A Short Study Of World War II
Ford There has been so much said about World War II, but you have to admit it is a rather fascinating subject. The thing about that war is that it is not just fascinating, it is fascinating on many different fronts. On one front we have the conspiracy factor. In the war with Japan, that applies to the attack on Pearl Harbor, whether or not we knew it would come and did we purposely put all our ships together except for the carriers? On the European front the conspiracy has to do with the fact that it was felt by many that some Americans were supporting the NAZIs. A case in point was Henry Ford. It is said that he had a photo of Hitler on his desk. There are many articles that claim that Henry Ford was a financial backer of Hitler and that he received a medal from the NAZIs for this support. Another fascinating area that the war showed us was our huge capacity for production and innovation. It was true that the Germans did have a superior technique for developing new inventions and ideas. This technique was that they put all their scientists and engineers mostly in one place, Paramundi, and they all shared their findings with each other, making these advanced weapons systems possible. This was too little too late for them however, because of our huge production capability, which by the way we could not duplicate today if we had to. By the war's end we were producing over 50,000 airplanes per years. In 1943 we built almost 2,000 merchant ships with only 500 sunk that year. We had built over 50,000 Sherman tanks during the war and only the Russians built more of one type of tank and that was the Soviet T-34 which was probably the best tank of the war.
Montgomery The war had produced clashes been strong willed personalities. There were the great generals on all sides such as Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Bernard Montgomery, Harold Alexander, Charles de Gaulle, Georgy Zhukov, Alfred Jodl, Gerd von Rundstedt, Erwin Rommel, Isoroku Yamamoto, Chuichi Nagumo and others. When these generals, admirals and field marshals banged heads, things got interesting indeed. Sometimes they banged heads even when they were on the same side. Witness Patton and Montgomery always trying to outdo each other. Sometimes these personalities had such huge egos that they made insufficient battle plans, because they underestimated the enemy. An example of this is Pearl Harbor again. If Yamamoto would have taken his carriers to the west coast of the U.S. and bombed us, he could have caused immense damage and perhaps extended the war by many years, even though the outcome would have been eventually the same. Another thing that we have to study if we want to be scholars of World War II, were the reasons for the war. Why did the war really start? The Japanese thought that we were cutting them off from vital oil and rubber supplies in the Pacific and that we were getting too big and powerful there. The Germans felt that we were weak and our race purity was diluted by all the different races in this country and that we would be easy pickings, because we would not make good soldiers. There was a lot of resentment in Germany left over from their defeat in World War I and their treatment afterwards. If one was to try and pinpoint the events that started World War II in Europe and the Pacific they would have to be, the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 and the invasion of China by Japan in 1937. Germany was worried that a Communist revolution might take place in their country and this also fed the fires of war. Germany had another desire and that was to unite German speaking people in outlying areas that were not part of Germany.
NAZIs Being Tried At Nuremberg When the NAZIs and Japanese were tried for some of the heinous experiments that had performed on people, they were amazed. Some of them even went so far as to say that they just copied experiments that had been performed in the U.S. years before. Unfortunately, this country has had many cruel medical experiments that one has only to look into the history books to discover. While it is true that we some scientists here did some horrible things, nothing was on the scale of what happened in Germany and even Japan. It is amazing how one human could be so unfeeling to another. In Japan they cut people open while they were alive to observe their organs and such. No anesthetic was used and the people were called logs in Japanese. The Germans performed similar experiments. One German who was convicted of violating the London Pact for submarine warfare stated that the U.S. had been conducting unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific. Another fascinating area to look into is who profited from World War II? Keep this in mind as we look at this question. While a company may appear to be in a certain country, it could still have backers from somewhere else. Some American companies that are very famous were said to have profited extensively from the war and some had backed the Germans. There were South American arms companies that did very well. Companies in the U.S. that backed the U.S. and made huge profits from the war were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics just to name a few of many. It is hard to believe that some American companies did help Germany, but they did. The U.S. Tried to prevent excessive profits by passing an excessive profits tax, but it didn't work at too well. |
