Firstly, yes DDay was difficult - we were trying to place a lot of boots on the ground, in a fairly short time period, in a restricted area of land, a set of several beaches. It was made very difficult because of the German presence specifically guarding that coastline. The landing area from Cherbourg to le Havre is roughly 200 km.
Secondly, an amphibious attack on the US has 59533 km of shoreline to pick and choose landing zones from. [Note, some of that is actually the shoreline of the Great Lakes, but to be perfectly blunt I don’t think shorting the total by at wild guess 10000 km is going to make a rats ass of difference.] There is enough random cargotainer traffic, fishing trawler traffic and random passenger liner traffic on the seas that you could get a fleet within a fairly close distance of the US as Q-ships, military vessels disguised as other purpose ships. Once you had boots on the ground in a decent port city, you can keep landing troops and supplies. Our coasts are pitifully lacking in military buildup, we barely have any of the old gun emplacements left. We would have to depend on satellites and otehr forms of surveillance. The weakness of satellite surveillance is they look where we aim them, There are great swatches of unobserved water on the earth. Heck, for all I know there are ways to make entire cargotainer sized troop ships invisible to random flyovers by satellite by conceiling the heat signatures and coloring them to blend into the water.
Oakie, look, Shodan has the SDMB Conservasnark franchise, and he’s good at it. Stop horning in on his territory with remarks intended to be witticisms and actually only half what you intend.
Ah, what you wrote wasn’t clear. I was assuming that you said that our armed forces stopped him in Germany and that without us he would have spread to the US.
Of course if Hitler’s army came over and landed in New York they would have been rebuffed by American soldiers. I could see a case for thanking those hypothetical soldiers for not speaking German.
But they don’t exist and we, unfortunately live in the real world.
Okay, I’ll bite. You do remember those Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents?
I suppose it would have been, according to you, totally impluasible for the Nazis to develop their own atomic arsenal?
This is all speculation you understand. On your part as well as mine. But not pure fantasy.
Still speaking English in the real world. Thanks to non-hypothetical armed forces who stopped the Germans, Japanese and Italians before they could take over that real world.
Not sure how old you are. I’m in my fifties so I had no first hand experience in WWII. But my father did and so it’s not that distant a war to me to still appreciate
how things are. And how they might be different.
…but the premise of the OP is that we have a military rah rah rah.
It’s pretty banal, but that’s what it is. Maybe it’s awkward because it’s so outlandish to imagine a completely de-militarized America — but if someone says “without soldiers, Germany could have dominated us to the point of changing our language (if they were so inclined),” any reply along the lines of “no, we could have fought off Germany/Russia/Iceland” is outside the scope of the hypothetical.
I’m younger still, so I don’t remember WWII directly. But Hitler never had a realistic shot at taking over the US. Even if we never got involved in WWII, there is a reasonable shot that the Russians would have gotten him (So I’ve heard, anyone care to fight my ignorance?).
But as I say, even if Hitler had pushed us back, rebuffed the Russians and solidified his hold on much of Europe. He couldn’t land an invasion force worth a poop.
There is no possible hypothetical where the US won’t have any army at all. So on some level, yes, they stand between Canada and Mexico from rushing us and picking over our bones. But I’m saying in the real wars that have existed since our founding I’m not seeing a realistic scenario where we are both taken over, and not speaking English.
I thought I did a decent job of explaining it in my original post. Conducting amphibious, sustained, large scale invasions is extremely difficult. China couldn’t even invade Taiwan if they wanted to, and that’s trivial compared with them or the USSR crossing the Atlantic or Pacific to conquer a nation with a population and industrial base similar or greater than theirs.
I just… how the hell do people think this is practical? I don’t even know where to start explaining it. It takes a ridiculous amount of support and logistics to conduct an oversea invasion. No country in the world has a sealift capability that even remotely approaches what it would take to conduct any significant invasion of the US. You could triple the size of the chinese army and airforce and increase their navy by ten fold and the idea that they could conduct a hostile invasion of the US even if the airforce and navy sat this one out would be silly. And they would even be invading California, where everyone’s a pussy!
The world isn’t a game of Risk where you can wait 2 turns and move your armies from great britain to island over to the US. The logistical requirements of a modern cross-continent amphibious invasion are staggering.
I was hesistant to use two centuries because even though it was a round number, it may stretch the edge of implausibility to include the early 1800s. Maybe if the British commited to total war, and no one helped us, and we mismanaged it, and we were willing to surrender relatively easy, just maybe.
But in 1863? No way, that’d just be silly. The full force of the country was used for creating weapons. Millions of men were trained for war, many of them hardened combat veterans. The US was as strong a military power as it had ever been in 1863, despite the losses incurred in the civil war, and there’s no way any power would’ve had a chance at invasion.
What the hell are you talking about? I assume you’re talking about me. It kind of cracks me up how I can be labelled ultra-conservative one week and then one of the liberal masses the next week, as a result of a weak world view where there are only two sides and you must absolutely be clearly on one of them.
I didn’t bash veterans in any way. I bashed idiots who wrote this jingoistic nonsense. If a veteran wrote it, then he’s sort of an egotistical asshole.
Veterans should be thanked for what they do - even when they’re asked to do the wrong thing, they’re not the ones setting the policy. But the idea that it’s them that’s protecting us from some ridiculous hypothetical cross-world gigantic military invasion beyond anything the world has ever seen is silly.
If I said that veterans were the only reason an invasion force of aliens made up of super intelligent polar bears haven’t taken us over, and I said that there was no such threat, you could say OMG LIBERAL! BASHING THE VETERANS! and it would make only slightly less sense.
Who did that?
Yes. The Nazis did not aim to “take over the world”, nor could they have. They couldn’t invade England - not even close. The idea of them someday invading North America is comical. And even if they did, they might institute policies that makes it beneficial for people in a country to speak their language, but they wouldn’t stamp out the native languages of the places they conquered. They didn’t do it with the places they actually conquered.
Actually, we honor Vets on Veterans Day. Memorial Day is for decorating the graves of the war dead–or honoring them in more abstract ways.
I remember how chilly it was in the basement of my New England grandma’s house when we went down to get baskets for the flowers. (Texas is already hot, this time of year & few Houston houses have basements.) But I don’t remember much about my father’s gravesite; I was 5 years old. If I could bring back memory, I’d prefer to actually remember* him*–who had died the previous year. He’d survived being shot down by the Luftwaffe & evaded capture–only to die in a SAC bomber crash during the Cold War.
I’ve got the flag my daddy wore to his wake. And I hate, hate, hate cheap, meretricious jingoists who drape everything in red, white & blue–& make idiotic statements like the one in the OP. This source gives 4,718 as the current total of Iraq Coalition Military Fatalities to date. (I’m not feeling picky enough to exclude the non-Americans.) And 1,790 in Afghanistan. We had more reason to be there; how many died because Bush & his war criminal cronies decided to divert our national energies to the utterly obscene Iraqi mess?
I also had several relatives who served but lived long enough to die naturally. (Well, the hard drinking & smoking started in the service–but most of them would have been dead by now, anyway.) Yes, spare some thought for the vets. And we keep making more–many with grievous injuries.
Why are they staggering? Could it have anything to do with the fact that you have to plan on fighting the native military? If you don’t have to fight such a military, then not so staggering.