For one thing, there was no such thing as “international law” back then, and there pretty much still is none now. There’s only ad hoc convenience and might makes right where nations are concerned.
For another, what the hell does it matter ? Under US law it’s perfectly legal for e.g. the NSA to spy on all of my shit ; but that doesn’t mean I have to smile, nod, sit and take it, does it ?
An yet they did en masse. Weird, that.
I’m not sure why you’re so hung up on this, but yes such incidents did take place and no, nobody gave a shit - at that point the US was already unofficially in bed with the Allies anyway. Besides, it’s not like British, Norwegian, Polish etc… captains flying the “wrong” flag for safety cabled the US consulate to warn them first. It was war, and there were U-boote out there. You did what you hadda do to survive this shit.
I’m a historian. I don’t take sides, I dispassionately tell it how it was. But for the record, “they are/were very bad persons !” has never been a valid response to “it’s kinda wrong what you do/did to them”.
As for ravenous, look up the history of Asia in the twenties and thirties, then tell me how totally out of the blue, unconscionable and unprecedented Germany’s actions were (besides the Holocaust. That was sorta kinda on the side of slightly reprehensible, admittedly :o).
Absolutely.
But I don’t know that it gives y’alls any kind of moral high ground. Propaganda-wise it was (well, still is) the international wartime equivalent of going “I’m not touching you ! I’m not touching youuuu !”, then crying foul when the exasperated recipients of such shenanigans punch you in the face :p.
And to some extent the same is true of Pearl Harbour (ill-advised and horrible as it might have been). It’s the same principle : either you’re in or you’re out.
Defending American freedom doesn’t usually require bombs, and bombs don’t usually defend American freedom. Being a Super Power has its advantages so in the modern era the Americans struggling to protect American rights are combatting other Americans.
Whatever banner our forces deploy under we receive all kinds of trade benefits from our arms. I know it doesn’t make for a good recruitment poster, but does that count for something?
This is patently false. Public international law falls into three broad categories: treaty law, customary international law, and jus cogens.
Modern international law really began with the peace of Westphalia treaties in 1648 which solidified the idea of the sovereign state. WWII brought about the full force of jus cogens in International law, but it had been discussed prior, and somewhat prominently in the Wimbledon case of 1923.
But the idea that their was no international law prior is just crazy - half of the founding fathers were admiralty lawyers before becoming revolutionaries. The father of American law, Holmes, was one, too.
Even the 7th amendment stems in part from the founding fathers’ history in admiralty law (which was and remains one of the most important parts of international law). Read this part of a correspondence from Jefferson to Madison:
That last bit would be the 7th amendment discussed in light of the law of Nations as the direct result of their experience in admiralty law, where there is no right to a jury trial.
Kobal2’ s contributions are nothing but a tissue of historical falsification which I will not continue to reply to.
Falsification. Addressed by Darth Panda in reply #44.
Red Herring. We were discussing 1939-1941 US law as applied to supplying belligerents.
Falsification. Google “1930s Neutrality Acts” for cites.
I get hung up with all due haste when I encounter such grotesque historical falsification.
I know more history than you do, I know that historians are permitted to pass moral judgment which is supported by fact, and I know that the Axis nations’ record of invasive armed aggression followed by mass atrocity renders them guilty as charged of ravenous barbarism.
The only major war in Asia in the twenties and thirties were proceeded totally out of the blue in 1931 from Japan’s ravenous, barbaric war on China.
The Moral High Ground is unambiguously ours for our aid, under any guise, to the victims of ravenous, barbaric Axis aggression.
We had been crying foul from the time the first shots were fired by the Axis. Sadly we lacked the national will to do much more than the minimum to aid the victims until we became victims ourselves.
And by this reasoning, then attacking Iraq was the correct answer because it could have had weapons of mass destruction, right?
This conclusion is deeply flawed as it relies on one of two arguments. Either this, that not knowing what the opponent is capable of allows for a claim of defense with no logical reasoning or that your impossible hypotheticals somehow add validity to a real life situation. Neither one is a basis for a logical conclusion.
Mind you, fighting the Axis was the moral and right thing to do. We prevented even worse atrocities than what had occurred. However, it was not to protect our homelands, as the Axis could not have conquered the US.
As I’ve stated several times, the objection to the alt-his is not that they are alt-his, but that they are absurd. Alt-his can be good fun and entertaining, but one cannot confuse them with reality.
It’s disingenuous to claim that my objections were simply a counter historical scenario where Hitler kept one promise. It was the an entire string of impossible or wildly improbable events were created and then utilized to attempt to prove an argument from real life. No. You don’t get to do that.
You state that the reasons are immaterial, but nothing could be further from the truth. This brings us back to Bush and the Iraq war. Hussein didn’t have WMD, so claims of defense do not fly.
