Should America Have Entered World War I? | Hacker News Reader

Should America Have Entered World War I?

nytimes.com

23 pointsokket60 comments

This article mentions that had the US not entered World War I the likelihood of World War II happening was much lower.

I'd like to propose the idea that World War II, in all it's horrificness, saved us from much worse.

In a rather bizarre and twisted sense, we may be very very lucky that WWII happened and that it happened at the exact time that it did: happening late enough that we saw how awful modern total war is, but not so late that we would have the weapons to truly eradicate ourselves.

Unfortunately, I think you mean it was "recent enough" we were able to see how awful it was. Which means that if we give it a couple more generations to fade out of (some) living memory, we open up ourselves to another conflict, this time with the ability to eradicate ourselves.

Which then raises the question, had WWII not happened, would we have gotten nuclear weapons when we did? And would the next "awful" conflict have been apocalyptically so.

WWII ultimately jumpstarted so much of the scientific advancements we have made in the last 70 years that it is impossible to say that we would have been able to eradicate ourselves without a modern total war.

IDK. I'm not disagreeing, just thinking aloud. You make an interesting point. And certainly one that is fun to hypothesize about.

We likely would not have gotten nuclear weapons when we did, but they would probably have happened by the 50s and 60s, as would rocketry. There was already research on nuclear fission happening in the 1930s (in Germany, of all places), and people had already speculated on its use as a weapon. The German nuclear weapons program had already begun when Germany invaded Poland. WW2 massively accelerated this research and let researchers get away with things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do (like building a nuclear reactor under the bleachers of Stagg Field in Chicago). Given the scientific progress made in the 30s, though, it's likely that it would've happened anyway by the late 1950s.

Interestingly, if WW2 had not happened, it's very likely Germany would've been the first country with nuclear weapons, and hence the world superpower now. Most of the original researchers on nuclear fission were German, and many of the key scientists on the Manhattan project emigrated from Germany or Nazi-controlled countries. The key uranium mines of the 1930s were in the Belgian Congo, and the ore that was eventually used for the Manhattan Project was sitting on the docks in Belgium when the Nazis invaded.

The effort to develop nuclear weapons was ruinously expensive. I doubt we would have undertaken it in peacetime, so we may not have seen nuclear weapons until the early 1960s if not for the war. We almost certainly would have been at war with the Soviets before that.

It was expensive, but not ruinously expensive. As pointed out recently, the Norden bombsight program cost nearly half as much and people don't think of that as ruinously expensive. The US interstate highway program cost vastly more as well.

Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

South Africa also produced some nuclear capability despite not being at war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma... Naturally a country rich in uranium would be tempted to see what applications there were.

> the Norden bombsight program cost nearly half as much

That's very difficult to believe.

Research and development, manufacturing, training, it ended up being fantastically expensive. Remember, this was a highly capable analog computer that had to operate in a difficult environment and even included a self-destruct feature.

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-norden-bombs...

> ...the cost of the entire program came to more than $1 billion.

So the Norden cost $1B (~$12-14B now), the Atom bomb cost $2B (~$25-27B now), and the F-35 today is ~$150B over budget. How's that strike you?

His source is probably a Malcolm Gladwell tech talk [1] It is corroborated by other sites on the Internet [2], though Gladwell frequently gets his information from secondary sources so who knows if these are independent? Based on the history of the project though [3], it seems plausible - the Norden bombsight is basically an analog computer whose development started during WW1, and building a computer with WW1-era technology seems like it could easily cost half as much as building an atom bomb with WW2 technology.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell/transcript?langua...

[2] http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-norden-bombs...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight

The entire US economy had be reworked to a wartime footing in WW II. The government was far smaller and poorer and would have stayed that way but for the war. And frankly it's difficult for me to believe the Norden gunsight cost that much.

The Russians developed nuclear weapons because they didn't have a choice given the US had already done so, and it's not clear when they would have been successful without the US project.

The reason I picked the early 1960s for peacetime development is nuclear weapons development became much easier with the introduction of nuclear power. At that point it became much easier for any motivated government, so it's not surprising the South Africans were able to do it in the '70s. And still they needed US help to do it on that timeline.

I have no idea what's true in this, but I've heard exactly the opposite economic theories about WWII as it pertains to the US.

I.e. that untold amounts of capital was spent on making equipment that was just sent overseas to get blown up, if the US wasn't in the war it's not like it wouldn't have had a giant export market, and all that workforce could still be mobilized to manufacture goods, except some of the working-age people wouldn't have been sent overseas to die & get maimed.

