When technology changes history can't repeat and the lessons of history can become dangerous illusions.
When agriculture was invented you could obtain more power and wealth by stealing land from your neighbor and hiring lawyers to make it legal. When industry was invented you could still steal resources like mines, factories, and wealth and still use slave labor to build rockets like Hitler did. The source of the wealth and value was in the physical resources.
With our new scientific revolution where human knowledge is growing at about 10%/yr (number of scientific articles) and this increasing knowledge is reducing the whole concept of resources down into only energy and human "knowledge and creativity" being sources of value, things become more difficult to steal. When all what are commonly called "resources" become fungible (no steel, use fiberglass; no oil, use solar; no ammonia, use air, water and energy; no fisheries use water and energy to Hydrogen to single cell protein to fish food to fish; etc), the real source of value becomes between peoples ears.
Note that there hasn't been a profitable war of conquest in the last half a century. Most of the value in the stock market is no longer "book value" but has become this intangible stuff between peoples ears. All GM factories and resources have less value that what is between the ears of Tesla workers. Conquest not longer economically works and historical analogies are no longer as valid.
Putin still believes he can capture the value in peoples heads, but the more he destroys the more the true value of the people becomes unavailable. He has the illusion that capturing the body and the factory means capturing the mind and that isn't always true. The value he want between peoples ears will just go back to the old communist workers who "just pretend to work while the government pretends to pay them" and the economy rots.
Also note that the USSR was effective against Germany because the USA supplied half of their war material. Russian capacity to produce their own war material at scale over time is an open question. This is reason #1,000 why keeping China on the sidelines is so important.
First Covid and now Ukraine. Both challenges reveal a serious failure in America's culture. The flaw is the American elite are unable to tolerate an open conversation of the issues and the tradeoffs of different responses.
The American intolerance for uncertainty and the arrogance of its elite have brought and will bring the country great trouble.
We saw the social, economic and health harms that resulted from the US going to war against a virus that couldn't be stopped. We know that expanding the war in Ukraine will bring elevated death and misery to the people of Ukraine and all who get directly involved in the fighting.
And yet the drums of war are pounded. That is fine if we accept we don't really mean it. But what happens when the people buy their own propaganda?
So here is a question that will not be asked or discussed by America's elite: What difference does it make to the people of Ukraine who governs Ukraine? If it is true that the country is equally divided between European and Russian sentiment, what is the best way to reconcile the conflict?
Sure, Putin is horrible for waging war to settle the contention. But is the "West" clean in how it has interfered in Ukraine and pushed for a Ukrainian government that acts in its interests?
I think from a military perspective, comparisons WWII with todays Russian adventure in Ukraine is tenuous at best.
But if you are going to reflect on and draw comparisons with WWII, you need to start in 1914 and WWI, and for Russia/Ukraine start in 1990.
After the defeat of Germany, the allies were triumphalist, treating Germany very shabbily, as an inferior - just as the US and the West did to Russia after the fall of the USSR. The West plundered Russia sending in its ‘carpet baggers’ rather than help build a stable economy. The Treaty of Versailles allowed France to annex the Rhineland Palatinate until 1934 as a demilitarised zone and to ensure reparations were paid. Annexing territory as a demilitarised zone is permitted for some but not others (hint: Russia).
Germany had funded its war with debt, the Kaiser gambling that he could repay the debt from plunder of resources from conquered Countries, particularly France. War reparations left Germany unable to service or repay the debt, or pay for the workings of the State so it printed money which resulted in hyperinflation. Germans lost everything as the currency became worthless, just as Russians did - many lost a lifetime’s savings - as their currency became worthless.
So a straight line can be drawn from the defeat of Germany to the rise of Hitler, enabled by the resent, shame, impoverishment, shoddy treatment at the hands of the victors. And so you can draw a parallel line from the fall of the USSR to events today in Ukraine.
The Western powers bear responsibility for WWII and invasion of Ukraine. Saying that is no more giving support or justifying Hitler as it is Putin. Just pointing out contributory negligence.
Next interesting fact. Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way round, yet Germany had neither invaded nor threatened either Country. Poland was no strategic importance to UK & France and as for treaty obligations, we had those with Czechoslovakia but in the name of expedience, ignored them. So Poland was just an excuse. The WMD, as it were, of the day.
