Part of the problem that the US Navy ran into when it went to war was that – like many military forces before or since – it had to learn some things for itself before it believed them. The British had over two years of experience fighting the Battle of the Atlantic at that point, but the Americans didn’t feel that they needed any advice from them on the matter. It didn’t help that Admiral Ernest J. King was an Anglophobe, in addition to having a generally abrasive personality. (His wife reputedly once said: “Ernie is the most even-tempered man I’ve ever met. He’s always in a foul mood.”) As a result, the Americans made mistakes in their early ASW methods of operations which could have been avoided. In fairness, the US Army had similar learning-curve problems in North Africa, notably at Kasserine Pass if I remember correctly.
Most over-rated WWII Leader
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@strategic:
I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.
If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe. I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers. I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them. The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.
At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.