That's the Broken Windows Fallacy writ large. The US economy grew tremendously throughout the 19th century without making things and then destroying them.

Yes, the 19th very same century where America went to war with Britain and later itself.

That's seven years out of a hundred, though you missed a few.

The point was we were never on a wartime economic footing in the same way were were in WW II.

Don't forget the Mexican/American war, the Spanish/American war, the unending "Indian Wars", and various other military expeditions during that period.

It's probable that the War of 1812 showed America how unprepared it was for conflict with a serious power.

The civil war from 1861 to 1865 required the complete commitment of both sides, with the Union in particular developing massive industrial capacity to help the cause.

This rapid and urgent industrialization was further developed during the Reconstruction phase when a large chunk of the country had to be built back up from ruin.

If these two conflicts never happened there wouldn't have been the same urgency to develop industry. It would be much more of an agricultural economy like the southern states and not like Ohio, New York or Pennsylvania with their enormous appetite for large-scale manufacturing.

If that was the case the US would be utterly unprepared for any conflict in Europe. As it was the US military was in really rough shape prior to the outbreak of war in Europe. There was no pressing need for a large, well-equipped standing military since Mexic

Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

Much of their advancement on that front was due to espionage against the US.

Hard to say for sure. The way the Russians tell it, their program was already too far along to benefit from successful espionage beyond confirming they were on the right track.

> Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

Parts of the Cold War were peaceful for some countries (including the USSR), but the period in which the Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1943-1949) was a period during which the USSR was constantly involved in international armed conflict, and was absolutely not peacetime for the USSR.

>This article mentions that had the US not entered World War I the likelihood of World War II happening was much lower.

This would have likely resulted in leaving Germany in a dominant European position. Over the course of modern history, the worst thing for European stability has been a dominant continental power.

WWII stemming from a humiliated Germany might not have happened, but it's difficult to say that a imposing, bellicose, and likely-equipped-with-a-bomb Germany would be a much better outcome.

It would be interesting to see an analysis of how WMD technology would develop in the absence of a major conflict. It did take a Manhattan Project to get the atom bomb, after all. It's also a mind-bending exercise to try imagining the remainder of the 20th century without WWII.

Alternative outcomes of WW1 represent some of the most interesting "What if?"s of the history of the 20th century.

It's a fascinating conflict to read about, since it seemingly could have gone either way up to nearly the end of the war. Compare that to WW2, where by late 1942 I think it was more or less clear that the axis powers would not be winning on the offensive, and it became more of a question of how absolute the end would be (armistice vs surrender).

WW1 also lacks as clear of a "good" vs. "bad" narrative as the WW2 has, which makes it complex, and complex history is typically more interesting to me.

Obligatory shout out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's not a perfect academic take on the topics he covers, but he weaves a good story.

America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms' wouldn't to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.

-Winston Churchill

The reasoning there is kind of hard to follow. Did the US add the War Guilt clause to a treaty that was otherwise going to be fairly neutral?

In school we learned that it was England and France who pushed for the punitive version of the Treaty of Versailles, but I guess this could be my American textbooks whitewashing the world.

The reasoning is without the US the powers were balanced enough that nobody would have been the clear victor. The Treaty of Versailles was punitive because the victors could dictate terms to the Germans instead of coming to an agreement entered into willingly on both sides.

I think the reasoning here is that without American intervention the Allied powers would not have been in a position to insist on a punitive armistice treaty.

The idea is that if the US had not entered the war, then the UK and the continental powers would have worn themselves out (they were already pretty worn out by the time we joined) and have sued for peace (armistice) and hammered out an agreement. It wouldn't have been ended up being lop-sided, because there would have been no winner(s) dictating terms -- just a bunch of tired people agreeing to quit and not fight again. Who knows if this is true or not, but the Treaty of Versaille was negotiated between clear winners and clear losers - which was enabled by the US joining the war late on one side.

The confusing part is, if the war was ended indecisively then how is that going to prevent future wars? Brush fire wars plagued Europe for centuries until WWII came about and everybody realized that war was too dangerous to toy with anymore.

The people might have been different, but I don't see how an indecisive WWI prevents another border skirmish from getting out of hand 20 years later. Maybe it would have been better for the Jews, but even that's iffy given the generally hostile attitudes of continental Europeans to Jews and Gypsies.

Counter-factual hypotheticals are tough. I think it intriguing to consider that the US staying out would have prevented the rise of the Nazis and Soviets, but I'm not in a position to run the experiment.

