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- Newsgroups: soc.history
- Path: sparky!uunet!well!moon!island!fester
- From: fester@island.COM (Mike Fester)
- Subject: Re: Isolationist?
- Message-ID: <1992Nov17.173802.3126@island.COM>
- Sender: usenet@island.COM (The Usenet mail target)
- Organization: /usr/local/rn/organization
- References: <1992Nov15.164537.7160@midway.uchicago.edu> <1992Nov15.211734.17693@gordian.com> <dxb105-161192142228@theophys1.anu.edu.au>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 17:38:02 GMT
- Lines: 39
-
- In article <dxb105-161192142228@theophys1.anu.edu.au> dxb105@phys.anu.edu.au (David Bofinger) writes:
- >In article <1992Nov15.211734.17693@gordian.com>, mike@gordian.com
- >(Michael A. Thomas) wrote:
- >> In article <1992Nov15.164537.7160@midway.uchicago.edu>,
- >thf2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank) writes:
- >> > Yes, but England wouldn't have withstood as long as it did if the
- >> > US hadn't taken sides long before Pearl Harbor.
- >
- >Interesting question: just how close did the UK come to collapse before
- >the US started providing real support? And which form of support was the
- >most important?
-
- Even with US aid, they came very close to running out of aircraft and spare
- parts during The Battle of Britain. I have read in various sources that the
- British were down to about 1 week supplies. Hitler, for various reasons,
- switched to the far less effective night time Blitz. The attack on civilian
- targets, while terrible, did far less damage to the RAF than daylight pin
- point attacks on airbases, factories, etc.
-
- >> Besides, it was no
- >> secret that the Axis powers were allied.
- >
- >Something of a secret from Adolf Hitler, perhaps. He spent a lot of
- >effort trying to convince the Japanese (Turks, Rumanians, Finns) to join
- >in the attack on Russia. The US policy-makers of the time, however,
- >certainly thought that the Anti-Comintern pact was much more solid than
- >it was.
-
- Hitler apparantly did as well. As you say, he kept trying to pressure the
- Japanese into opening a second front in Asia against the Russians (most
- likely, one of the reasons he declared war on us). One reason they didn't:
- they had in fact attacked Soviet positions along the Mongolia-"Manchukoku"
- border in the late '30s (the Nomonhan incident) and had gotten their military
- clocks cleaned. This could not have been unknown to Hitler, as it made
- the newsreels in the US at the time.
-
- Mike
- --
- Disclaimer - I'm only doing what the little voices tell me to do.
-