I think the only thing that could have prevented the War was to keep Hitler out of Power.
Maybe FDR could have a policy of political assasination?
Failing that, FDR was inaugurated March 4, 1933
Hitler was appointed Chancellor January 30th 1933 and became Dictator on March 23, 1933.
I am going to say there is no policy or change FDR could have made in his first 19 days in Office to completely prevent the War. Hitler was coming from jump street.
Again, forget “completely prevent the war.” Just go with what would FDR’s single policy do-over have been.
The thing that troubles me about all these “we couldna done nuttin’” responses, sincere and well intended though they may be, is that they suggest a kind of helplessness in the face of problems, a helplessness so deeply ingrained that even floating a suggestion seems futile. This does not bode well for coping with real life problems in real time where you get no do-overs.
Would you still have this sense of futility and powerlessness if I were giving you limitless do-overs, and limitless powers on FDR’s part? No, I don’t believe so. So why is it so challenging to come up with with one policy shift that maybe could have made tevents in the 1940s go more smoothly? If nothing could have possibly been worth trying, why bother thinking through our present policy problems–you can’t change the course to hell in a handcart anyway, right?
The problem with asking what FDR could have done is that the seeds had long since been sown for Hitler’s rise and the attractiveness of his early regime for Germans.
As I said earlier and as jimmy reiterated, once Hitler was in power the die was cast and short of turning east Europe over to him, the war was on.
Something could have been done. Something along the lines of a Marshall Plan to alleviate the German economic disaster that allowed Hitler to come to power. But that would have to have been done in the 1920’s and there was no way the politcal climate then would have allowed that. The Marshall Plan was an advanced approach in 1946 and in the 1920’s would have been laughed out of town.
In 1938, the Frech Army was the largest and most powerful on earth. Combined with the UK’s still-powerful navy, GB and France would have had no trouble disposing of the German Army…and it probably would have been over in 6 months or so.
This was the only chance to avert war-by 1939, Germany was too strong and both France and GB lacked the will to take them on.
I had tried to post this earlier, but it didn’t work. What about US entry into the League of Nations? A stronger League, with teeth, might have been more effective than the actual League was.
I don’t agree with the “War is inevitable” bit, though. Look, in 1938, the German army had 36 divisions, and about 600,000 men. The Czech army itself had 400,000 men, had more and better tanks than the German army (the Germans, in fact, relied on Czech tanks during the invasion of Poland, because the Czechs, prior to annexation by Germany, had extensive tank factories and the Germans almost none). The Czechs also had an advanced airforce, and any German invasion of Czechoslovakia would have to be through the Sudetenland, which consisted of heavily fortified mountain passes.
If the English and French had complied with their treaty obligations, or even if the Czechs had been willing to resist on their own, a German invasion would have been next to impossible. And Hitler knew that…he was running a bluff, and it worked. Yeah, the domestic situation in England and France made it difficult for those two countries to stand up to Hitler, but if they could have, I think Hitler would have backed down, at least for a few years.
The path I’d hoped this debate would take would be more like David Simmons proposing that a proto-Marshall plan take place in 1922, and then we’d argue how the idea could have been sold to the American people, or that **ralph124c ** would propose his idea and we’d kick around how the U.S. might have advocated that its future allies get off their duffs and do something, but instead you folks seem to shoot down your own proposals before they can be discussed.
I maintain that, since we did a pretty poor job of minimizing WW II as events occurred, we have to be able to find some means, through the magic of hindsight, to have made things happen better, but no one seems to agree with this basic assumption. Why is that?
It was a combination of factors. First, the French had suffered really terribly in WWI. Most of the fighting on the Western Front was in France, and the French had about 1.3 million soldiers killed in the war. In 1918, about 60% of French men between 18-28, had been killed or mutilated from the war. And remember, it had only been 20 years So the French population was really antiwar. Second, the Daladier government wasn’t very strong. It was in a really tenuous coalition, and the Radical Socialists themselves were really deeply divided.
So, there just wasn’t the political will.
If you want to minimize WWII, or end the war earlier, the US could have just made sure to do nothing. The Germans were strangling Britain’s supply chain with aggressive U-Boat tactics, and if FDR hadn’t gotten Lend-Lease through Congress, it’s likely the British would have been forced to surrender. With Britain out of the war, the Germans would have been able to more effectively fight the Soviets, who would also be hampered by a lack of lend-lease aid.
