“(E)everybody (in America) had guns. One commonality among the nations conquered by Germany is that private firearms ownership was heavily restricted or simply banned. With no such restrictions here . . . the Germans would have faced an armed force at least 10 times the size of their invasion force, who were also motivated to ensure that they (the Germans) would lose.” – John Mixon in What Would Have Happened if Germany Had Invaded the U.S. During World War II? [at slate.com]
WTF is SLATE doing posting a non grabber article?
Slate?
Is this an alternate universe?
Surely there is a disturbance in the force…
The funny part is I am 100% sure they don’t even realize they are doing it.
I don’t know if the two people that still read Slate could create much of a disturbance.
At slate no less?
Why do you guys always hide the whole article behind the jump, even when the entire thing is literally one paragraph?
Am I cynical or is it because you get me to visit another corner of your website– one more click
Manufactures clicks and makes it more difficult (but not impossible) to use RSS readers.
It’s extremely annoying and I’ve decided to dedicate my life to helping people get around shit like this.
I miss the days of a simple text web. Now we have to weave through a landmine of advertising and gimmicks to get to any real content.
ABP, Full-text rss, mobilizer, lynx, etc… FTMFW
Click Bait
Click bait for other sites? No. It’s “quote of the day”. As in, pull one salient bit from something larger of interest.
Better question is what if Germany didn’t attack France or England and focused all efforts in Russia.
And supplied their troops with winter clothing.
What if Patton lived and he kept heading east after Berlin? What if we nuked the Soviets before they had the bomb?
Actually, Hitler wasn’t an idiot when it came to military strategy. He knew the failures of the First World War and made every attempt to avoid them. The Kaiser bet that he could knock out France so fast that Russia wouldn’t even be mobilized yet. A war on both fronts was unwinnable for Germany.
Hitlers first failure was the Battle of Britain. After that he guessed it would take 2 years for Britain and America (not yet in the war) to launch a European invasion. It actually took 3. Once the war opened up on the west he figured Stalin would jump in and crush Germany. So the invasion of Russia was a necessity.
He underestimated the callousness of his enemy .
Who would have calculated that your prey would destroy their own ( burn ) fields , factories , and cities , displace and kill millions of their own just to slow the progress of an invasion . They used , as they had historically had , a Russian winter , as their # 1 weapon and with the help of American MOTOWN manufacturing , I.E. personnel carriers , WWII European theater was basically done .
The Germans miscalculations in Russia along with the allies successful misdirection of the Normandy invasion spelled the end of the German / Italian conquest of the world .
‘Who would have calculated that your prey would destroy their own ( burn ) fields , factories , and cities , displace and kill millions of their own just to slow the progress of an invasion.’
Anyone who had even a cursory knowledge of Napolean’s invasion of Russia should have known Stalin would use the same strategy as Alexander I. Hitler’s miscalculation was in thinking that trains, airplanes and tanks changed everything, which they didn’t.
Best Founding Father’s advice…let’s keep slaves, and the Whiskey Rebellion amongst others.
That’s OK, it’s OK to be proud of ones ethnic and religious heritage, except your American heritage.
There is the fact that the entire world at the signing of the Declaration of Independence accepted slavery as a normal part of society. Among American Indian tribes in North, central and south America, In Africa, The Ottoman Muslim Empire, Asia, the Mid-east. EVERY WHERE.
It was Western Europe and then America that first outlawed slavery before the rest of the world followed suit. Kind of. We had to fight a war with the Ottoman Empire to stop the Muslims from continuing the slave trade out of Africa.
There you go. There a little fact you can feel proud about being an American.
The Liberal/Progressive is all about saying how we should be proud about our native culture. (Except your American heritage, of course) I’m French, Scottish, German and something else. I was born in this country, (which makes me a native american), but out of all my nations of origin, I feel proudest of my American heritage.
The best country in the world!
God damned straight man. I’m so sick of hearing this liberal revisionist history these days, where America is just the evil empire which devoted its entire existence to racist murder. It’s complete bullshit. It’s revisionist because it completely leaves out context, and the rest of the world from the picture. The biggest misconceptions taught today are the slave trade, the realities of slavery in the Americas, and the realities of it in Africa and the Middle East. Here’s a thought to all you liberal educated types, do the research yourself on these subjects because I don’t have the bandwidth to do the deprogramming for you.
