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Index of /members / papers /Psychology Indian land rights Tribal Affiliations Index of /members / papers /Psychology Indian land rights Tribal Affiliations The injustices that happened long ago are still not fixed and need to be, because they are visible everyday through the hardships these people face. Introduction Ever since Europeans discovered America Native Americans began losing their land progress If The United States Had Entered Early Into World War II What if the United States had entered early into World War II? If they had joined forces with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany would any of the tragic events that occurred during those years still be written in history? From Pearl Harbor and concentration camps to communism and the Cold War? its feasible to believe that some, if not all, of these? bumps in the road?
could have been anticipated and prevented? If only President Roosevelt had been more partial to Hitler than to leaders of the USSR, France, and Britain, maybe history would be written differently. If Roosevelt had joined forces with Hitler, the United States could have prevented Hitler from attacking the USSR, and possibly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. This could have led to less world communism and possibly eliminated chances of a Cold War between the States and the USSR for the forty years after World War II. Look back to the date of the wars most massive encounter. It began on the morning of June 22, 1941, when slightly more than 3 million German troops invaded the USSR.
Although German preparations had been visible for months and had been talked about openly among the diplomats in Moscow, the Soviet forces were taken by surprise. Stalin, his confidence in the countrys military capability shaken by the Finnish war, had refused to allow any counter activity for fear of provoking the Germans. Moreover, the Soviet military leadership had concluded that blitzkrieg, as it had been practiced in Poland and France, would not be possible on the scale of a Soviet-German war; both sides would consequently confine themselves for the first several weeks at least to sparring along the frontier. The Soviet army had 2. 9 million troops on the western border and outnumbered the Germans two to one in tanks and two or three to one in aircraft. Many of its tanks and aircraft were older types, but some of the tanks were far better to any the Germans had. Large numbers of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the first day, however, and their tanks, like those of the French, were scattered among the infantry, where they could not be effective against the German panzer groups.
The infantry was first ordered to counterattack, which was impossible, and then forbidden to retreat, which ensured their wholesale destruction or capture. For the invasion, the Germans had set up three army groups, designated as North, Center, and South, and aimed toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kyiv. Hitler and his generals had agreed that their main strategic problem was to lock the Soviet army in battle and defeat it before it could escape into the depths of the country. They disagreed on how that could best be accomplished. Most of the generals believed that the Soviet regime would sacrifice everything to defend Moscow, the capital, the hub of the road and railroad networks, and the countrys main industrial center.
To Hitler, the land and resources of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus were more important, and he wanted to seize Leningrad as well. The result had been a compromise? the three thrusts, with the one by Army Group Center toward Moscow the strongest? that temporarily satisfied Hitler as well as the generals.
War games had indicated a victory in about ten weeks, which was significant because the Russian summer, the ideal time for fighting in the USSR, was short, and the Balkans operations had caused a three-week delay at the outset. The Russians were doing exactly what the German generals had wanted, sacrificing enormous numbers of troops and weapons to defend Moscow. Hitler, however, was not satisfied, and over the generals protests, he ordered Army Group Center to divert the bulk of its armor to the north and south to help the other two-army groups, then stopping the advance toward Moscow. On September 8, Army Group North cut Leningrad's land connections and, together with the Finnish army on the north, brought the city under siege. On September 16, Army Group South closed a gigantic encirclement east of Kyiv that brought in 665, 000 prisoners. Hitler then decided to resume the advance toward Moscow and ordered the armor be returned to Army Group Center. (Carley 111) Meanwhile, a drastic undertaking was being launched.
The Reich Security Main Office? an agency of the police and the Nazi Party guard, known as the SS? dispatched 3, 000 men in special units to newly occupied Soviet territories to kill all Jews on the spot. These mobile detachments, known as Einsatzgruppen, or action squads, were soon engaged in incessant shootings. The massacres usually took place in ditches or ravines near cities and towns. Occasionally, soldiers or local residents witnessed them.
Before long, rumors of the killings were heard in several capitals of the world. This could be compared to the other killings of Jews in concentration camps throughout Europe. If FDR had been allied with Hitler, maybe he could have influenced him to ignore the senseless killing of these innocent Jewish people. After a standstill of six weeks, Army Group Center resumed action on October 2. Within two weeks, it completed three large encirclements and took 663, 000 prisoners. Then the fall rains set in, turning the unpaved Russian roads to mud and stopping the advance for the better part of a month.
In mid-November, the weather turned cold and the ground froze. Hitler faced the choice of having the armies dig in where they were or sending them ahead, possibly to be overtaken by the winter. Wanting to finish the 1941 campaign with some sort of a victory at Moscow, they chose to move ahead. (Carley 127) In the second half of November, Bock aimed two armored spearheads at Moscow. Just after the turn of the month, one of those was less than twenty miles away. The other, coming from the south, had about forty miles still to go. The panzer divisions had often covered such distances in less than a day, but the temperature was falling, snow was drifting on the roads, and neither the men nor the machines were outfitted for extreme cold.
