Posted on 12/11/2013 5:51:00 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Patton got his start killing Mexicans back in 1916. I can only imagine what a demon he would have been fighting them in WW2.
Almost half of all Americans are of German descent, IIRC. I know I am.
Yes. And that would be expected. But the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, not the Germans. There were a lot of German descent in the US. While we have the benefit of hindsight in knowing the horrors the Nazis were committing, that wasn't the case at the time.
“Japan initiated hostilities, Germany was not obliged to bail them out. In the event, Hitler might feared that the U.S. would finish off Japan and then turn on Germany. Official American policy at the start of the war was to devote 80% of our resources to Europe and 20% to the Pacific. After Midway, the Pacific got more resources, but it was still largely a side show from the bigger war. If the U.S. only had to take on Japan, we would really have steamrollered them, and been left with a big well oiled military machine and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, HMS Great Britain.”
Good point! Japan would have been defeated so quickly that we would never have dropped the atomic bomb on them, perhaps. OR, we would have incurred much greater casualties, invading their home islands and fighting house-to-house.
I've long heard a secret protocol already existed between Mexico and Germany dating back to WWI where Mexicans would grab the southwest as a distraction in the event of a German invasion of North America.
Second, the Third Reich was not a democracy; Hitler was not going to be voted out of office because of some battlefield disaster. The German people were too cowed to express disapproval of Der Fuhrer (consider Stalingrad).
Guess you must have missed the part where Hitler’s own people tried to take him out at least once.
Not to deny that Mussolini lied but in this case it was the old trains schedules that lied. He did indeed make the trains run on time but he did it by a very simple trick. If the 10:12 train always arrived 30 minutes late (and it did) he just changed the schedule to read 12:42. The trains still took the same time to arrive but no one was waiting for it to arrive as 10:12.
Hitler had very little choice. England was being fed and armed by American convoys. Eventually, Hitler knew he would have another active front from a revitalized England. Hitler knew he couldn’t win in Russia and sustain an invasion in France.
Hitler could only slow that by sinking our shipping as it was coming out of American ports before it formed into convoys. Doing so would cause us to declare war, so it was a moot point.
Hitler only needed another year of determined invasion of Russia to secure that front. He was buying time by attacking American shipping.
It's more than just that, though. The U.S. was effectively at war with Germany long before any formal declarations were made anyway. The U.S. was shipping arms to Great Britain across the North Atlantic under U.S. Navy escort.
I've never understood this idiotic infatuation with war declarations or even open military attacks like Pearl Harbor as a benchmark for determining when a war "officially" began.
Western Europeans seem to have great difficulty in envisioning the scale of some of the rest of the world. Rolling through Belgium and France just doesn’t compare to trying to tank across hundreds of miles of steppes, or, over here, land on a continent and then make there way across it’s 3000 some odd miles of just about every topography known to earth.
I have a hard time believing that Hitler ever had any ambition to wage war against the U.S. when Germany's vaunted military machine was seriously lacking in the two types of weapons that would be absolutely essential to such a military campaign: long-range bombers and aircraft carriers.
The Pact presented the condition "ARTICLE 3....to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked..." by a country not already involved in the war,"
Technically though, the US and the allies didn't attack Japan so Germany was not obliged to declare war on the US based on the pact.
FDR was already at war with Hitler — before Pearl Harbor.
Good point. There isn’t a single country in Europe that’s even as large as the state of Texas, so the whole nature of a military campaign would be very different here.
That is a NICE M1!!
None the less, it was still an act of insanity. Germany couldn’t even force a crossing of the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Even the USA and Briton had to use all their resources just to invade France with England as a base.
Exactly RIGHT.
It just goes to show you that there are some things that are so stupid only a Professor would publish them.
Hitler did not know that his double-dealing "allies" in the far east had secretly agreed with the Soviets that Russian denunciation of the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact of April 1941 was just for show. He wanted a second front in his war with the Soviets. As usual, Stalin honored his Japanese treaty the same way he honored The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: by living up to it as long as he was too weak to break it.
Lest anybody think Hitler was alone in his delusions, we made the same mistake on our side. Stalin was given huge inducements to come into the war against Japan, something he did -- like the rape of Poland -- when there was little left to do but divide the spoils.
Hitler didn't even have the sealift capacity to invade Britain across 27 miles of water. How the hell was he going to invade the United States?
Not in the least bit secret: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
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