Hitler dosen't declare war on USA

No German DOW, means there is enough sentiment to “Kill the Japs” first. FDR is unable to maneuver past this.
The US concentrates on the Pacific Theatre, eventually invading Japan in the winter of 1944, to almost a million casualties. There are very few Japanese people left.
In China, the extra aid to Chaing means he is able to eliminate Mao, if ineffective against the IJA. Chaing establishes a ‘cult of personality’, and institutes economic policies which end in collectivizing the Chinese Mainland.
In Europe, England prevails, but the Soviets sweep across Europe. Waking up at last, the US frantically feeds men and material into the British Isles, but it is a lonely bastion of Western Civilization against the hordes of Eurasian villainy. The English take pride in calling their embattled land, “Airstrip One”.
In the USA, the million man pile of dead in the invasion of Japan causes revulsion against FDR, and brings Wallace and the Progressives into power. (A minor butterfly causes Weiss’ gun to misfire saving Huey Long, who serves as Wallace’s VP.) After the election, someone mentions how a union of all the English-speaking Progressives would be a good idea. Long proclaims, "We are all one family, but nobody's the Papa."
The world by the 1960’s is one of three fairly stable power blocks centered on the Western Hemisphere – surrounded and protected by oceans, the reformed USSR, astride all of Eurasia, and the Chinese Hegemony, which controls all of East Asia.
:D

This all assumes that Americans were on board with abandoning Europe, which has been and will be debated a lot in this forum.
 
And you, conversely, assumed that it had to be wrong.

I looked it up and found an article talking about it inside about five minutes. It was a criticism of the methods, to be clear, but it pointed out that the starting methodology (pre-war) was to weight by voting public.

It does include more college educated respondents than a statistically averaged sample would suggest, but not an overwhelming number - even if all of the college educated respondents (30%) were in favour, thus overrepresenting their population fraction by a factor of three, the other 70% would still be about six to one in favour of intervention.

That is if the 70% is the correct sampling, method or data gathering done.
At this time surveys were done archaic compared to modern surveys which tend to results to be biased.

Where did you get that figure from? Whatever the faults of early "scientific" polling, too-small sample sizes was *not* one of them! "
"In the early days of opinion polling,survey researchers drew much larger samples than those used by modern pollsters. Though the sample size varied from poll to poll, the AIPO sample s tended to be about 3,000 cases, the NORCsamples about 2,500 cases, and Roper samples about 5,000 cases. The reason for the large samples is that researchers had not yet figured out that they could draw relatively small samples and still get adequat estimates of opinion. In fact,one of the early leaders in public opinion polling, Hadley Cantril, said of the 5,000 person sample that Roper used to predict the 1936 election for Fortune magazine, “from the point of view of statistical adequacy its sample was ridiculously tiny"... http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4740/berinsky.pdf

The size of the total sample size won't matter if it is larger than what is accepted today. The issue would be how the question is formulated, data collected, etc, which points to methodology and can lead to bias results.

The only thing that larger sample size would help is time of completion, cost of doing the survey and the margin of error being less by a very small margin assuming the correct method.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
That is if the 70% is the correct sampling, method or data gathering done.
At this time surveys were done archaic compared to modern surveys which tend to results to be biased.



The size of the total sample size won't matter if it is larger than what is accepted today. The issue would be how the question is formulated, data collected, etc, which points to methodology and can lead to bias results.

The only thing that larger sample size would help is time of completion, cost of doing the survey and the margin of error being less by a very small margin assuming the correct method.

Sorry, but no.
Given the known facts about this survey -

Balanced for voting population,
Method was to knock on doors all over the US and ask people the questions directly,
Sample size of thousands,
Question was exactly as stated (Should President Roosevelt have asked Congress to declare war on Germany, as well as on Japan?)


Then there is almost literally no way there was not substantial support for war with Germany unless Gallup was engaged in deliberate, systematic and entirely unnoticed mass fraud.

The question is clear and impossible to misunderstand. The data is known to have been balanced post collection, the sample size is easily large enough to avoid edge effects, and there is no mechanism for major sampling bias (i.e. no accidental exclusion of a major branch of society).

In fact, the closest thing I can find to a major source of bias here is that it doesn't sample from the portion of the population currently in uniform or homeless.

Please explain some kind of mechanism as to how this poll could have drastically overstated US popular support for a declaration of war on Germany, rather than just handwaving with vague mention of "bias". How, specifically, does this bias come in?
 
The general reaction in the US press--including the former isolationist press--to the German DoW was one of indifference. It was a mere formality, they said; the US and Germany were already really at war, Japan could not have pulled off Pearl Harbor without German inspiration, etc. Richard Hill's *Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor* is good at documenting this, and at showing how Pearl Harbor revolutionized American public opinion not only toward Japan but toward Germany. (Hill unfortunately buys into what I consider untenable conspiracy theories about FDR, but that is another matter.)

