Posted on 02/28/2019 6:31:09 AM PST by DIRTYSECRET
Sending a GAZILLION tons of armaments and ships didn’t leave him much choice did it?!?!?
PLEASE don’t make me defend a monster on any issue.
But what would you do?
Don’t tell me America wasn’t at war before they officially were at war because we were doing everything short of bleeding as far as taking sides was concerned.
You wouldn’t consider someone arming your enemy THAT MUCH as YOUR ENEMY?
Stalingrad was many months away in Dec. 1941.
Chamberlain was caught between a rock and a hard spot.
Britain was not ready for war, so he came home waving a piece of white paper, having been played for a chump.
Privately, he told his ministers to prepare for war, knowing that history would remember him as a chump.
Stalingrad was many months away in Dec. 1941.
Yes, that’s true, I was thinking Moscow, not Stalingrad, but even then Hitler knew the war was not going the way he wanted in Russia.
I am not making you do anything.
I am just pointing out the reality.
We did not declare war on Germany until they did it first.
If he had done it before the attack you might have a point but he did not.
Since it took a few days it was doubtful it was because of "treaty" and the attack by Japan would have cut any help for the UK off cold.
So he got what he wanted without lifting a finger UNTIL he declared war on us.
Once that happened we were the ones who did not have a choice.
I’ve listened to a lot of radio broadcasts from that time.
The impression I got was that pretty much everybody knew after Pearl Harbor, that war with Germany was inevitable.
If Hitler had focused more on taking Moscow, Stalin may very well had been removed from power.
I believe Khrushchev admitted that Stalin was on thin ice as it was at that point. Certainly losing Moscow probably would have resulted in some kind of revolt within the Red Army.
Why do people persist in thinking that WWII was only in Europe?
Japan had been rising for some sixty years at that point. WWII would have come if WWI had not been fought, if Hitler had not come to power if Europe had just continued to have petty little wars. War with Japan was always coming. And without Germany to ally with they would have allied with the USSR.
It would have arrived a bit later, probably in the 1950's but it would have come.
And considering their advanced in germ warfare it would have been a very nasty war.
There was some push by the Communist Party in the US but it was not a popular notion.
Japan was the target until Hitler obligingly decided to pin a target on his own back.
It’s a fair statement that while most didn’t want war, they were resigned to its’ inevitability and necessity.
War with Japan does not equal a World War. Japan initially had no allies and any war with them probably would have been Pacific-centric.
But for Hitler the WWII that came to pass would not have.
Japan is interesting, we were allies in WWI, and friends until around 1924 when the US passed an immigration bill which greatly reduced the number of immigrants from Japan, and Asia.
The Japanese considered that an insult (kind of sounds like our Southern neighbors, don’t it?) But it led to the bolstering of the hardcore militarists, who ultimately took over the country.
Then, they would have sailed to california and bombed the coastal cities and factories until we gave up
What Yamamoto wanted was for the US to sue for peace, granting Japan freedom of the Pacific.
This is true. In the 1930s the Nazis were decided Anglophiles. They thought the British aristocracy was paragon. They even took up fox hunting to emulate the Brits.
But that changed after he invaded Poland and signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, which put Hitler at loggerheads with Churchill.
It was the general populace that was isolationist. FDR wanted the US in the war against Germany. Japan was his back-door ingress.
There was no valid reason to move the bulk of the Pacific fleet from contiguous San Diego Harbor to Pearl Harbor - 3000 miles from the mainland, and 6000 miles from the capital - a place that was merely a Territory, not a State of the Union, except as an explicit threat to Imperial Japan. Admiral Richardson rightly opposed the move, and was replaced.
I am not an apologist for the Axis or for Japan. I simply recognize the fleet move for what it was: a shot across the bow. A martial culture like the Japanese would not have taken it any other way - quite apart from the political and economic pressures applied by the US.
The fleet moved in 1940, and was attacked in 1941.
We were squeezing Japan over their invasion of China by cutting off their oil imports.
Japan had too much invested in China to back out. They felt their only option was to make the US unable to enforce the embargo.
Japan originally planned to attack the Philippines and ambush our fleet as we launched our counter attack. I believe it was Yamamoto who convinced the Emperor that a direct surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was the only way to ensure victory, as the ambush had too many variables and was open to detection by the US.
Anyway, Japan felt they had no choice. No amount of diplomacy, short of the US allowing the oil imports and thus supporting Japan’s invasion of China, would have stopped the attack.
If you wanted to stop US involvement in WWII, you would have to have stopped Japan’s invasion of China.
I wonder now, if we knew China would have gone Commie, if we should have just supported Japan?
Read Sir Max Hasting’s book “Retribution” on the last year of the war in the Pacific, W.W. II. He goes into some detail on what happened in China and after reading that it was going to happen no matter what.
“” “” Just read a little on Operation Barbarossa to check my dates.
The German Army was on the verge of taking Moscow when they declared war on us. So I don’t think they were worried about Russia at that point.”” “”
dfwgator is right. Hitler declared war on US on December 11, 1941. An overwhelming Soviet counteroffensive in Battle of Moscow started on December 5, 1941. It was largely possible after moving 18 division and general Zhukov from the Pacific by the Soviets after Stalin finally believed intelligence that the Japanese would not hit the Soviet Far East.
German units were mostly in disarray either on defence or running by December 8 and by December 11 taking Moscow wasn’t on menu at all.
Not only the battle was lost but the whole East Front revealed itself for a bad gamble it was.
Hitler’s declaration of war on US was a hysterical reaction to it. He hoped Japan would follow suit declaring war on USSR so the Soviets would split their forces. Japan didn’t.
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