Likewise, Nazi Germany did not have the ability to project power onto the American continents. They were a continental power, not a marine going nation. In order to make your case you needed to make up a series of impossible events, including, apparently, going back and erasing the Two-Ocean Act, which I linked to previously, as that built up Navy could easily handle the Axis.
Your scenarios are preposterous to anyone who has spent more than an hour on Wiki studying specifics. Look at lebensraum, for example, and read the second paragraph:
Hitler spelled this out back in 1928 in Mein Kampf in which his openly declares his hatred of Jews and Slavs. He had openly denounced Communists as Germany’s greatest enemies. Another quote.
From Andrew Roberts’ Storm of War, p. 144,
Yet, in order to create some sort of danger to the US, you would have Hitler stop being Hitler and the Nazis stop being Nazis.
In 1941, Germany and the USSR were rivals with a short term marriage of convenience which both knew wouldn’t last. They both had roughly the same industrial output capacity for war, and massive armed forces. The Red Army had 5.5 million active duty soldiers and another 14 million in reserve, and 22,000 tanks. They were rapidly modernizing
You have the Nazis and Hitler who are committed to destroying Russia and annihilating her people. After splitting Poland, they uneasily sit right next to each other waiting for the right moment. They have the rail lines and roads for the logistics necessary to supply these colossal giants in battle.
You want us to believe that Germany would ignore this, have them count on a piece of paper to protect themselves from ignominious defeat, go back on their core reasons for existence and do all this to fight a country which they didn’t care about?
The US had a little less than three times the military capacity that of either one and is actively rearming on a scale never seen before in peacetime. It already had one of the greatest navies and was actively building one which no other country could match, especially Germany with her second rate force. They had a large number of U-boats, but u-boats don’t support an army across the ocean.
You want to create an artificial scenario in which the Nazis, without a real navy, invade and conquer all of South and Central America, Mexico and Canada, and all this time, the US would not use the greatest navy in the history of the world to sink the supply ships.
In order to debate the proposition that fighting WWII was necessary to preserve American freedom, it’s useful to consider the consequences of alternative scenarios. It’s not useful to claim omniscience and declare that anything outside your worldview is impossible. You seem to be well versed in WWII history. I suggest you spend some time reading about logical fallacies.
I’m talking de facto, not de jure. In practice, only defeated nations and their leaders ever get tried for breaches of treaties, war crimes or various atrocities. A law that is not universally applied is no law at all.
[QUOTE=Nelson Pike]
Red Herring. We were discussing 1939-1941 US law as applied to supplying belligerents.
[/QUOTE]
Handwave. The principle is the point. Actions being legal under nation A’s laws have fuck all to do with how nation B is expected or “allowed” to react to them.
I’m aware of them.
First of all, the existence of these acts does not mean they were followed by private actors and smugglers - and Lord knows the US has a great and honourable tradition of smuggling stuff in and out of Great Britain :p.
Second of all, they were only officially enforced on a case-by-case basis (e.g. support for China was hardly ever interrupted, on paper because Japan hadn’t formally declared war on it, in reality because the US government had already taken sides in that conflict). The loosening of the acts and the cash-and-carry policy were another on-paper neutral, in practice not decision since it benefited whichever belligerent had a large navy able to cross the Atlantic - coincidentally to be sure, that happened to be Britain and France. So were the so-called “neutrality patrols” in the pan-American security zone which reported spottings of U-boats to anyone it may concern.
US neutrality was always a bit of a sham, owing in large part to Roosevelt and Hull. It’s not a *bad *thing that it was.
Cite ?
“Permitted” ? By whom ?
Of course self-described historians are allowed to say whatever they want. It’s just bad deontology or methodology to pass judgement. The reader is free to draw conclusions, the reporter of facts should remain as neutral as possible. Once you start taking sides, you’re not writing history any more - you’re writing an op-ed, or propaganda.
And in that they were acting well within the zeitgeist of their time. Which is my point - not that they weren’t aggressive racist asshats, but that they were hardly unique or exceptional for their era in that regards. See : colonialism, the break up of China, Soviet Russia, the scramble for Africa…
War’s not the only “ravenous” item on the menu, Bob.
There are thousands if not millions of examples of where you are wrong, here’s one:
I must have missed the part where the US was defeated by the Menominee Tribe.
In the Wimbledon case, Germany claimed since it was a neutral power, it couldn’t allow passage bringing arms into Poland during the Russo-Polish War. Germany was sued by the British, French, Italians, and Japanese. The court found that:
Since Germany wasn’t even a party to the war, it’s hard to imagine that it had been defeated.
It should also be noted that US contractors in Iraq were recently found guilty of manslaughter for the [Nisour Square massacre - Wikipedia](Nisour Square massacre )
There are plenty of times when governments prevent proper enforcement of international law, such as in the Nicaragua vs US case, but it isn’t universally true and the bigger point that you miss is that the vast majority of treaties don’t have anything to do with war or atrocities, so your sweeping generalization is completely wrong.