On December 5 the generals commanding the spearhead armies reported that they were stopped: The tanks and trucks were freezing up, and the troops were losing their will to fight. (Gerdes 416) Stalin, who had stayed in Moscow, and his commander at the front, General Georgy Zhukov, had held back their reserves. Many of them were recent recruits, but some were hardened veterans from Siberia. All were dressed for winter. On December 6 they counterattacked, and within a few days, the German spearheads were rolling back and abandoning large numbers of vehicles and weapons, rendered useless by the cold.
On Stalin's orders, the Moscow counterattack was quickly converted into a counteroffensive on the entire front. The Germans had not built any defense lines to the rear and could not dig in because the ground was frozen hard as concrete. Some of the generals recommended retreating to Poland, but on December 18 Hitler ordered the troops to stand fast wherever they were. Thereafter, the Russians chopped great chunks out of the German front, but enough of it survived the winter to maintain the siege of Leningrad, continue the threat to Moscow, and keep the western Ukraine in German hands. (Keegan 208) The seeming imminence of a Soviet defeat in the summer and fall of 1941 had created dilemmas for Japan and the U. S. The Japanese thought they then had the best opportunity to seize the petroleum and other resources of Southeast Asia and the adjacent islands; on the other hand, they knew they could not win the war with the U.
S. that would probably follow. The U. S. government wanted to stop Japanese expansion but doubted whether the American people would be willing to go to war to do so.
Moreover, the U. S. did not want to get mixed up in a war with Japan while it faced the ghastly possibility of being alone in the world with Germany on top. In the most immediately critical area of the war, the USSR, the initiative had passed to the Germans again by summer 1942. The Soviet successes in the winter had been followed by disasters in the spring. Setbacks south of Leningrad, near Kharkiv, and in Crimea had cost well more than a half-million men in prisoners alone.
The Germans had not sustained such massive losses, but the fighting had been expensive for them too, especially since the Soviets had three times the human resources at their disposal. Moreover, Hitlers overconfidence had led him into a colossal error. He had been so sure of victory in 1941 that he had stopped most kinds of weapons and ammunition production for the army and shifted the industries to work for the air force and navy, with which he proposed to finish off the British. He had resumed production for the army in January 1942, but the flow would not reach the front until late summer. Soviet weapons output, on the other hand, after having dropped low in November and December 1941, had increased steadily since the turn of the year, and the Soviet industrial base also was larger than the German. (Carley 155) Looking ahead to the summer, Hitler knew he could not again mount an all-out, three-pronged offensive.
Some of the generals talked about waiting a year until the army could be rebuilt, but Hitler was determined to have the victory in 1942. He had sufficient troops and weapons to bring the southern flank of the eastern front nearly to full strength, and he believed he could compel the Soviet command to sacrifice its main forces trying to defend the coalmines of the Donets Basin and the oil fields of the Caucasus. The offensive began east of Kharkiv on June 28, and in less than four weeks the armies had taken the Donets Basin and advanced east to the Don River. The distances covered were spectacular, but the numbers of enemy killed or captured were relatively small. Stalin and his generals had made the luckiest mistake of the war. Believing the Germans were going to aim a second, more powerful, attack on Moscow, they had held their reserves back and allowed the armies in the south to retreat. (Keegan 396) Hitler, emboldened by the ease and speed of the advance, altered his plan in the last week of July.
He had originally proposed to drive due east to Stalingrad, seize a firm hold on the Volga River there, and only then send a force south into the Caucasus. On July 23 he ordered two armies to continue the advance toward Stalingrad and two to strike south across the lower Don and take the oil fields at Maikop, Grozny y, and Baku. The Russians appeared to be heading toward disaster, as the German thrust into the Caucasus covered 185 miles to Maikop by August 9. Hitlers strategy, however, presented a problem: Two forces moving away from each other could not be sustained equally over the badly damaged railroads of the occupied territory.
In the second half of August, he diverted more supplies to the attack toward Stalingrad, and the march into the Caucasus slowed. Nevertheless, success seemed to be in sight when the Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army closed near the Stalingrad suburbs on September 3. (Gerdes 254) The USSR reached its low point in the war at the end of July 1942. The retreat was almost out of hand, and the Germans were getting into position to strike north along the Volga behind Moscow as well as into the Caucasus. On July 28 Stalin issued his most famous order of the war, ? Not a step back! ? While threatening Draconian punishments for slackers and defeatists, he relegated communism to the background and called on the troops to fight a?
patriotic? war for Russia. Like Hitler, he had thus far conducted the war as he saw fit. In late August he called on his two best military professionals, Zhukov, who had organized the Moscow counteroffensive in December 1941, and the army chief of the General Staff, General Aleksandr M. Vasilyevsky, to deal with the situation at Stalingrad.
