A little unfair. France was flattened as soon as the war broke out. What could they have done? Britain struggled to hold on to what it had throughout. And the US population at that time was strongly against military action, so a war before Pearl Harbor would have been one against our will. No wonder, since the New York Times covered up the Holocaust so nobody knew what was going on in Nazi Germany. All we knew about Hitler was that he was a TIME icon.
I agree
They could have kept on fighting.
The French worked hand in glove with the Nazis.
FDR was more subtle, but the effect was the same.
September 1939? Who knew?
On the one hand the true and stated goal of the US and the allies was to destroy Germany's ability to wage war by pouring US resources and manpower into massive air and land assaults against Germany. By grinding them down, day after day with a relentless pounding of German and associated Axis power industry and transport, did the West hope to stop the Germans.
Did the US and GB have the information about the death camps? Most certainly yes. Did they have the time and resources to divert manpower to bomb “sideline” facilties like concentraton camps? The answer is probably yes but again, they concetranted all their resources on stopping German industry.
Bombing Auschwitz and other killing machine facilites could indeed have been done but it was not a priority target. Divert and risk US aircrews to stop the murder of Jews? Hmmmmm, probable but not part of the plan and too much of a diversion from the main mission - halt German war production capability.
As a Jew, I feel that they SHOULD have bombed these camps but as a student of history, I also understand the lack of desire to divert forces and resources for those missions. In those days, we were less human rights-oriented. As a result of the Holocaust, the world pretends to be more human rights supporters.
It is also probable that the stories coming out of occupied Europe were so horrific, so unprecedented, so unbelievable, that they allies thought these assessments to unreal to believe all the details, even from eyewitness accounts and reports.
It is easy for us to sit back and judge what should have, might have been done but one should be more critical of the allies for not accepting Jews fleeing from Nazi Europe, seeking asylum on boats in the 1930's. This is a shamefull episode in that Jews were forced to return to Germany because nobody would take them in. Moreover, thousands tried to get into British Mandate Palestine where they could have been settled but the Brits were hypersensitized to Arab demands to halt Jewish immigration there. Hundreds of thousands could have been saved, amongst them 1.5 million Jewish children!