Yes! Franklin Pierce!!! The absolute worst. And I don't even care whether or not he was a Republican or a Democrat (as if it mattered...). :-)

Strick - You are absolutely right on the naval warfare bit. I would've gotten into that too, but I'd already written enough on it, I figured. Roosevelt's government was already unofficially assisting the British in the Battle of the Atlantic long before Hitler ever declared war on the USA. And yes, the Japanese were more easily provoked.

Here's another interesting sidelight on the early war years. The Luftwaffe had been strictly ordered from early 1940 NOT to bomb British cities or metropolitan areas. It was the British bomber command that commenced aerial attacks on German civilian centers on May 11, 1940, thus beginning the strategic bombing offensive. This was Winston Churchill's decision. One of the key targets specified was "railway stations", which normally lay in the very center of the most densely inhabited civilian areas of German cities. On June 20, 1940 the definition of "military targets" was expanded to include industrial targets...this meant not only factories in Germany, but also the workers homes that lay all around those factories. Therefore, the British commenced the infamous "blitz" themselves in June 1940. The Germans did not respond until September 6th of that year, launching their own blitz on London and other English cities in retaliation.

The horrors that followed between then and VE Day included the well-known bombing of London and Coventry, the German V-weapons, and the incineration of much of Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, and a hundred other places by Allied bombers. At no time did those bombing raids achieve their stated aims: to break the fighting will of the enemy populace or to break the ability of their industry to keep producing war materiel. No...but they wrote a whole new chapter in the insanity of war.

It took ten times the effort (and money) to build a 4-engine bomber and to crew it, as it did to build a fighter plane. In the air war over Germany, the German fighter planes generally shot down a fair bit more Allied bombers than they lost fighters in doing so. Accordingly, the whole proposition of mass bombing cities with fleets of 1,000 or more bombers was a peculiar one...in that it was prohibitively expensive and did not achieve its principle objectives...but it was done anyway. Why? Because it COULD be done. And that is probably the same reason the atomic bombs were dropped. Because they COULD be.

Put it this way. Give a violent person who is in a killing mood an ax, and he is likely to use it. Give him a shotgun, and he will use that too. Give him a bazooka, and the same result follows. Murder is not a procedure that is often accompanied by a sense of humanity or proportion.

I have written the above merely to demonstrate that simplistic thinking which wants to place all the "good guys" on one side of a historical conflict and all the "bad guys" on the other side is unrealistic and self-serving nonsense.

It's equally silly to make all the "good guys" either Republicans or Democrats...or conservatives or liberals. You can only do it by being totally partisan and willfully blind.

- LH