> We could, after all, have just pounded Japan
> after Pearl Harbor and left Germany alone.
I'm not sure how. Germany and Japan were at least loosely allied.
Pounding Japan would have left us with the undealt-with problem of
the Nazis.
Please bear in mind that in World War II Germany declared war on the
US first, not vice-versa.
In his book, `Germany, Hitler and World War II', Gerhard L. Weinberg
says that Hitler figured that Americans would be poor soldiers because
the country was `mongrel', that he expected to conquor the US at some
point (but not in any near future), and was waiting for a blue water
navy on his side. (His program to build a blue water navy for the
Third Reich kept getting delayed by higher priority actions, like
invading Poland.) So after the Japanese attacked the US and appeared
to have vicerated its navy, Hitler made sure that Germany declared war
first.
That means that the anti-German animus of a great many people in the
Roosevelt administration was irrelevent. The US was in a
German-American war whatever its leaders desired. Their then choices
were to surrender, negotiate, or win.
--
Robert J. Chassell
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http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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