A day in history.

If the US had not entered the war in Europe Germany would not have been short of anything. They controlled most of the continent early on and who would stop them from continuing to do that? Not Britain and not Russia.

The Manhattan Project in the US came about because Einstein and other scientists warned Roosevelt that the Germans were experimenting with nuclear science. Germany had plenty of capable scientists who were not Jewish.

Go to a map and point to the known uranium mines active in Europe in 1938. Unless I'm wildly off point here, you won't find any large amounts of known (then) uranium deposits where the Panzers were roaming.

Would Germany have conquered Russia without the US getting and making the second front more than a pipe dream? Maybe, but I think not.

By December of 1941, Hitler had lost the battle of Moscow, the battle of Rostov, and the USSR was launching a counter offensive. In January of 1942 Stalin was planning a spring offensive - and I can't see the Japanese attack on the US impacting any of that action.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_%28World_War_II%29#Soviet_counter-offensiv e:_Winter_1941 for more information (and plenty of links) of a part of the war that had little (if any) input from the Western Allies.

What is more likely is exhausted armies resulting in even bloodier battles, maybe with Spain joining (Franco wanted some French lands that Hitler wouldn't bribe him with), and the Iron Curtain falling further West. Would the Russians have been able to battle through the Austrian and Italian Alps? Probably not (historically the Western Allies didn't attempt that) and if things looked that bad Italy could have made a separate peace - possible after the fall of Germany.

But that's not a nice picture of the world... Even with the Soviets exhausted from all those years of war it wouldn't have been nice.

Gioodgulf

Well, there were the American people and then there was U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt--the American people wanted the U.S.A. to stay out of the European war if possible while Roosevelt strongly desired that the U.S.A. enter it, although he couldn't admit to that publicly--but he told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that he was looking for a pretext to ask Congress to declare war on Germany. The U.S. Navy was openly attacking German U-boats and providing convoy escorts to British merchant ships partway across the Atlantic Ocean by the summer of 1941, actions that Roosevelt cheerfully denied--he claimed the escorting of British shipping was simply a series of "drills" by American naval vessels.

The Atlantic Charter, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill at sea in August of '41, was essentially a statement of the war aims of the Anglo-American powers, certainly a clear indication that Roosevelt intended to take the U.S.A. into the European war as soon as possible.

Did the American people "set themselves up" to go to war? Of course not, because the American people weren't the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces--that was Roosevelt's individual role as president. The idea that the oceans bordering the U.S.A. kept it safe from foreign attack was a nineteenth-century concept that many Americans still believed in the early twentieth century--but Roosevelt knew otherwise, he was fully aware that if Germany dominated Europe and Japan controlled the Far East they could eventually pose a threat to the U.S.A., economically and at some point militarily as well. BTW, the war production was what finally pulled the American economy all the way into full prosperity again; a major conflict fought on foreign soil is almost always good for a country's business activity.

Were the American people genuinely outraged by the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Obviously, because it was an underhanded attack while Japan was negotiating with the U.S.A., supposedly attempting to peacefully resolve their differences. Roosevelt may have been outraged as well, and at any rate as a master politician he publicly expressed only outrage at the time--but he was certainly gratified when Germany declared war on the U.S.A. three days later and he got what he'd wanted for over a year, American entry into the European war.

I've seen "Tora, Tora, Tora" several times, but it was made in the 1960s (IIRC) and therefore is based on what was known or believed at that time RE the Pearl Harbor attack; furthermore, it's focus is almost entirely on military matters rather than on political machinations within the Japanese and American governments, notably Roosevelt's intention to do whatever was necessary to draw the U.S.A. into a war against Germany--something not necessarily known too well at that time.

AFAIC it was ultimately about confronting Adolf Hitler... --C.K.

Although it may be difficult to find a copy, for the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, whichever network Walter Cronkite was on, produced a special called "Pearl Harbor: Two Hours that Changed the World." This show interviews both Americans and Japanese who were present during the attack and looks at the events that led up to it, military and political. Japan realized that with the English, French, and Dutch pre-occupied with the war in Europe, the US was the only nation that could stop Japanese expansion in the Pacific. The Japanese, who were highly racist when it came to racially impure societies, severely underestimated American resolve. On the other hand, racist Americans severely underestimated Japanese abilities as warriors. Both nations learned hard lessons during the war due to those views.

The US had at least 7 warnings of an impending Japanese attack, including one sent from Peru's ambassador to Japan, who had overheard Japanese officials talking about it. We ignored them all. Nearly 20 years ago, I showed my students the Pearl Harbor special, along with the movie Final Countdown. which is about the modern aircraft carrier Nimitz getting transported back in time to December 6, 1941 and in a position to stop the Japanese attack before it begins. I then had my students write a paper about how they would convince the American authorities that the attack would happen if they could go back in time, and even if they should, since it would change history in ways that we can only imagine, and perhaps not for the good.

