Better Them than Us

Nowadays the America First movement has a lot of detractors, who think that we really screwed up by not getting into World War II much earlier on.

Actually, I think that that is an unfair assessment, that ignores a very relevant issue.

First, to debunk any issue over whether or not the U.S. could have stopped Hitler in the mid-1930s when he was first beginning to conquer territory. Perhaps action against Hitler at this point would have accomplished something, but it is ludicrous to blame the U.S. or the "America First" movement for our un-involvement at this point. France and Britain did not go to war with Germany until September of 1939. It would have been ludicrous to assume that there were conditions under which we would have gone to war with Germany before that. So even if it would have been possible to have stopped Nazi Germany back in 1936, 1937, or 1938, this was not and could not have been the U.S.'s job.

So really, we are talking about September 1939 to December 1941 here. If America were to get into World War II any earlier than it did, it would have had to have been sometime within that date range. At this point, I think that it was a very good thing that we waited as long as we did; or at the very least that we waited until after the invasion of the U.S.S.R. by Hitler in June of 1941.

What many Americans don't realize is how much of the fighting against Germany was done by the U.S.S.R.

Even then, others did the fighting. The best description of how Hitler was defeated was Stalin’s. The old monster said that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.

Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies. That sounds formidable, and indeed is by today’s standards, until you remember that in the same 11-month period more than half a million Russians were killed on the Eastern Front. Leaving aside the respective Allied casualties, to see how the war was won you need only compare two figures. In all the western campaigns of the war against French, British, Americans, and troops of many other lands, some 200,000 German soldiers died. Four million Germans died on the Eastern Front.

- Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Boston Globe

While I am not certain that the exact numbers are correct (most accounts put total Germany military fatalities at 3.5 million), there is little doubt that Stalin did most of the work defeating Hitler.

If we had declared war on Germany at any time before he invaded the U.S.S.R., Hitler might have decided to delay the war on the Eastern front. He didn't go after Stalin until France was conquered and Great Britain was pretty much neutralized as an actual threat to the Nazi Empire, so if he knew that he was about to fight a country with as many resources as the United States, he might well have decided to delay the eastern expansion. At the very least, he might have devoted fewer resources to it.

This would have meant far higher casualties for us, and in all likelihood, a much more powerful Soviet Army.

By waiting, we managed to get Hitler to, in the short term, expend a lot of resources on the U.S.S.R., and in the long term, to commit a lot more resources to the U.S.S.R. for the rest of the war. Put bluntly, he killed more Soviets and fewer U.S. citizens.

Which was better for us.

Now of course, one could argue that this course of action would not have been better for those under the Nazi thumb. However, that would assume that if we had gone to war with Germany earlier that it would have shortened the war. If Germany had put off the invasion of the U.S.S.R. as a result of our earlier entry into the war, then it might have gone as for as long or longer. The only people who likely suffered more because the U.S. waited are those who were living in the U.S.S.R. and in U.S.S.R.-controlled areas in June of 1941, which areas Hitler might not have invaded had we gone to war in 1939 with France and Britain.

And I'm sorry to say, better them than us.

That is all.