View Single Post
(#27 (permalink))
Old
samurai007's Avatar
samurai007 (Offline)
JF Old Timer
 
Posts: 890
Join Date: Oct 2007
12-05-2007, 06:54 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tenchu View Post
Samurai000,

I never said they were responsible. You made that up. I will not hold someone responsible for their fathers actions or what not. And I never said atrocities piss me off, you made that up. I said I was disgusted at the cowardice of the US during the WW2. They knew they were going to enter both wars, but they held back and let their allies be slaughtered so when they come into the fight they look like a knight in shineing armour, when truth be it, if Germany was fighting them from the begining of the war, as with Japan, then who knows who would have won. It was an extremely clever tactic that promised the victory of allied forces on both fronts, however it was extremely coward too. That is what my problem is. Read what I said and base what you think of me on that, not the thoughts going on in your head. You are a creative person, that is a good thing, but dont let you take it too far, okay.

Oh, and for your info, the reason I dont forgive now and I say this is part of American culture (cowardness) is coz they did dodgey stuff in Vietnam too, and again in Iraq. They have not changed.
You seem to have learned some fictional American history, so let me try to enlighten you. America in the 1930's was in what's called the Great Depression (Great Depression) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Millions of people were out of work, many farms were destroyed by the Dust Bowl (Dust Bowl) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and the economy was the worst it has ever been in US history, before or since. We had aided Europe in WW1 and over 320,000 Americans were killed or wounded in what was often seen in the US as a European conflict that need not have really concerned the US. In fact, the US entering WW1 was sometimes called "Wilson's Folly" because Woodrow Wilson was the US President who decided to get the US into WW1.

So, the bitter and very recent memories of WW1 and the devastating effects of the Great Depression combined meant that the US really had no intention of entering WW2 when it started. As the war went on, FDR began to send some lend/lease aid to England and the allies, but was still determined to not personally enter the war, even after the German U-boats began sinking US ships in the Atlantic. It was not until 1942 that FDR began to change his mind and begin to think about the possible need for the US to join the war, but inertia still prevented him from acting. If the Japanese had not sneak attacked us at Pearl Harbor, FDR would have faced stiff opposition to any attempts to declare war on Germany and Japan. It might still have happened, but probably not for months, and maybe years, and by then, the Axis may have destroyed the other allies sufficiently that the war may have ended very differently.

Pearl Harbor not only gave FDR an excuse to join the war, it became a rallying cry for all of America, uniting the country and filling it with a will to fight and win the war, to buy War Bonds, to ramp up to a war-time economy, to invent new technologies, etc, etc. A divided and half-hearted America might well have pulled out after losing thousands and thousands of men in a single day numerous times, such as at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Japan was always seen as less of a threat than Germany, and had they never personally attacked us, we might well have ended the war after Victory in Europe, assuming we accomplished that at all, and just let Japan keep their Empire so long as they didn't bother us.

That is what really happened, not some "cowardly" ploy from the start to hang back and ride in as the heroes of the day.


JET Program, 1996-98, Wakayama-ken, Hashimoto-shi

Link to pictures from my time in Japan

Last edited by samurai007 : 12-05-2007 at 06:56 AM.
Reply With Quote