They proposed to wear the enemy down by locking its troops in a bloody fight for the city while they assembled the means for a counterattack. (Keegan 312) The Axis was riding a high tide in midsummer 1942. Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil were seemingly within Hitlers grasp, and Rommel was within striking distance of the Suez Canal. The Japanese had occupied Guadalcanal at the southern end of the Solomons chain and were marching on Port Moresby. Within the next six months, however, the Axis had been stopped and turned back in the Soviet Union, North Africa, and the southwest Pacific. U. S.
Marines landed on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942. Against a small Japanese garrison, the landing was easy. Afterward nothing was easy. The Japanese responded swiftly and violently by sea and by air. The outcome hinged on the Japanese navy's ability to bring in reinforcements, which was substantial, and the U. S.
Navy's ability to keep the marines supplied, which was at times in some doubt. While the marines battled a determined foe in a debilitating tropical climate, between August 24 and November 30 the navy fought six major engagements in the waters surrounding the island. The losses in ships and aircraft were heavy on both sides, but the Japanese were more seriously hurt because they could not afford to accept a war of attrition with the Americans. Their warships did not come out again after the end of November, and the Americans declared the island secure on February 9, 1943. (Gerdes 230) On the eastern front the Germans advances to Stalingrad and into the Caucasus had added about 680 miles to their line. No German troops were available to hold that extra distance, so Hitler had to use troops contributed by his allies. Consequently, while Sixth and Fourth Panzer armies were tied down at Stalingrad in September and October 1942, they were flanked on the left and right by Romanian armies.
An Italian and a Hungarian army were deployed farther upstream on the Don River. Trial maneuvers had exposed serious weaknesses in some of the Axis armies. On the morning of November 19, in snow and fog, Soviet armored spearheads hit the Romanians west and south of Stalingrad. Their points met three days later at Kalach on the Don River, encircling the Sixth Army, about half of the Fourth Panzer Army, and a number of Romanian units. Hitler ordered the Sixth Army commander, General Friedrich Paulus, to hold the pocket, promised him air supply, and sent Man stein, by then a field marshal, to organize a relief. The airlift failed to provide the 300 tons of supplies that Paulus needed each day, and Man steins relief operation was halted 34 miles short of the pocket in late December.
The Sixth Army was doomed if it did not attempt a breakout, which Hitler refused to permit. (Carley 141) The Russians pushed in on the pocket from three sides in January 1943, and Paulus surrendered on January 31. The battle cost Germany about 200, 000 troops. In the aftermath of Stalingrad, in part owing to the collapse of the Italian and Hungarian armies, the Germans were forced to retreat from the Caucasus and back approximately to the line from which they had started the 1942 summer offensive. (Keegan 389) If the United States had entered early into World War II and joined forces with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the tragic events that occurred during those years would most likely be changed in history. Pearl Harbor would not have occurred because Japan would not have needed to provoke Congress to declare war. Concentration camps and genocide would have most likely been negotiated out of the?
battle plan? because the United States would have had power over Hitler? s decisions. Communism in Russia may not have been a problem that lasted until the 1980? s if the U.
S. had convinced Hitler to become an ally because the Russian leaders may have felt differently resulting in the division of the world between the victorious powers of the war. If the United States leaders could have convinced Hitler not to attack the USSR, than most likely, the Cold War would not have occurred during the forty years after the war between Russia and the U. S. The alliance between the leaders of both countries began to dissolve in 1944 - 1945, when the Russian leader Joseph Stalin, seeking Soviet security, used the Red Army to control much of Eastern Europe. U.
S. President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin's policy and moved to unite Europe under American leadership. Mistrust grew as both sides broke wartime agreements. These events would not have taken place if the U. S.
were an ally with Germany because The USSR would have been allied with us as well for saving them from attack. If only President Roosevelt had been more partial to Hitler than to leaders of France and Britain, maybe history would be written differently. If Roosevelt had joined forces with Hitler, the United States could have prevented Hitler from attacking the USSR, and possibly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. This could have led to less world communism and possibly eliminated chances of a Cold War between the States and the USSR for the forty years after World War II. U. S.
leaders during the war should, have taken the philosophy, ? Make friends with the enemy, ? into consideration. Carley, Michael J. The Alliance that never was and the Coming of World War II. New York: Ivan R.
Dee, Inc. , 1999. Gerdes, Louise. The 1940? s. New York: Green haven Press, 2000. Keegan, John.
The Second World War. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
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