Both Germany and Japan overestimated how much power Roosevelt had. They were dictatorships and they assumed the top guy could pretty much do what he wanted. So they discounted Congressional opposition to war.
I think Japan could have bypassed the Philippines and other American possessions and just attacked the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia. These were where the oilfields they wanted were located. The Philippines were just important because they lay across the route between the oilfields and Japan.
The United States didn’t declare war when France or the Netherlands were overrun nor when Japan occupied French Indochina. Nor did the United States declare war when Britain, China, or the Soviet Union were attacked. It seems likely to me that the only thing that would have caused Congress to declare war would have been an attack on an American possession.
So let’s say Japan attacks southeast Asia but avoids any American possessions. And let’s say the United States protests greatly and imposes economic sanctions - but stops short of war. The British and Free Dutch wouldn’t have been able to defend their east Asian colonies and Japan would have secured the resources it needed to defy American economic sanctions.
Hitler might have joined Japan in a war against the United States in 1941 but he wasn’t going to start one of his own. So Germany would have just continued its war against the British Commonwealth and Soviet Union. The United States would have continued its program of economic aid to these powers. And the United States would have continued its atomic bomb program (which pre-dated Pearl Harbor) and were based on fears of an equivalent German program.
I think the Soviet Union would have beaten Germany eventually even if America stayed out of the war. Britain would have been on the winning side but it wouldn’t have been able to counter-balance the Soviets with the Americans. So continental Europe would have ended up under Soviet control just as Eastern Europe historically did.
Japan would have eventually subdued China for the most part. The United States looking for allies to balance the Soviets would have had to accept a Japanese Empire as a fait accompli. The Americans would have an atomic bomb but it would remain a theoretical threat that had never been used in actual warfare. The British would have gradually lost their empire as they historically did. You might have seen proxy wars in Africa and southern Asia with Soviet-backed rebels fighting American-backed British regimes and American-backed rebels fighting Soviet-backed French and Dutch regimes.
I can envision a world in which America never fought Japan, but I can’t envision one in which America never fought an aggressive Nazi Germany. Really, the only reason it took us so long to get involved is that we kind of liked the idea of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union beating the tar out of each other. What happens to the Cold War if we step in right away and don’t let Russian infrastructure go to hell in the German onslaught might be the better alternate history question…
I think there was a clear understanding in the US by '41, that this wasn’t a second great war. It wasn’t a bunch of Europeans having a squabble with no direct consequence for Americans. Polls were clearly moving in a pro-war direction and had been since the war had started. Americans were increasingly of the opinion that the wars were becoming an existential crisis, that the US was going to end up at war sooner or later, and most likely sooner. The US may have not declared war in December in response to a Japanese on the Dutch. But it was going to be yet another provocation, and the US was almost certainly going to eventually be at war with an expansionist Japan. It’s not that the Dutch East Indies were more important than China. It’s that the DEI, plus China, plus French Indochina, plus Thailand, plus Burma, etc. was more important than just China.
Here is some poll data (all Gallup)
1938-Sep-23 - 73% favor keeping mandatory arms embargo
1939-Jun-29 - 51% favor keeping mandatory arms embargo
1939-Sep-22 - 62% favor repealing mandatory arms embargo
…by 1941-Sep-4 - 62% approved limited naval warfare with Germany
by 1941-Nov-19 - 72% considered “defeating the Axis” as “the biggest job facing the nation”
At the same time the US was gearing up to war. The draft had been instituted the army had already gone from less than 200 thousand men to 1.6 million, and was still rapidly expanding. The navy had also grown but not as much. But the Navy generally had a long lead time. In '39 the US had 5 aircraft carriers and 1 under construction. By Pearl we had 8 and 11 under construction.
I think the US was clearly gearing up both mentally and materially to fight (primarily the Germans). But if the Japanese hadn’t attacked the US. The US would have eventually attacked the Japanese. And with Wake, Guam, the Philippines, and a massive advantage in men and ships. It wouldn’t have been any better for them than the actual time line was.
