Sounds like somebody nees to buy Hearts of Iron 2. Maybe I’ll dust it off this weekend.
Warning, geekery:
Anyway, I recall one game I played as the USA. Since the war was coming, I joined the allies early, and shipped lots of troops over to France to help defend. And the Germans just rolled over my troops and they got wiped out, total loss of 15 divisions. American troops in Europe could just become speedbumps for the blitzkrieg. We were able to defeat the Germans only after painfully learning to counter their doctrinal superiority, and after they had been bled white on the Russian steppes. If our troops were just reinforcing the Maginot line we’re gonna get creamed. I suppose we convince the French to fortify their border with Belgium? Sucks to be Belgian, because the Belgians can’t fortifiy their border with Germany without inviting an attack. Or we invade Belgium ourselves…
What I’m arguing is that the course of events (ruinous terms of the Treaty of Versailles, worldwide economic turmoil in the 1920s and 1930s, collapse of the Weimar Republic, general lack of will by England and France to get into another war) was such that Roosevelt by himself wouldn’t have been able to stop it.
Maybe we could argue that Woodrow Wilson could have worked harder at Versailles. But remember, the isolationists in Congress blocked U.S. entry into the League of Nations, so Wilson probably got as much as he could, too.
As to “anticipating Pearl Harbor better” the problem in intelligence is not really gathering information in most cases. Rather it is figuring out the what whomever you are spying on intends to do. I would wager a pretty good dinner that had agents reported that a large Japanese fleet of carriers with all of the supporting ships had sailed from Japan, none of them would have put a very high probability on the objective as being an attack on Pearl Harbor.
In order to put the US in a better position vis-a-vis the Axis we would have had to start a rearmament program. Build up the industrial capacity to make weapons. Design and build some new and much better aircraft. Design and build much better tanks. Build a lot of aircraft carriers. Strengthen and completely redo our antisubmarine tactics. Institute a peacetime draft so that there would be people to operate all this new equipment.
Of course, in order to do this FDR would have had to begin a huge educational effort right after taking the oath. The public would need to have been educated as to the need, right here in the middle of a depression (the absolute low point in fact), that this should be done. Maybe it could have been sold as a “full-employment program.” That’s how Hitler did it. Well, that isn’t actually how he sold the rearmament program but that’s how it turned out.
The point is that most American politicians in the 1930s thought Germany was not a serious problem; Roosevelt was one of the few exceptions and probably the only major political leader in the country who was actually doing things to prevent and/or prepare for a war with Germany. And that includes spending his political capitol to get laws passed that would have failed without his personal intervention.
And history has shown that Roosevelt was right; Germany did turn out to be a threat and the efforts he made were needed. I wouldn’t say that every single choice that was made was perfect, but the hypothetical alternatives might have been slightly better at best. America (and the world) were lucky; the right man was in the right place at the right time.
If the USA had sent troops to Spain, it would have been strange having them fighting alongside Russian backed forces.
By 1936, it is highly likely that most informed people knew what had been going on in the USSR - also the USSR was aggressively (verbally) expansionist - Comintern springs to mind.
Mussolini had been pretty harmless, it is possible that Hitler looked the same, while the USSR really did look unpleasant.
At the time Franco did not look that bad a bet, Spain was a bit of a basket case, and ‘democracy’ was not quite the buzz word that it later became. As it happens Franco played his cards rather well - keeping Spain out of WWII must have required quite a bit of finesse.
What has always baffled me is precisely why the Japs declared war on the USA, they were interested in oil - well that was Indonesia - and the other territories that they picked off largely belonged to the British and French.
In the long run they were interested in the Soviet Far East, but they did not have much chance of invading the USA. So the US oil was no magnet.
I can’t quite see what they had to gain from attacking the USA, although it was very handy for Germany that they did.
I am also pretty sure that the individual leaders were an important part of the mix.
The Japanese figured they needed the oil and had to attack British and Dutch possessions to obtain it. And they assumed that if they attacked British and Dutch possessions the United States would declare war on Japan in response. So they figured if they were going to end up in a war with the US, the best strategy was to knock out the American military before it was ready.
