World War I

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MiddleAgedKen
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Re: World War I

Post by MiddleAgedKen »

Jericho941 wrote:It's really hard to convey just how completely beyond the pale Stalin's brutality was, and how long-lasting the consequences of living under such a regime are.
Everything I needed to know about the Soviet Union I learned from Solzhenitsyn. :)
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First Shirt
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Re: World War I

Post by First Shirt »

My grandfather, a 26-year-old father of three, decided that it was worth his time and effort, and he enlisted, along with two of his younger brothers.

It's really hard for me to accept that they wasted 2 years of their lives for nothing.
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Langenator
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Re: World War I

Post by Langenator »

Windy Wilson wrote:
Greg wrote:In fact we knew as early as the end of WWI that war with Japan was essentially inevitable[.]
Famously, the journalist/author Hector Bywater wrote "The Great Pacific War in IIRC 1926, about a war between Japan and America starting with a surprise attack on the Philippines and Hawaii, with fleet operations in the Pacific that eerily paralleled the actions of the US Navy in WW2.
Given that the general idea of War Plan ORANGE didn't change much from it's first iteration shortly after the U.S. acquired the Philippines from Spain, I wouldn't credit Bywater with a huge amount of genius. The biggest change after WWI actually made things easier for the planners - Japan's acquisition of the Mandates from Germany. Prior to WWI, these German-controlled islands would have been neutral in the U.S.-Japan war, and thus the USN/USMC couldn't capture them to use as bases to support the advance. They would have had to go from Hawaii to the Marianas in one leap, resulting in a fleet arriving in enemy waters at the end of quite a long voyage.

The main debate that went back in forth in the ORANGE plans was between the so-called "Through Ticket" - sending the fleet racing to relieve the Philippines as soon as the war started, to attempt to stop Japan from capturing them, and leaving the Philippines to their fate in favor of a methodical advance, capturing island bases along the way.

The methodical advance finally won out, the plan approved by the Joint Board in the mid-1930s. The senior member of the Joint Board at the time was the Chief of Staff of the Army - ironically, Douglas MacArthur.

For the definitive look at ORANGE, see War Plan Orange by Edward Miller.
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Johnnyreb
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Re: World War I

Post by Johnnyreb »

The Orange plan was made when the fleet was burning coal. The world had watched what happens to a worn out fleet of ships at the end of a long voyage when the Japanese fleet, all fresh, took out the Russian fleet, worn out and in bad need of refit and unable to make normal full speed, with lousy crews on top of that. The Orange plan was to be a methodical advance because coal powered ships had to make a lot of stops for more coal, and to clean out the boilers and reline them with bricks. By WWII coal was out and oil was in, but the Orange Plan remained much the same. Perhaps somebody understood back then that if the Philippines were attacked, nothing the US could do in the next few months was going prevent us losing the Philippines regardless of a Pearl Harbor.

And yes, Wilson was nuts. For a year before the US joined the war, navy gun crews on US merchant ships were already shooting at U-boats, as were US destroyers and such, on secret orders from Wilson. No war declaration, no telling Congress or asking their permission to commit acts of war. That is why the Germans were talking to the Mexicans. FDR did much the same thing, under his orders, US destroyers and aircraft were actively helping British ships attack U-boats. Tracking U-boats and vectoring the British in for the attack. The USS Greer was fired on after vectoring a British plane in to the attack and tracking the U-boat with sonar for 3 hours. In all Green tracked that U-boat a total of nine hours, in 3 segments. The U-boat shot back once, the Greer attacked with depth charges. missed. And then Roosevelt played with the truth some and used the incident as an excuse to issue a shoot-on-site order just like Wilson did. Not real neutral at all.

USS Kearny was torpedoed after she and 3 other US DDs came out of an Iceland port to help a British convoy, they helped by attacking the U-boats. So a U-boat shot back, hit with one torpedo but didn't sink her. This was 2 months before Pearl Harbor and Hitler mentioned it when he declared war. USS Rueben James was sunk off Iceland in early 1941, while protecting a convoy. The wiki about it doesn't say if the ship was dropping depth charges or not.

We were de-facto at war in the Atlantic more than a year before Pearl Harbor. Just as in WWI, by order of a Democrat President who ignored the law and the Senate and just did whatever he pleased. But the sad part is that the Navy never used torpedoes for this, so they never found out what a piece of crap US torpedoes were.
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Jered
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Re: World War I

Post by Jered »

Windy Wilson wrote:
Greg wrote:In fact we knew as early as the end of WWI that war with Japan was essentially inevitable[.]
Famously, the journalist/author Hector Bywater wrote "The Great Pacific War in IIRC 1926, about a war between Japan and America starting with a surprise attack on the Philippines and Hawaii, with fleet operations in the Pacific that eerily paralleled the actions of the US Navy in WW2.
War Plan Orange goes back to 1897.
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Jericho941
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Re: World War I

Post by Jericho941 »

Johnnyreb wrote:The Orange plan was made when the fleet was burning coal. The world had watched what happens to a worn out fleet of ships at the end of a long voyage when the Japanese fleet, all fresh, took out the Russian fleet, worn out and in bad need of refit and unable to make normal full speed, with lousy crews on top of that. The Orange plan was to be a methodical advance because coal powered ships had to make a lot of stops for more coal, and to clean out the boilers and reline them with bricks. By WWII coal was out and oil was in, but the Orange Plan remained much the same. Perhaps somebody understood back then that if the Philippines were attacked, nothing the US could do in the next few months was going prevent us losing the Philippines regardless of a Pearl Harbor.
Well, taking ABDACOM seriously would've done wonders.
And yes, Wilson was nuts. For a year before the US joined the war, navy gun crews on US merchant ships were already shooting at U-boats, as were US destroyers and such, on secret orders from Wilson. No war declaration, no telling Congress or asking their permission to commit acts of war. That is why the Germans were talking to the Mexicans.
A quick Google fails me on this. But still, gee whiz I wonder why he would do such a thing. This predates the Zimmerman telegram by two years.
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MiddleAgedKen
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Re: World War I

Post by MiddleAgedKen »

The only things that would have given ABDACOM a chance to be viable would have been: (1) Attaching Force Z (with the carrier it was supposed to have), and (2) the Dutch had had time and money to actually build at least AMSTERDAM and ROTTERDAM (the proposed Project 1039 battlecruisers).

Even then, ABDACOM was going to be a sandlot team unused to operating together. That led to no end of trouble for even the USN by itself in the Solomons, let alone trying to integrate the Dutch, RN, and RAN into a unified force with the Asiatic Fleet.
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NVGdude
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Re: World War I

Post by NVGdude »

MarkD wrote:
Greg wrote:
MarkD wrote:And the great experiment would be done. We'd have fallen. We'd be Belguim now.
Wait, what?
If we stayed out of WW I we'd have never become a world power. We'd have balkanized and been beaten piecemeal.

Hardly. We became a world power by industrializing and building weapons for Brits and French. By the time the US entered WWI, we were manufacturing more munitions than England and Germany combined.

So we were hardly neutral, but we were using English money to bootstrap our own industrial base.
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scipioafricanus
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Re: World War I

Post by scipioafricanus »

I always wondered about the ZImmerman Telegram. Did Germany really think Mexico could have launched a coordinated effort against the US? With they ongoing revolution, they weren't exactly a strong, unified force.
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randy
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Re: World War I

Post by randy »

I seriously doubt the Germans expected any sort of successful operations from the Mexican government. Probably the best they hoped for was stirring up enough trouble on our southern border to distract us and tie up troops and logistics support that could be sent to Europe.
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