Hitler wasn’t content to stop with the Sudetenland? Of course not! Nothing to do with liberating ethnic Germans. Hitler’s interests were always Russia and its oil and other resources. Czechoslovakia was just testing the water for a response with a plausible excuse for invasion. Look at a map. Czechoslovakia was just opening the door to a route through Poland and onward to Russia. So that is no comparison with Russia/Ukraine.
Hitler’s military were fuelled by Pervitin a super-stimulant which let them fight for days without sleep. It had inevitable side effects. The British and French were still stuck in WWI fighting static battles, and had no response to mechanised warfare… Blitzkrieg.
Did the Allies win the war or did the Germans lose it? An historic overview tends to make one ask, when we see all the blunders and misadventure on the Allied side, how on Earth did the Allies win?
But Hitler was the Allies best weapon. He countermanded his generals many times, the results being catastrophic and often letting the Allies off the hook. So…
This far into the war, my anecdotal experience is that knowledge of World War II is somewhat more likely to lead to shallow thinking about Russian and Ukraine.
It's no different than economics; think of a the kind of "love at first sight" kids who immediately take to economics. They learn the basic concepts and think they can solve all the world's problems by applying them. But they get tripped up because they have no experience and refinement in their analysis skills. So they take a basic concept and apply it to a situation that looks superficially analogous.
That's what casual historians are doing when they fit historical templates on current events. If we do it superficially, and say Russia = Nazi Germany and Putin = Hitler because there are obvious comparisons to be made, we're not necessarily going to get to very educational conclusions.
Just like one who just finished Econ 101 might have an inflated idea of how much he can know by applying supply and demand, someone who knows more about history and sees its value might be more prone to overestimating how much one can get out of historical parallels.
There's value there, but there's like, a "midwit" sweet spot where a little knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.
I'd note also that the Russian role in combat was decisive in defeating Germany. We tend to focus on Normandy, the British on Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, all crucial, but Russia is estimated to have been responsible for about 75% of all German battle deaths over the course of the entire war, despite fighting for only about 70% of the time the war was ongoing.
Another historical example could be the Russo-Japanese war with major Japanese victories being a shock to everyone. Not without reason, it was only 36 years into Meiji restoration: that's how astoundingly quick they went from swords and samurai (abolished 1876) to modern world class power able to triumph over a major European empire. It was a devastating blow to Russian prestige which also proved highly internally destabilizing in the face of increasingly organized and threatening political opposition to the Tsar regime and Russia was quickly plunged into disarray. The defeat was a major contributor to the Revolution of 1905 which Lenin himself called, "The Great Dress Rehearsal", and insisted that without which the, "victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible." While he defeated that early revolution, Nicholas II stopped short of crushing the revolutionaries altogether and instead introduced liberalizing measures and treated future Bolsheviks with kid gloves in a way that did not get repaid in kind a decade later.
The Soviet Union regime those Bolsheviks created was likewise not long for the world after it retreated humiliated and demoralized from its experience in Afghanistan.
The west must make up its mind when it wants to confront the issue of nuclear weapons around the world. Now seems as good a time as ever with more countries with unfavorable views of the west developing nukes waiting any longer makes no sense. We should lead NATO's army into the Ukraine as the deliver weapons and fighter jets. We should inform Russia that we intend to move up to existing front lines of skirmishes everywhere in the Ukraine. NATO forces with the Ukrainian army will start taking back territory and give Russian troops the ability to leave the Ukraine. Once Russia is out real talks of trust and verify will begin the process of destroying nukes all around the world unilaterally with the goal of banning their existence. As these talks progress economic cooperation will begin to raise the standard of living for populations around the world from the bottom up. If Russia pushes the button so be it. If the world is not ready to strive for peace now the chances nukes will be used in some fashion by some other player goes up. There is never a good time to do this but it must be faced at some point in human history. War is obsolete, we do not want to say the same for humans. One last point. The next weapon of mass destruction will most likely be worse than nukes and easier to build. Say no to war and yes to building economic equality. Both trust but verify and improving economic conditions are tangible verifiable things we can be adjudicated and vastly improve our chances of survival as a species.