No, you're right; France more than anyone was responsible for the awfulness of the Versailles Treaty. But if the US hadn't gotten involved, the war would've ended indecisively, and the French could never have demanded and gotten such terms. (The Austrian Empire would probably also have been kept intact, and Italy would have had little chance of stealing the South Tirol.)

A negotiated peace in the west would probably have also repealed the horrible peace in the east. The Germans defeated Russia completely enough that they could get whatever it occurred to them to demand; the resulting treaty was almost as hard on the defeated as Versailles, even though Germany wasn't actively out to destroy Russia, and it certainly didn't help the Whites in the civil war.

The reasoning is that the countries involved would have agreed to a treaty to end fighting without a clear victor, so there would have been no real grounds to impose such harsh conditions on germany.

Okay, so I was skeptical that he had ever said such a thing, but it turns out that a magazine called the New York Enquirer (later, the National Enquirer), which was later charged with sedition for opposing america's entrance into WWII did publish an article claiming that he said it.

Churchill claimed that he had said no such thing, and was sued for libel over it: https://www.winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/fi...

After the publisher was indicted for sedition, the judge dismissed the case.

It sounds to me absolutely nothing like something he would have said.

A lot of assumptions in this article with no reasoning behind them.

tldr version: US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two and there would have been no WW2 and no military industrial complex.

Seems like quite a stretch on many fronts.

If anything seems like those things would have come sooner, except Germans would have developed nukes first.

>US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two

That is a fact. US contribution in WW1 was, while very much appreciated, extremely minimal and did not affect the balance of forces that much.

The rest is up to debate.

> That is a fact

We have differing definitions of facts, I guess.

I think not much of a stretch. All nations involved were having problems with mutiny and political turmoil by early 1917. The example of Russia coming apart and being taken over by Bolsheviks was there, and the winter of 1917 plus the Spanish Flu of 1918 made it rather unlikely there would have been a continuation of war in 1919. But, without the American involvement, the French and UK would not have been able to impose reparations, etc.

That WWI and it's peace settlement were a major contributing factor to WWII seems pretty clearly established as well.

> That WWI and it's peace settlement were a major contributing factor to WWII seems pretty clearly established as well.

Sure, but WW2 could very well have started in 1931 or 1953 (just random years) instead, for other reasons. For example, the USSR would have been a much more powerful nation in the 40s and 50s if it wasn't decimated by WW2. And with no presence of US forces in Europe, what would have stopped its expansion but war? Add in communist China and you have the makings for an even more deadly war.

I don't get this assumption by Kazin in the piece:

> How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement.

I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything, they'd become stiffer -- negotiation became less and less feasible as the casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made. (People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic.

What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else.

And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.

I've often thought the same thing. There wasn't anything about the Central Powers that made them uniquely bad at the time of the Great War, no great principle was at stake --- this was much more an imperial shoving match than a contest between freedom and authoritarianism. We basically dared the Germans to sink our civilian maritime traffic by sending arms to the U.K., and we had picked sides long before the Zimmermann telegram -- it's no wonder the Germans wanted Mexico to start a war with us.

Who's to say what might have happened if we'd stayed out of it. The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires almost certainly would have collapsed anyway. I suspect an exhausted Germany, with the Eastern front pacified and a stalemate on the Western front, would eventually have sued for peace with an equally exhausted France and Britain.

Worth noting that we were shipping supplies and arms to both sides up until the UK blockaded Germany with their first-rate Navy. After that, the only side left to ship to was the Allies.

edit: changed 'embargoed' to 'blockaded'

I don't think the germans sue for peace without the US involved. The Russian army had been destroyed. They could devote nearly all their resources to the Western front. They probably can't win, but they also can't lose, so you either get years of stalemate or both sides grudgingly agree to peace.

Agreed. One could envision an iron curtain falling across Europe decades earlier, dividing Europe along the Western Front. I'm not sure it would have been a better outcome; I'm not sure it's possible for the Great War to have had a good outcome. But it certainly would have been different without US involvement.

There's an interesting bit at the end of John Barry's "The Great Influenza" about how Wilson got the flu at Versailles. Barry suggests that Wilson was physically and mentally affected and thus gave in on terms around punishing Germany for the war. Apparently until he got the flu he'd been pushing back hard against anything like that.

My European history teacher had the same theory. Although there was also some hubris involved as he didn't take any senators like he should have

"Alone among the former belligerent nations, the United States observes a holiday on the anniversary of the Armistice" - Canada has Remembrance day on November 11th.

