the Marines invaded Guadalcanal they were still using the 1903 rifle.) Look at the planes - autogryos and biplanes - not a single modern fighter in the newsreel.

declared war when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. I suppose one could argue that neither of them should have done so since Germany had not attacked them and they were not prepared militarily.

Most I think would agree that Germany would have attacked France and Britain in 1940 even if neither had declared war the year before, just as it attacked the USSR in 1941. I agree that the US entering the war in 1939 would probably not have changed much on the ground when Germany invaded France and attacked Britain the next year. Perhaps all that it would have achieved would have been an earlier start to building up our military forces, perhaps shortening the war.

Everyone laughs at the Maginot Line, but it was actually successful. It was never penetrated. The French and English were afraid that the Germans would breakthrough the ML and placed their reserves behind the ML to contain a breakthrough. If they had trusted the ML and placed their reserves further North they could have stopped the Germans when they went around the ML. At the time the French had more tanks and better ones than the Germans, and the French & English outnumbered the Germans.

With another few months they would have been able to punch into Germany.

Hindsight is 20/20.

I don't think that Hitler would have attacked France or Germany in 1940. He wanted Russia and had said so before the war. He may have gone after them after beating Russia - IF he was able to beat Russia with Russia fighting alone.

If Franco had joined the war on the side of Germany then Hitler may have won. Spain would have given the Germans a land attack method on Gibraltar. Holding Gibraltar would have enabled Hitler to close the door to the Mediterranean, allowing him to control Africa and the Middle East's oil. (Oil discovered there in 1932.)

you can't go to war unless the American people are fully behind it. And the American people were not interested in sending Americans to die for Europeans.

Most Americans wanted to fight the Japanese only at the time. Hitler, in an amazing act of stupid, did FDR a favor in declaring war on us so FDR didn't have to convince the American people that it was in our interest to fight Germany.

didn't have the equipment to arm them...after WWI there was no build-up to speak of, and after WWI the American people were dead-set against any kind of involvement...I think FDR was wise in starting the build-up and slowly getting involved by providing arms support first.

the right thing to do?

Although given conditions in this country, the build-up to get a large enough army by that time would have been tough...the country was very pro-isolationist after WWI

The attack on Pearl Harbor probably wouldn't have occurred if we had been engaged in Europe and the Pacific fronts. Most likely we could have prevented D-Day from being necessary. We should have entered the theater in 1938-1940. I'm still an isolationist, but there are legitimate exceptions and that was one of them. We have no business being in Iraq or Afghanistan now and shouldn't have gone into either. That's not a global threat, it's a regional matter.

And as for a declaration of war, WW-II was the last one we've had. Since then we've just bombed the hell out of innocent civilians without Congressional declaration. Korea, VietNam, Granada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and coming soon to a theater near you, Syria, are all outside the realm of Constitutional boundaries.

If we're going to put our troops in the firing line, Congress needs to declare war. It was never intended to be the whim of whatever president was in office and presidents from both parties have violated the intention. I'm a liberal, but I do not approve of what is going on now. I'm just glad we have Obama instead of rMoney.

Two of my three daughters have boyfriends in the military. I don't want to see either of them deployed for some bullshit "police action". Both are fine young men with good intentions. They're serving in the military, one Army, the other Airforce, to protect our country, not kill innocent civilians. I respect them for that and trust them with my daughters. End of rant.