Would the world be a better place if prime-age adults would know basics of history? This seems implausible because (a) most people wouldn't exercise cognitive humility in applying historical knowledge to current affairs, (b) a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and (c) expert historians disagree among themselves about any 'lessons of the past' in relation to any specific current crisis.
Re: "For someone like me, born less than a decade after the second World War, it made sense to read a lot of its history. But I wish that younger people at least knew some of the basics."
Samo Burja, a worthy analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war, knows history, but rarely draws comparisons to World War II (or other historical events). Instead, he mainly probes the logic of the situation, capabilities, technologies, demographics, social psychology, institutions, qualitative game theory.
(He shares Arnold Kling's view of the unintended consequences of economic sanctions against Russia.)
Here is a link to Samo Burja's latest podcast interview about the war (23 March 2022):
The interview conveys (a) Burja's framework and (b) how he updates his beliefs in light of new evidence.
Having studied modern European history. I ask myself: How might I criticize Burja's analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, in light of what I know of World War II? I got nothin'. This is hardly surprising, given Burja's wide knowledge of history. Perhaps knowledge of history is useful in a general way, rather than via specific historical references, comparisons, or analogies.
I agree with the points that it's good for people to read more WW II history and to remember Hitler when they consider Putin. The analogy of Hitler's Polish invasion with Putin's Ukraine invasion is a bit off.
The Germans invaded Poland on September 1 and by the 12th they had reached Warsaw & the Vistula River. They controlled the western half of Poland. I'm not sure the Russians have much control of large areas of the Ukraine, yet, a month in.
The German operation was well-planned and the German army was the most effective fighting force in World War II as Israeli military historian, Mart Van Creveld showed in his book, "Fighting Power." The German army's power was the result of a strong cadre of non-com officers, i.e., sergeants that were empowered to act independently.
The Russian has no such cadre of non-coms. Their doctrine doesn't stress independent action. That's why their generals are so far forward and getting killed.
The Russians have terrible logistics, which is dependent on railroads. That's why it's been hard to penetrate very far. And then there's the MUD. Anyone who has read much about WW II's Russian fighting should remember that the first thing that stopped Hitler's panzers was the autumn mud. If the Russians had planned a little better, they might have gone sooner when the ground was still frozen. That's when they had their first successful counteroffensive in WW II.
Re: "Russia likely has agents throughout Ukraine, and they may play a decisive role in the war."
Compare Robin Hanson:
"I now update to seeing Russia as surprisingly weak. [... .] Key problem must be Putin thought he had better internal spies at low military levels than he did. We usually think of orgs having spies in rival orgs, but in fact most important spies are within your own org. Rulers everywhere should ask now how good are their internal spies." (24 March 2022)
As described in this Austrian briefing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4I07aRlPcQ), Belarus and Russia are preparing to cut off the land supply lines from the western edge of Belarus on down south. This would put an end to the notion that the "Ukrainian resistance" (in a country that is renowned for being mostly an enormous steppe) can be supplied indefinitely by NATO. That puts US/NATO in the position of either attacking Belarus to pre-empt the attack, or just acquiescing and pretending.
There's a split between the wildly pro-war diplomatic corps and the military in the US. If there's a WW2 analogy, it's the US of the present : UK of the late 1930s. The UK was overwhelmed when its commitments to colonies and allies were tested and defeated in quick succession in multiple theaters. In this situation, though, there is no US to our UK -- our main industrial supplier and international creditor is... China. One of the main reasons why the US dropped European neutrality was just Hitler being stupid and declaring war on the US. Otherwise the US might have just focused on Japan while letting the UK and USSR bleed out, which nearly happened anyway.
True, the USA provided only limited help to the UK in 1941, but we were not at war with Germany (or Japan) until December of that year, and maintaining the figleaf of announced neutrality required some restraint. Meanwhile, the isolationist lobby and public opinion were serious constraints on F.D. Roosevelt's freedom of action. The Holocaust Museum has a telling timeline of changing public opinion from 1939 through 1941: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us-public-opinion-world-war-II-1939-1941
The Germans used lots of horses throughout the war, and not just for supply trains - they also moved a lot of their artillery with them. If you see pictures of the aftermath of the Falaise Pocket battles in August 1944, after the Allies broke out of Normandy, you will see plenty of horses among the dead.
When technology changes history can't repeat and the lessons of history can become dangerous illusions.
