A Minor Mystery Of WWII

[PoliticalChic]

In all fairness 1933 Germany was only at a crossroads. Churchill was even quoted as saying they were at a crossroads around that time. Germany was on the upswing and Germans living better. So a 7 year old doing the salute at that time means nothing.

They were Nazis.

They were as anti-Semitic and as anti-communist as Hitler.

The ex-Royal Couple met with the Nazis in Portugal, and would have allied Britain with Hitler.

 

[whitehall]

PArtly true, but we had extensive networks of corporate execs, foreign service officers, etc. that could provide very accurate production stats, political news, and informal contacts in nearly every country in the world, so we weren't totally blind, either. For instance, the Standard Oil companies could provide very precise estimates on how long the Japanese military could last under an oil embargo, and had the means to locate and sink a Japanese ship carrying most of the Japanese petroleum industry workers and engineers to the conquered Dutch territories to rebuild the oil refineries and wells there, some 800 out of thousand or so experienced oil field personnel. It was a disaster for the Japs.

That's my point. The FDR administration relied on rumors and inuendoes and hearsay but there was no central agency to put the information together and verify it until it was too late to deal with it. The FBI was orientated toward making arrests but the mission was to capture and execute spies rather than gathering information. Military intelligence was able to break the Japanese code to some extent but by the time the information was utilized Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

 

[Picaro]

That's my point. The FDR administration relied on rumors and inuendoes and hearsay but there was no central agency to put the information together and verify it until it was too late to deal with it. The FBI was orientated toward making arrests but the mission was to capture and execute spies rather than gathering information. Military intelligence was able to break the Japanese code to some extent but by the time the information was utilized Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

Which PArty was blocking FDR's military spending? was it space aliens? Which President created the OSS and it successors?

The Peanut Gallery can note that FDR never supported deficit spending in his first two terms, a fact modern right wing smear jobs are careful to avoid mentioning.

 

[westwall]

What are you talking about????
We had no intelligence outside of the continental USA.


What is interesting in a conversation that is heading toward indicting the Democrats as having a spy system, a police state……but when it comes to a CIA, we didn’t have one under the President who led America to the Left….Franklin Roosevelt.



That’s because Stalin was beloved by FDR, and he couldn’t imagine needing spies in Russia.



Novelist Daniel Silva puts it this way:

" You see, before the war, we had no intelligence service-not areal one, anyway...our intelligence operation inside the Soviet Union consisted of a couple of guys from Harvard and a teletype machine. When we suddenly found ourselves nose to nose with the Russian bogeyman, we didn’t know shit about him. His strengths, his weaknesses, his intentions. And what’s more, we didn’t know how to find out. That another war was imminent was a foregone conclusion. And what did we have? F**k all. No networks, no agents. Nothing. We were lost, wandering in the desert. We needed help. ...General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German General Staff’s Foreign Armies East branch, Hitler’s chief spy on the Russian front.

“Gehlen was the answer to our prayers. The man had spent a career spying on the Soviet Union, and now he was going to show us the way. We brought him into this country.... . He told us what we wanted to hear. Stalinism was an evil unparalleled in human history. Stalin intended to subvert the countries of western Europe from within and then move against them militarily. Stalin had global ambitions. Be not afraid, Gehlen told us. I have networks, I have sleepers and stay-behind cells. I know everything there is to know about Stalin and his henchmen. Together, we will crush him.”



We used Nazi intel post war just as we used Nazi rocket scientists.




Reinhard Gehlen

As head of the Gehlen Organization he sought cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), formed in 1947, resulting in the Gehlen Organization ultimately becoming closely affiliated with the CIA.
Wikipedia.

INTELLIGENCIA

 

[westwall]

Maintaining a minimal front across the broadest front in history would have helped immensely.

Germany had technical and tactical superiority...Air supremacy against horribly overmatched Soviet air force was a given....Attrition was really the only tool Stalin had, and Hitler played into it.

Yup. That arrogance came back to bite them in the ass.

 

[whitehall]

Which PArty was blocking FDR's military spending? was it space aliens? Which President created the OSS and it successors?

The Peanut Gallery can note that FDR never supported deficit spending in his first two terms, a fact modern right wing smear jobs are careful to avoid mentioning.

