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A little historical context. The Committee to Defend America First* only had ~800,000 members (out of 130,000,000) total during it's life span. It was isolationist in a time when the US public in general were growing increasingly aware that we would have to fight the Axis and we should be ready for that while helping Britain and China stay in the fight.
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UK & the Commonwealth of Nations, we (the US) certainly helped them stay in the fight. Was China ever in the fight? Everything I've read about the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek says otherwise. KMT seems to have been merely a criminal enterprise, with warlords, gang leaders, old entrenched families, graft galore. Mostly they were gearing up for a showdown with the Chinese Communists - but that was always somewhere over the horizon.
China soaked up lots of IJA attention & IJ money, resources & personnel. But Japan couldn't make their investment in China pay, & they could never find anyone to negotiate with there to end the war.
UK & the Commonwealth of Nations, we (the US) certainly helped them stay in the fight. Was China ever in the fight? Everything I've read about the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek says otherwise. KMT seems to have been merely a criminal enterprise, with warlords, gang leaders, old entrenched families, graft galore. Mostly they were gearing up for a showdown with the Chinese Communists - but that was always somewhere over the horizon.
China soaked up lots of IJA attention & IJ money, resources & personnel. But Japan couldn't make their investment in China pay, & they could never find anyone to negotiate with there to end the war.
It would mean Psy would have sung Gangnam style in Japanese, not Korean. Germany most likely won the war, they were only 6 months away from developing a nuke.. Europe most likely would look completely different today with very little immigration.
That's interesting. Everything I've read indicates that the German economy in WWII was straining just to produce conventional arms - aircraft, tanks, cannon - plus railroads, engines, wagons, trucks, etc. & they weren't doing well @ all - @ the end, they were starved for gas/diesel/lubricants. Their transportation systems - rail, canals, rivers, shipping - were bombed to bits by day & by night.
I don't remember any mention in German physics of real possibilities of explosive metal - their physicists had used the wrong kind of moderating rods in their attempts @ a nuclear pile - they got some kind of contamination in the cadmium they used, as I recall. @ any event, TMK, they were nowhere near developing their own nuclear weapons. Japan similarly investigated the possibility only to a slight extent - & deemed it too unlikely to pay off in real time - plus the Japanese economy was in worse condition than the German one - Japan had been @ war since the early 1930s.
if the US had never entered WW2Europe would now be ruled by Germany, SO NO CHANGE THERE THEN!!!
That's not clear. Germany & allies planned to conquer the USSR in a few months' time. Germany smashed army after army, & the USSR kept forming new armies. In the end, despite massive losses of men, materiel & territory, the USSR's military forces rose to the challenge. They learned tactics, strategy, & simply massed arty & armor & troops & went straight ahead. Finally, the Germans couldn't keep mustering more men & materiel to replace their losses, while the Soviets could (the US helped supply trucks, food, aircraft, we supplied engineers & logisticians).
I think the USSR would have prevailed over Germany - but the losses would have been catastrophic on both sides. The USSR finally died of its own contradictions in 1991. If they had been effectively alone in the field against Germany, the USSR would likely have collapsed much sooner. Stalin was sufficiently bloody-minded that I think he would have lived @ least long enough to conquer Germany - if only out of sheer spite.
I may not understand war gaming, but I do understand not considering the ramifications of various potential scenarios. As you said before, war gaming is the playing out of various "what-if's" in order to consider ways to respond to them or overcome them or avoid them or whatever. When the U.S. player launched a successful attack on the flank of the Japanese carrier fleet (in the pre-Midway war games), the umpire, Admiral Ugaki, overruled it on the grounds that it could not happen. Too bad they didn't play the game through and deal with the situation as presented (i.e. discuss and consider the implications of an unexpected event), because in real life, it turned out that this is exactly what did happen.
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War games for the IJA & IJN became just checkpoints on the way to implementing their strategy/tactics. IJN, for instance, loved feints & countermoves, misdirection & splitting off scouting/decoy/main forces. Because of all these intricate maneuvers, @ speed, @ distance, & under radio silence - IJN fleet war games typically ran out of fuel. The IJN response to this - instead of investigating the why (lack of sufficient fleet oilers & resupply ships) & fixing the problem - was to stop the games, refuel, & then restart the games, as if nothing untoward had happened.
The US & allied navies, of course, didn't do things that way. & we transported food, first aid, medics, medical ships, as well as fuel & ammo (the first priority for IJN ships). We also practiced shipboard firefighting & damage control.
And any driver can be a bad driver, any parent can be a bad parent, any cliche can be a bad cliche.
People like you need to remember Vietnam was the first American war simulated on computers and the results used to formulate tactics at the 5 sided puzzle place on the banks of the Potomac in Arlington VA.
That worked real good didn't it.
People like you need to remember Vietnam was the first American war simulated on computers and the results used to formulate tactics at the 5 sided puzzle place on the banks of the Potomac in Arlington VA.
That worked real good didn't it.
OSS in China & Gen. Marshall, Gen. Stillwell & a long series of US diplomats & officers saw the writing on the wall in China. The KMT (under the G'mo) was a criminal enterprise - in current times, think Pakistan skimming off Western & Saudi aid, supplies, money, military materiel going to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, then US & NATO & allied forces in Afghanistan.
The KMT postured nicely, & waged a relentless war of words on aid going to anyone else in China. But they were too wedded to the chaos of war - which allowed them to double deal & dabble in the black market, sell food, arms, ammo to the highest bidder, sell letters of transport, passports, visas & on & on. Smuggle in food, smuggle out people.
The IJA simply bungled its way into Korea, Manchuria & China - which latter soaked up personnel & resources to no good end. The IJA simply kept throwing more people into the meat grinder, & promising that soon - someday - they would completely conquer China & all would be well. More or less as the French huffed & puffed & vowed to reconquer post-WWII Indochina - & with much the same success.
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China, not so much
