Russell,
Your sentiment that “it’s good we stopped the Huns before they got the bomb” amounts to Whig history at its most Whigy.  Why not argue that we should have helped Germany defeat the Russian Empire in WWI so as to prevent the Cold War, or that we help France defeat Germany in 1871 so as to prevent Nazism .. but then, of course, this would scuttle the whole Germany defeats Russia idea, so perhaps..  This is a parlor game not historical analysis.

I’m not sure that you could imagine a more violent or bloody war. Perhaps it is possible that if both sides developed nukes simultaneously there would have been a much less bloody war.  The cold war comes to mind.

FDR did not need any urging from Churchill to slander the members of America First.
According to historian Justus Doenecke, he was fully up to the task of character
besmirching without foreign prodding.

Actually, according to A.J.P. Taylor, German miltary production in WWII never reached the level of WWI
In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker describes Churchill’s enthusiasm for gas warfare (The British had used mustard gas against Kurds in Iraq in 1921-22 under the direction of “Bomber Harris” the hero of Dresden.
It is odd that with “the lead in nerve gas and missiles to deliver it” the Germans never did.
Even Carlton Hayes nods when he asserts that WWII “was fought with all the deadly weapons of the earlier one>”

I guess by that logic Mr. Seitz, we should bomb Iran, since they may have or will have destrutive military technology of their own . Hell, what you just said, made the Iraq war valid in its reasons also. I would have never guessed that Mr. Taki would have hired a neo-conservative for his fine online publication.

Richard :The history of technology is not subject to historiographic whimsy, whig or otherwise.

My point is that in 1938, as ow, not all of our contemporaries are living in the same time, and my sentiment is that, with German still the lingua franca of physics at the time, we were bloody lucky the Hun jumped the gun, and let the demands of conventional ordnance and aircraft productions derail or side track high-tech programs so precocious that we—and the Russians--spent a postwar decade cheerfully reverse-engineering them.

Hitler’s weak grasp of the time scale of transforming research into weapons systems --materiel cannot be willed into existence—led to many formidable systems, e.g the ME262, coming too little and late to change the course of the war.

Only a few years delay in the onset of hostilities would have quantitatively changed the picture , allowing , for example , Otto cycle submarines or the Messerschmidt jets introduced late in 1944 to be produced in the numbers of the piston aircraft that preceded them, the Aliies would have been on the short end of air superiority.

The industrial scale of diffusion and calutron enrichment were simply beyond the Third Reich’s means , but despite the pre-war implosion of the German physics establishment - I had the rare opportunity of discussing it with Heisenberg and von Weisacker three decades ago, time and money enough would have allowed them to go the heavy water reactor route. They did’t get a nuclear weapons program off the ground because Speer had a war to fight and pulled the plug on their program. We put ten thousand of chemical engineers and metallurgists to work with an unlimited budget. Heisenberg got a blackboard and three dozen postdocs. Had he got more, Moe Berg might well have plugged him in Zurich instead of chatting over tea at ETH.

The bottom line is that the lack of time and Hitler’s strategic myopia transformed a rapidly evolving high tech arsenal into an historical footnote - vergeltungswaffen don’t win wars. Strategic weapons can- the problem being that it would be harder to attach the epithet ‘Good’ to World War II had it been fought a l’outrance , with the weapons of the World War III that never was.

Dan should note that Corporal Hitler’s reluctance to unleash Tabun and Soman is widely attributed to his having been floored by a whiff of mustard gas in WWI.

William Bernard guesses wrong. His comment is as irrelevant to what I have written as it is mistaken to my views on Iran.

Mr. Seitz,
Yes, I knew that but hesitated to mention it lest I might seem to imply that he was, at least in one respect, following Kant’s categorical imperative.

Like A.J.P. Taylor, Viktor Suvorov has a very low evaluation of German preparedness and military technology in Operation Barbarossa.  In Icebreaker, Suvorov claims that Hitler’s invasion of Russia was preemptive and his temporary success was only due to Stalin’s massing of troops so close to the border.  Suvorov claims that Soviet military strength was far superior both in qualitative technology and manpower and that it was Hitler’s paranoia, dumb luck, or intuition that prevented a Soviet invasion of all of Europe.

This is an astounding thesis if true but even if false or hypothetical underlines a distinction between “preemptive” and “preventive” war.  The problem with the latter it seems to me especially since the US has arrogated to itself the role of global hegemon, is the interminable nature of the policy as well as the very malleable and opportunistic criteria involved in evaluating threats to peace.

The America First Movement did not advocate that America sit on it’s hands during the European war. And they weren’t pacifists either.

Lindbergh, who was always close to the top brass of the USAAF, believed that US air power not the Royal Navy was the military force that protected North America. He saw FDR’s policies of Lend Lease etc as diverting valuable resources that should have been applied to continental defense. In particular he advocated the development of long range air power. In practice the FDR and Truman administrations actually followed Lindbergh’s prescription here. They developed the B-29, the first truly long range, nearly inter-continental, bomber, in a program that actually cost more than the Manhattan Project. Had Lindbergh’s prescription been taken up, presumably the USAAF could have had B-29 type weapons earlier than in fact it did.

This is of course all arm chair historical speculation, but all told, probably less counter-factual than the nightmare vision of a triumphant Third Reich ruling the world with poison gas and a successful nuclear weapons program. A program, one might add, that in our real history was found to have been something of a dud.

Russell, I see now that you’re not arguing that it’s fortuitous that we went to war with Hitler sooner rather than later,” but instead that it’s fortuitous that Hitler went to war in ‘39 before he could have developed more horrible weapons. Ok… One reason why Hitler jumped the gun is that he felt that he was in a position of military strength vis-a-vis the other western powers and the Soviets.  If he’d given them another few years, they might have built up huge arsenals making WWII reap more blood, toil, sweat, and tears than it did. So, again, what is your point? There are an infinite amount possible outcomes, some better some worse. 