When agriculture was invented you could obtain more power and wealth by stealing land from your neighbor and hiring lawyers to make it legal. When industry was invented you could still steal resources like mines, factories, and wealth and still use slave labor to build rockets like Hitler did. The source of the wealth and value was in the physical resources.
With our new scientific revolution where human knowledge is growing at about 10%/yr (number of scientific articles) and this increasing knowledge is reducing the whole concept of resources down into only energy and human "knowledge and creativity" being sources of value, things become more difficult to steal. When all what are commonly called "resources" become fungible (no steel, use fiberglass; no oil, use solar; no ammonia, use air, water and energy; no fisheries use water and energy to Hydrogen to single cell protein to fish food to fish; etc), the real source of value becomes between peoples ears.
Note that there hasn't been a profitable war of conquest in the last half a century. Most of the value in the stock market is no longer "book value" but has become this intangible stuff between peoples ears. All GM factories and resources have less value that what is between the ears of Tesla workers. Conquest not longer economically works and historical analogies are no longer as valid.
Putin still believes he can capture the value in peoples heads, but the more he destroys the more the true value of the people becomes unavailable. He has the illusion that capturing the body and the factory means capturing the mind and that isn't always true. The value he want between peoples ears will just go back to the old communist workers who "just pretend to work while the government pretends to pay them" and the economy rots.
Also note that the USSR was effective against Germany because the USA supplied half of their war material. Russian capacity to produce their own war material at scale over time is an open question. This is reason #1,000 why keeping China on the sidelines is so important.
First Covid and now Ukraine. Both challenges reveal a serious failure in America's culture. The flaw is the American elite are unable to tolerate an open conversation of the issues and the tradeoffs of different responses.
The American intolerance for uncertainty and the arrogance of its elite have brought and will bring the country great trouble.
We saw the social, economic and health harms that resulted from the US going to war against a virus that couldn't be stopped. We know that expanding the war in Ukraine will bring elevated death and misery to the people of Ukraine and all who get directly involved in the fighting.
And yet the drums of war are pounded. That is fine if we accept we don't really mean it. But what happens when the people buy their own propaganda?
So here is a question that will not be asked or discussed by America's elite: What difference does it make to the people of Ukraine who governs Ukraine? If it is true that the country is equally divided between European and Russian sentiment, what is the best way to reconcile the conflict?
Sure, Putin is horrible for waging war to settle the contention. But is the "West" clean in how it has interfered in Ukraine and pushed for a Ukrainian government that acts in its interests?
I think from a military perspective, comparisons WWII with todays Russian adventure in Ukraine is tenuous at best.
But if you are going to reflect on and draw comparisons with WWII, you need to start in 1914 and WWI, and for Russia/Ukraine start in 1990.
After the defeat of Germany, the allies were triumphalist, treating Germany very shabbily, as an inferior - just as the US and the West did to Russia after the fall of the USSR. The West plundered Russia sending in its ‘carpet baggers’ rather than help build a stable economy. The Treaty of Versailles allowed France to annex the Rhineland Palatinate until 1934 as a demilitarised zone and to ensure reparations were paid. Annexing territory as a demilitarised zone is permitted for some but not others (hint: Russia).
Germany had funded its war with debt, the Kaiser gambling that he could repay the debt from plunder of resources from conquered Countries, particularly France. War reparations left Germany unable to service or repay the debt, or pay for the workings of the State so it printed money which resulted in hyperinflation. Germans lost everything as the currency became worthless, just as Russians did - many lost a lifetime’s savings - as their currency became worthless.
So a straight line can be drawn from the defeat of Germany to the rise of Hitler, enabled by the resent, shame, impoverishment, shoddy treatment at the hands of the victors. And so you can draw a parallel line from the fall of the USSR to events today in Ukraine.
The Western powers bear responsibility for WWII and invasion of Ukraine. Saying that is no more giving support or justifying Hitler as it is Putin. Just pointing out contributory negligence.
Next interesting fact. Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way round, yet Germany had neither invaded nor threatened either Country. Poland was no strategic importance to UK & France and as for treaty obligations, we had those with Czechoslovakia but in the name of expedience, ignored them. So Poland was just an excuse. The WMD, as it were, of the day.
