Read it, enjoyed the anecdotes, mulling over the contents and dreading a future that sees Charles Lindbergh in power in the US, and hence an ultra-isolationist America doing squat to stop the fascist powers of the world. I fear Xibei San Ma will have to face the Japanese alone, without American aid or troops to give aid or distraction...
The thing to remember about the America-Firsters is that they were pacifists but patriots as well. When the Japanese attacked, they were basically behind the war effort and the party dissolved almost overnight. Caroline O'Day was also a pacifist and summed it up pretty well: `Japan, Germany, and Italy have decided the issue of peace or war. ` I don't think the question for armchair historians is so much if a Lindbergh Administration would fight so much as how much more the Axis could get away with before it did fight. Presumably a more isolationist America would not have applied diplomatic pressure or economic sanctions to the Japanese, so they might have stayed confined to China for a few years more. I'm risking being pelted with tomatoes here, but Britain and the Soviet Union basically won the war in Europe before any American troops arrived (Operation TORCH kicked off right as the USSR was turning it around in Stalingrad). Direct US involvement just shortened things for a few years. You can argue though that Britain and the USSR would have collapsed if not for Lend-Lease and Roosevelt's constant circumventions of the Neutrality Acts, so if Lindbergh cut things off completely in January `41, would Barbarossa now have been a success six months later?
All a bit of a moot point for the context of this AAR, as we know already the Japanese here will DoW the USA no matter who is in the White House, so it's not too much of a spoiler to mention that there will still be American involvement. They only way to keep them out would be to defeat Japan by 1941 but I won't have enough ships cranked out by then... well, ships aren't the main issue, I could make quite a few bold moves with a minimal 6x CL + Transport fleet, but I don't have sufficient ground troops to invade Japan *and* keep a line to a port open in the face of the Japanese hordes I have at the border.
Oh dear, I'm not liking the look of the American political front. Wendell Wilkie? Blech!
On the flipside, lovely to see you back in the saddle!
Hehehe I can see the campaign posters now: `Willkie. Blech! Vote Lindbergh`