Try bringing up that one group of your colonial ancestors were slaves to a lib/prog/sjw and then show them that they were white as well. The mental gymnastics and denialism are rather impressive trying to justify their worldview that white people only had brown slaves.
Yep. Woodchuck. One of our first wars as a new country was against the Barbary Pirates, (Muslim Countries) that were raiding american ships and taking the white sailors and making them slaves.
It is part of the Marine Corp Hymn, “From the shores of Tripoli”
Oops. “To the Shores of Tripoli”
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli .
That is where the Marines got the nick name ‘ leathernecks ‘ ,.
We have been at war with Islam since about 1776 .
Got to love old Thomas Jefferson .
How do they get away with rewriting history ?
Silly Americans to busy playing , partying , and working to read and learn what they never taught us in school , unless you were born before 1954 and or were lucky enough to run across a patriot in your educational journey .
Real quick gauge of how far down the rabbit hole a progressive has fallen is to ask them the following……
On the whole over the past couple centuries, is the world better off for having America?
After 10+ years of being glued to MSNBC and the MFM my 80+ yo Korean war veteran father started babbling left-speak about imperialist-this and slavery-that. I sat there mouth agape and my 20YO son shot me a flabbergasted expression.
30 years ago my father would have just said “What kind of stupid question is that?”
Out of respect for my parent I just reminded him that his Korean-war sacrifice is presently keeping 60M South Koreans from starving in a North Korean genocidal gulag. Left it at that.
My hate and contempt for the Left and its pervasive Anti-American media bombardment knows no bounds.
The founding fathers actually wanted to start a country without slavery. The grievance in the declaration that got the most verbiage was about slavery having been allowed in the colonies in the first place. In the end, half the colonies were going to refuse to join if they couldn’t keep slaves, if that had happened we would still be British and we’d still have slavery.
They knew the ideals they were founding a country on were inconsistent with slavery, but it was a choice between ideological purity and actually succeeding.
The fact that the constitution protects slavery until a certain date is evidence that there was a desire to eliminate it competing with a desire to keep it.
Yes, TJ was a hypocrite on slavery. No, that does not invalidate every idea he ever had or mean the founding father’s had no wisdom, which is the only reasonable premise for such a comment.
Yep. There are our ideals, then there is reality. And how much do we compromise with those ideals without betraying them?
Thomas Jefferan and him owning slaves? Yet he wrote some of the most incredible truth about being a free people. Which is still true, despite that fact. It is again, judging people of the past with current day standards.
So I can accept that some of our Founding Fathers owned slaves, as many did around the world, and yet they were learning to accept that all people needed to be treated as equal human beings, which ultimately we did, as one of the first countries that did outlaw slavery.
Germany also didn’t invade England… I have a feeling America owes a lot more to the Atlantic than it does to gun ownership when it comes to being invaded.
While not a true invasion they did have u boats off our coast & sent some Americans to do sabotage. The sabotage failed because they didn’t make sure they sent people that wanted America to lose.
America is insulated by oceans to the east and west and weak and friendly neighbors to the north and south. It also benefits from having three zones separated by mountains. It would have taken 10 million troops to conquer America and every one of them would have to stick around to hold the territory. This is what Manifest Destiny was all about.
Germany on the other hand was sandwiched between military adversaries with no natural boundaries. Had it had the means to attack America it would have been defenseless at home.
Germany also didn’t invade Switzerland. No shores, completely surrounded by Germans, guns in each house.
If there’s one obstacle more formidable to an invasion force than an ocean it’s a mountain range.
And explosives on everything of value.
The Germans didn’t avoid Switzerland because they couldn’t take it. They avoided Switzerland because they knew taking it would be very costly and there would be nothing left of value when they finished.
Not to mention, Switzerland’s “neutral” status made it a useful tool for Germany in a number of ways (currency exchange, espionage, etc). Had Hitler defeated Russia, I have little doubt Switzerland would have eventually gotten the axe, though.
Sending millions of troops across the Atlantic to occupy a country with ten times Germany’s land area wasn’t ever going to happen, with or without America’s civilian-owned guns.
Thanks Stinkeye
That’s exactly why the Germans didn’t conquer the Swiss , they didn’t need to because they were not an external threat and most importantly , Switzerland was a giant German vault for their squanders .
