Sarah Paine

They'll go one cause.

And they'll probably be right that their one cause is really important.

But then they are just ignoring all these other things.

So that's the more important thing in strategy.

So your thing is, it's truly important.

Well, it depends whether the war is a war for limited or unlimited objectives, because you can play that game with the Russo-Japanese War.

Japan, all the data you talk about Japan, it's a fraction of Russia.

And Russia gets trounced in the Russo-Japanese War.

So there's something up what's going on, whereas Japan's having a very limited objective and Russia has other problems at home and is willing to bail.

That's one thing.

But there's another thing.

If Germany had simply never bought a surface fleet, if they'd been sensible...

Surface fleet, yeah, it's great Britain's got one, but it can always deploy that thing.

Germany will never deploy its surface fleet.

It'll get it sunk, which is what happened in the Norwegian campaign.

At least from the German point of view, they got Norway out of it.

But if they had simply bought U-boats instead, I don't know whether it would have... You'd have to do the math, and I haven't done that, of...

What their goal would need to be is to knock Britain out before the United States ever gets into the war.

Oh, definitely do not declare war on the United States because maybe if you can keep the commerce rating going for another six months, maybe Britain falls.

Maybe that's the pivotal error.