Roosevelt Believed America Was Entering Quagmire, New Reports Show
New York (Rhodes Media Services) -- New documents unclassified and released today show that senior U.S. officials, including then President Franklin Roosevelt, worried that the war effort in Europe would result in another Vietnam, even though that war had not yet begun.
The documents show that a slow start in desert warfare had military experts wondering if America had entered a quagmire and that Nazi-sympathizing beduin insurgents constituted a guerilla threat not unlike what they should expect in a couple of decades in Vietnam.
"Despite our best intentions to rid the world of the Nazi threat to civilization, I fear that bands of individuals, armed by the Nazis, could mean a drawn out conflict with many American casualties, just like we can expect when we go into Vietnam in the 60s," said General Eisenhower in a 1942 memo to President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt echoed those sentiments, saying that he feared unrest at home may make it hard to garner support for the ongoing war effort, and added that he couldn't afford a quagmire after convincing a dubious American public that war against Germany should come before an all-out war on Japan, the country that attacked America in the first place.
Posted by Ryan at November 4, 2003 01:49 PM
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