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I would like to pose a question to the members of this board. I just discovered an article on the French Resistance on CNN. In it the writer-Charles Kaiser-whom I quote here made this interesting statement.
Americans reflexively believe that had Germany occupied the United States, nearly all of us would have joined an armed resistance to the Nazis. That's what I thought, too, when I was 16. But that reflects a hopelessly naive view, both of what the world looked like to most people after the Nazis had conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and France, and of what it actually meant to take up arms against an occupying power.
Let us assume the following worst-case scenario for a moment-never mind that some of it may be totally ASB by our standards.
Hitler does not make the mistakes he made in Operation Barbarossa. He launches it on time and the operation succeeds in conquering all of western Russia. Russia is forced to withdraw from the war.
Britain is starved into submission by the U-Boat threat. Churchill is voted out of office as the situation worsens and his successor agrees to end the war against Germany. Eventually Britain is occupied.
The U.S. has to fight on alone against the Axis powers. Eventually it is invaded and forced to surrender and is divided up between Japan and Germany - think Man in the High Tower.
Realistically speaking - all ASB aside - how many Americans would resist a Nazi occupation? What form would that resistance take? Finally how successful would such a resistance be?