Hitler didn’t attack Switzerland because it would have been foolish to attack his own banker.
The combination of geography, resources, and population makes the U.S. all but invincible to foreign military invasion.
The combination of U.S. industrial capacity outside the range of enemy bombers, the Allies’ establishment of air superiority, and the development of a long-range bomber escorts (P-51) that allowed day-time bombing of German industry doomed Germany, no matter what happened with Russia. Once these three things came together, Germany was on the wrong end of a waiting game. Hitler made some bad decisions that sped up the end game, though.
Or a smallish nation invading a country spanning a continent halfway around the world is too logistically challenging and impractical. The rest of the article touches upon that, but guns, ya know?
Unless, the military contractors can make a $hitload of cash……..
I doubt that the uncommitted voter today cares much about history or the “rifle behind every blade of grass” argument.
We would be better off recalling the 2004 Jihadi school massacre in Beslan, Russia, resulting in 385 deaths. Or, the 2013 Jihadi Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi, Kenya, resulting in 67 deaths. Ponder the question: Why couldn’t it happen here? And, then, contemplate the images of rifle-toting civilians standing guard in front of military recruiting centers.
There are no where near the number of police and National Guardsmen to protect all the soft targets in the US. The unorganized militia would be a sufficient resource.
The Mumbai massacres.
There was a reporter saying how the local police forces had pistols but would not engage the terrorists. It took days to finally kill all the Muslim terrorists after hundreds of deaths.
For a very realistic scenario of what could happen read Day of Wrath by William Forstchen. Yes, it could happen here.
That is one of the most ridiculous counter factuals I have ever seen. At no point was a German invasion of the US even a remote possibility. Even at the height of most his grandiose delusions Hitler never even dreamed that it was possible. Because it wasn’t. He didn’t have to worry about how many guns US civilians had because he knew how many the US Navy had. They would have been better served going with the idea of a Japanese invasion since there was actually a quote by Yamamoto about US civilian gun ownership, and the Japanese actually invaded the Aleutian island of Kiska.
The Yamamoto quote is unattributed, but the thought behind it is likely correct, and it mirrors our reluctance to invade Japan, or anywhere else.
NOTE: the only successful repulsion of an amphibius assault of WWII happened on Wake, Island (US TERRITORY) December 7, 1941 (that’s right, on the same day as Pearl Harbor). Marines beat back the Japanese with the assistance of unarmed contract civilian construction workers (DOD/NAVY) thought, if they weren’t “armed” the enemy would not treat them like combatants, but they were forced to fight like dogs, with the weapons of fallen Marines and Japanes [seems like a recurring theme throughout history, no?]. They were forced to surrender, after weeks of repeated and constant attacks, 20 days later, and they were brutally tortured. One ‘greater’ good from all of this was more Marine hard-core lore. Another was that the NAVY woke up and said ‘never again’ and they set about to create their best fighting force THE US NAVY SEABEES. (You might object, but the first NAVY SEALS came from that group).
Anyway HOORAH SEABEES!
We survived a possible German invasion, and Russian, but we’re still fending and fighting off the f-ing coomie evil house of blue (D),
There is more than one way to defeat a country or neutralize it. Had Japan not attacked us, and had we remained pacifist and not developed the A-bomb, it is possible Germany might have. An invasion of the USA would not have been necessary or practical, but knowledge of the bomb would have sufficed to keep us out of the war, and possibly even have been used as a threat to get us to stop aiding the Allies. Nuclear armed or not, our neutral stance might even have encouraged the Nazification of parts of South America, along with continued efforts to increase pro-Nazi sympathies in the US. Thankfully, history spoke otherwise.
It is now pretty much accepted that both Japan and Germany were working on an atomic bomb for the sole purpose of it’s use to bring America to the table of concession . NY , Detroit , Chicago , and the chemical valley’s of West Virginia and East Texas were marked targets .
Chuck Norris would have stopped them……..
Yes, even wearing diapers, Chuck is a force to be reckoned with.
Little known fact; they say necessity is the mother of invention, well it was the need for a diaper strong enough to contain baby Chuck Norris’ poops that lead to the invention of Kevlar.