I’m not sure I get your confusion as you seem to have read all of my posts in this thread. The only thing I can think of is perhaps you are unaware that Borneo was part of the DEI. The US Navy was located in the Dutch East Indies, thus attacking the DEI meant attacking the US Navy. Tarakan and Balikpapan were both major ports for shipping oil from some of the largest sources of oil in the DEI and both were invaded by the Japanese.
I doubt it very seriously. There was too much isolationism in the United States. I cannot see the United States going to war to defend Indonesia, or even China without a Japanese strike against the United States.
There are too many if’s here. I do not think the Soviet Union would have survived without American entry into the war. Hitler never wanted to fight Great Britain. If Germany had conquered the Soviet Union to the Ural Mountains I think is is likely that Winston Churchill would have been replaced by a British leader who would have signed a peace treaty with Hitler. Great Britain would have remained free. The British Empire would have remained intact. Germany would have ruled the continent of Europe.
According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Japan would have surrendered without the use of the atomic bomb. During the Second World War the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million dead and one third of its industrial and farm plant, so it was in a poor position to threaten Western Europe, much less the Untied States.
They survived Barbarossa on their own, after which Germany was on the losing end of a war of attrition. There is no reason to believe that Germany would have defeated the USSR had the US remained neutral. The German army and their allies had been so badly savaged by Barbarossa and the winter fighting that the 1942 summer offensive was only conducted on the southern third of the front.
Nonsense. He made it perfectly clear that he wanted to fight Great Britain by invading Poland on September 1, 1939 after the UK had guaranteed it’s independence.
They also ended the war with the largest army in history, with most of it in Central Europe.
See Bartman’s post concerning the actual degree of isolationist sentiment in the US. See my other posts and note that the US Navy was deployed to the Dutch East Indies, so a move against them would mean attacking the US. Perhaps you should stick to threads explaining why you think blacks are genetically inferior.
There were American forces stationed in China when Japan attacked that country. American troops and ships even came under fire. But the United States didn’t regard that as a cause for war. Nor did the United States regard it as a cause for war when American ships were attacked by the Germans in the Atlantic.
I’m going to stick with what I said earlier - Congress wasn’t going to declare war in 1941 for any reason less than an attack on American territory. And the reason I say this is because that’s what happened in history.
He merely suggested NDD stick to racist rants about how blacks are inferior to whites.
Considering the fact that around 90% of NDD’s posts are on this subject and that NDD regularly espouses views that would cause most people to label him a racist, what’s wrong with the comment?
We’ve been down this road before Little Nemo. This should be familiar, links to cites used are in the original post.
The sinking of the Panay was in no way remotely comparable to what we are talking about in the DEI in 1941, and the US was already at war with Germany in the Atlantic. By the by, I should note the significance of the US destroyers at Balikpapan being on the way to join Force Z. Force Z was the two British capital ships in the Far East, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, which were sent into the South China Sea to intercept reported Japanese invasion convoys that had been spotted prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Had they been there they would have come under attack by the Japanese twin-engined bombers that sank Force Z.
So many variables it’s impossible to gauge and taking any one, say the Ploiesti oil fields, out of the equation changes literally everything.
As it was, something over 80% of German deaths and casualties occurred on the Eastern Front. Even now, the scale of events on the Eastern Front seems unimaginable.
It’s also worth bearing in mind Germany was effectively surrounded by the Soviet Union and British Empire - it had to supply everything from within its boundaries, and the capture of every oil field, coal mine, steel mill, etc had an exponential effect because its production could not be replaced.
In short, the war lasts longer, Britain develops the nuke, parts of Germany become radioactive. Surrender rapidly follows. Faced with being nuked, Japan negotiates a surrender on advantageous terms. Churchill, who was re-elected due to the war not having been finished, launches a surprise nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, reducing Moscow to radioactive rubble, and the Soviet Union disintegrates into chaos, leading to a return of the Tsar.
