We did get a song out of it...
Posted on 09/09/2018 9:55:03 PM PDT by OddLane
That's true, but after Pearl Harbor, we were looking for something, anyway to give us a way in. We basically already committed to "Europe First" even before Pearl.
That's also true but, in everything that I've ready, the FDR administration wasn't very confident that they could swing the country behind declaring war on Germany. The country was white-hot against the Japanese for Pearl Harbor and it was probably a little less than 50-50 that the a declaration of war against Germany could have been made.
Germany declaring war on the US made everything easy for the US government ...
Fat fingers ...
And then there is the fact that even by 1941, we were still ramping up the military and we really weren’t ready to do very much then.
FDR was probably holding out for another year or two before committing. But Pearl changed all that.
Fact is, the Empire was finished, although few at the time understood that. The subjects were tired of being, well, subjects. India was so big the Brits could not hold it once the people wanted self-government. And even places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand wanted to be treated as equals, not as Imperial outposts.
British financial disarray was not due to America. The City had been bled deeply by the cost of WWI. By 1941, Britain was broke, even considering its gold reserves. Granting the US rights to bases in British possessions was the tissue that allowed Roosevelt to sell Lend-Lease to a country still dominated by isolationists. In reality, Lend-Lease was a massive foreign aid program from which the US got little monetary value in return - but did get two allies capable of fighting.
The socialists took over England after WW2 and the big decline surged forward.
They get so sick of the established historical narratives that they loudly and defiantly proclaim the opposite.
It's not any more true -- usually it's less true -- but it isn't boring and it does purge out all the tired orthodoxies people grew up with.
I don't think we have to take Peter's article very that seriously.
Funny!
Chamberlain could have killed rearmament, but he didn't.
It would be a mistake to assume that there was heavy support for rearmament that forced Chamberlain's hand.
Churchill didn't represent public opinion. He was a voice in the wilderness people didn't listen to.
Did Neville Chamberlain create the conditions for the RAF to win the Battle of Britain?
> “It would be a mistake to assume that there was heavy support for rearmament that forced Chamberlain’s hand.”
I never said that there was HEAVY support for rearmament, but the support definitely shifted from less than half to more than half (votes). The “Peace in Our Time” document signing was the exact moment of the change. That is why England survived (very narrowly).
Labour pretended afterwards that Chamberlain was more opposed to rearmament than they were, which wasn't true. Churchill's supporters likewise played up the differences between Churchill and Chamberlain to make Chamberlain represent military unpreparedness, which also wasn't true.
Ironically, things worked out for the country, because when war did come Britain did have newer and better planes than would have been available if the country had gone to war in 1938 or had started seriously rearming back in 1935 or 1936. Chamberlain didn't intend that, of course, but it turned out that Britain had good luck.
> “Chamberlain didn’t intend that, of course, but it turned out that Britain had good luck.”
I agree with this.
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