Hitler wasn’t content to stop with the Sudetenland? Of course not! Nothing to do with liberating ethnic Germans. Hitler’s interests were always Russia and its oil and other resources. Czechoslovakia was just testing the water for a response with a plausible excuse for invasion. Look at a map. Czechoslovakia was just opening the door to a route through Poland and onward to Russia. So that is no comparison with Russia/Ukraine.
Hitler’s military were fuelled by Pervitin a super-stimulant which let them fight for days without sleep. It had inevitable side effects. The British and French were still stuck in WWI fighting static battles, and had no response to mechanised warfare… Blitzkrieg.
Did the Allies win the war or did the Germans lose it? An historic overview tends to make one ask, when we see all the blunders and misadventure on the Allied side, how on Earth did the Allies win?
But Hitler was the Allies best weapon. He countermanded his generals many times, the results being catastrophic and often letting the Allies off the hook. So…
This far into the war, my anecdotal experience is that knowledge of World War II is somewhat more likely to lead to shallow thinking about Russian and Ukraine.
It's no different than economics; think of a the kind of "love at first sight" kids who immediately take to economics. They learn the basic concepts and think they can solve all the world's problems by applying them. But they get tripped up because they have no experience and refinement in their analysis skills. So they take a basic concept and apply it to a situation that looks superficially analogous.
That's what casual historians are doing when they fit historical templates on current events. If we do it superficially, and say Russia = Nazi Germany and Putin = Hitler because there are obvious comparisons to be made, we're not necessarily going to get to very educational conclusions.
Just like one who just finished Econ 101 might have an inflated idea of how much he can know by applying supply and demand, someone who knows more about history and sees its value might be more prone to overestimating how much one can get out of historical parallels.
There's value there, but there's like, a "midwit" sweet spot where a little knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.
I'd note also that the Russian role in combat was decisive in defeating Germany. We tend to focus on Normandy, the British on Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, all crucial, but Russia is estimated to have been responsible for about 75% of all German battle deaths over the course of the entire war, despite fighting for only about 70% of the time the war was ongoing.
Another historical example could be the Russo-Japanese war with major Japanese victories being a shock to everyone. Not without reason, it was only 36 years into Meiji restoration: that's how astoundingly quick they went from swords and samurai (abolished 1876) to modern world class power able to triumph over a major European empire. It was a devastating blow to Russian prestige which also proved highly internally destabilizing in the face of increasingly organized and threatening political opposition to the Tsar regime and Russia was quickly plunged into disarray. The defeat was a major contributor to the Revolution of 1905 which Lenin himself called, "The Great Dress Rehearsal", and insisted that without which the, "victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible." While he defeated that early revolution, Nicholas II stopped short of crushing the revolutionaries altogether and instead introduced liberalizing measures and treated future Bolsheviks with kid gloves in a way that did not get repaid in kind a decade later.
The Soviet Union regime those Bolsheviks created was likewise not long for the world after it retreated humiliated and demoralized from its experience in Afghanistan.
So, have a nice day?
The west must make up its mind when it wants to confront the issue of nuclear weapons around the world. Now seems as good a time as ever with more countries with unfavorable views of the west developing nukes waiting any longer makes no sense. We should lead NATO's army into the Ukraine as the deliver weapons and fighter jets. We should inform Russia that we intend to move up to existing front lines of skirmishes everywhere in the Ukraine. NATO forces with the Ukrainian army will start taking back territory and give Russian troops the ability to leave the Ukraine. Once Russia is out real talks of trust and verify will begin the process of destroying nukes all around the world unilaterally with the goal of banning their existence. As these talks progress economic cooperation will begin to raise the standard of living for populations around the world from the bottom up. If Russia pushes the button so be it. If the world is not ready to strive for peace now the chances nukes will be used in some fashion by some other player goes up. There is never a good time to do this but it must be faced at some point in human history. War is obsolete, we do not want to say the same for humans. One last point. The next weapon of mass destruction will most likely be worse than nukes and easier to build. Say no to war and yes to building economic equality. Both trust but verify and improving economic conditions are tangible verifiable things we can be adjudicated and vastly improve our chances of survival as a species.
Would the world be a better place if prime-age adults would know basics of history? This seems implausible because (a) most people wouldn't exercise cognitive humility in applying historical knowledge to current affairs, (b) a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and (c) expert historians disagree among themselves about any 'lessons of the past' in relation to any specific current crisis.