This article fits the anti-gun agenda perfectly. Hitler couldn’t cross the English Channel to invade a laughably unprepared Britain. There is no way Germany is projecting power across an ocean to invade a country protected by a navy with proven blue water capability. A German invasion of the US is pure fantasy. We might as well talk about what Hitler would have done with a fully functional Death Star. This article is subtle jab at pro 2A arguments about the value of civilian arms to the security of a free state. It essentially says: look at those silly gun-nuts who think they stopped the German invasion.
The anti’s ain’t that subtle and they ain’t that deep. Simple sods really or for the most part, the members not the leaders, they wouldn’t be anti gun. It takes a certain level of gullibility and downright low iq to follow the gun grabbers cause.
A rifle behind every blade of grass.
There are several problems with this pretend pro gun Slate piece, but the thing that continues to have relevance is that a gun owning population in no way guarantees freedom. Germany’s civilian population to my knowledge was well armed prior and during WWII, as was the civilian population of Iraq under the Hussein rule. Here in the U.S. We as a population are silently cooperating in the obliteration of our remaining rights, yet believe the 2A will somehow have relevance in the absence of the other rights we are watching vanish.
the German people were disarmed in the 1930’s
……………and only the Sunnis along the border areas with Persia , Syria and Turkey were laughably armed .
We as a population are silently cooperating in the obliteration of our remaining rights, yet believe the 2A will somehow have relevance in the absence of the other rights we are watching vanish.
That part of your post I will agree with.
Next Week On Slate: What if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo?
What? By playing “Rock Lobster” repeatedly, at loud volumes? (sarc)
19th century France had airfields and support infrastructure to deal with jet age bombers?
Wouldn’t need it. It would take only one sortie. The plane could crash after that.
What if the Persians had nuclear missiles today ?
Reminds me of the story about Switzerland and the Axis Powers:
“What would you do if we sent an invasion force twice as big as your civil defense militia”?
“Shoot twice and go home”
Meh-it would have taken more than 10 million troops.And some handy atomic bombs for herr hitler. A better question is what if we had wrecked Russia and China in 1950? BTW-happy 70th Atomic bomb day! Thank you for saving (perhaps) a million Americans…
Whoa , after that Happy Birthday comment , Nissan , Honda , Hyundai , and Toyota ( manufacture of the most American car ) are packing up and leaving .
Sorry we HAD TO drop those things , but you guys started it , even if we were flying sorties over the hemis for a couple years to help the Chinese , YOU STARTED IT !
Yep-and we saved the Japanese empire so they could get rich. If we had invaded we may have had 1000000dead Americans and 10000000 dead Japanese-let alone a Russian invasion. You’re welcome…
Not sure it matters but… Hyundai is Korean. Toothy best of my knowledge, they had nothing to do with the whole kerfuffle.
And still true today. The American private citizenry is the most heavily armed force in the history of mankind.
I have read that one of the Nazi’s plans was to invade the USA in the mid 1970s. I think WWII Germany really was a lot weaker than most think. Germany lacked a decent Navy or Strategic air force. War production usually was crappy and the nation just was not that big. The British were going to assassinate Hitler, but they realized he was the best General the Allies had.
What would have happened had Germany made a large scale invasion of America Mainland during WI I? The same thing Yamamoto warned the Japanese military when they proposed the same thing, a rifle behind every blade of grass.
If Germany had attempted an invasion of America, most of the invasion force wouldn’t have had to worry about rifles and grass, because they would have been at the bottom of the Atlantic. Aside from their U-boat fleet, Germany’s navy in those days was a pretty sad affair, and getting millions of soldiers (not to mention tanks, artillery, and aircraft) across the sea undetected during a ten-day crossing just wasn’t ever going to be within their capabilities.
It was for the other enemy, but in Oregon there were local militias organized to watch the coast and respond to any invasion, with the intent to hold as well as possible until the Army could show up. The governor made them official militias.
Here locally, they had some pretty nasty tricks prepared for any invaders*, and with most of the male population near-marksman level at up to 500 yards, I would NOT have wanted to be a Japanese soldier trying to make my way on American soil.
I have to presume things on the east coast wouldn’t have been too much less tough.
*on one place along the coast, the plan was to let the Japanese come ashore with just scattered opposition — and once they got serious equipment landed, to set fire to the entire peninsula!
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