I have been a student of WWII for most of my 62-years,and I agree with Herbert Hoover!We needed to help the Brits,but we should have let the Nazis and The Soviets destroy each other!!
Monday morning quarterbacking at its finest. Suppose one of the "bastards" had scored a decisive victory over the other, then what?
Then either Stalin had all of Europe, or Hitler had all of Europe. Either way, very distasteful.
The clear implication is that Alger Hiss and the rest of the paid agents of the Soviet Union in the Stare Department engineered us into the war so that Stalin could retain power. If he had failed in his war with Hitler, Stalin would have been deposed and likely the USSR would have fallen.
There is evidence that Stalin was planning to invade Germany while the Nazis were attacking France & Britain, but that the quick collapse of France prevented that. If France & Britain had been able to stabilize their front as in WW1, then we might have seen Russians doing the attacking. Probably the Russians would have pushed the Cold War frontier somewhat closer to the Rhine in that situation.
Hoover was obviously no kind of a strategist.
For at least 400 years it has been British and then US policy to prevent any one tyrant from controlling all of Europe.
If he does, he controls massive economic and military resources and within a few years can put together a force capable of utterly overwhelming UK or USA.
This was even more important in the past, when Europe represented a much larger percentage of the world’s potential power.
Nukes have changed these calculations, but in 1941 nobody knew they would work.
It is all Tojo’s Fault!
My dad used to say about WWII that “Germany and Russia decided to split up Poland - and the entire world went to war to make sure Russia got all of it.”
Not entirely accurate - but amusing in hindsight - WWII as a ‘Polish joke’.
...and then waited until December 8, 1941 to declare war against Japan...
...so as to induce Hitler to declare war on us on December 11...
...so that we, already at war with Japan (for three whole days) could finally turn around and declare war on Germany in order to help the USSR.
That FDR was one clever sumbitch, I'll tell you what.
...and then waited until December 8, 1941 to declare war against Japan...
...so as to induce Hitler to declare war on us on December 11...
...so that we, already at war with Japan (for three whole days) could finally turn around and declare war on Germany in order to help the USSR.
That FDR was one clever sumbitch, I'll tell you what.
Fascism and Communism were sweeping the world, even in America.
In the 1930s a man ascended to power in the U.S., he became El Presidente for life, eventually dying in office.
Old George P is laughing somewhere...
Coulda, shoulda, woulda in hindsight.
Shoulda been on better watch and prepared at Pearl Harbor, too.
Shoulda been ramped up with war material production earlier.
The plan to let the Soviets shed most of the blood was a valid option, and it worked.
Had not the Soviets degraded the German war capacity, many more allied troops would have gone to their deaths.....Americans, Brits, Candians.
Besides, war in Europe wasn’t even popular in the United States until Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against us.
Like FDR or not, he couyld not single handedly take America further into war, against GOP isolationism of the time.
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word. -- As quoted in The New York Times (24 June 1941)
But:
1) Once Japan attacked us we were going in on allied side. No more shilly-shallying.
2) Right or wrong, there was a feeling that if we didn't "drain the swamp" this time, we'd have to do it in the next generation. And, as bad as the outcome of the war was for Eastern Europe and some other parts of the world, we didn't have another World War after 1945 (though, to be sure the atomic bomb may have been the main reason for that).
3) You couldn't tell at the time how things were going to end. A lucky break for Germany might have brought Japan, Arab militants, Indian nationalists and Latin American dictators on board and created an even more powerful -- unstoppable -- force.
A Soviet win might have brought them not only Eastern Europe and (eventually and for a time) China, but also Western Europe and Japan. We got involved in the Cold War to prevent that. Possibly our getting involved in WWII had the same effect earlier.