bump
an” example of the folly of military unpreparedness for any great nation”
We seemed doomed to repeat the mistakes of the 1930’s today lead by the the Liberal Dims and the Liberaltarian GOP...
My uncle, who I was named after, died on the Bataan death march. I have been to the Philippines many times, and I am about to retire there soon. Not Bataan, but New Bataan.
If there was no expectation of victory then they should have evacuated as many as possible to Australia. They let these men fight to the death for no reason.
Heck with the Philippines, they didn’t have s significant force in California after Pearl Harbor. Patton wrote that the few obsolescent tanks he had would have met a Japanese invasion at the beaches. Only after the scare passed did he learn that they had no main gun ammunition.
Agree with you. And remember the Brit and French appeasers were actually hitler supporters- Chamberlain’s pals in parliament of whom many were pro-nazis. Later the Vichy French and the British Union of Fascists, and the closeted Brit pro-nazi aristos (like the Duke of Wales who thought hitler was great).
It was actually turned “patriotic” for Brit commies to be fighting the nazis— and this is how the agents in place for Stalin stayed in place.
FDR was all about control of the nation by his dictatorship- welfare state that could not be supported. He was glad to give the ultimate distraction that continued ton enrich his socialist pals— getting the poor survivors of the Depression into uniform to fight a World War. There is a danger of picking up the Comintern’s line on this war in saying this— but it is largely true. FDR was appalling- and never forget the Rockefellers supported him even as they made millions off slave labor in partnership with Ruhr valley German industrialists.
#15 is a bit overdrawn. The capital ships that turned the tide in the Pacific were laid down in 1937/38. FDR was rearming when the war began; we were just a couple of years late getting started.
Exactly!
It took years to fully mobilize, and Marshall wanted a cross-channel invasion back into France in 1942, but the Higgins boats that made that possible weren’t available in sufficient quantity until literally just before — the Higgins boats were being painted as they were rolling on the railways to be shipped to Britain.
I’m perfectly able to accept that there were traitors in the US and UK — there were three, four, maybe five in the Manhattan Project, and four inside the MI6, even Ultra was known about by Stalin — but it has nothing to do with this.
I don’t like FDR, and it’s clear that he had the carriers steam south from Pearl to get them out of the way during the Dec 7 attack he’d been made aware of, but this piece looks like bashing.
Actually, far from getting gutted, American military spending significantly increased during the 1930s under FDR, even in his first term. It almost doubled as a percentage of GDP, and also increased in absolute terms, though not by as much.