Oh yeah, I bet you can find tons of Axis equipment with Allied origins. I remember reading a book talking about Sea Lion and the Germans put together what very little landing craft they had and it turned out these craft in origin were all US and British that was sold prior to WWI.
U.S & Germany
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Correct, ShadowHAwk. That’s how we got drawn into WWI as well. Perhaps FDR would have pulled us into WWII one way or another, regardless.
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What part of Europe are you from?
I would not say we were “just as bad.” The fact remains that the Japanese bombed Pearle Harbor first, not the US bombing Tokyo Bay. Nor did the US soldiers do anything as barbaric as burying people alive or machine gun hospital patients and nurses, as the Japanese did in China.
That is not to say that it was justified to drop napalm and nukes on Japanese cities. It wasn’t.
That is not to say the 1937 embargo was a wise political move. It wasn’t.
However, the fact remains that if it weren’t for the United States, you Europeans would still be fighting World War I.
The United States is not a perfect nation. We are not Peace Doves. Still, this fact cannot be denied about the Two Great Wars, the most horrific and bloody nightmares the world has ever seen: Europe started them. America ended them.
There are fallen soldiers on your continent who never came home. Show some respect.
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Hmm. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you. You were connecting two actions which were an act of war, yet no war was declared (Pearle Harbor, and shipping war materials). You were stating that the US was “just as bad” as Japan in only that respect. Still, if it’s true that the Japanese only committed a timezone error, then you really can’t connect the two after all.
Also, what do you mean by “sloppy with paperwork?” Are you saying the US failure to declare war on Germany was literally a problem with paperwork, or is this some European figure of speech I’m missing?
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Interresting, interresting…
The U.S. would have enterd the war sooner or later it was just to determind how…
and like allready mentioned in here they were already involved it just needed to be official.another point is the debate about england.
I don’t think that hitler ever wanted to conquer england at all.
he never mentioned england as a place for his race in “mein kampf” and it was more likley the opposite way that he wanted to come to an agrrement w. them to fight his war against russia for his goal and have his back free!!!in the end he was still unpredictable and changed his mind often on things…
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Hitler declared war on the US in the hope that Japan would declare war on Russia and alleviate the some of the pressure on his Moscow front. Stalin counterattacked with his siberians on Dec 6.
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Hitler declared war on the US in the hope that Japan would declare war on Russia and alleviate the some of the pressure on his Moscow front. Stalin counterattacked with his siberians on Dec 6.
And you base this on what?
I’ve never come across this theory being seriously put forward by a historian. If you have some basis for this I’ll be real interested in reading through it.
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I read it. It was put forth as a possible explanation for why Hitler would do something so stupid. I cant remember the actual source. Try Hitler by John Toland or The German Army1933-1945 by Matthew Cooper. Considering Hitlers impulsive behavior it seems entirely plausible, don’t you agree?
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True true, ill track it down.
Being a historian at heart i love checking sources
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I’d be interested to know what you find.
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I just went through both texts in a cursory fashion for the dec 41 passages and could not find the quote. I did read it as I am not smart enough to have made it up. I certainly would not want to be guilty of academic/forum fraud
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If the United States “declared war” on Germany by supplying Britain as a friendly-neutral, then the USSR “declared war” on the UK by supplying Germany with Oil, ore, etc.
Please.
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Hehe, you people never seem to realize entirely that Hitler, while a political genius and mastermind, totally let power corrupt him once he had it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Hitler was definitely the man in charge in 1941, failures in taking Moscow non-withstanding. It was inevitable that he would of declared war on the United States in 1941; for him jumping the gun early was always better than later. In his mind everyone really was after Germany. “Rationality” was not a word in his vocabulary, “Teppichfresser” (carpet chewer) was endearing nickname the press gave him once he became Fuerher.