Something else he could have done would have been to not announce an oil embargo against Japan, and more generally, to encourage trade with Japan, rather than tying trade with Japan to withdrawal from China. This would have improved Japan’s resources, and made them less likely to 1. use the “Southern Strategy” of attacking southeast Asia to sieze their resources, and 2. Meant no attack at Pearl Harbor. These together would have strengthened the hand of the “northerners” in Japan’s military, and they might have attacked Siberia, which would have forced Stalin to keep the Siberian garrisons there. And, without the Siberian reserves, Moscow almost definately would have fallen.
So, if FDR’s main goal is to minimize the extent of the war, no Lend-Lease, and increased trade with Japan seems to be the way to go. Of course, “a shorter war due to an Axis victory” might not have been FDR’s preferred outcome. 
Because the magic of hindsight suggests that “we” would have had to:
Change the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so that Germany wasn’t laid flat, which led to the rise of Hitler;
Change the isolationist mood in the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s;
Have a more conciliatory leader than Stalin take power in the U.S.S.R., so that Germany wouldn’t worry about its eastern front;
Keep Germany from rearming in the 1930s;
Create a League of Nations with enough power to stop Italy and Spain, so that fascists wouldn’t believe they could win every time;
Have the French and British show a united front against Germany in 1935 or 1936;
If all of the above failed, hope that a more aggressive response to the takeover of Czechoslovakia would have stopped the Germans before the point of no return.
In other words, there wasn’t one single thing that caused World War II, but a whole root system.
Well, there’s the obvious thing that could have been done. Roosevelt could have told Marshall to organize a small squad of riflemen to travel to Germany in civilian disguises and shoot Hitler. The 1936 Olympics would have been a good opportunity.
Sorry pseudotriton ruber ruber- completely misunderstood _ I missed your thrid post and thought you were complaining that the thread had done this … (Tho I think David Simmons puts it right: once Hitler was in power it was, for all intents and purposes going to end in bloodshed - didn’t need to be 50 million dead though - as the stop him early crowd rightly note).
I guess under “ended it quicker” what I think FDR could have done is uncorked the Manhattan Project sooner. I know the roots pre-program started in 1939, but the full swing project started (depending on when you count) say certainly Spring 1942 when the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory was organized and Robert Oppenheimer became deeply involved.
I know FDR could never gear up the way he did w/o a War - but even if he could have doubled the tiny early years budget and other resources (or just increased by 25% or 50% etc) and accelerated the program by 6, 8 or 10 months FDR could have ended the war more quickly by that single act.
This seems to be a view that everyone holds, but I am not persuaded that it’s true. Most of the reading I have done on this suggests that Hitler had a fairly precarious grip on power in the early days and if one of his early adventures had gone astray, it would have given one of his rivals the opportunity to shunt him aside. One of the key factors that lead him to undisputed power was the way he kept gambling and winning when confronting foreign powers. The Sudetenland, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia as well as rearmament generally - in every single case he said ‘Bah, they’re all talk, they won’t do anything to oppose me because they are weak, degenerate and afraid’ and he was proved right. By the time it came to Poland, the track record spoke for itself. Most Germans (including the top brass) weren’t eager for another destructive war any more than the French, despite all Goebbels’ propaganda - but Hitler was going to grab Poland just like Czechoslovakia and Austria, not start a general war. By the time France and Britain called his bluff, the die was cast. A realistic prospect of war in the early-mid thirties would probably have led to Hitler being banged up in his old cell again.
The reconciliation between Hitler and Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet pact was one of the key things that lead to war because Hitler DIDN’T need to worry about the eastern front. Up until that point he had the Soviets and the Anglo-French trying to keep Germany in check and potentially able to crush Germany between them easily. Once the Soviets fell away, it became a much tougher proposition for the western powers to take on Germany from one side alone. In fact, if the western democracies had held their noses and cooperated with Stalin to keep the Fascists in check, it would would almost certainly have prevented any conflict at all. One could even speculate that without the prestige and support from the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet regime would have fallen apart under its own contradictions much earlier and not only would there have been no WW2, but no Cold War either.
Or alternatively, an combined Anglo-French-US naval blockade of Italy in 1935 would have brought it to its knees within a matter of weeks at very little cost, toppled Mussolini, established the credibility of the western democracies and made it clear to every ambitious tinpot dictator that foreign aggression was not the way to go.