In retrospect, Japan had probably misread the situation. While the United States would have been very angry about a Japanese attack on Malaysia and Indonesia and would probably have imposed diplomatic and economic sanctions, there probably would have not been enough public support for a declaration of war. Japan probably could have gotten away with seizing the European colonies in East Asia and avoided a general war.
And I believe they underestimated the potential industrial capacity of the US. They probably figured they would have time to make the conquest and consolidate it and thus be in a position to win by the time the US could replace the losses.
I’m not so sure about this. Although isolationist sentiment was still there, the rapid fall of France had frightened a lot of people pretty badly. A draft, the first in peacetime, had been instituted. We were escorting merchant ships part way across the Atlantic. We had supplied the British with 50 old destroyers that could be used on routine work freeing up modern destroyers for anti-submarine work.
It’s quite possible that Congress, and eventually the public, would have supported war against Japan if they had attacked the European holdings in Asia. Especially so if they attacked the Philippines which seems to have been part of their plan.
Japan attacked the Philippines several hours after the attack on Pearl and they attacked Wake Island on 11 December. If the Philippines and Pearl Harbor didn’t do it, Wake Island would have I think.
My take? The last U.S. President who could have stopped WWII was Hoover. Unfortunately, he had neither the political inclination nor (no discredit to him) the foresight to make the right moves and I seriously doubt that he could have garnered the political capital to make it happen.
The time to stop WWII was the period between 1928 and 1932 when the NDSAP were consolidating power and building their own political capital to take over Gerrmany. The way to stop Hitler would have been to pressure the WWI allies, particularly France, to back off on their vengeful refusal to permit Germany to restructure the WWI debt (and, perhaps, to even provide some aid), to ensure that the Republic was not gutted from the inside with the tacit approval of the German citizenry.
A Germany that was more (nearly) healthy economically and, thus, more internally divided politically would not have had the desire to re-arm or the united government to pull it off.
Hoover, of course, despite having a great deal of political capital in Europe, probably did not have enough capital to make such a thing happen and probably never even considered the possibility as he fought his own problems at home.
The next (but smaller) window to prevent WWII would have been for France and Britain to react aggressively against Hitler re-militarizing the Rhineland. This might actually have been feasible, but it hardly required the assistance of FDR. And, again, an FDR that was even inclined to recognize the need would have been hard-pressed to go wandering off to cajole European governments to take military action in the midst of FDR’s own bid for re-election.
(In a really sneaky alternative universe, FDR would have found a way to push the Europeans to crush Hitler’s Rhineland adventure, then found a way to provide the Japanese with a better tactical program for armored warfare so that rather than the utterly humiliating defeat at Khalkhin Gol, they either won or, at least, made a good showing. Without that defeat, the “Northern advance” wing of the Japanese military might have beaten the “Southern advance” wing strategy debates and Japan might have gone after Siberia rather than Malaysia and Indonesia, thus leaving the U.S. out of a conflict that would have weakened Japan and the U.S.S.R.)
britain too had suffered a heavy loss of manpower in ww1 and there wasnt enough time to repopulate sufficiently so much so that by the time the u.s. entered ww2 britain was actually suffering a manpower crisis and was having to cannibalise units to get them up to strength . i cant give a cite on this so it isnt written in stone ,but a t.v documentary i saw stated that the r.a.f. lost more bomber crew killed over germany then u.s forces of all 3 services for the entire war in europe ! a fact i personally find difficult to believe but its stuck in my mind . this goes some way to explaining the lack of eagerness for britain to enter another major war so soon after the last one .
I agree that the way to have stopped WWII was economic aid to Germany. However I disagree as to the time. The time to act was in the early 1920’s when Germany’s wild inflation begain. At that time, although there was a recession in Europe they had the means to gove some help.
Hoover was too late, I think. He took office in March, or was it April?, 1929 while there was a recession beginning in the US. In October that caught up with the stock market which crashed. From then on through 1934 GNP fell and unemployment rose. There was no chance that Hoover could do a thing about problems in Europe. And, as you say, his laissez faire inclination prevented him from that sort of thing to the extent he made no effort to have the US government do anything about our crash let alone talking Britain and France into helping Germany.
One factor a lot of people forget is that the German people and military were just as unenthusiastic about having a replay of World War I as their British and French counterparts were - if anything moreso; Germany, after all, had been on the losing side of the war and had suffered even worse that the western powers. And the German generals had a realistic idea of how their army compared to that of France and Britain in the 1930s.
