FOUR DAYS THAT TRANSFORMED THE WORLD

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

On Monday, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan by a nearly-unanimous vote in the House of Representatives.

On Tuesday, December 9, the Gallup poll revealed that, following the Japanese attack, only 45% of Americans supported the idea of the United States entering the European war against Nazi Germany.

Four days after the Pearl Harbor attack, on Thursday, December 11, 1941, at the order of Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States; this was followed an hour later by a similar declaration by Fascist Italy. That afternoon, by the same nearly-unanimous vote for the declaration of war against Japan, the House of Representatives declared war on both Germany and Italy.

With those acts, what had been primarily a war in Europe became The Second World War, the most destructive war in human history, fought across the planet. At the war’s conclusion, three and a half years later in 1945, the United States was the primary world economic and military power, a position it has occupied ever since.

Hitler did not need to declare war. The Tripartite Pact, signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan in October 1940, was defensive in nature. The parties were obligated to defend any one party to the agreement which was “attacked by a power not presently a party to the war.” There was only one power “not presently a party to the war,” the United States.

But Japan had attacked the United States. Thus, there was no obligation under the pact for Germany or Italy to support Japan by declaring war on the United States.

Hitler’s decision to do so has been singled out by historians for two things: that the decision was the only time in his career that he kept a promise, but this is not true since there was no public, formal promise to support a war of choice by Japan. It has also been called Hitler’s greatest mistake, since without the German declaration of war against the United States, there was little likelihood that Franklin Roosevelt could have gotten a unilateral declaration of war against Germany through the U.S. congress, given the state of public opinion at the time. The common belief has been that “Hitler signed his own death warrant.”

Is that actually true?

In the fall of 1941, Hitler’s economic advisors informed him that despite the United States not being at war, the fact that Roosevelt had gotten the Lend-Lease Act through Congress and was supplying Britain and the Soviet Union, the economic expansion of what was universally recognized as the strongest industrial economy on earth to meet the demands of supplying Germany’s two major opponents would mean that by 1943 - when the American economy was fully mobilized - it would be larger and stronger than the British, German, Italian, Japanese and Soviet economies, combined.

Hitler didn’t disagree with the analysis. Had he seen it, Benito Mussolini would have agreed with it, as would have the leaders of Japan.

Hitler had seen the United States as Germany’s greatest potential enemy since he had written “Mein Kampf,” and at the same time had recognized the United States as the greatest economic power among the industrial economies. He believed that it was the entry of the United States into the First World War that had defeated Germany, and that it had happened because of the influence of the “Jewish bankers” in America.

Hitler believed that more strongly by the time he became Chancellor of Germany. In particular, he saw Franklin Roosevelt, who had been elected president in the same time period that Hitler had taken power, as the American leader most closely aligned with the “Jewish bankers” who had financed the “plutocratic capitalism” that had made the United States the power it was; thus he saw FDR as his greatest enemy from the outset.

Franklin Roosevelt returned the favor. He privately told his close associates shortly after he took the oath of office on March 5, 1933 - weeks after the Reichstag Fire and the passage of the Enabling Act that gave Hitler total power in Germany - that Hitler and the Nazis were dangerous to the interests of the United States. In November 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, he told his chief speechwriter that he expected the United States and Germany would be at war within five years.

Throughout the 1930s, the United States was adamantly opposed to becoming involved in another European war; the country partially agreed with Hitler that the bankers (not ony the Jewish ones) who had made loans to Britain and France had maneuvered the country into joining the Allies in order to save their loans, and in that they had been aided by the “merchants of death” who sold weapons to the Allies. In 1932, the Congress passed a law forbidding the export of weapons to any country at war. FDR was able to modify the policy in 1938 in the Neutrality Act to allow such exports, but only on a “cash and carry” basis; there would be no American financing of weapons exports.

Following the fall of France in 1940, FDR began working to prepare the country for the war he foresaw as inevitable. Publically, all decisions made were defended as being in the interest of national defense. The first peacetime draft was passed by Congress in July 1940. In September, when it became clear Britain would hold on after the Battle of Britain, 50 American destroyers of World War I vintage were provided the Royal Navy in exchange for American basing rights in the Bahamas and Jamaica in the Caribbean. Finally, calling on the United States to become “the great arsenal of democracy,”Lend-Lease became law in April 1941. In May, the United States declared the western Atlantic from a line extending south from Iceland to be a “Neutrality Zone” patrolled by the U.S. Navy. In July, it was announced the Navy would escort convoys headed to Europe to the border of the “neutrality zone.” That same month the first confrontation between a U.S. Navy warship and a German submarine occurred; in September the destroyer Ruben James was sunk by a U-boat. In August, FDR and Churchill met at Placentia, Newfoundland, where the Atlantic Charter was issued.

Additionally, beginning in 1940, the United States government, working through Pan American Airways, began developing airfields in Central and South America in cooperation with the governments there. This provided cover for the first “intelligence offensive” in which the U.S. gained the support of those governments as a result of the economic benefit of the airfield construction program, to take action against the strong pro-Nazi movements in South America. Pan American replaced the German Condor Airline as the main provider of air travel in Latin

America.