Counter-factual reasons can yield some real insights—e.g. questions like, “Absent slavery, could there have been a war between the states. Yes, well then, slavery did not cause the Civil War.” But this is not what you’re doing. You’re basically saying, “I’m glad that history turned out the way that it did or else we would not be standing where we are now,” which is, alas, WHIG HISTORY (and at its most Whigy, I might add.)

Dr. Seitz’ argument boils down to the anthropic principle: you wouldn’t be reading this comment if the Universe had gone any other way. :-p

My point, already stated, is that some components of technological advance cannot be willed into existence.

Once nations go to war, the tendency to direct finite material resources at solving military problems competes with the desire to develop better arms. Blessed with the resources of a continent and secure behind two oceans, America could ,and did ,simultaneously expand production and research, albeit we still had to scour the wartime world for materials- somebody will eventually wring a doctoral thesis out of Paul Nitze’s first real job-- forget uranium or rubber --our boys in Brazil and Africa had to chase theirs around to keep tantalite, carbonado, electronic quartz and the rest of the Right Stuff out of Speer’s pipeline.

The career of Gustave Herz’s ( as in Gigaherz) staunchly patriotic physicist grandson affords a cautionary example of the will-and-reality disconnect internalizing the Hitlerian brain drain. Asked to brief Admiral Canaris on metal “isotopes”, he didn’t get as far as uranium. Told of how the density difference between iron 56 and iron 58 might shift several hundred tons of metal into the armor belt of treaty-compliant fixed tonnage pocket battleships, Canaris plucked the promising vacuum tube designer from radar development and consigned him to the office where Russian headhunters found him still busily writing memoranda in 1945. He got home from Siberia in 1964.

End of story, but though Napoleon warned against interrupting opponents making mistakes, it would be unsporting not to throw a weasel to the whigwhackers--

Lente cursus vi scientorum currite qui bellum magnopere desiderat.

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.

All this revisiting of WWII and WWI makes me wonder just what a Nazi regime would have looked like.

I mean, were people other than Jews suffering under the Nazi regime?

Over time would it have softened?

Would it have been worse or better than being behind the Iron curtian?

I just don’t know.  I guess the killed gypsies as well… It certianly was bad…

Yet, you know and I know if the people fighting WWII knew that in 60 years Europe was going to be 15% muslim they might have thought twice.

There was a show about a set of photos taken in Nazi occupied Paris here.

The controversy was that things looked a little too good, not too bad.

I’am sorry for being jerk to you Mr.Seitz. I will not do it again.

WWII is so tragic because it didn’t have to happen. Poland could have done the right thing and given back Danzig. FDR didn’t have to wage a cold war in the Atlantic with Germany. FDR didn’t have to take sides with the murderous Soviet Union. WWII happened because a select few people, such as Bernard Baruch, wanted it to happen. Germany, due to its policies concerning both money and Jews, “had to” be crushed.

Let’s say you changed just one or two things from the Nazi regime - rounding up and killing of the Jewish population was horrendous, but let’s face it history is filled with similar occurences, committed by both American and England.  (Slavery, treatment of American Indians, treatment of Ireland).

And Israel is pushing the envelope even today, with our very different moral framework.

Let’s say, that the Nazi’s instead of killing Jews (and others) just expelled them. 

Let’s say, their Nazi territorial ambitions where slightly more restrained.

How much of the equation does that change?  Do relatively small changes turn something from pure evil into an acceptable political solution?

Hitler was a vegetarian?  Does that make all vegetarians evil? 

Jonah Goldberg’s book on fascism labels almost everything under the sun as fascism.  But, let’s face it, his book does more to make fascism look like the norm, rather than than making us think about changing or suspending these policies.

For example, do you think the state will make smoking legal just to avoid the label of fascism? A state does not have an interest in the health of its citizens?

I guess the war (WWII) could have been a worse given more time to build up even greater fighting machines.  That is (obviously) very speculative.

It could have gone other, more peaceful directions as well.  What if england accepted one of Germany’s many offers of peace?  Would that have been just a stalling tactic by Germany, or could it have led to something better than the cold war, over time?

I have to say you are right about Bernard Baruch. He was a major warmonger in both world wars. He also helped keep Churchill afloat with his lavish lifestyle. Churchill lived way above his means most of his life.

It seems that Alan Dershowitz agrees that certain things are within the bounds of proper discussion and in fact should not be left “off the table”.

Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter,<b> writing: “Political solutions often <b>require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.”

And I am only talking about what might have been possible 60+ years ago, when the moral framework was very different.  I am not advocating for anything like that in the year 2008, as Mr. D is.

Independant.

So, tell me again who lost WWII?

The gipsy mother who forced her daughter of 13 to marry a 14-year-old boy yesterday dismissed British values as irrelevant to her.

Mrs Gural, 31, who is pregnant with her sixth child, said: “I’m not bothered what anyone thinks.

We really have a problem here.

Daily Mail

One question is if Hitler really had a larger window of opportunity. Did he really jump the gun or was Germany’s miserable financial and economic state in 1939 so bad that a war was the only way out? Hitler had run up a big deficit and the german government was on the verge of bankrupcy in 1938. Could he really have waited a few more years? I doubt it.

And what about Japan?
Did they act too soon as well?
Afterall, had they waited to
develop the 3 fin propeller their
navy might have outrun ours at
Midway.
As it was, they developed it
high tailing it over reefs we
wouldn’t enter.