Was Germany a legitimate threat to the U.S.?

Great Debates
1

People, this is the gist of a recent exchange between myself and Sake Samurai in the Pit, the MLK thread started by Rascist Scumbag. Only those bits pertinent to this topic are included:

Sake Samurai: " Claiming that WWII was a threat to American freedom is pure speculation. Sure, Japan attacked Hawaii and Germany had a couple of boats sneak up to our shores and yell “Boo!”, but there was never a serious threat of invasion or economic ruin. We got involved in WWII to further our own interests abroad, counterbalance Russia, and improve our standing and strength in the international community. The freedom of the average American citizen was never in jeopardy."

The Peyote Coyote: "Sake: The following statement is pretty assinine: "Claiming that … etc (I am not going to quote the above again.)If you’ve ever read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a book based upon confiscated Nazi papers, then you know Nazi leaders had talked about invading the United States, possibly around 1943 IIRC.
"Furthermore, assume Japan and Germany had gotten their act together and taken out Russia and the UK. Do you seriousily think Tojo and Hitler would have said: “Oh, what the hell, we rule Asia, Africa and Europe, we can be content with that and ignore the biggest plum of all in North America.” Hell, no, the Axis forces would have come over here. It is elementary psychology – you don’t stop rolling the dice when you’re hot.

"The major reason for a lack of invasion was Hitler’s inability to grasp grand strategy. Had he been the military genius his followers claim, the Germans would have delayed the Poland invasion a couple of years in order to build up a fleet. Had that happened, Britian would have gone down and we would have probably been fighting the Nazis on the Atlantic Seaboard.

"Furthermore, some Japanese leaders, as witnessed by remarks they made during the war, fully intended to invade the U.S. at some point after the conquest of Asia. It is true the strike at Pearl Harbor was not intended as a harbinger of invasion – the Japanese military wanted to ensure the U.S. would not interfere with its conquest of southeastern Asia and Indonesia. However, the war would have gone a lot worse for the U.S. had the Japanese admirals had the sense to listen to their pilots and ordered a second strike at the Pearl Harbor oil depot, maintenance facilities and secondary airfields.

" Read some histories on World War II, and I think you will come to the conclusion we were pretty lucky things worked out the way they did."

Saki Samurai: "Peyote: I don’t agree with you at all. I have read the Rise & Fall and know all about the plans to dominate the US. It was a pipe dream. I feel comfortable saying that there was no possible way that would have happened.

“I can not take seriously your claim that Japan & Germany would have actually taken over the UK & Russia had we not interferred.”

Peyote Coyote (after some exchanges having nothing to do with this issue): "Yamo, I would not have thought it possible, but you just made an assertion at least 10 times more assinine than Sake Samurai’s assertion that Nazi Germany was no threat to the U.S.

“Good God, go back to school and learn some history.”

Sake Samurai: "Peyote, until you produce some evidence proving that Hitler was very capable of invading the United States in the 40s, I suggest refrain from calling my statement “asinine”.

"Projecting a theater of combat some 3,000+ miles is exceedingly difficult, even today. The resources and supply effort needed to sustain an army across an ocean are stunning. The Germans overextended themselves several times with disasterous results. Moving several divisions across the Atlantic and having them land on American soil and carry on a serious campaign was beyond the German’s capabilities. Please show me how it was feasible that they could have launched a successful threat against the American people with all of Europe and Russia at their throat.

"I will conceed the one possible threat if things had occurred just a little bit differently: long-range missles (V-3) and the atomic bomb.

“We really should open a new thread, I don’t think “Rascist Scumbag” cares to discuss intellectual or historical matters unless involves blatant ignorance.”

End of exchange. All right, Dopers, what about it. Was Nazi Germany a legitimate threat to the U.S.? Is The Peyote Coyote having figments of the imagination or has the Samurai over-indulged?

Let’s hear it from you guys.

