Comment Re:I never have understood (Score 5, Informative) 265
Japan/Germany - they couldn't REACH us to do much damage, even if they'd wanted to.
That's just not true. The German u-boats in particular were very much able to reach us, and cause significant damage. Operation Drumbeat in particular was able to do a surprising amount of damage. With only 5 u-boats, they were able to sink 25 American ships, many of them within sight of major US cities such as New York and Boston, all in the span of a single month.
Over the next few months, they managed to sink 22% of our tanker capacity, and well more than 2 million tons of cargo shiping.
It got to the point where the u-boat commanders were calling the time from January to August in 1942 the "American Shooting Season," and east coast cities and towns had to be blacked out after dark for most of the remainder of the war.
They couldn't invade, but Germans could certainly reach us all right.