Britain was never realistically going to be in a position to beat Germany, Italy and Japan combined, with France knocked out of the war, a worser-than-worst-case scenario that had not been planned for in 1939. The Far East was always going to be on the hind teat for weapons and aircraft while the Middle East remained the crucible of war.
Well, there was Singapore, which had been compared to Gibraltar. Bataan held out for three months before it was surrendered (and Corregidor held out for another month after that). Singapore held out for one week. And the Singapore garrison surrendered to a Japanese that was less than half its size.
Overall, the British fought hard in World War II and deserve full credit for holding out against the odds and fighting their way to victory. But the Malaya and Singapore campaign was an ignominious disaster.
aldiboronti writes:
> German Americans however were vastly outnumbered by Americans of English
> ancestry, most of whom would call themselves simply Americans rather than
> English-Americans. In the 1940 census the top five surnames in the country
> were Smith, Johnson, Brown, Williams and Jones.
No, there clearly more Americans of German ancestry than of Irish ancestry, and there are almost certainly more of Irish ancestry than of English ancestry. Look at the table in this article:
Even if you throw in some of the people who answered “American” or “white” (and some of those are actually German or Irish in ancestry) and even if you throw in Scottish and Welsh ancestry, German ancestry is almost certainly more common in the U.S. than British ancestry. Take a look at the map in that article. If you ignore Hawaii (where the largest ancestry is Japanese), four states in the southwest (where the largest ancestry is Mexican), the deep south (where the largest ancestry is African), the border south (where many people didn’t like the question and answered “American”), and parts of the northeast where Irish and Italian ancestry are largest, nearly all the remaining states are of plurality German ancestry. Only Utah, Maine, and Vermont are of plurality English ancestry.
Incidentally, the vast majority of people in the U.S. with the name Brown are descended from Germans with the name Braun and the vast majority of those with the name Miller are descended from Germans with the name Muller.
Per Wiki people who now self-identify as being of English ancestry comprise 8.7% of the US population, far behind the 15.2% who self-identify as being of German ancestry, and behind the 10.8% identifying as Irish. I do not think post-1940 immigration has included enough western Europeans to alter the proportions since. Also consider that Brown and Smith are among the 100 most common Irish last names, and that Brown, Smith and Jones are the 1-2-58th most common Scottish last names.
Oh, and Americans with the last name of Smith are often descended from Germans with the last name of Schmidt (or variations thereof). Many semi-common last names in the U.S. are frequently German or respelled German names - Stock, King, Stone, Winter, Summer, Thomas, Arnold, etc. And many Americans with English last names are descended from people from many other countries who just picked an arbitrary name when reaching the U.S. You can’t use a list of common last names to say anything about American ancestries.
Not worth mentioning, as no US Nazi sympathizers slowed down the US war effort in the slightest.
And see this link, one of the cites in the Wiki bibliography:
NB the 22,000 who showed up at that 1939 Madison Square Garden Pro-Nazi rally were not all pro-Nazi- there were anti-Nazis there who got into fights with the pro-Nazi attendees. Also consider that even if all 22k had been Nazi there it would be an unimpressive number compared to the ~20 million German Americans, ~three times the population of Austria. A real pro-Nazi mass movement could have rented out Yankee Stadium. Finally, even the 1939 pre-war sympathizers may have been antagonized by Germany’s serial treachery of repeatedly invading neutral countries.
Interestingly, it was Thomas Dewey who prosecuted Kuhn after the Madison Square Garden rally.
One British historian made a rather unkind note that if the British, Australian and Indian troops who fought in those campaigns would have known what was in store after their surrender, they would have fought harder.
We suffered losses, in blood and money, and there was nothing in it for us, nothing at all. We didn’t get any territory out of it, and didn’t want any. As for Wilson’s desires to set ethnic-based national boundaries in central Europe, most Americans did not see this as a worthwhile project, worrying rather that it would end up meaning that American troops would have to stay over there to police the mess. A widespread viewpoint was that the British and the arms merchants had suckered us into that war. Remember that the policy “if you stay on your side of the water, we’ll stay on ours” had been firm ever since the Monroe administration.