Should the US have entered World War 2 sooner to help stop the holocaust?

Answer 1

First of all, nobody in the west knew the Holocaust was going on until very late in the war, and then the knowledge only reached high levels of the western leaders, who weren't really sure whether to believe it. The Germans did not proudly advertise their efforts to exterminate various groups, and,as barbaric as they were showing themselves to be on the battlefields and in occupied countries from time to time, it was a difficult thing to believe until the camps were overrun by our advancing armies, and the proof was undeniable. The average person in Britain and the US only learned of these horrors after the camps were captured and film footage was made, and shown in newsreels in movie theaters. By that time Germany was almost beaten, but people were more than ever glad that their nations had helped end such a monstrous evil.

The US had neglected its military since the end of WWI. The Navy had begun building new ships in about 1935, after more than a decade of practically no construction. The Army Air Corps had begun to seek designs for new warplanes from aircraft manufacturers. But money for any sort of military buildup was still lacking, as the Great Depression lingered on into the late 1930s. Americans did not WANT to have to go to war in Europe again, just a generation after having to save the Europeans from themselves in 1918, at tremendous expense of blood and treasure.

General George Marshall was sworn in as the new Chief of Staff (the man in charge) of the US Army two days after Nazi tanks had rolled into Poland, the same day the British and French declared war on Germany. The Army Marshall now commanded was only the 21st largest in the world, right behind Bulgaria, barely 235,000 officers and men. It had no modern tanks, its artillery was all small stuff left over from WWI. ALL its weapons were left over from WWI, and to the extent it was prepared to fight at all, it was ready to refight WWI. The Air Force was still a part of the Army, and would remain a part of the US Army, as the US Army Air Force, until after the war was won, so it was Marshall's responsibility too. It had no planes capable of surviving in combat. None. Zero. And few man trained to fly. All the weapons, all the equipment, EVERY THING the US Military was going to need for the war still needed to be designed, manufacturers capable of making those items found, contracts let for the production, and money found to pay for all this. And the Army, and the Air Force, needed millions more men, bases where they could be trained, and time to train them. Marshall had to create all this starting from nothing, and eventually there would be more than eight million men in the Army and another three million in the Army Air Force. Marshall was the true architect of victory (and after the war, the creator of the Marshall Plan). In his efforts to create this force capable of winning a world war Marshall was hampered by the necessity of sending tanks, trucks, artillery and guns to all the Allied nations who were receiving Lend Lease. It took American industry several years to build up to peak production and so for many, many months everything produced was sent overseas, to Britain, Russia and China, and others, who were already fighting.

What all this meant was that the US was not ready, was incapable, of landing on the mainland of Europe and closing with the German war machine, to fight and destroy the German war making capability, before that actually happened, in the summer of 1944. Thus, even if the US had entered the war sooner than it did, its unlikely that events could have been moved to a more rapid conclusion. Thus, the US could not have exerted itself more, somehow, to bring the Holocaust to an earlier end.