Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point
We should have done more to help England earlier on in the war.
Edit: we also could have done a lot more to shut down the concentration camps too. Bombing rail lines and things like that.
I'm pretty sure we didn't know the
full extent of the concentration camps until we were nearing the final chapters of the war.
Also, the war needed to be won first. Back then, you didn't put the entire theater at risk by spending lives and resources to stop something that wasn't well understood and wasn't critical to the war effort. As sh-tty as that sounds, imagine if we had diverted resources and it delayed winning the war by months or even years. Or worse, imagine if we had devoted significant resources to that and we lost the war. It's the same reason why the Enigma codebreakers allowed hundreds or even thousands of civilians to be killed on merchant ships. They knew you don't risk the war to save a few. You could go even further down this line of thought and think about the ramifications of ending the war in the Pacific with nuclear weapons. Allied Forces had estimated 750,000 Allied casualties and another two years to complete the Invasion of Japan. Do you kill 200,000 people on their side or nearly a million on our side and who knows how many million soldiers and civilians on Japan's? But I completely digress.
Also, I think there's a bit of revisionist history in why we had delayed getting involved in the war. I think 70 years ago, the horrors of WWI were still fresh in the minds of the nation. We were very reluctant to go hot in another continental war. In retrospect, yeah, we should have. But 70 years ago we weren't exactly eager to get involved in another conflict that could cost us a significant amount of money (WWI cost us somewhere between $0.25 trillion and $1 trillion in 2018 dollars) and lives (117,000). From the time the war started until we got involved, even if we had gotten involved in the war on day one, however you define that, it would have taken us months to mobilize for war. We had already begun to mobilize well before we actually declared war on Japan. To start that mobilization on 9/1/1939 it would have taken until spring at a minimum to organize the draft (1940 was the first peacetime conscription law passed in the US) and build up the machinery necessary. Even with the neutral stance for so long and the pre-war mobilization efforts, the US still couldn't enter the western theater until 11 months
after Pearl Harbor.
Honestly, I think we probably made the right calls at the time. We can argue about it, but it would take a very compelling argument to convince me otherwise.