The Coyote gnaws …
but he does not swallow.

2

Coyote, you are playing a lot of ‘what-if’ games at once here. Germany did invade Poland inappropriately, they did initiate a war against Russia that forced them to fight on two fronts, and Hitler was a megalomanic and an incompetent military commander. Japan did not make a second pass (actually, I think they would have been far wiser not to attack Pearl Harbor at all).

We need to reduce this to a single what-if strategy, and I would suggest this: Japan does not attack Pearl Harbor. Given that Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, war against Japan is inevitable, and our victory is inevitable as well. If you have another single what-if to proprose, we could debate that instead.

3

I’ve always felt that the Nazi machine at no time during the war posed a direct threat of invasion to the United States.

However, I do believe that if Hitler had managed to take Britain and solidify his power base (peace with the Soviets, whatever), we would eventually have been on the target list.

I’m just re-reading Rise and Fall now, so I’ll chime in if I come across any good quotations.

-andros-

4

Cooper, why do we need any "what if"s? Why not just ask the question posed? Did the Nazis pose a direct threat to the US?

-a-

5

Threat? Absolutely. Logistical nightmare? You bet. But last itme I checked there were a few precedents in military history for long term operations on foreign soil in situations where suply lines were vulnerable. If we look hard, we might even find some in the very conflict in question. How far way were those Pacific islands, again?

More to the point, have we all forgotten that Germany and Russia were both working on nuclear weapons programs long before the end of the war? Anybody out there remember that both Russian and American rocket science was advanced tremendously by the knowledge of German engineers after the war?

Finally, how eveil does a despot have to be before a nation can stand against him without being charged decades later with selfish motives? I have been called a cynic more than once, but even I accept that sometimes people, even people who happen to hold political ofice, act from principal rather than greed.

The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*

6

Good god, a voice of reason on the third post! What is this board coming to?

I want to go on record as agreeing wholeheartedly with Andros’s thesis as presented in his first two paragraphs. Not being as masochistic as he, however, I won’t concur with his third, which would require me to get out the Shirer book (and a block-and-tackle set to hold it up).

7

The question, as posed, is a what-if. Also, he includes a number of other what-ifs, sometimes as arguments for his position. Germany and Japan were never threats to us because we went and killed them all first. So, you are posing a what-if by supposing we ignored them longer. See?

8

Perhaps we must rephrase the question:

Was Nazi Germany ever a significant direct threat to the Citizens of the United States of America?

No what-ifs. We must not change history in this evaluation. Germany DID attack Poland, France, the Low Countries, North Africa, shipping routes in the Atlantic, the United Kingdom and Russia. Japan DID attack mainland Asia and the Pacific islands, including Hawaii.

I look at the events of the War before we got involved and consider the caliber of German leadership, strategy, technology and economics and conclude that they posed an insignificant threat to the USA. I don’t think anyone was seriously considering the possiblility that Panzers would roll down Pennsylvania Avenue and the head of Hitler would be placed upon the Lincoln Monument.

Hell is Other People.

9

I suppose it depends upon what you mean by a ‘direct threat’.

If you mean actual Nazi Occupation of continental American soil, that’s an absolutely remote possibility at best. Where would they launch an invasion from? The idea of a cross-Atlantic naval invasion seems absolutely ludicrous. Unless the Nazis managed to A) force a small island government- say, Grenada, or Barbados, etc.- to fall and be replaced by a strongly pro-Nazi government and then B) ferry thousands of troops across the Atlantic to this little island and gather supplies for weeks if not months of campaigning without being intercepted and destroyed the the American Navy or bombed into hamburger by the American Air Force… it just seems ludicrous to think of the Germans being able to mount a military invasion of the U.S.

