It may seem strange, but American troops did fight alongside the Republicans. I don’t know of any that fought alongside the Fascists. Aside from Fr Coughlin, there was no one in America with any kind of political clout who wanted Franco to win. The US didn’t get involved for the same reason we didn’t get involved in WWII for over two years. The fact that the Communists supported the Republicans doesn’t make the Republicans Communists, although many of them were.
Yes, but like British etc, they were volunteers and in no way official, heck Americans and British were found with the Taliban.
I don’t think that Communists and Anarchists were ‘republicans’, they just happened to be fighting the same enemy.
Interesting thread. I agree that WW2 had so many interlinking causes, many of which were out of the hands of FDR and his predecessors, that either preventing it or “winning it better” would have been next to impossible.
That said, if FDR had a “do over,” he could:
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Have Hitler killed while he was still a rabble-rousing streetfighter in Munich. Hitler, more than anyone, harnessed German frustration with the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression and the weakness of the Weimar Republic. I really think if Hitler hadn’t been around in the 1930s, Germany wouldn’t have taken the path it did.
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Warn the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. I mean, c’mon, he was a former asst. secretary of the Navy. He loved the Navy. I’ve never believed the conspiracy theories that he purposefully failed to warn the fleet so that the U.S. would get dragged into the war to help Britain. Forewarned, the USN could either sortie to attack Nagumo’s fleet at a time and place of its own choosing, or make itself absent on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 and leave the Japanese planes with little to attack.
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Don’t order the internment of Japanese-Americans. A bad idea, proven unnecessary and morally wrong.
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Order attacks on the railways leading to the Nazi concentration camps, and take other steps to help those held in them. Could have been done, probably would have done some good, but we didn’t.
As others have argued, FDR did about as well as anyone could have, given the deep and widely-held isolationist views of the great majority of the American public before Pearl Harbor.
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Hitler was named Chancellor on January 30, 1933. FDR was inaugurated President on March 4, 1933.
While some U.S. President might have been able to order Hitler’s assassination while he was a street thug, FDR was a bit late to take that particular path. -
I’m not sure at what level Secretaries of the Navy (prior to WWII) were involved in maneuvers, but someone in the Navy should have remembered that they had actually enacted two separate War Games between 1928 and 1938 in which they presumed that the Japanese would attack from a Northern Pacific transit. Perhaps FDR might have read up more on potential naval strategies, but he had been out of the Department of the Navy for ten years prior to the first speculation regarding an attack on Pearl Harbor and may not have been aware of that scenario.
I definitely fault the Naval command, but I am less eager to lay that mistake on FDR’s lap. (It clearly would have been better for us had he ordered a watch for an attack in place of the watch against sabotage that was issued.) -
Absolutely agree. Racist fears are not a legitimate basis for Federal action, (particularly when they are thinly disguised attempts to make a wholesale land grab). Even J. Edgar Hoover argued against E.O. 9066. (Although it is possible that he simply wanted more power for the FBI, he did argue on the right side of that line on that occasion.)
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In fact, it might have been a better military strategy (although we did not know it at the time). The U.S.Strategic Bombing Survey after the war indicated that our assaults on factories were less productive than our interdiction of railways and highways.
Well, as threatened, I dusted off Hearts of Iron II. Armed with foreknowlege, I assumed the role of FDR to lead the United States to early victory over the forces of darkness. And I’m not doing so hot.
I nudged the US away fron isolationism as much as possible, and managed to join the Allies in 1938. So when Germany invaded Poland in 1938, America was now at war with Germany. Again I sent as many troops to France as possible. We held for quite a while, but now we’re confined to two pockets in Brittany and Maresailes. On the plus side my early intervention kept Norway independent, and from their I’ve liberated Denmark and cleaned out North Africa. And I’ve appeased Japan, so there’s no Pacific war. So in 1941 the allies are in better shape than before. So what’s the problem? Why can’t I roll back through France?
The trouble is the Soviet Union. Oh, they’re at war with the Axis…but they won’t attack. The German (really Polish) and Soviet border hasn’t changed in a year. A real “phony war”. I suppose the Reds are tying up a lot of German divisions over on the phony eastern front…but I’m barely hanging on. I make limited gains and suffer limited setbacks. Without the Red Army crushing Germany on the Eastern front I’m screwed. Although I’m still cranking out divisions, and I’ve got this secret research program in Los Alamos…
Anyway, the relevance of all this is that a more successful western Allies means that the Nazi-Soviet pact might hold up. Oh, Stalin will rush in and scoop up Poland and Eastern Europe once Germany cracks…but he’s not doing his job. And I’m really worried about Japan, because I’ve diverted so much to the European theater that the Pacific is looking pretty tempting for them.
The OP provided, “For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say you’re FDR in 1944–you get a do-over in one sphere of U.S. policy over the past two decades…” That, to me, meant that FDR could authorize the OSS to whack a particularly vile rabble-rousing paper-hanger anytime after 1924.
