93 year old Chuck Yeager tweets more than DJT.
https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
The Brits believe that they first broke the sound barrier and that the movie "Breaking the Sound Barrier" is a true story.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044446/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
There is no doubt that Britain got in over its head fighting Germany back in the day. It is also a fact that the USSR got itself into pretty much the same pickle. But dissing Britain over that glosses over the fact thatThe result was that although Britain got its fat in the fire and needed us to get it out for them, we needed Britain. And FDR did everything he could to keep Britain in the war. And he did the same for the USSR, for the same sort of reason. Germany with Russia’s resources would have been far tougher than Germany already was without them. When Stalin convinced Harry Hopkins (despite the conventional wisdom to the contrary) that the USSR would hold out for at least a year, FDR did what he could to enable it to last a lot longer than that.
- the US did not want war with Germany - even after the German conquest of France - any more than did the Britons who cheered Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” And cheer they did, just as Americans polled 4-1 against entering the fray.But . . .
- FDR (or any other responsible leader) could not view the possibility of a NAZI Britain (with its Royal Navy) with equanimity. Can you say, "existential threat?”
Think how tough it was to invade Europe as it was. Without the beating the Wehrmacht was taking on “der Ostfront,” invasion of Europe would have been “too hard” by far. The A-bomb would have turned the tide, but that would have been after an intolerable additional several months of V-2 bombardment of London. And until it worked, the A-bomb still seemed speculative. As was America’s ability to develop it before the renowned science of Germany.
At the end, America had the most chips - but because of FDR’s socialism, that did not translate into the Pax Americana which it might have. Given Coolidge economics, the US economy would have been substantially bigger in 1938 than in fact it was. And economic power was America’s edge in WWII; alone we produced more materiel than all the Axis powers combined, in just about every category (except submarines - but even there, America made much bigger, longer range subs). Make allowance for the superiority of German tanks - and of the (relatively few flight hours delivered by the) Me-262 - but still, it isn’t close. And with strong economics going in - and without the time required to teach New Dealers what strong economics actually consist of - the disparity would have been even greater.