@Narvik:

@ChocolatePancake:

Also, don’t forget that the USA had the nuclear option.
If the war in Europe kept on grinding, then I bet the allies would have eventually nuked Germany out of existence.
With the overwhelming air and naval advantage the allies had, Germany would have had no chance.

I don’t think so. They only made two bombs, and had stuff for one more. You could hardly bomb any nation out of existence with that. Strategic bombing is also severely overrated, it cost more to build bombs than the value of the cornfields that most of them land in. The Allied bombing killed more French cows than Germans, and that’s a fact. I figure the Allies would have won anyway, but because of Patton and not the Bomb.

Not true.  The United States had more weapons in 1945 than simply two… they had a production bottleneck, but by the end of the calendar year of '45, they had around a dozen weapons or so, and ramping up production.

Would have taken longer, but yes, we could have leveled a lot of industrial areas of Germany (or Japan) using nuclear weapons.

Yes, there were three bombs built… but more were ready by the third week in August, with the third bomb two be dropped on Japan by 19 August, with another three weapons ready by September, and another three to be ready in October, for a total of 9 weapons to be dropped on the Home Islands before Olympic took off in November.

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf

@Narvik:

@ChocolatePancake:

Also, don’t forget that the USA had the nuclear option.
If the war in Europe kept on grinding, then I bet the allies would have eventually nuked Germany out of existence.
With the overwhelming air and naval advantage the allies had, Germany would have had no chance.

I don’t think so. They only made two bombs, and had stuff for one more. You could hardly bomb any nation out of existence with that. Strategic bombing is also severely overrated, it cost more to build bombs than the value of the cornfields that most of them land in. The Allied bombing killed more French cows than Germans, and that’s a fact. I figure the Allies would have won anyway, but because of Patton and not the Bomb.

Not true.  The United States had more weapons in 1945 than simply two… they had a production bottleneck, but by the end of the calendar year of '45, they had around a dozen weapons or so, and ramping up production.

Would have taken longer, but yes, we could have leveled a lot of industrial areas of Germany (or Japan) using nuclear weapons.

@General:

I wonder if access to all those minerals in Eastern Russia and Siberia would have jumpstarted the German atomic program, along with the natural momentum of subduing the Soviet Union. Image a new Cold War breaking out between US and German-led blocs.

On a side note I do feel Germany should be rewarded for Russian conquest by having Turkey and Spain ally with them since they were on the fence to begin with.

The problem wasn’t raw materials for the Nazis.  Their problem was that Heisenberg couldn’t figure out how to achieve yield through critical mass.  Their scientists simply weren’t as good as Fermi, Oppenheimer, and the rest of the University of Chicago physics department.

That’s absolutely true.  The Manhattan Project was always designed to be used against the Germans.

Except Vietnam is far, far closer to the United States these days than China.  Why then would you make them a Chinese ally (whom they hate) and not part of a Pacific coalition?

So says the guy who is literally advocating using nuclear weapons to “wipe out” a race of people “once and for all.”

You need to look up the definition of a Holocaust, buddy.

Do you honestly not understand the difference between targeted strikes using precision munitions, and advocating using nuclear weapons to wipe an entire nation “off the map” in order to get the whole mess resolved “once and for all?”  Your words–eerily reminiscent of a “final solution” even.

From today’s NY Times.  I can’t post a link, so here is the text.

FIFTY years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a strategic bombing campaign against targets in North Vietnam, an escalation of the conflict in Southeast Asia that was swiftly followed by the deployment of American ground troops. Last month, President Obama expanded a strategic bombing campaign against Islamic insurgents in the Middle East, escalating the attack beyond Iraq into Syria.

Will Mr. Obama repeat history and commit ground troops? Many analysts believe so, and top officials are calling for it. But the president has expressed skepticism about what American force can accomplish in this kind of struggle, and he has resisted the urgings of hawks inside and outside the administration who want him to go in deeper. Mr. Obama, his supporters say, is a “gloomy realist” who has learned history’s lesson: that American military power, no matter how great in relative terms, is ultimately of limited utility in conflicts that are, at their root, political or ideological in nature.

It’s a powerful, reasoned position, amply supported by the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. But that history also shows that a president’s attitude and analytical assessment, no matter how gloomily realistic, are not necessarily an antidote to ill-advised military action. Foreign intervention has a logic all to itself.