This may sound rather controversial, but for someone looking at pre-WWI maps of Germany and Austria, and comparing them with the setup in say 1930, they would conclude that a ‘bloc’ of German controlled territory had been split up into a load of artificial states.
And on the other side of that ‘bloc’ there was the USSR which was looking distinctly dangerous.
While one might feel rather sympathetic towards the newly emerged and seriously threatened states, at the time, one might not think that a strong German buffer is an entirely undesireable prospect.
Logistically there was not much the USA could really do, they were a heck of a long way away, so it was really down to Britain and France to intervene, and at the time it would not be too hard to think of good reasons for avoiding sticking ones neck out.
pseudotriton ruber ruber, following your response to Paul In Saudi, I understand exactly what you are getting at.
Hitler knew what he was going to do, he published a book saying what he was going to do, he gave numerous public speeches in which he said exactly what he was going to do.
Everything he did, pointed to him following his plan.
Yet people did not believe that he was deadly serious.
Maybe we learnt a lesson, that we should take nutters seriously, or at least believe that they will try to do what they say they are going to do.
I think that practically the only effective thing that anyone could do to stop Hitler was to kill him. Probably about 1936, probably with a slow acting poison - mercury comes to mind.
OK. Let me invite you all to shoot down my idea:
The US decides that sending our soldiers to fight in the Spanish Civil War (say we sent a few advisors over there Vietnam-style) is a good idea, and we establish a military presence in Europe so by 1936 there are many thousand battle-ready American troops there. We start building a wartime economy five years before we actually did, have a bunch of Europeans claiming that Americans are warmongering maniacs (just like we have today anyway), and send Hitler the strong signal, “No funny business, Bub.”
Plus which we have a democratic Spain, grateful to us and more than happy to lease the U.S. some military bases from which we could wage a pretty good ground war if need be.
Commence firing–NOW!
I think the best option would have been a post World War I Marshall Plan. Not that it would have been politically feasible at the time, but a properous Germany may not have been the right environment for fascism to take root. That and early recognition of the Allies of the dangers of Christo-fascism.
No popular support. None whatsoever. Americans felt like they’d gotten burned in WWI; the general attitude was that the decadent, corrupt Europeans had managed to drag us into a pointless, tremendously destructive war. The last thing the average American voter wanted was another military adventure in Europe. In regard to the threat posed by the Nazis, Roosevelt’s biggest problem before the war was American isolationism and anti-militarism; it’s rather surprising that he was actually able to get a peacetime military draft through Congress in 1940.
Assassinating Hitler, no matter how often it has been tried, and done in time-travel novels, wouldn’t solve the problem - the Nazis are already in place, the democracy had already been dismantled. The next Nazi would just take Hitler’s place. Maybe the war would have started later, or not been global, but Lebensraum was still a basic tenent of Nazi ideology, and dictatorships need victories.
[QUOTE=jimmmy]
I guess under “ended it quicker” what I think FDR could have done is uncorked the Manhattan Project sooner. I know the roots pre-program started in 1939, but the full swing project started (depending on when you count) say certainly Spring 1942 when the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory was organized and Robert Oppenheimer became deeply involved.QUOTE]
So the solution to WWII would have been to drop atomic bombs on Germany? Thanks for that solution. I have always suspected this, but to hear it…
Because 1. Roosevelt was no absolute ruler, even if he had absolute knowledge of the future, he couldn’t go against the majority of his population, or convince the leader of the other countries what to do,
2. It’s impossible to believe somebody who says he has knowledge from the future, and before it has happened, claims about how terrible it wiell end are just claims - it hasn’t happened yet. If Roosevelt had told the leaders of the other countries what would happen, they would have called him a lunatic. And if history can be changed, then his version is a variant of the future, not the future, so it’s understandable why the others will be sceptical that this will happen.
Those who advocate the French (or the Americans from Spain) occupy Germany - for how long, please? Hitler was only the pus of the festering boil sweeping through half of Europe at that time - see Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy: all right-wing answers to economic troubles. Without changing the underlying problems of the society, removing Hitler doesn’t solve the problem. And occupying a country for the next 10 or 20 years isn’t a solution, it only encourages rebellion and guerilla war.
Don’t forget all the applause Hitler got early on from the other countries because he was anti-communist. A better understanding of the dangers of communism and how democracy works would have helped, but given how hard that is to educate some countries still today…
So if you want to draw the parallel to Iran, it fails badly on all counts. Esp. as Iran has no second Hitler, and all relevant circumstances are different.