From: pjt@newton.cs.jhu.edu (Paul Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.french
Subject: Ally bashing
Date: 2 Sep 92 13:34:45 GMT
Organization: Johns Hopkins Computer Science Department, Baltimore, MD

In article <hthomas.715424047@galaxy> Henry Thomas <hthomas@ph.tn.tudelft.nl> writes:
    > And they [Americans] also know where is their interest:
    > Until 1941 they styed neutral, and get money from UK with the
As you point out later in your message, Roosevelt was quite keen to enter the
war, seeing Allied success as vital.  But he had to fight a very powerful
isolationism.  Many ordinary Americans (wrongly) felt, "Hell, we bailed out
those lousy imperialist European powers the last time this happened.  Let them
handle it this time."  One might see in US neutrality and lend/lease a clever
attempt to maximize commercial gain while minimizing risk of life.  But another
hypothesis that also explains the data is a simple underestimation (by orders
of magnitude) of the threat of Nazi Germany by a large sector of the American
public and politicians.  There certainly may have been cases of profiteering:
I'd not heard the ITT/Porsche story before.

    > I've been told that the US secret services where aware of Pearl
    > Harbour, and let it happen. That explain why most of the fleet was
    > away, doing training far away. The US president wanted to force the US
    > in the war. I don't know what credit to give to that.  Maybe you can
    > help me.
This story has circulated in the US for a long time, and it has its advocates,
although it is not as popular as all of the Kennedy assasination conspiracy
theories.  I have never seen convincing evidence to support the claim, but
neither can I categorically dismmiss it.  If you look at it from the Japanese
viewpoint, it probably just looks like Murphy's Law:  they plan everything so
carefully for this massive surprise raid, and when comes time to execute it,
most of the best targets are not in port!  I paraphrase a version of Occam's
Razor recently posted in some newsgroup (sorry, can't give proper attribution):
Never ascribe to malicious intent what can be explained as simple stupidity.

    > I didn't say "cowardly". Fullpoint. What I say is that the americans
    > miniized the risks for their planes, and english minimized the risks
    > for the civilians.
That's cowardice.  Are you certain of this motivation?  On what grounds?

    > And I tell you: Brest, Cherbourg, Lorient and many others towns where
    > completely destroyed by the americans bombing. And people don't ressent
    > it too much. But it is a fact.
A propos of this and the FDR-knew-about-Pearl-but-did-nothing theory, it is an
uncontrovertible fact that Churchill, having Bletchley Park to thank for
deciphering the German communications, knew in advance of the bombing of
Coventry.  He had to make a ghastly choice like the one some <suggest> FDR
faced with Pearl Harbor.  He decided that defending or evacuating Coventry
might tip off Germany that Enigma had been broken, and that this would be a
more important loss than the lives, city, Cathedral, etc.  I wonder how the
locals feel about Winnie now that this has been declassified.

    > [It pisses] me off that this argument (we saved your asses) is so
    > commonly used. As someone else said, we can then talk of lafayette
    > and go back to cro-magnon. There is no point in that.
I agree whole-heartedly.  Le Marquis de Lafayette est un fort brave mec!
     +++paul