Re: "For someone like me, born less than a decade after the second World War, it made sense to read a lot of its history. But I wish that younger people at least knew some of the basics."
Samo Burja, a worthy analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war, knows history, but rarely draws comparisons to World War II (or other historical events). Instead, he mainly probes the logic of the situation, capabilities, technologies, demographics, social psychology, institutions, qualitative game theory.
(He shares Arnold Kling's view of the unintended consequences of economic sanctions against Russia.)
Here is a link to Samo Burja's latest podcast interview about the war (23 March 2022):
https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-samo-burja-3/
Transcript: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-currents-059-samo-burja-on-ru-ukr-23-mar-2022/
The interview conveys (a) Burja's framework and (b) how he updates his beliefs in light of new evidence.
Having studied modern European history. I ask myself: How might I criticize Burja's analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, in light of what I know of World War II? I got nothin'. This is hardly surprising, given Burja's wide knowledge of history. Perhaps knowledge of history is useful in a general way, rather than via specific historical references, comparisons, or analogies.
I agree with the points that it's good for people to read more WW II history and to remember Hitler when they consider Putin. The analogy of Hitler's Polish invasion with Putin's Ukraine invasion is a bit off.
The Germans invaded Poland on September 1 and by the 12th they had reached Warsaw & the Vistula River. They controlled the western half of Poland. I'm not sure the Russians have much control of large areas of the Ukraine, yet, a month in.
The German operation was well-planned and the German army was the most effective fighting force in World War II as Israeli military historian, Mart Van Creveld showed in his book, "Fighting Power." The German army's power was the result of a strong cadre of non-com officers, i.e., sergeants that were empowered to act independently.
The Russian has no such cadre of non-coms. Their doctrine doesn't stress independent action. That's why their generals are so far forward and getting killed.
The Russians have terrible logistics, which is dependent on railroads. That's why it's been hard to penetrate very far. And then there's the MUD. Anyone who has read much about WW II's Russian fighting should remember that the first thing that stopped Hitler's panzers was the autumn mud. If the Russians had planned a little better, they might have gone sooner when the ground was still frozen. That's when they had their first successful counteroffensive in WW II.
Re: "Russia likely has agents throughout Ukraine, and they may play a decisive role in the war."
Compare Robin Hanson:
"I now update to seeing Russia as surprisingly weak. [... .] Key problem must be Putin thought he had better internal spies at low military levels than he did. We usually think of orgs having spies in rival orgs, but in fact most important spies are within your own org. Rulers everywhere should ask now how good are their internal spies." (24 March 2022)
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1507044709364948993
As described in this Austrian briefing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4I07aRlPcQ), Belarus and Russia are preparing to cut off the land supply lines from the western edge of Belarus on down south. This would put an end to the notion that the "Ukrainian resistance" (in a country that is renowned for being mostly an enormous steppe) can be supplied indefinitely by NATO. That puts US/NATO in the position of either attacking Belarus to pre-empt the attack, or just acquiescing and pretending.
There's a split between the wildly pro-war diplomatic corps and the military in the US. If there's a WW2 analogy, it's the US of the present : UK of the late 1930s. The UK was overwhelmed when its commitments to colonies and allies were tested and defeated in quick succession in multiple theaters. In this situation, though, there is no US to our UK -- our main industrial supplier and international creditor is... China. One of the main reasons why the US dropped European neutrality was just Hitler being stupid and declaring war on the US. Otherwise the US might have just focused on Japan while letting the UK and USSR bleed out, which nearly happened anyway.
True, the USA provided only limited help to the UK in 1941, but we were not at war with Germany (or Japan) until December of that year, and maintaining the figleaf of announced neutrality required some restraint. Meanwhile, the isolationist lobby and public opinion were serious constraints on F.D. Roosevelt's freedom of action. The Holocaust Museum has a telling timeline of changing public opinion from 1939 through 1941: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us-public-opinion-world-war-II-1939-1941
The Germans used lots of horses throughout the war, and not just for supply trains - they also moved a lot of their artillery with them. If you see pictures of the aftermath of the Falaise Pocket battles in August 1944, after the Allies broke out of Normandy, you will see plenty of horses among the dead.