Someone else commented on the unlikelihood of finding similar discussions on other spanking sites. I was going to comment on that, but he beat me to it. I think discussions like this one is one of the things that makes this site special. Yes, we all enjoy spanking, but our lives are not so narrow so as to embrace only spanking, to the exclusion of all else. It's probably also why we get such good stories on this site. We have educated people here who also happen to like writing spanking stories.

I might recommend "One Day Of Magic," the first chapter of David Kahn's The Codebreakers if you are interested in reading about how the US was intercepting and decrypting the Japanese cables.


The Japanese plan was on what I would call an absolutely strict timetable. Unfortunately for everyone, Murphy intervened -- on both sides, I might add.

CrimsonKidCK

I don't doubt that the Japaness commanders, seeing the Royal Navy's success at Taranto, recognised the value aircraft and aircraft carriers. But Taranto, like Pearl Harbor, was an attack by aircraft on dreadnought battleships at rest in their bases.

ON th eother hand, I do doubt whether, at the time of the attack, the High Commands in either navy (or in the US Navy) realised the transformation in strategy and tactics that was about to result from the development of the aircraft carrier. (The battle of Midway, which sounded the death-knell of the dreadnought battleship, and confirmed the aircraft carrier as the capital ship of the future, was still six months or so in the future).

For my part, the absence of the carriers from Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941 was just a coincidence, and the USA's unpreparedness for the Japanese attack was a cock-up not a conspiracy. But seventy years on, as the attack passes out of living memoray, I suppose we will never know for certain.

Re the rise of the Aircraft Carrier-Two British capital ships were sunk off Singapore by Japanese aircraft- with massive loss of life; and if the Admiralty had forgotten Taranto, they certainly now knew that the day of the battleship, except possibly for shore bombardment as in D-Day was certainly over

I am pleased so many authors and members share my interest for naval history. I agree with Goodgulf and Tagetarear about Pearl Harbor. I think it took time for admirals who had graduated from USNA about 1905 to understand that the battleships were no longer "the queens of the seas", and I don't think they understood it 1941.

May I suggest you use your knowledge to write spanking stories about naval officers in WW2 and the beginning of the cold war. I am sure it was a lot of wives, daughters, Wrens and WAVES who needed to be spanked. I am sure many WAVES and Wrens preferd a spanking instead of extra duty and confinement.

Often they didn't have a choice. Check DJ Black's site, "A Voice in the Corner" under "real life spankings" and you will find a number of women enlisted personnel who wrote in detailing their spankings during WW II mostly in the British military.

I find most conspiracy theories pretty uncompelling. One reason is that such theories have abounded through history, but have very rarely been supported by anything coming to light later - and if you think about secret diaries, changes of heart, interrogation of conspirators after their eventual failure and the rest, the chances of a conspiracy staying secret aren't good. Oddly enough, though, one almost universally discounted by historians for a long time - Abraham Lincoln's suggestion that there was collusion between Chief Justice Taney, President Buchanan and southern interests over the Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court which strongly supported slaveholder interests - may have been correct.

Another reason is that the theorists hugely underestimate the human capacity for wilful blindness and incompetence. In 1941 the US military, like the British, were blind to the quality of the Japanese armed forces. They were little yellow men from a quaint culture, after all. No large-scale air attack on a massive, well-armed fleet in a purpose-built military harbour had ever been attempted. The Americans in Pearl Harbor were nervous, but they feared ethnic Japanese saboteurs more than Zeros and consequently disposed their fighter aircraft in ways well-devised to make sabotage difficult but a gift to Japanese fighters. The fact that American radar picked up unidentified incoming planes but this was discounted at a relatively junior level does not fit well with a well-oiled conspiracy but does fit well with a psychology that cannot accept that the extraordinary may one day happen and that day may be today: there are countless examples of this both from military affairs and from accidents and other disasters.

Finally, the success of the Japanese attack greatly weakened the US in its fight against a strong enemy, and had the battle of the Coral Sea gone the other way or a lesser commander than Nimitz led the Americans there, the oucome of the conflict could have been different, at least to the extent of prolonguing the war in the Pacific by two or three years with massive additional casualties (remember that in 1941 Roosevelt could not know the H bomb would be ready by 1945). If a Japanese declaration of war had been accompanied by an unsuccessful attack on Pearl Harbor, would Americans not have pursued the war?

Wow, can we work in spanking here somewhere?