There is also incidentally no reason to think that if the US rather than Germany had declared war first it would have made any difference to the "Germany first" strategy which US planners had agreed on well before Pearl Harbor. As Louis Morton writes, by the summer of 1941,

"...the decision on the course the United States would follow in the event it was "compelled to resort to war" had, in effect, been made. The United States would make the main effort in the Atlantic and European area where the major enemy, Germany, was located, Just how the final blow would be delivered was not yet known, but the Americans expected it would require a large-scale ground offensive. In the Pacific and Far East, United States strategy would be defensive, with greatest emphasis on the area encompassed by the strategic triangle, Alaska-Hawaii-Panama. Implicit in this concept was acceptance of the loss of the Philippines, Wake, and Guam, Thus, in a period of less than three years, the Pacific orientation of U.S. strategy, developed over a period of many years, was completely reversed. By mid-1941, in response to the threat from Europe, the eyes of American strategists were focused on the Atlantic. It was there, they believed, that the war in which the United States was certain to be involved would be decided.

"These expectations were more than fulfilled. Though the war when it came opened with an attack in the Pacific, the President and his military advisers made it clear at the outset in the first of the wartime conferences with the British held at Washington in December 1941-January 1942 (ARCADIA) that they would stand by their decision to defeat Germany first. Not once during the course of the war was this decision successfully challenged." http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_01.htm
 
The general reaction in the US press--including the former isolationist press--to the German DoW was one of indifference. It was a mere formality, they said; the US and Germany were already really at war, Japan could not have pulled off Pearl Harbor without German inspiration, etc. Richard Hill's *Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor* is good at documenting this, and at showing how Pearl Harbor revolutionized American public opinion not only toward Japan but toward Germany. (Hill unfortunately buys into what I consider untenable conspiracy theories about FDR, but that is another matter.)

There is also incidentally no reason to think that if the US rather than Germany had declared war first it would have made any difference to the "Germany first" strategy which US planners had agreed on well before Pearl Harbor. As Louis Morton writes, by the summer of 1941,

"...the decision on the course the United States would follow in the event it was "compelled to resort to war" had, in effect, been made. The United States would make the main effort in the Atlantic and European area where the major enemy, Germany, was located, Just how the final blow would be delivered was not yet known, but the Americans expected it would require a large-scale ground offensive. In the Pacific and Far East, United States strategy would be defensive, with greatest emphasis on the area encompassed by the strategic triangle, Alaska-Hawaii-Panama. Implicit in this concept was acceptance of the loss of the Philippines, Wake, and Guam, Thus, in a period of less than three years, the Pacific orientation of U.S. strategy, developed over a period of many years, was completely reversed. By mid-1941, in response to the threat from Europe, the eyes of American strategists were focused on the Atlantic. It was there, they believed, that the war in which the United States was certain to be involved would be decided.

"These expectations were more than fulfilled. Though the war when it came opened with an attack in the Pacific, the President and his military advisers made it clear at the outset in the first of the wartime conferences with the British held at Washington in December 1941-January 1942 (ARCADIA) that they would stand by their decision to defeat Germany first. Not once during the course of the war was this decision successfully challenged." http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_01.htm

Well then, it seems that there is no difference. Much more would have to change to keep America and Germany/Italy from fighting.
 
The US likely enters the war against Germany according to a timeline developed by the Pentagon to properly prepare the US armed forces for that conflict in conjunction with the United Kingdom. The reason given will be that Germany is behind Japan's attack, and that the US cannot be safe until Nazi Germany is defeated. The longer it is after Pearl Harbor, the more controversial it will be, but likely there will be wide support for a war against Germany. FDR can likely find whatever pretext he needs.

Most likely it won't happen until 1943 to give the US enough time to prepare.

In the meantime, the US could expand its operations in the Atlantic to assist the Royal Navy's efforts against the U-Boots which were doing very well by late 1941. Since there is no Second Happy Time, the U-Boots are in bad position.

The US could also concentrate all its naval and land forces in the Pacific without needing to worry about the war in the Atlantic/Europe. That means the Pacific Fleet will be boosted by additional ships. USS Wasp will likely be transferred to boost the carrier fleet and could participate in operations in the Coral Sea or Midway. There'd also be more support for any Guadalcanal type operation and troops for New Guinea.

If the US does enter the war in Europe (likely, but by no means assured), the US is likely to try a direct build up in England for assault in France and not waste efforts in a Mediterranean strategy. While the US will have learned some important things in the Pacific campaign, there's probably still lots of problems with its handling of armor.
 
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