Greenfield: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

FrontPage ^ | 9/7/17 | Greenfield

[marktwain]

The major totalitarian power fought against each other. Germany and the Soviet Union did most of the fighting and killing.

The U.S. and the rest of the allies had a major role, we supplied much of the material that made the Soviet victory over the Germans possible; we defeated the Japanese and the Italians.

It was American air-power that destroyed the German war machine at home.

[schurmann]

“Who was it that was the deciding factor in WWII....”

Sir Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “You can count on the Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else first.”

American intervention was a deciding factor in the First World War; the US land forces were the only ones that did not implode during that conflict.

I fault the Americans of the 1914-1918 period for daring to believe they could play both ends against the middle, indefinitely. And for determined blindness, in refusing to recognize where the preponderance of US interests resided, until almost too late.

I wasn’t thinking of US industrial power supplying the Allies during the 1939-1945 period, contributing a great deal to final victory.

I was thinking of the mulish inward-looking isolationism and pacificsm of the period 1931-41. Some of it afflicted the Allies too.

With Adolf Hitler and his coterie of thugs in charge, a resurgent Germany bluffed the Western Allies over and over, watching carefully to see if France and Britain were going to stand up to him, or back down.

They backed down, every time until the German attack on Poland.

What-ifs and might-have-beens are problematic in the study of history, but it’s a fair bet that if the United States had thrown its weight behind France and Britain when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, the situation could have been defuzed short of the widespread war that ultimately happened.

But the United States was too enamored of navel-gazing.

[schurmann]

“...It was American air-power that destroyed the German war machine at home.”

British air power played a major role also.

And after Nazi propaganda was discredited, and post-1985 historical analyses were conducted, it was found that air attacks on Third Reich populace and industry had pushed the Germans to the very brink, between three and five times. But by ill luck, the Western Allies did not discover how close they’d come to success, and redirected efforts elsewhere, just in time to avoid German collapse.

The level of destruction inflicted on Imperial Japan was less than Nazi Germany sustained, but by mid 1945, war production was greatly reduced because imported resources had been almost entirely cut off through a combination of US submarine interdiction, naval blockade, and aerial mining (conducted largely by the US B-29 fleet). Had the war continued into 1946 death by starvation would have become widespread.

The commonplace that direct air attack cannot halt industry nor sufficiently undercut civilian morale is a postwar creation, largely driven by interservice rivalries. The senior US armed services are still deeply distressed - insulted even - that American aviators had the bad taste to come out of nowhere and win the war before they were ready.