Today we think of Lyndon Johnson as a man unwaveringly committed to prevailing in Vietnam. But at least at first, he shared Mr. Obama’s pessimism. He and his advisers knew they faced an immense challenge in attempting to suppress the insurgency in South Vietnam. “A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere,” he said privately in early March 1965. “But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”

Johnson also knew that the Democratic leadership in the Senate shared his misgivings, and that key allied governments counseled against escalation and in favor of a political solution.

On occasion the president even allowed himself to question whether the outcome in Vietnam really mattered to American and Western security. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” he despaired in 1964, even as he was laying plans to expand American involvement. “What’s it worth to this country?”

At other times Johnson was quite capable of arguing for the geopolitical importance of the struggle — he was adept at tailoring his Vietnam analysis to his needs of the moment. But the overall picture that emerges in the administration’s massive internal record for 1964-65 is of a president deeply skeptical that the war could be won, even with large-scale escalation, and far from certain that it was necessary even to try.

So why did Johnson take the plunge? In part because he was hemmed in — not merely by 15 years of steadily growing American involvement in Indochina, but, more important, by his own and his advisers’ use of overheated rhetoric to describe the stakes in Vietnam and their confidence in victory. Moreover, he had personalized the war, and saw any criticism of its progress as an attack on him, compromising his ability to see the conflict objectively.

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We know the results. In the very week in which he professed to see “no daylight” in the struggle, Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder, the graduated, sustained aerial bombardment against North Vietnam; also that week, he dispatched the first combat troops. More soon followed, and by the end of 1965, some 180,000 men were on the ground in South Vietnam. Ultimately, the count would top half a million.

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Recent Comments

R.
3 hours ago
Syria is Obama’s Rwanda.

Mike Roddy
13 hours ago
Your last quote from Johnson is correct, and applies to today’s situation in Iraq and Syria. Deploying ground troops there would be a…

Ed
16 hours ago
To compare President Johnson to President Obama is ridiculous. Personalities do matter; personal life experiences do matter. Johnson was in…

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True, it’s hard to imagine Mr. Obama ordering a Johnson-style surge of combat forces to Iraq or Syria. The circumstances on the ground are dissimilar, and he sees the world and America’s role in it differently than Johnson did. By all accounts he is less inclined to personalize foreign policy tests, and less threatened by diverse views among his advisers.

In these respects he is much closer in his sensibility and approach to another Vietnam-era president, John F. Kennedy. He consistently rejected the proposals of civilian aides and military leaders to commit combat forces to Vietnam, but he also significantly expanded American involvement in the conflict during his thousand days in office, complicating the choices open to his successor. Whether he could have continued to walk that line, as Mr. Obama is trying to do, is an unanswerable question.

But the point is not about biography; rather, it’s about the inability of a president, once committed to military intervention, to control the course of events. War has a forward motion of its own. Most of Johnson’s major steps in the escalation in Vietnam were in response to unforeseen obstacles, setbacks and shortcomings. There’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t repeat itself in 2014.

And there is a political logic, too: Then as now, the president faced unrelenting pressure from various quarters to do more, to fight the fight, to intensify the battle. Then as now, the alarmist rhetoric by the president and senior officials served to reduce their perceived maneuverability, not least in domestic political terms. Johnson was no warmonger, and he feared, rightly, that Vietnam would be his undoing. Nonetheless, he took his nation into a protracted struggle that ended in bitter defeat.

“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out,” a sullen Johnson told McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, in 1964. One can only hope the same sentiment is not being expressed in the Oval Office today.

Glad we have folks advocating for a second Holocaust on the boards…

@Redleg13A:

I am in the US Army and have been for 13 years…I have many friends at many military posts…and lots of orders are showing up saying “somewhere in CENTCOM”.

I recieved similar orders stating the same such words in January of 2003…

A word of advice too, the more the politicians deny something, the more likely it is going to happen. Look for the narrative to start to change about boots on the ground (it already has to an extent)…once everyone is nice and comfy in their new, or old, political offices about 15 Nov, you will see a much more aggressive call to action. You’ll see.

Possibly… although, if you believe that Obama is doing air strikes simply to shift the media narrative away from “we’re doing nothing,” to “we’re bombing them, see, we’re doing something,” and that the President is merely a political opportunist who is deeply uninterested in defense policy, then don’t expect to see boots on the ground.

I’m not saying you’re right, but I’ve seen enough WARNORDs that never turned into EXORDs to think that this could all be smoke to shift the political narrative.