The freaking whole country was in a deficit under FDR. People were actually starving to death and dying in ditches during FDR's first two terms. There is no evidence that FDR's spending was blocked, as a matter of fact war production is what brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression.

 

[Oddball]

Yup. That arrogance came back to bite them in the ass.

Well, it was just one man.....Had he turned the war over to the generals and put his pet obsessions on the back burner, they might have had a chance.

 

[westwall]

Well, it was just one man.....Had he turned the war over to the generals and put his pet obsessions on the back burner, they might have had a chance.

No, not really. The US alone outproduced the entire world over a period of 2 and a half years.

The best they could have hoped for is a negotiated peace, but that would have had to be arranged early.

Add in the fact that Stalin was planning on attacking the west in 1942, and Germany is screwed no matter what.

 

[Weatherman2020]

They were Nazis.

They were as anti-Semitic and as anti-communist as Hitler.

The ex-Royal Couple met with the Nazis in Portugal, and would have allied Britain with Hitler.

At that time Germany had not gone nasty. And had turned their economy around. Even Lindbergh fell under their spell.

 

[Picaro]

The freaking whole country was in a deficit under FDR. People were actually starving to death and dying in ditches during FDR's first two terms. There is no evidence that FDR's spending was blocked, as a matter of fact war production is what brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression.

Yes, Republicans really screwed the pooch. Hoovervilles everywhere, Republicans screaming for Hoover to call out the Army and gun the unemployed down in the streets, Hoover having them bayoneting veterans, and resisting improvements in the economy. War production didn't begin until after 1939, and GDP was already back up to pre-1928 levels by 1937, as a matter of fact. FDR did that without deficit spending.

Republicans gave criminal illegal aliens Social Security and even lets them mail the checks to Mexico, and routinely create bank crashes and multinational trillion dollar bailouts for the criminals . Their 'Greatest President' was a drug dealer who cut deals with terrorists,

 

[Picaro]

They were always going to be outmanned and outgunned vs the USSR.

That's why they needed the Brits to either join them fighting the USSR or at least make peace

Maybe taking the oilfields in the Caucuses first then dealing with Moscow later -- clearly the Lord had other plans

A couple of errors changed and they would have won. The Soviets couldn't have held out without British aid saving Moscow, and yes racing for the oilfields instead of bogging down in Stalingrad was stupid. It still years for the Soviets to drive them out, even against kids and old men for the last year of war.

 

[Picaro]

https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/facttell/overview.htm

Between the wars, American intelligence officers concentrated on codebreaking and counterintelligence operations against Germany and Japan. Notwithstanding Secretary of State Henry Stimson's alleged dictum that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," by 1941, the United States had built a worldclass signals intelligence capability. The "Black Chamber" under Herbert Yardley, the Army's Signal Intelligence Service under William Friedman, and Navy cryptanalysts cracked Tokyo's diplomatic encryption systems. Working backward from intercepts, Friedman's team figured out what kind of cipher device the Japanese used-the "Purple" machine. During the 1930s, the FBI launched an extremely effective counterintelligence attack on German and Japanese espionage and sabotage operations in the Western Hemisphere, infiltrating many networks and arresting dozens of agents. The Bureau had less success against Soviet efforts to penetrate US governmental and economic institutions.

As American entry into World War II seemed to draw closer in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt created the country's first peacetime, civilian intelligence agency--the Office of the Coordinator of Information--to organize the activities of several agencies. Soon after, however, the United States suffered its most costly intelligence disaster ever when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. That failure-a result of analytical misconceptions, collection gaps, bureaucratic confusion, and careful Japanese denial and deception measures-led to the establishment of a larger and more diversified intelligence agency in 1942, the Office of Strategic Services.

And as already pointed out, international businessmen were a steady and accurate source of information on a variety of industries and political intel. Standard Oil's 'Seven Sisters' in particular was very active in cooperating with American State Dept. and Foreign Service intel gathering.

Republicans failed to budget funds for intelligence work after WW I and their Great Depression made it tough to fund one as well. They were always focused on corporate welfare programs and Wall Street swindling, and still are.