I agree with most of your post, but not this. Compared with 1939, the United States had made incredible progress at setting the stage for a total war economy, and building up the infrastructure of its armed forces for rapid expansion with conscription. I think it is pretty hard to say we were “totally” unprepared. The American military was probably in better position for that war than just about any other in its history of the peacetime armed forces save Vietnam or the Gulf Wars…
Okay, so maybe not “totally”. You are right, we had taken some steps in the right direction. The winds of war were blowing and they did accept that reality back then.
See this thread for more info:
www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?5080-The-Pre-War-US-Army-From-Emaciation-to-Power.
Maybe, but there had been elements of the US engaged in convoy protection in the Atlantic before the formal declaration of war against the US by Hitler following Pearl Harbor while the US armed forces were building up significantly during 1941.
I don’t know the details, but I suspect that the Cash and Carry then Lend Lease programs from 1939 until America entered the war was building up American war production capacity.
From a position of limited preparedness, the American response in enlistments, arming, and war production was the most impressive and effective example among all the combatant nations, and more so because America fought a long way from home in the Pacific, Europe and Mediterranean theatres.
I think that was more a triumph of Japanese planning and execution than a failure by America to be ready for something beyond reasonable expectation.
It was also a double edged sword for Japan as the attack galvanised Americans and ensured that Japan would be defeated, which Japan ably assisted by a relatively ineffective, in military and strategic terms, attack which put only a few major ships out of action permanently; failed to destroy the oil storages without which the whole American fleet at Pearl Harbor would have been rendered useless; and, surprisingly for Japan which saw the importance of aircraft carrier attacks, failed to damage one US carrier.
That’s overly generous. 
He lost whole of the Philippines as well, after losing his major food supplies to the Japanese (because he didn’t want to affect morale by moving them to safer positions, rather like Percival in Singapore thought it would be bad for morale to prepare defensive positions on the island when he had plenty of time to do so) so that the Filipino and US troops would starve when they retreated to their final defensive positions, which is a stroke of considered strategic brilliance which exceeded even losing half his bombers on the ground on Day One by going off the air.
Didn’t MacArthur’s delay of a phased tactical withdrawal to the redoubt of Bataan also allow an unexpected number of Filipino civilians to flee into the area further straining food supplies?
Point 1. Yes I was wrong in my comments about us being totally unprepared. We had started to do a lot of things right starting in 1939, but the country should never had let it’s armed forces deterioate to the level it did in the inter-war years. We were lucky that we had the capacity to quickly turn things around, in both industrial and a will to fight sense.
Point 2. Pearl Harbor’s attack could have been lessoned if the detrmination had not been made the the newly installed radar units had been tracking American planes, the Japanese could have had a much warmer reception. Also, intelligence had been monitoring the Japanese diplomatic traffic and they knew something was afoot, but again they didnt see Pearl Harbor as the main target. Setting our planes wingtip to wingtip was not a good idea, but again, I heard intelligence had been warning of a possible ground sabotage attack. They blundered here too. It was a well planned attack resulting in complete surprise and great destruction and loss of life. Fate intervened with our carriers at sea and the oil tank farm remaining unscathed. The American public was rightly riled up and this proved to be an unfortunate thing for Japan in the end.
Point 3. Yep, McArthur did lose the whole Phillippines. War Plan Orange was a disaster and it was suicide to pen all your troops up on the Bataan Peninsula, fighting a delaying action while you waited for help to come from America. Any other General would have been cashiered, but “Mac” had too many friends in high places.
I don’t know, but I think it was stupid to bottle your troops there with no way out. To my mind, the Army should have been sent to the hills for a massive guerilla campaign. There are many islands in the Phillippines and troops could have been allowed to go to them all to continue the fight. As I said before, War Plan Orange did not turn out well. The U.S. had been attacked everywhere and with our limited forces, no help was available to the Phillippine garrison. Thank God the Japanese were somewhat inept in their total strategic thinking process, this helped give us time to recover.
America wasn’t alone there. Britain and Australia, and maybe Canada, did the same thing.
The US also fell into the same trap the Allies had already fallen into twice by assuming that an offense couldn’t be launched in the Ardennes Forest. The lesson should have been learned from 1914 and certainly from 1940. It was just luck Airborne troops had been stationed there to allow them to rest and refit in what was expected to be a quiet zone of the front in '44. There was plenty of evidence that Germany was massing for an attack but it was discounted at least partly because it was still dogmatically believed that it wasn’t possible to launch an armored attack through such terrain.
Eisenhower believed that this attack was actually fortuitous for the Allies because it allowed them to destroy the Axis forces in open battle rather being forced attack them behind prepared defenses. This would eventually prove to be true but it was very nearly a disaster. Even then many question the decision to attack the salient in a frontal attack rather than attacking the shoulders from the north and south and cutting off the main body in an encircling maneuver. It took several months of brutal combat to regain the ground that had been lost. It should be pointed out however that the German Army in the West largely destroyed in the action.
It was not so much that they did not expect an attack in the Ardennes region, more they did not expect an attack of that scale again at all in the west.
Yes, but then they didn’t invade England, did they? It is true that the burning of Washington was a disaster, but it is also instructive that the last battle of the war at New Orleans was a resounding defeat for the British.
I haven’t read all the posts here, but did anyone mention Slapton Sands?