Maybe he’d send a time-stamped cable to Coolidge, twenty years earlier…?
The problem I have with the basic assumption of the OP: how does FDR get the knowledge about the future? Does he get a history book about WWII that fell through a hole in time? Or is there a time travel machine (a cool DeLorean?) involved?
Because once FDR starts changing one thing (and he can change history at all - which is the basic idea, after all) - then the whole history from that point on changes. If he only has a history book, he can’t make any better decisions from that point on, because he lacks foreknowledge with the changed situation. The only way he could be continually ahead of all others would be a time machine, traveling back and forth to find the optimal solution - similar to a strategy simulation game. Because one change might, through the convoluted way history and human reactions run, turn out to result in worse things than before.
If FDR just has one shot and then looses the edge on his contemporaries (or even if he doesn’t) how do the people around him know he hasn’t turned crazy? Or how could he convince people that he really knows all about the future? (Even if he predicts the next horse race, that could be a fluke.) Generally, we don’t believe people who claim to see the future.
Well, in a lot of ways Roosevelt really did act as if he had a history book drop out of a time wormhole, at least with regards to the European theater. Rosevelt knew that Hitler would have to be stopped, and did everything in his power to give American support to the Allies.
It’s on the Pacific theater that the US seemed to be acting blindly. We didn’t understand the Japanese, we couldn’t predict what they were going to do, we had no idea what our policies would lead to. Now, maybe war with Japan was inevitiable. But the US seems to have blundered into war with Japan unprepared, whereas we were practically at war with Germany long before Hitler declared war on us.
And even if he hadn’t, it’s kinda his JOB to try to guess what the future holds for the country and plan accordingly. It’s not as though every choice a President makes, based on his reading of the world and its leaders and economic forecasts and all that stuff is always dead on the money. (Right, W.? I said, ‘Right, W.’) Because something happened in a certain way doesn’t mean it had to happen in precisely that manner, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why this OP is so difficult to conceive of.
It’s not that the question is hard to conceive of…it’s just hard to DO.
Roosevelt was dedicated to stopping the Nazis. He did all he could to stop the Nazis, within the limits of American political reality, and sometimes beyond. But if Roosevelt proclaimed that if Germany annexed Czechslovakia, or invaded Poland, that the US would declare war on Germany, well, it wouldn’t work. Because the isolationist (and who can blame them?) American citizenry wouldn’t allow it. Congress would repudiate such an announcement, it would be a hollow threat.
Roosevelt’s strategy…of aiding and arming the British in every way he could…was just about the best he could do. Short of declaring war on Germany, which Roosevelt couldn’t do…what exactly should he have done besides aiding the Brits and the French? And all this in the middle of the Great Depression?
I remember at the time of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986-87, when there was some muted discussion of impeaching Reagan, his defenders argued that he had simply done all he could to fight Communism in Nicaragua and to help the hostages in Lebanon. Sure, maybe he crossed the line, maybe he broke the law, but hadn’t FDR done the same in secretly helping Britain (esp. with convoying in the North Atlantic) before Pearl Harbor? Or so the argument went.
FDR might very well have been impeached, had the full extent of his pro-British activities come to light at the time. U.S. Navy personnel and ships were repeatedly going in harm’s way in a conflict in which we were supposedly neutral. I think FDR did the right thing, but many - probably most - Americans at the time would not agree.
The really scary scenario here is if, instead of pushing into the Dutch Indies immediately, the Japanese had used those troops to invade Hawaii on the heels of attacking Pearl Harbor. There is no way that we could have stopped them, I don’t think, and that makes the war a whole lot longer. We’d have won in the end, of course, but it would have been much, much harder, longer and bloodier. Read Days of Infamy and End of the Beginning by Harry Turtledove if speculative historical fiction interests you. Those book lay out that exact scenario, very, very realistically IMHO.
Keep in mind that for Japan, attacking America was just a means to an end - the end being occupying the Dutch East Indies. If Japan didn’t occupy the DEI, it had no reason to occupy Hawaii or attack the United States. And the occupation of the DEI couldn’t be postponed for long either. Japan’s decision to go to war was prompted by the American oil embargo. Japan had a limited supply of oil and needed to occupy the DEI in order to restore its oil supply. Japan couldn’t afford to waste any time on what would have essentially been a diversion from its main objective.
While I think it is possible that the Japanese could have taken the Hawaiian islands, I doubt that it would have been the slam dunk that you appear to believe. It took them several months to conquer the Philipines, where much more of our air forces were destroyed on the first day (partly due to a(n un)lucky fog bank that rolled across Taiwan at the time when the Japanese had scheduled to launch their own initial air attack), and they were able to continue to use Taiwan as a forward base throughout the campaign. In contrast, they would have had to rely solely on naval transport to accomplish the entire assault on Hawaii. We also would have had to rely solely on naval resupply (although we could ferry some planes directly), but we would have had the advantage of a shorter supply line and a more established military infrastructure. In addition, diverting sufficient naval resources to an assault on Hawaai would have made it more difficult for the Japanese to suppress the Philipines, Wake, Midway, and other locations where we would have had forces behind their lines.