All this was seen by Hitler (rightly) as a decision by the United States to foreclose National Socialist Germany. The destroyer deal in September 1940 had led directly to the signing of the Tripartite Pact in October.

Hitler saw the Tripartite Pact as giving Japan the assurance of support as they expanded in Southeast Asia. By the time of the passage of Lend-Lease, he hoped that the United States and Japan would become involved in a Pacific War that would divert the United States and reduce the amount of aid provided to Britain and the USSR. In May 1941, he privately told Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka during his visit to Germany that if Japan attacked the United States, Germany would support them and declare war. He reiterated that in October 1941 to the new Foreign Minister, Togo.

In May 1941, Japan and the USSR concluded a five year non-agression treaty. At the time, Hitler saw this as a good thing because it diverted Japan from any adventures in Siberia and gave them security against the USSR entering a Pacific War.

In June 1941, Japan began negotiations with Vichy France - with support by Germany - to obtain basing rights in French Indochina, which placed Japanese units within range of the Philippines, British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies.

When the agreement with Vichy was announced in July, FDR responded by embargoing the sale of oil and other petroleum products, as well as aluminum and steel. The Japanese were faced with the reality that they would run out other supplies of oil by early 1942. At this point, the Imperial Navy was directed to begin planning to take the Philppines, Malaya and the Indies to obtain the raw materials.

The attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941 resulted in Churchill immediately offering an alliance to Stalin, which he solidified by diverting Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR. By September, the Luftwaffe was meeting the American P-40s that had been in the first shipment in combat over Murmansk. German intelligence also discovered there were American USAAF advisors present assisting the Soviets in taking the US aircraft into the Red Air Force.

When Hitler made his second promise of support to Japan in October, he very much wanted to see the U.S. diverted by war in the Pacific because the invasion of the Soviet Union was beginning to bog down with the early arrival of the Russian winter.

FDR did not want to become involved in a war in the Pacific. The American and British military staffs were planning how the wartime alliance would work for the day when the United States entered the war in Europe. Germany was seen as the main enemy. In this atmosphere, negotiations began with Japan in the fall of 1940 to ease tensions. Churchill was terrified that this would result in Japan attacking British and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia while leaving the Philippines untouched; this would result in Britain becoming involved in a second war in Asia without American participation, at a time when the British were overstretched with the war expanding into North Africa.

American intelligence had broken the Japanese diplomatic code in the fall of 1940; the first fruit of that was the text of the Tripartite Act. By the fall of 1941, they were reading Japanese diplomatic communications between Tokyo and the Japanese negotiators in Washington. In mid-November, the Japanese determined that they must move south by the end of the year unless the negotiations resulted in the U.S. dropping the embargo. FDR read the message ordering the negotiators to extend the talks into December though nothing was expected from them two days after it was sent.

At this point, it was expected that Japan would attack the Philippines, along with Malaya and the Indies, in December. Pearl Harbor was not mentioned by anyone. On November 26, Kido Butai, the Imperial Navy’s striking fleet, departed Hokkaido bound for Hawaii. The radio operators of the ships were left behind to continue making routine communications that would be picked up by Allied listening stations in the Pacific, in which the operator’s “fist” would be recognized and taken as proof the fleet was still in Japan.

Following the Japan-USSR non-Aggression Pact, in September Soviet spy Richard Sorge, operating a superb spy ring in Tokyo, discovered the Japanese plans to move south. With the possibility of a Japanese attack in Siberia no longer on the table, Stalin began withdrawal of the Siberian Army and transfer of the troops to the Moscow Front. They began taking position there in November as the Wehrmacht approached the Soviet capitol. The Siberians were a force large enough to bring the Red Army in the West back to the strength level it had before the Nazi invasion.

In October, when his economic advisors presented their expectation of American expansion being completed in 1943, Hitler decided that since war with the United States was inevitable, it was better to fight before the U.S. gained its full strength, while it was distracted by a war in the Pacific. When he spoke about this with Mussolini, Il Duce agreed with him.

Hitler wasn’t wrong to think there was a likelihood of success for Germany in an early, short war; when the Americans invaded North Africa and came up against the Afrika Korps, the Germans initially dominated their opponents. What they didn’t expect was that the American military would learn from their mistakes as rapidly as they did.

The problem as the Germans foresaw it was that while German aircraft and tanks were superior to what the United States was producing, the estimated American ability to produce 50,000 aircraft and 25,000 tanks by 1943 - a remarkably accurate estimate - would mean that German quality would be swamped by American mass production.

On December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor, the Red Army began the Moscow Offensive that would stop the Wehrmacht. On December 9, the Wehrmacht was forced to withdraw from the forward positions around Moscow. On December 10, the withdrawal became a retreat despite Hitler’s orders to hold the line at all costs.

At the same time, the news from the Far East told of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and the sinking of the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales on December 8 by the Imperial Navy’s air force. It was expected that troops would land in Luzon within a week.

On December 11, gambling on a rapid war in which Germany and Japan could inflict sufficient defeats on the United States that they would withdraw back into the Western Hemisphere, Hitler kept the promise made to Foreign Minister Togo in October and issued his declaration of war on the United States.

And that, boys and girls, is how we grew up in the world we did.

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