Britain and the “West” were totally cool with Hitler mucking up the territorial boundaries of Europe as long as he provided a buffer state against World Communism; the Munich Agreement cooked up by Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Germany was hailed as “Peace in Our Time.” The Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 let him wage complete war with absolute safety against the West in 1940. Which he then used to launch a surprise invasion of Russia in June 1941. Somehow he believed he could switch alliances on or off again with complete abandon; even his generals believed this to some extent, Goering was trying to work out a peace deal with the Western allies in the end days of WWII. So to him declaring war was no big deal, he would of forged some new treaty/ceasefire somewhere along the way to patch things up, with his deluded thinking. His forces were stuck in Russia too by this point, and knowing he was in for the long haul, he probably expected some help from the Japanese if he joined in their war. (Of course which the Japanese had no interest in, and had just signed a non-aggression treaty with Russia earlier that year…)
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Britain and the “West” were totally cool with Hitler mucking up the territorial boundaries of Europe as long as he provided a buffer state against World Communism; the Munich Agreement cooked up by Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Germany was hailed as “Peace in Our Time.” The Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 let him wage complete war with absolute safety against the West in 1940. Which he then used to launch a surprise invasion of Russia in June 1941. Somehow he believed he could switch alliances on or off again with complete abandon; even his generals believed this to some extent, Goering was trying to work out a peace deal with the Western allies in the end days of WWII. So to him declaring war was no big deal, he would of forged some new treaty/ceasefire somewhere along the way to patch things up, with his deluded thinking. His forces were stuck in Russia too by this point, and knowing he was in for the long haul, he probably expected some help from the Japanese if he joined in their war. (Of course which the Japanese had no interest in, and had just signed a non-aggression treaty with Russia earlier that year…)
Yeah I think he started to get a deluded idea of how people thought about alliances. He seemed to be under the impression that crushing the USSR would cause the UK to “come around” and become his ally at some point.
Hitler wrote in his unpublished book that he expected the UK and Germany to take on the USA during the reign of his successor in the 1980s. Go figure.
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I thought hitler only wrote mien kamf…what other books did he write?
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Hitler would not have declared war on the U.S because he was not interrested in fighting her!!..plans were allready made w. what to do w. the U.S.A and he send his people there to infiltrade and manipulate the peoples mind and hopefully keep the U.S some sort at bay…why do you think that the Nazi party in the U.S still exist?..those people who came to the U.S in the '30s and '40s where not Brandenburger but highly trained Napolas…
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being at “war” officially is only meaningful in semantics. The U.S. was already at War with Germany as soon as they invaded France and the Netherlands. For a short time we were attempting to recruit them as anti-commie buddies but that obviously was not going to work out.
Both US and Germany had multiple spies operating against each other, especially when it came to Atomic research, which was already well under way in 1941. There were politicians and citizens who were lied to about the deaths of Americans on merchant shipping that uboats were sinking. There were many begging Roosevelt for war in the US for a long time before Pearl Harbor.
We were already at war with Japan before Pearl Harbor, we were operating the flying tigers (totally against the geneva convention) in China against Japan (a clear stance of War) while supporting our puppet Chaing. We were also enforcing an embargo against Japan’s oil to bait them into aggression to make it look like they started it, a plan that eventually worked in what we call “Pearl Harbor” a wonderfully planned (by the US) event to get us into the war which the wall street big boys desperately wanted.
Whats up with the codes we cracked for both Japan and Germany? Does anybody really believe we were just able to magically crack them because we were smarter and they were inferior? The ruskies never cracked them, and we weren’t about to provide them with that information. Please!, its obvious the bankers knew who was going to win and geared us up for it. They placed most of their bets on us, while draining our enemies dry and came out rich as all hell. Look at Switzerland if you want proof. A small, defenseless country with the most international banks at the time. Notice this country is NEVER touched by any side in either WWI or WWII despite untold carnage raging all around it. Think about it, its a no brainer.
Think about it, we went from a pretty rural and slightly militarized nation to becoming the largest and most powerful economic and military power the world had ever seen, ONLY because of our involvement in WWII. We just needed some time to gear up and decide who our enemies would be.
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i wonder about this sometimes…
A) The US would have told the UK…“sorry…we have our own problems right now…we have to knock out the Japanese”
OR
B) Maybe the US would have taken their merchant shipping losses into account and said to Adolf…“HEY!!! Enough is enough…were coming after u the minute we kick Japan’s A$$”
Its a very hard question to answer…FDR wanted to go to war with Germany…but isolation was the idea at the time…even though his Short of War policy to help the UK was in effect
WHo knows what would have happened if Adolf had left the US alone after Pearl?
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Except the codebreaking part.
A German brought the Enigma Codemachine once to a Convention in Poland but Nobody cared for it so much before WWII.
After WWII started it was Remembered by the Allies and soon figured out how it works, so the code was cracked for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, just not for the German Kriegsmarine.
The German U-boats used a diffrent roll first and later two rolls of the enigma codemachine instead of one…that was the key element to make it so hard to crack!!!..
when the brits opened Blechleypark they knew what to go after for, just don’t had the right equipment so they had to built a Computer first…the rest is well known… -
Yes there was exposure to the Enigma machine, how do you explain the quickness with which the Japanese code was cracked?
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As far as I can see the US would have declared war on Germany for 2 reasons.
A-The would have felt a morale oblegation aginst NAZIs
and
B-They would not have licked another really powerful nation in the war. Thats why their help to Russia was limited to on;y the essintals.PS-What is FDR. Is it some US abbrivation.
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