king bloo;3883267 said:
Moscow was the tipping point. Hitler knew he had to beat Russia before winter and failed to do it in time.
this is not a correct theory about Hitler, because you have to remember that his philosophy was that Germany could not fail to crush the USSR as the USSR was filled with less-than-human Slavs. does anyone who knows anything about fighting seriously in Russia know how serious the Russian winter is? sure, but Hitler was a fucking idiot on that score.
king bloo;3883267 said:
After that, it was all downhill. From what I remember, many WW2 historians pretty much point to Dec 6th as the point where Germany really lost the war. Dec7th was just the icing on the cake with the US getting involved officially.
a few points:
01. name some of these "many WW2 historians," as i have never heard this theory
02. "the point where Germany really lost the war" is a vague concept, because some people cite ideas like "well, when the USSR and the US got involved, there was no way Germany could ultimately win." but if you want to talk "after that, it was all downhill," then we should really be talking Stalingrad, which would place "all downhill from here" point around February 1943. this is, to say the least, not prior to the US entrance into WWII.
03. one thing you should also remember is that the US started supplying the USSR via Lend-Lease prior to our official entrance into the war, and Britain sooner than that. so to touch on the RACISM RACISM RACISM part again, the US was essentially provoking Germany as much as they were Japan... and this also plays into the USSR's ability to fight Germany.
king bloo;3883267 said:
The flying tigers were responsible for hits against Japanese in China prior to the attack on PH and we were going out of our way to otherwise piss off the Japanese. The American Volunteer Group, as they were called, were typically experienced US fighter pilots that were discharged and allowed to "volunteer" to help China unofficially because we were not in the war yet. Once the US entered the war, they re-enlisted in our military and gave birth to the Flying Tigers. Their planes were decorated almost identically in both the Chinese and American versions of their squadron. The documentation supporting all of this was declassified in the 90s.
i am familiar with the Flying Tigers, but all the biography is irrelevant to what we're talking about: did they attack Japanese targets prior to December 7th? no. they were selected and trained in the summer of 1941, they had largely arrived in Asia by November 1941, and they first struck Japanese targets on December 20th, 1941. ALL of this is after Pearl Harbor.
king bloo;3883267 said:
You're assuming that we didn't want to go to war. See below...
i'm not assuming this at all; in fact, i explicitly stated in my prior post that FDR
DID want to go to war. not wanting to go to war has NOTHING to do with planning for an attack, if you know one is coming, to minimize loss and maximize your response. if Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in the manner they did and been decimated, it would still have been justification.
king bloo;3883267 said:
My bad, I'm old, cut an aging nigga some slack. You're right, Franklin Roosevelt was President.
let me be honest: i point this out largely because you told people to read some books.
king bloo;3883267 said:
Again, the American public had pretty much had enough of war after having lost men in WWI. We were supporting our allies with weapons and some maritime cover via our warships, but we had no taste for real war anymore. It's true we were friendly with China and they were suffering at the hands of the Japanese, but without having been attacked directly the American public had no want for war. Thus, the plan to piss off the Japanese while helping out our Chinese friends was drafted and initiated.
another brief list:
01. no dispute that post-WWI Americans were not clamoring for war, but this doesn't mean that ANY attack on Pearl Harbor would not have roused our desire to attack (and we should also note that the Japanese did a lot more than attack Pearl Harbor). my point here is that Pearl Harbor's defenses were set up at the time of the attack for sabotage more than anything else; changing something like that, if we'd known clearly what the attack was going to have been, would have saved lives and material while STILL allowing us to say "Japan attacked us" and call for war. and as a tie in to that, you have to remember that at the time of Pearl Harbor, military theory rated battleships as much more important than carriers, so to let Japan do such damage for the purposes of starting a war you want to WIN later still doesn't make sense.
02. i'm going a little beyond "friendly with China" to say that FDR & Friends were very enraged over what Japan was doing there.
king bloo;3883267 said:
The Flying Tigers WERE actively engaging Japanese targets prior to Dec 7th, and it's documented (as I said earlier, it's been declassified) but rarely ever discussed though there is a documentary or two out there that speaks on it. The Flying Tigers had downed at least 100 Japanese planes months before PH.
then please support this with SOME kind of citation, because everything i see says otherwise. i will obviously acknowledge it if you can prove it. now you COULD claim that allowing this unit to be constructed prior to Pearl Harbor was meant to provoke them... but this might also force you to admit the foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor was not what you have implied it to be.