The other one that immediately comes to mind is the turkey shoot off the Atlantic Coast called “Paukenschlag” by the Germans (Drumbeat) and colloquially referred to by them as the Second Happy Time. For reasons I have never understood, the US did not a) blackout coastal cities and b) had no convoy system in place after hostilities with the Germans formally commenced. The result was the mass sinking of dozens if not hundreds of vessels that were highlighted by the lights of coastal cities. This was eventually remedied, but it was really inexcusable.
Much truth here, but fundamentally, the Japanese lost the war the moment it attacked Pearl Harbor.
No. But there were several commerce raids off the British coast that made things uncomfortable for his majesty’s gov’t. And the burning of Washington (and of my hometown) were retaliations for the U.S. burning Toronto. While the war may have been a touch over a draw, the British were forced to concede (in their own secret documents) that the United States would inevitably conquer Canada and begin to threaten their possessions in the Caribbean by 1817…one of the main reasons why the British gave back captured U.S. territory in Maine and Michigan with no real counter to their generosity in the Treaty of Ghent…
New Orleans was a resounding defeat, but it wasn’t the last battle of the War of 1812. I believed the British stormed a fort at Mobile, AL and won a useless victory…
And while Washington was a disaster of the first order, the successful defense of Baltimore began the process of ending the war as the British now realized it was becoming a “peoples’ war” where their relatively small numbers of soldiers and marines were beginning to lose their military advantages…
It should also be pointed out that the war of 1812 was being fought at the very height of the Napoleonic wars - and France was a much bigger threat than the US so got the overwhelming majority of the attention.
A good observation, pdf27. Apart from the obvious case of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, the British were much more directly interested in contemporary events in the Iberian Peninsula, where 1812 marked the “turn of the tide” in favour of Britain and her Portuguese and anti-Napoleonic Spanish allies. In that year, Wellington ground out what were ultimately decisive victories over the French at Badajoz and Salamanca, and the Spanish/Portuguese armies scored multiple victories over the French in southern Castile. The net outcome was the liberation of significant western Spanish territories in the north and the south, temporary Allied occupation of Madrid, and the undermining of the French strategic position in the Peninsula as a whole, pointing to ultimate Allied victory over the following two years. Compared to the Peninsula, New Orleans must have seemed a long way from London. This is certainly not to deny the latter’s ultimate importance. Best regards, JR.
The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the peace treaty of Ghent was singed so the lives of the Royal Marines and soldiers were thrown away unless you count from the American perspective that it legitimized the United States as a regional military power. There is no questions that Napoleon provided a much more existential threat to Britain than did her former colonies. But at the same time, even with the winding down of the wars, I believe the economic toll on the two countries–Britain and America–was simply to great to continue. And while Britain’s navy was far more powerful, there was a fear that a militarized United States, with a large standing army that was becoming ever more effective and well led, could cause problems. But in the end, Britain needed America’s resources and markets, and America needed Britain for the same reasons.
Regarding the Burning of Washington, one interesting thing of note was a massively violent storm cell erupted over the city as the British Army was setting fire to it dousing much of the flames and killing and wounding dozens of His Majesty’s soldiers and marines. The British suffered more casualties in burning the city than they had suffered and the abortive Battle of Bladensburg. Providence? 
Nick - I agree that there was a certain absurdity in the decisive battle in the war taking place after the peace treaty was signed; one of a number of absurdities connected with this war. You would know much more about the “remembrance” of the war in the US - but it is my impression that the memory of this first major post-Independence war in the United States suggests that considerable importance is attached to the peculiar victory as a legimating act for the new state.
None of that detracts from the sense that this war was a bad-tempered postscript to hostile relations between Great Britain and her former American colonies that should, really, have been regarded as settled some years before. Best regards, JR.
There’s no question about this. The Battle of New Orleans was a significant, unifying event. The War of 1812 was in many ways even more unpopular than Vietnam and caused significant dissent in the New England states were individuals contemplated succession over the fact that the war was severing them from their key markets of Britain and Western Europe. The end of the war concluded on a military triumph and the securing of the key Mississippi River waterway ushered in an era of good feelings and an economic boon followed soon by a depression in the early part of the nineteenth century IIRC. It of course also propelled General Andrew Jackson’s political career…
None of that detracts from the sense that this war was a bad-tempered postscript to hostile relations between Great Britain and her former American colonies that should, really, have been regarded as settled some years before. Best regards, JR.
Both sides are to blame for this. Where I live was a major war theatre (The Niagara Frontier/Southern Ontario) and there are still several forts, historical markers listing gun positions along the Niagara River, etc. As a specific, one of the bigger attractions having to do with the war is Fort Niagara, built by the French in the eighteenth century and eventually captured by the British/American colonists after the securing of Canada from the French. The fort was strategically located on a choke point of Lake Erie making its guns potent to hostile shipping. The British held the fort for the duration of the American Revolution using it as a post to launching raiding parties of British troops and American Loyalist “Rangers” through Western New York and even into Pennsylvania. Fort Niagara was supposed have been turned over to the New York Militia/U.S. Army but the Brits held onto it for years after the treaty refusing to leave. Despite this, the relations between the U.S. Army officers eventual stationed at the fort and their British counterparts across the lake were actually rather good with exchanges and dinner parties being the norm. With the coming of the War of 1812, it was also one of a string of ignominious defeats the early U.S. Army suffered as they essentially forgot to lock the gate allowing a large British raiding party to basically sneak in and secure the fort and circumventing its rather formidable rampart defenses…