Could World War II have been avoided?
As my parents and grandparents tell it, no one really believed that mankind would be so stupid as to ever get into a war like “The Great War” (WW1) again. No side won and a lot of people died for essentially nothing. So, when Hitler came along, he was first thought of as just a raving lunatic that would soon be pushed into political limbo and then disappear. By the time he consolidated power, it was too late to do anything but confront him militarily – and no nation wanted to do that. Chamberlain’s negotiation over the Sudetenland proved that Hitler could not be trusted and that everyone was terribly naive about never getting into another war. To answer your primary question —- Sure, but the western US would now be bilingual Japanese-English and the eastern US would be bilingual German-English.
