Sorry I don' have the e-mail, I got a historical piece about the Civil Air Patrol. German U-boats were parked right off the eastern AND gulf coasts, sinking boats with impunity before Dec. 1941. They even sank boats in the St. Lawarence and Conneticut rivers. Without Pearl Harbor, don't you think that America would have eventually gone to war in Europe? Even assuming the CAP work as it did, u-boats would still sink American boats in the shipping lanes or near England. I figure some point would be reached where America wouldn't take it any more.
Kevin T. A little knowledge...... Well, it's hard to know. Yes, probably, but would it have been soon enough? Certainly the US was very heavily favoring Britain from far before the declaration of war. It was egregiously in violation of neutrality and did all sorts of strange things. Most amusingly, the US declared Iceland part of North America in order to legally justify extending its convoy coverage out to Iceland in the Atlantic, considerably relieving the burden on Great Britain. Which is actually the bit of trivia behind one of my best old Quiz Bowl war stories, actually. It's my guess that we _certainly_ would have entered the war had Britain itself been invaded, and probably would have entered by mid-1942 under any circumstances, but the determination to press for a complete victory was probably at least partly a result of Pearl Harbor. At any rate, without massive American logistical support, plus the effects of the allied strategic bombing campaign (which were in my opinion more significant than they are often given credit for being, but that's a huge debate for another forum) one wonders if the results in late 1941 and early 1942 on the Eastern Front might have been very different. Gautam