If you mean actually causing death to Americans and destruction of American property, then that’s something Germany was already doing. German U-boats repeatedly attacked American shipping on the Eastern seaboard. Wasn’t Germany also developing a sub-space bomber? I’ve had friends tell me such, but I can’t really cite that as ‘evidence’…

But I think a Nazi invasion of the U.S. was just a pipe dream. It would involve the destruction or suppression of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force; as well as finding some place to use as a launching point… and I don’t think a Normandy to Norfolk invasion would have worked.

JMCJ

This could be YOUR sig line! For just five cents a post, JMCJ Enterprises will place YOUR sig line at the bottom of each message!

10

I think there may be two arguments going on in this thread: one of pure post-historical analysis, the other (for lack of a better term) the In-Context, What-If Game For Taking Lessons From History.

The first, as personified here by Sake Samurai, allows no what-ifs, depends only on observation, and taken to the extreme could be summed today as: We Won, Therefore As A Historical Fact The Germans Did Not Threaten Our Nation, Though They Did Threaten Our Citizens To The Exact Extent of the War Death Toll. Accurate as far as it goes, but boring and not very informative.

To learn from that history we must put ourselves in that context. And that would mean, if we still try to follow Sake’s exhortation “[not to] change history in this evaluation,” that we must also not presume knowledge on the part of the participants and leaders that they did, in fact, not possess.

True - and our leaders were best-guesstimating what the results of those actions would take, and trying to predict what actions would come next. To analyze the threat they saw, we must play what-if, mustn’t we? They did. They had to.

So - is the question “Were the Germans, looking back across 50 years, actually a threat” or is it “Could the Germans have been a threat at the time, and was it reasonable to act as if they were?” (After all, much of reality is perception…)

I vote for the second as a more interesting debate, and I would expand the threat in question to The Axis Powers.

That Germany could not pose a direct and immediate threat to invade the mainland States is, I think, clear. Does that mean that they were not a threat to “us” at all? Does it further mean that they could not have been a threat? Give them another 10+ years of research and conquest, and maybe South America, and it starts to look different, perhaps.

I’m not so sure. If we assume for the moment that the new-ish book I heard about recently (regarding FDR’s determined efforts to get us into the war) is true, I’d say that he definitely DID think the Axis Powers had to be stopped before it was too late. I don’t think he wanted war for the fun of it. (One of the contentions, backed up supposedly by historical documents, is that US strategy from the fall of 1940 was formulated to cause Japan to attack us. Basically, we asked for it, again supposedly because we (FDR and other leadership) knew we had to get into the war regardless of public opinion.)

So Sake: are you saying that, given exactly what FDR knew in 1940, that he was wrong? When you “consider the caliber of German leadership, strategy, technology and economics [before we got involved]” aren’t you doing so in light of the results, after the fact? Can you honestly say that, as the Germans rolled across France, you would have said “Don’t worry; actually their top brass are idiots and their economy isn’t up to supporting this. Wait five years; you’ll see?” And do you really think, had things gone a little differently, (say, we stayed out of the war indefinitely) that Germany would have failed due to “the caliber of [their] leadership, strategy, technology and economics” strictly of its own accord?

Or, if they only failed because we beat them, doesn’t that mean they were a threat that demanded elimination? Even if they couldn’t have invaded us directly at that exact time?

11

I’ve just scanned this thread, so ignore me if this has already been mentioned.

Our lightly populated next door neighbor was at war with Germany in 1939. Denmark fell in 1940. If the US stayed out in 1941 and as a result Britain fell, all you have to do is count the stepping stones:

From Britain (1) Germany can stage an invasion of Danish Greenland. From Greenland (2) the Nazis invade Canada (who would probably have lost most of her Army in Europe and Africa). Now you have half the Wehrmacht in Canada (3) wondering if Americans are as easy a pushover as their cowardly neutrality would seem to indicate.

A threat? I think so.

12

Absolutely, positively not ever a threat to the continental united states. Not even close. We did NOT extend a supply line across the atlantic, england provided a basis for the western theatre. Germany did not gain significant resources from any company they conquered; Canada could never have provided the resources necessary to get further than montana. Furthermore had the Germans invaded Canada the U.S. most definitely would have defended her.