Most treaties are entirely pedestrian, executed in the most boring way possible, and are absolutely the law of the land.
I’m not sure how quoting this particular finding helps your case, honestly. “You don’t get to *actually *be neutral, bitch ! We’re having a war over here ! That canal of yours ? International now ! You didn’t build that (:o)” isn’t exactly great PR for the even-handed majesty of Blind Justice.
Oh, good ! Five guys were thrown in jail over one incident in a war of aggression fought over bullshit, deliberately mendacious pretences that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands ! Good for their victims… I guess… And, it should be noted for fairness, eleven other flunkies were charged over Abu Ghraib, including 2 (TWO) who did more than six months’ time.
However, one must also look at the plausibility of the alternative scenarios to determine if they provide support for the argument or not.
If you wish to throw out a debate on plausibility of the scenarios, then you must accept all counterarguments, including my aliens. It’s simply not fair for one side to have wildly implausible or impossible arguments and refuse to allow the other side the same options. Thus plausibility become a key factor of the discussion.
Likewise, the argument concerning the plausibility of the alt-hist scenarios must be made if one is to incorporate the potential outcomes in the “real life” argument. It is meaningless to point to possible consequences of impossible wildly improbable scenarios to support your claim that the war was necessary to preserve American freedom, especially as each highly improbable scenario is based on impossible odds from another improbable scenario based on the impossible odds from another improbable scenario, and turtles all the way down.
We can have a debate of the consequences of any of your alt-hist ideas, but as they are counter-factual, then they cannot support your conclusion about the historical war. For example, you argue that if the isolationist movement were stronger and lasted longer, that may have lead to Germany invading the Americas and then threatening the US. Leaving aside the enormous number of other fatal problems with it, this argument would have no relevance to the historical war.
The isolation movement completely failed to stop the Two Ocean Navy Act, and the resultant navy would have demolished the Kreigsmarine, preventing Germany from invading the US. In order to make the US weak enough to be vulnerable to German attack, not only does the Two Ocean Navy Act have to be undone, but the Navy itself would have to be pretty much disbanded. It would require not only a stronger isolationist movement but a Ghandi-like pacification movement as well.
You are most welcome to challenge my assertions. However, I suspect that you are unwilling to do this as it would require a basic knowledge of history. For those who are interested, a search here on the SDMB will show a large number of previous debates which cover topics such as the impossibility of Germany crossing the channel. I don’t recall a debate concerning an attempt of Germany to directly attack the US, because while we will debate such alt-hist as sending modern aircraft carriers back in time, there are some topics which are too fantastic.
If your argument here is that the strength of the US Navy would have overwhelmed any attempt by the Germans to invade the US during the war, you are conceding my point; US involvement in WWII was necessary to defend our freedom.
If your argument here is that the strength of the US Navy would have been such a deterrent that the US did not need to enter the war, then you have provided a plausible scenario, the outcome of which we can debate. I posit the following:
The US refrains from entering WWII and does not develop atomic weapons. (The Manhattan Project was driven by the war; no war, no bomb. Britain and Canada were unlikely to have succeeded without US support.)
Germany remains a military power long enough to develop atomic weapons. (Germany was researching atomic and other super weapons. German scientists were capable of producing these weapons. Germany had access to the materials needed to produce these weapons.)
Germany, after defeating or neutralizing Europe, sends U-boats to the eastern US coast, armed with nuclear torpedoes. (German U-boats did approach the US coast during the war, so it is reasonable to assume that they could have successfully delivered a nuclear warhead to at least one coastal city. An invasion would not have been necessary to threaten our freedom. Is there any rationale for believing that Hitler would have been satisfied with ruling only half the world when he was the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal?)
OK. So you are asserting that the strength of the US Navy would have been such a deterrent that the US did not need to enter the war. Then please address the scenario from my previous post that you ignored. (Repeated below for your convenience.) And remember, my point is to answer the OP; US involvement in WWII was necessary to defend our freedom. I submit that had the US stayed out of the war, the following results could have been reasonably expected.
The US refrains from entering WWII and does not develop atomic weapons. (The Manhattan Project was driven by the war; no war, no bomb. Britain and Canada were unlikely to have succeeded in time without US support.)
Germany remains a military power long enough to develop atomic weapons. (Germany was researching atomic and other super weapons. German scientists were capable of producing these weapons. Germany had access to the materials needed to produce these weapons.)
Germany, after defeating or neutralizing Europe, sends U-boats to the eastern US coast, armed with nuclear torpedoes. (German U-boats did approach the US coast during the war, so it is reasonable to assume that they could have successfully delivered a nuclear warhead to at least one coastal city. An invasion would not have been necessary to threaten our freedom. Is there any rationale for believing that Hitler would have been satisfied with ruling only half the world when he was the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal?)
