Hess apparently underestimated the influence the university redwing elite had on the government. So did Churchill; so did we.

You say "Germanophobia" as if it were a bad thing.

It lost the War.

Which "it" lost what war? And what do you mean by lost?

The inability to think rationally about Germans made us focus on them all out of proportion to the no less evil and dangerous Soviets.

No less evil, much less dangerous -- to us.

Neither was a danger to us. In leaving the Soviets in place we locked ouselves into a fifty year war that wasted our tax dollars, the lives of our armed forces, the social cohesiuon of our society and the lives of 100 million foreigners.

On the other hand, doing what Orrin would have approved would have locked us into diplomatic relations with a Nazi regime in Berlin.

It was a mistake by Coolidge to finance Hitler. As I see it, anyway.

Not everybody agrees, even now.

OK, I'm feeling benevolent, so I'll bite. I have never before heard any suggestion of a connection between Calvin Coolidge and Adolph Hitler and Google is unable to enlighten me. As CC left office in '29 and AH didn't get into office until '33, I'm skeptical that there's much of a connection between them.

I think they both wore brown shirts.

OJ: Funny thing about the USSR: from 1946 to its demise, it never fought a war of conquest. I doubt the Nazis would have done as well.

We had nuclear weapons. The Nazis would have behaved identically.

We wouldn't have, but for fighting the Nazis.

We wouldn't have needed them had we not fought the Nazis.

Talk about your feedback loops.

Sorry, this doesn't clear it up for me. If it was a sting operation and Hess was crazy, why keep him locked up, in pretty much his own personal prison, out of reach of the media, until he died in 1987? It makes no sense that people like Albert Speer got shorter sentences.

Hess was locked up away from the media because had he been given access to the press he would have spilled the beans about the extent to which the British upper classes were ready, willing and able to betray the British people. Halifax, Hoare, Eden, Lady Astor and Edward VIII and the rest of the Cliveden set(including Viscount Massey) were collaborators with Hitler on even a more slavish level than Petain and Laval. Churchill of course knew this and realized that had the news of this treachery broken while Londoners were subjected to the Luftwaffe blitz, it would have resulted in something not unlike the October Revolution. The Britain of Empire that Churchill loved so much and to which he was totally devoted would have collapsed like the flimsy house of cards it was by 1940.

Exactly the opposite--they couldn't afford to have it revealed that there was internal opposition to the war in Nazi Germany. Read anything Harry posts on the topic--the New Deal/Vansitartt-Churchill/Stalinist ideology required that every German be a Nazi.

Nonsense, OJ.

Popular films of the period are full of anti-Nazi Germans collaborating with Allied spies. If there was any place where that kind of racist nonsense was applied it was with respect to Japan, where every Japanese was seen as a murderous subhuman, with poor eyesight and buck teeth.

Moreover, if the Western allies actually were interested in what you are trying to peddle, they would have simply instituted the Morgenthau Plan after WWII. In fact quite the opposite occured.

Bart:

Only because they were stunned to discover that the Soviets were just as bad and had to scramble. Even at that, they effectively enacted the Morgenthau Plan in East Germany and Poland.

Confronting the Soviet military in Europe was a physical impossibility for the US in 1945. We had neither the men nor the willpower at home. More importantly, in free elections all across the nations liberated from the Nazis that became the West, the Communists were receiving 30-40 percent of the vote. They arguably won in Italy and the Schumacher pacifist socialists arguably won in Germany. Any American confrontation with the Soviets would have resulted in significant 5th column action against our troops and quite possibly on the home front. Our bombers could never have reached Moscow, let alone the Soviet factories which were located in the Urals.

America had no goal of reducing Poland to agrarian poverty.

Yes we did--FDR hated the Poles. Just listen to Harry speak about them to get some idea of how New Dealers felt about them.

An administration that cooked up Pearl could easily have provoked war with the Soviets and we'd have won rather easily, though obviouslty the better solution was just to let Nazis and Commies punch each other to a standstill and let the regimes fall.

FDR may have hated the Poles. After all he hated Blacks and Jews. But one thing he could do was count votes. Alienating Polish Americans could cost him dearly in Illinois, Connecticut, Wisconsin and NJ inter alia. He wasn't about to do that, and his political advisers would never let him do that.

Japan chose to bomb Pearl Harbor and thus reaped the whirlwind. Any notion that FDR somehow encouraged this is merely apologetics for Hitler.

Bart;

yes, that's part of why he helped cover up Katyn and all of why he covered up his own betrayal of Poland at Teheran.

FDR provoked Japan, he was just too racist to realize how much damage they could do at Pearl.

There is no evidence that the US, which had virtually no foreign intelligence at the time, knew anything other than the official reports or the British ones about Katyn, which blamed the massacre on the Nazis. The US was not prepared to go to war over Poland and the London Poles, with their Nuremberg-style anti-Jewish legislation, would have been a very tough sell to war-weary Americans. The Brits had already sold them down the river. As it was, we let Chiang Kai-Shek get booted off to a crappy little island, and China was infinitely more important to us than Poland, and Chiang was merely a garden variety crook not a fascist thug.

Japan and the US had issues. We had issues and have issues with a lot of places. Our embargo of Japan was less stringent than our current one against Cuba and far less stringent than our current one against North Korea. Would you make the claim that El Tirano Castro is entitled to bomb Miami Beach, without it resulting in an American response? Would you claim that the DPRK is justified in throwing a few nukes at the West Coast?

Bart:

That's simply false--we and the Brits knew the Soviets had done it. it's an outdated and discredited New Dealer claim that we didn't know.

But you have the second part right--we did sell out the Poles.

It wasn't a matter of 'selling out the Poles.' It was more that we had no realistic alternative. Do you really think the US was going to go to war with the Soviets in 1945? That there was any serious constituency for that in the US? Everyone from the Taft GOP to the Wallaceites would have opposed it. The military was probably most opposed, as they knew the situation on the ground, where the vast Soviet superiority in men and materiel would be decisive. It took us till at least 1951 to develop a bazooka that could even slow down a T-34. Moreover, the situation in Western Europe was hardly conducive to military conflict against the Soviets. Our supply lines would have been a disaster.

How much support could the London Poles have engendered in the US? They were fascists by any realistic definition of the term, rolling back the reforms that had been made under Pilsudski. The notion of fighting a war to protect fascists after fighting a war to defeat them would have been a no-sale in the US, and certainly in Europe. Keep in mind that it was the European nations that kept Spain out of NATO until after the death of Franco.

It took the grotesque excesses of Stalin to turn Americans into Cold Warriors. The Berlin Blockade and Soviet imperial adventurism in Korea were pivotal in that change. The US was unwilling to support Hungarian, Polish and East German freedom fighters in the 50s and our situation vis-a-vis the Soviets was far superior to what it was in 1945. The Communists had lost about half their European support and the Italian Communists were already moving toward Eurocommunism.

You would also be on stronger ground were you to discuss our failures in Czechoslovakia where we did arguably abandon a system worth preserving.

Bart:

just keep pushing East until the Soviets fire on us and you have your war.