Now, Germany were certainly a serious threat to U.S. interests. No one wanted to see a fascist europe - perhaps in fifteen years a unified fascist europe (what a joke, europe unified, but they might have believed it) could have become as serious a threat as the soviet union later became (though they would have made better trading partners). No, the problem was that there was so much U.S. money in europe to begin with that we couldn’t stand to see the national banks fail. I really think FDR’s position was so much fear-mongering - or maybe he knew something about the holocaust that wasn’t getting published in the nightly news. Some evidence suggests that he did, and if he had I would understand why he would want to get into the war. But the reason there was so little public support for the war was that it really wasn’t known how bad things were in europe - and lets face it, war in europe was not a new thing, by any stretch of the imagination.

13

I fail to see what resources other than fuel, food and runways, the Germans would need in Canada to present a threat to the US.

The fact remains that there is no difference between a threat and a potential threat. A victorious Hitler would eventually become as much a military threat as the Soviet Union was in the '50s. By 1941 FDR was in a position to know about developements in rocketry, long range and jet aircraft, and atomic weapons. Such weapons in the hands of a proven war monger would present a clear threat to the US regardless of where his country was located.

14

The problem is firstly that you have to marshall those resources (which is difficult in occupation), and secondly as I stated, we would have defended Canada without doubt. Also, I don’t think Canada is able to produce all of her own food, much less an occupation armies. Anyone know this?

15

Coop makes a good point about threatening US interests. And really, threatening US interests is tantamount to threating the US. If not, then why fight the Cold War? As Ursa points out, there is not difference between a potential threat and an actual threat. The perception is what really matters.

Germany as a legitimate threat, yes. As a likely or immediate threat, doubtful.

I’m wondering if the question asked isn’t really, “Should the U.S. have entered the war in Europe against the fascists?” Because I think what we’re really doing is examining the motives of the American leadership. And I think it’s important to remember that there was no one single motive for entering the war, with Roosevelt “asking for” Pearl Harbor, or not. Stability in international commerce had to be a prime concern of course, because Dr. New Deal wasn’t really curing the US economy. And remember that Dr. Win the War, really pulled the world out of the Depression through Keynesian military spending. But I think it’s reductionist to limit it to that factor alone. Self-interested politicians or not, let’s give the American leaders some measure of morality. Please don’t flame me for defending politicians, but principle(as Spiritus stated), had to have played a great role too. Couple those two factors and all of a sudden it looks pretty important to enter the fray in Europe.

As an eventual threat to the US, I might not agree with the time frame of other posters, but if Hitler, in his dementia, felt it was important to go into North America, he certainly could have given it go if the US hadn’t entered the war in Europe. England alone could never have dislodged the Nazis from Western Europe. Despite no North African campaign, Russia probably would still have been able to hold the bulk of the Rodina, albeit it with radically changed borders. Imagine that the Nazis make separate peace pacts with the two Allied powers and then take the time(years perhaps) to regroup and consolidate their gains. German scientists unlock the atom somewhere in the forties and then start rattling the nuclear saber. England falls under the revamped and atomic Wehrmacht. (Is anyone doubting whether the USA would have become a belligerent the moment the first Nazi boot set foot on English soil? But let’s say they still stay neutral.) The route through the North Atlantic has already been explained. Given American neutrality, enough time, and the development of practical atomic weapons(and of course, favorable military outcomes), eventually the Nazis could have rolled through New England.

Let’s just thank heaven that the despite all the horror, the Nazi regime didn’t survive the war.

16

We don’t need to consider invasion to identify a threat.

Had Hitler consolidated Europe and reached a (temporary) truce with the U.S.S.R. and had Japan deliberately avoided attacking the U.S., they could have isolated us very effectively.