What baffles me is why the Japanese should want the Philipines or Hawaii
They could have signed up with the UK and taken Indonesia on the basis that the Dutch were occupied by Germany.
I’ve been pondering this and I reckon that there is some ‘racial memory’ thing, Butterfly and Pinkerton - also the forcing open of Japan for trade with gunboats.
It might have been payback time - and therefore not rational.
The Japanese felt that if they seized the DEI and Malaysia it would mean war with the US. That means primarily a naval war. And the Phillipines and Hawaii are naval bases. If the US navy has bases in the Phillipines that makes an occupation of the DEI and Malaysia impossible…even if the oil fields could be seized and held there would be no way to get the oil back to Japan.
So since they felt war with the US was inevitable, and occupation of SE asia was imperative, taking out the US navy in one surprise blow seemed like a good strategy. Hawaii wasn’t so important itself, what was important was the naval base and the ships themselves. And the Phillipines had to be occupied so the occupation of DEI couldn’t be stopped.
But I agree that if the Japanese attempted to occupy Hawaii it would be a terrible mistake. It would be at the extreme end of resupply, and the only reason to occupy is to deny the US Pearl Harbor as a base. Maybe a few submarine shellings of the west coast would be possible with a Japanese base at Hawaii, but that would just be a sideshow.
Tom,
I don’t think it would have been a “slam dunk”, certainly, but it wouldn’t have been that hard for the Japanese to do either. Consider:
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If the Japanese are going to invade Hawaii, they aren’t going to stop at just one raid (and they shouldn’t have in real life either). They are going to make damn sure to pound the hell out of Pearl, destroying the fuel stocks that they missed the first go-round, along with Hawaiian based air power (such as it was; at the time we thought the Brewster Buffalo was a legitimate fighter plane for God’s sake). They would have been fighting with complete control of the air.
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Much has been made of the fantastic good luck that the US had when none of their carriers were on port on Dec. 7. This is true, but Enterprise and Lexington were both close by ferrying planes across the Pacific (Lady Lex to Midway and The Big E to Wake, IIRC). If there is an invasion, They would have had no choice but to attack the Japanese fleet, and they would have been crucified. The Japs had 6 fleet carriers with vastly superior planes, we would have had no chance at all, none. That reduces US naval strength in the Pacific to Saratoga (There were some old battleships on the west coast, but they would have been useless for modern warfare). You say it would have been easier for the US to resupply Hawaii because of shorter supply routes. I say how are you going to get any supplies in? Hawaii would have been cut off. Now, the Japs being able to supply a conquered Hawaii it is another matter entirely…
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You make a good point about outposts like Wake, Midway, Guam, etc… being behind the Japanese, but without PacFleet, they are impotent, and the Imperial Fleet could have conquered them at their leisure.
Lemur- The whole point is to deny Pearl to the US. What a difference that would have made! Occupied Hawaii becomes a shield for the entire rest of the Pacific for as long as the Japanese can hold onto it. The US absolutely must retake Hawaii before we can do anything else. As it went in real life, Hawaii was a dagger aimed at the heart of Japan’s conquered territories and the home islands themselves. Long term, there is no way for Japan to win, they just don’t have the industrial power or the population to beat the US, but with Hawaii gone it probably takes us until '47, '48 to beat them.
Well, we go in through Alaska. Do-able, if we put in a rail line to Alaska from the 48.
But while the Japanese are occupying Hawaii and beating off American attacks, what are they using to invade SE asia? Hawaii would need to be protected by the Japanese fleet. If the fleet is locked into protecting Hawaii they aren’t available for other uses. Can the Japanese take the Phillipines, Malaysia, and Dutch East Indies with so much diverted to Hawaiian occupation?
They had six carriers that would have been vulnerable to both carrier based and land based aircraft. The “vastly superior planes” of the Japanese is somewhat overrated. The planes in which the U.S. fought to a draw in the Coral Sea and defeated Japan at Midway were exactly the same planes (on both sides) as were available at Pearl Harbor. The Navy never had that many Buffaloes, to begin with, and the Wildcats at Wake put up a pretty good show against the attacking fleet (as did the Tomahawks on December 7). Certainly, I would prefer to be flying an A6M than an F4F or P-40C, (and would not want to consider an F2A), but flying them against Kates and Vals they were effective. And with more of the Philipine force devoted to an attack on Hawaii, Japan is faced with a more equal combatant in that theater, as well–much closer to the homeland and with the ability to be resupplied from Australia.