There was a lot of support for a military buildup, for talking tough to the other major powers, and even for invading smaller countries when it looked safe. But whenever it looked like Germany might actually go to war, Hitler experienced serious internal resistance. Hitler ended up spending almost as much effort confronting his domestic oppoents as he did his foreign ones.
One reason Hitler stayed in power was because he never experienced a major setback in his early years as Chancellor. If he had been knocked down just once over something like the Rhineland, the Saar, Memel, the Anschluss, or Czechoslovakia, he would almost certainly have been overthrown.
I’ve heard that the Embargo of Japan by the US with regards to iron, rubber and other vital resources for the island nation pushed Japan to start the war with the US much sooner (which is a bit ironic, because part of the reasoning of the Embargo apparently was that the US was worried about the militaristic buildup in Japan and figured they ought to stop further arming by withholding the resources.)
I place the blame for WWII squarely on the shoulders of . . . Woodrow Wilson. If he had kept us out of the Great War (as he had campaigned to do in 1916), the great powers of Europe would have fought eachother to exhaustion, and Versailles would have never come about. Good, says I, a pox on both their houses!
In short, the moment we committed ourselves to World War I, World War II was sure to follow. Maybe nobody at the time could have predicted the specifics of what would happen, but just generally following George Washington’s admonition to avoid foreign entanglements would have been enough.
Nice try, but unfortunately, there were several causes for the fall of the Weimar democracy and the rise of the NSDAP, and the economic depression was only one. You would have also to work against the “Dolchstosslegende” (backstabbing legend) that Germany lost WWI only because of traitorous jewish generals, and not because of a real military defeat. You would have to stop the undermining efforts from the left and the right extremist parties. You would have to build safeguards into the constitution right from the start. Maybe then you would have a chance to keep the democracy and stifle the Nazis.
So the answer to a weak League of Nations, to the Isolationism of the US in the 30s, is … more isolationism??? Huh? What makes you think Versailles wouldn’t have happened without the US? (Do you think the French can’t win any war on their own?)
And I’m surely amazed at the powers of precogniciton George Washington had in a completly different situation to apply his doctrine to WWI. Awesome, better then Nostradamus.
Actually, no, I don’t. Germany was not in a state of constant, abject despair from 1919 through 1933. It had several periods of partial recovery. An extremely important one occurred at the second wave of the great (world wide) depression. The insistence by the allies, (primarily France), to refuse to restructure the debt pushed Germany over the edge into another serious depression. In a modestly active economy, (as occurred twice during the 20s), there was no reason to harp on the “backstabbing” or the injustice of Versaille. It is only when the economy was in the tank and people were worried about actually feeding their families that they began to look for scapegoats, both among the legitimate sources (the WWI vicrtors) and internal sources (Jews and Communists). In fact, if the economy had not gotten quite so bad, the NDSAP and the Communists might have gone on squabbling happily for several more years as to who could do a better job. It was only after the crisis of the crash that the Nazis were able to seize control, immediately outlawing the Communists and then proceeding to go after Jews while rebuilding the military.
Well, if the US had stayed out of the first world war entirely, the character of the peace would have been much different. If France and Germany had slogged it out to the point of mutual exhaustion, then perhaps France wouldn’t have been in a postion to dictate such harsh terms to the Germans.
And as I mentioned above, George Washington gave sound advice that we should have followed: stay the hell out of European conflicts. They’ve been at eachother’s throats since the end of the middle ages, and getting ourselves involved could only lead to grief, even if we achieved a short-term “victory” as we saw at Versailles.
And as for your last question . . . well, we should have recognized that whether they can or can’t is none of our concern.
The sinking of the Lusitania (with Americans on board) annoyed the USA
I once read a book by a German guy who ran a ring in the USA planting incendiary bombs on merchant ships, I’m vague on the details, but remember that he reckoned that his antics also annoyed the USA.
If the Americans had not been involved there would have been less of a check on the French who were still seething about 1870-71
I’m not sure about the financial considerations, but I would guess that the UK was in deep hock to the USA - if by some fluke Germany had won, that would have been lost.
My take is that after WWI the Germans seriously resented the loss of their Eastern empire, which sowed the seeds for Nationalism.