Several South American countries were partial to Hitler. With Europe (and, by extension, European-dominated Africa) under Hitler’s control, he could have persuaded Argentina and Paraguay to send the word out in South and Central America that he would support an overthrow of our self-serving Monroe Doctrine. Chafing beneath over 40 “interventions,” many of those nations would have responded favorably. The Caribbean Basin would have either become a series of Vichy-like Nazi refuges or would have required an awful lot of expenditure of time and manpower to “keep safe.”

Had Britain fallen, it is unclear that such developments as aircraft-operated RADAR would have necessarily been in our hands, making the war against the u-boat a very iffy proposition. Had Hitler been able to isolate the U.S., I would say that we would have, indeed, been “threatened,” perhaps not by conquest, but in our economic security.

Tom~

17

Expanding Ursa Major’s hypothesis, would an invasion of Canada be necessary? Could Germany have forced Canadian capitulation as part of a Brittish surrender? If so, then they could consolidate in peace before going invading the US.

If this is a resonable scenario (I don’t know how independant Canada was in the 40’s), it opens the possiblity of Australia also being part of a Brittish surrender, which considerably changes the war in the Pacific.

Scott

18

When I read the title of this thread I thought, “Is the real question whether we should have gone to war with Germany?”

Germany declared war on the U.S. after the U.S. declared was on Japan. Admiral Yamamoto (or “the Japanese Navy”, if you prefer) thought it was a mistake to attack the U.S. He said that he could have his way in the Pacific for six months, but after that the outlook wasn’t good. He was right.

FDR WANTED to go to war in Europe. Churchhill wanted the U.S. to come to Europe (and there is evidence that he knew of the Japanese attack on Hawaii but didn’t pass the intelligence on to FDR).

Could Germany have dominated the world? Maybe. I can’t see them taking over the North American continent; but with nuclear weapons they could have bent us to their will until we had similar weapons. I think that if we had not gone to war in Europe, we would have had a nuclear exchange.

19

Ursa Major rises some interesting points.

I’m not up on Canadian food production either, not for WW2, but Canada has been shipping significant GNP every year for a long time in the form of wheat from the prairies.

A far more likely proposition (and one which is being spoken more and more) is put forward by Paul Fussell (I heard him speak on a CBC radio program, lecture entitled “The Culture of War”) in which he states that its his opinion that Russia would have won the war on its own, with or without US aid. My conjecture from this is simple: If the USSR had not defended itself and fallen, the immediate conquest of North America would not have been near as challenging, via the North. No not directly over the Pole; but certainly down the western seaboard. I agree that Canada might well have become the advance base. And it is indeed all a big IF.

With regard to supply lines across the ocean: Canada and the US did it. Why couldn’t Germany? Sure, Britain was a marshalling area until significant parts of France were re-conquered… but we supplied everything from food to men to machinery via long-range aircraft and ship convoys. Had Germany continued its drive and beaten Britain on its own doorstep, it would have been a matter of time before islandhopping became possible. Logistically, convoys DID do it, there’s no IF there. The IF is whether or not the US could have sunk more tonnage that German U boats did.

Regards,

Jai Pey

===
James Parsons
IANBABAIBOTID
“…because the only people for me are the MAD ones…” - J Kerouac

20

At the top of this page I heard something to the effect of Hitler being a tactical moron.

Say what?!?!?!!?!

Apparently you guys were there so you know first hand, but the way I see it:

1 :slight_smile: France’s army was LARGER than Germany’s
2 :slight_smile: Germany took France in what…2 weeks.
3 :slight_smile: Constantly out numbered, Germany defeated the better part of Russia with TACTICS!
4 :slight_smile: All this happened while America’s thumb was in her ass, and the Axis powers were kicking butt all over the globe.

The Element of suprise was with Germany, and they needed it because they didn’t have the element of production, population, or time. Germany needed stuff to happen for them NOW, not a few years later when the Allies could catch up.