[QUOTE=JimSC]
OK. So you are asserting that the strength of the US Navy would have been such a deterrent that the US did not need to enter the war. Then please address the scenario from my previous post that you ignored. (Repeated below for your convenience.) And remember, my point is to answer the OP; US involvement in WWII was necessary to defend our freedom. I submit that had the US stayed out of the war, the following results could have been reasonably expected.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with your overall premise that WWII was a war fought in the furtherance of US strategic needs and goals, which to me means it was ‘fought to protect our freedom’.
Why would we have refrained from developing the atomic bomb? We knew the Germans were trying to do it after all, so the same argument that was used to actually get us to build it would still have caused us to attempt to develop one ourselves. We might have been neutral but we weren’t completely stupid. Even when we were saying we’d stay out of the war we were still ramping up our Navy as well as our other armed forces.
They weren’t, though. Hitler had back burnered the effort when he was told that it would take too long and cost too much. I don’t see that being a reasonable change, especially since regardless of whether the US came in or not the Soviets were becoming an increasing threat. And the Brits were still out there too, unconquered.
So, Germany not only develops a nuclear bomb but develops sub launched missiles capable of delivering it as well?? Or is this a suicide sub that drives it up and detonates?
The thing is, all of this is unlikely…and unnecessary to demonstrate that our freedom was threatened. Our freedom was basically threatened by Germany when they sank the first US flagged merchant ship, since we were at that point not free to trade as we liked (plus there was the whole dead sailors thingy that is kind of against freedom). Our freedom in the form of our strategic need for trade was threatened, resources were threatened, our overseas interests were threatened, etc etc. You don’t need elaborate and unlikely alternative universe scenarios to demonstrate this except to folks who don’t believe that ‘freedom’ equates to more than just being able to wave a flag on the 4th of July or be an ass on a message board. The US’s overseas interests, then as now directly correlate to our ‘freedom’, since by stifling trade or denying us access to necessary resources it tangibly hurts us all.
Agreed. I stated in an earlier post that it was morally right and only disagreed with the assertion that it was necessary to to protect the mainland.
This is the correct answer. The only change I would offer would be to add a qualifier of “impossible” instead of “unlikely” or “almost impossible.”
I do agree completely that the debate was framed wrong. We didn’t need to be literally threatened by the Third Reich in order for the US to be fighting for our freedom.
I guess it was the last time the interests of the population trumped the interests of capitalism, after WW2 the US military fought for a very different cause.
You’re not debating in good faith. You’ve simply repeated the same tired arguments, but embedded them within your scenarios, rather than having them laid out serially as before.
A good alt-hist argument actually requires some knowledge of history, otherwise it’s meaningless.
Besides not being aware of Hitler’s decision to stop the atomic bomb research (not to mention the insufficient resources to actually develop and build one), here are just a few fatal flaws.
It was Germany which declared war on the US first, and not the reverse. You’re scenario doesn’t account for that.
The greatest danger to Britain had already passed before Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the USSR). There was never a danger of an actual invasion to Britain. For other readers who are actually interested in history, here is an excellent essay which makes that case.
The scenarios fail to take into account the animosity between Nazi Germany and the USSR, nor the reasons while a permanent peace treaty would be impossible. Ignoring my previous post, with cites, doesn’t work. The case is still there, and without addressing it, nothing you say will convince anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Eastern Front.
The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union saw a greatest clash of armies ever in the world. It’s a pity the Eastern Front gets shortchanged in history as told in America. There were somewhere between 27 to 40 million Soviets killed or who died of famine and disease during the war, including both military and civilians. The scale was unbelievable.
A grasp of logistics is an absolute necessity when debating WWII. Unlike playing Risk where one wins with the roll of the dice, supplies were necessary and more critically, it was necessary to move them. This is why Germany was able to roll over France, wasn’t able to reach Moscow, and would never have been able to invade Britain, let alone the US.
It doesn’t appear that there is any interest in attempting to make an actual argument, but rather to doggedly stick to a fatally flawed premise. I have no desire to continue playing whack-a-mole, so unless someone with more experience jumps in and makes it interesting, I’ll bow out.
I’m sure you will declare yourself the winner, but I trust the readers can judge for themselves.
He/she did say it would be launched by torpedoes, which would be the least effective method I can think of. Little Boy, the lighter of the two atomic bombs used against Japan weighed 4,400 kg. The German G7a torpedo had a explosive charge of 280 kg of Hexanite. So they would just have to build a huge torpedo.
This would seriously blow the hell out of the fish in New York Harbor. It would be interesting to ask the physicists here how much (or little) damage would be done.