I think the point was that ours is "Veterans' Day", on which nobody mentions the events of 100 years ago, whereas "Remembrance Day" is actually about the Great War.

http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremon...

> Every year on November 11, millions gather to collectively stand in honour of all who have fallen in the service of their country.

http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php

> Remembrance Day | November 11, Saturday | National except MB, ON, QC, NS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

> Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

---

Armistice day is November the 11th (1919) and can be commemorated every year. Remembrance day is every November the 11th. Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday of every November.

When someone observes Remembrance day, on the 11th or the second Sunday, they are Remembering those who have `fallen in the service of their nation`.

Veterans Day is a day that honours those that have served in the US military. Also on November the 11th.

They all share a common history (ie. Armistice day) however they are all subtley different days.

Most Commonwealth nations have Remembrance Day observances, slightly fewer have Remembrance Sunday observances.

Most central European nations observe a similar day in meaning (remembering the dead) but on different dates.

It appears that November 11 is widely observed especially in the Commonwealth, but often not as a public holiday. It is a statutory holiday in the majority of Canadian provinces and territories (but not all and not at the federal level). It appears that it is also, in fact, a public holiday in France and Belgium. Most of my information for this comment is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day.

For those interested, this is covered with detail and nuance in the beginning of Adam Tooze's book "The Deluge"

https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1...

"How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement."

This is crazy talk. Germany was a de facto military dictatorship at the time. The legislature and citizens had no say. The only reason the war ended as quickly as it did is they realized the stream of fresh troops from the US doomed them.

Like most military leaderships the Germans were delusional about their capabilities. It's amazing they surrendered when they did, instead of fighting the allies inch by inch in germany. Because they surrendered in a "moment of clarity" it created the whole "stab in the back" theory that Germany could have won victory but it was taken from them.

If the US doesn't enter, the privations of Germany aren't as awful, and their delusions of victory would won out over pragmatism. The war could have lasted years longer.

Maybe, but then the resulting peace treaty would likely have been non-punitive, and then the Nazis and Hitler would never have happened, along with WWII.

No. Should America Have Entered World War II? Also no.

Go on. That flat answer adds nothing.

I'm curious, are you saying that America should not have responded militarily to the attack at Pearl Harbor, or to the declaration of war on it by Germany?

The US was provoking both Germany and Japan. Presumably if we'd actually wanted to stay out of the war we would have stuck to our own knitting.

The US was "lending" warships to the UK, and American destroyers were dropping depth charges on German submarines in an effort to get supplies the Germans were trying to choke off to the UK. In the North Atlantic we'd already joined the war, if unofficially and not wholeheartedly. This is one of the reasons Hitler decided to honor his ally's request to make it official.

In the Pacific US forces were essentially blockading Japan's oil supplies in an effort to force the Japanese out of Manchuria. Japan had to go to war with the US or give up any imperial ambitions (and we knew that wasn't going to happen).

The US embargo of Japan wasn't a blockade and wasn't really an aggressive move. It was a move to not participate in unchecked expansion of Japan by brutal means. Not giving into the whims of monsters isn't provoking them in the slightest.

That's just like saying that France and England started the war because they declared war on Germany when they invaded Poland.

If you're going to be contrarian about something like that, you have to provide some sort of rationale for it, otherwise you're just throwing red meat out there and inviting downvotes.

This goes 1000x over for touchy issues where you can be easily misinterpreted as expressing a pro-Nazi or pro-USSR viewpoint. Forums are discussions, not polls where all anyone cares about is the quantity of opinions on either side. And if you don't care about people misinterpreting you, there's no point in expressing yourself publicly to begin with. Like, literally no point. The whole purpose of forums are to communicate your ideas to other people, not to rep yourself. The more controversial and easily-misinterpreted your stance is, the more important it is to back it up with information and explanations.

So what, they should have just ceded control of the pacific to the Japanese after Pearl Harbour?

They should have ignored Germany declaring war on them?

Or do you mean they never should have participated in lend/lease and dealing with the allies?

No.

edit: What did it solve? Nothing, as proven by WW2.

What did WW2 solve? Very little; see the Cold War that followed.

Lindbergh's view that the Germans and Russians would exhaust themselves, was accurate. That Japan was goaded into war against the USA seems clear enough.

Even worse, the "success" of WW2 justified the creation of a huge bureaucracy, the largest growth after the war up to now has been the size and scope of government, with all the interference in all our lives, that it entails.

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