This is an excellent analysis of mens minds at the time and place. Well worth the read. Recall that Germany and Japan had an alliance and hitler merely preempted an American declaration. swith Pearl Harbor, choices were off the table and sheer logistics and build times allowed the USA to concentrate on the Atlantic.
Also recall that land warfare in the Pacific was constrained to limited island warfare up to an actual landing on Japan. Wheras just opening a front in europe faced a potential million man army. As it was both serious problems were sidestepped.
In WW2, after Japan sucker punched the US at Pearl Harbor, did Hitler have the option of not declaring war on the US? Why or why not?
Masters in American History from Northwestern UniversityUpdated Nov 12
This question pops up regularly on Quora, based on the belief that Germany declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor was a whim of Adolf Hitler’s. This is a common misconception about the events of 1941.
Adolph Hitler wanted to declare war on the United States in December of 1941 and had made up his mind to do so long, long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Japan very likely would not have attacked the United States without assurances from Adolf Hitler that Germany was eager to go to war with the United States and was looking forward to Japan entering the war as his ally.
Germany declaring war on the United States in 1941 is considered monumentally stupid today, but Adolph Hitler made his decisions based on what he knew and understood at the time.
After the disastrous British defeat in Belgium in May of 1940 and the loss of most of its army’s equipment during the Dunkirk evacuation, most of the world’s leadership elites assumed that Great Britain would have to leave the ongoing “World War II.” The French were being defeated and Britain would soon no longer have any continental allies. The Germans appeared to have the better air force—this view would not be disproved until September and the Battle of Britain—and Britain no longer had any plausible means of defeating an alliance of Germany and Italy in any land campaign.
The sheer willpower of Winston Churchill defeated the peace faction in the British government in late May of 1940. The British then confounded all conventional wisdom by staying in the war after France’s surrender and fending off the Luftwaffe, the German U-boats, and the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean through the summer, fall, and winter of 1940.
However, not losing the war was not the same as winning it. Germany and Italy and their allies, including the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan, ruled much of Europe and Asia and controlled or dominated most of Europe’s resources, including a population of some five hundred million people. Britain had the support of its dominions and colonies but could not muster a tenth of the military manpower of the Axis alliance. The Chamberlain government of 1939 had a vague policy of “besieging” Nazi Germany to starve it into submission in alliance with the French. Churchill, after June of 1940, only had a faint hope of doing so. The British blockade of Europe would hold for the time being, but the Soviets were providing Germany with oil, food and metals to support its war effort and would presumably be doing so for some time. The only major power still supporting the British war effort was the United States of America, as Churchill stated bluntly in one of his famous speeches that summer.
We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
This was all Churchill had by way of hope in 1940, but Adolph Hitler was still stymied. He lacked the naval power to invade Great Britain and would not have enough U-boats to blockade Britain and starve her into submission for at least another two years. Hitler, like Churchill, could avoid losing the world war if he handled affairs properly, but he had no immediate strategy for winning the war.
From the German prospective, the war could be survived indefinitely as long as Germany could feed off its conquests and avoid financial collapse. To end the war and rid himself of the economic suffocation of the British blockade, Hitler had to crush the British by indirect means. This meant a prolonged “siege” of the British Isles by sea and by air, to starve the British out, or by straining British international finances to the point where it could not sustain its military machinery and strategy.
Among the major powers remaining in 1940, Britain was uniquely vulnerable to economic pressure. Germany, Russia, and Japan were totalitarian states constructed around a nationalist core. They could force their national and conquered populations to endure bottomless hardship through military force. Germany and Japan could even extract the labor of millions of enslaved workers to keep their war effort functioning. The British Empire, while fundamentally wealthier than any of its enemies, was a capitalist imperial state. It had to sustain the economic and political systems of scores of colonies. It risked insurrections in India, southwest Asia, and Africa if it attempted to coerce resources out of its colonial population.
In other words, Britain had to pay for its war effort at something resembling market rates. It could not force India to provide grain or New Zealand to provide wool or the Americas to provide beef and timber. That made it vulnerable in a long war.
American public opinion, in the summer and fall of 1940, shifted towards taking an active role in the world conflict, but Americans had no taste for war and resented being dragged into a second European slaughter-fest only twenty years after they had sacrificed a hundred thousand lives in the Great War. None the less, the Roosevelt administration and a majority of Americans from June of 1940 realized that the nation had to be ready to fight Germany. A “Two-Ocean Navy” Act passed congress on June 19th. A military alliance with Canada, the Ogdensburg Agreement, was announced on August 15th. On September 2nd, the famous “bases for destroyers” deal granted fifty old American destroyers to Britain over the objections of the American navy, which was rehabilitating them as convoy escorts in the event of a future conflict. In return, the United States gained a dozen small British military outposts in the Caribbean, with the agreed stipulation that it would build them up to serve as anti-submarine bases in the event of a war with Germany and Italy. Two weeks later the Selective Service and Training Act, the first American peacetime draft, was passed to train a million young American men as soldiers. It was written into the law that they could only be used in defense of the Western Hemisphere—both Canada and Australia had similar restrictions on draftees—but it was no secret as to who their nation’s future enemy might be. It was hoped that this event would not happen for another two years, at least, as some of them would begin training with sticks instead of rifles.
Both American presidential candidates in November of 1940, Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie, ran on rearmament platforms and support for the British war effort. American public opinion had shifted that much. Knowing this, Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States, revealed a state secret to American reporters on November 23rd, two weeks after Roosevelt was elected to a third term: “Well, boys, Britain's broke; it's your money we want."
The secret to Britain’s success as a superpower had been, for two centuries, that it had never allowed its colonies to become a financial burden on the nation. The key to this strategy had not been colonial taxation, duties, or pillage, but the “invisible empire” of British investment in lands and resources. British middle and upper-class citizens, in the 19th Century, owned properties, businesses, and financial shares in every nation on earth, including independent powers like the United States and China. The empire on the map assured the safety and quality of those investments. They, in turn, brought enormous wealth back to Britain.
As part of its attempts to finance the Great War, between 1914 and 1918, Britain used hard cash, in the form of bank notes and precious metals; it took out massive bank loans, including the “war loans” from American banks that infuriated Americans so much that they were outlawed in 1934; and it used a system of “credits.” Credits, as Winston Churchill describes them, were hard financial assets viable outside of Britain because they were converted from the confiscated international holdings of British citizens. That is, the British government taxed the international holdings of its own people out of existence and converted them into paper assets that would hold their value in Argentina, Australia, Canada, or the United States regardless of how Britain fared in the ongoing war.
This was nearly invisible taxation on a scale so vast that it helped turn Britain into a “debtor nation” after the Great War and crippled British finances in the 1920s and 1930s. When the Chamberlain government renewed the program in September of 1939, it did so quietly and was able to keep the scale of the confiscation concealed from the general public, including, as it happened, the American and German governments. The most important secret of this credit was that it was, by 1940, a limited resource. Churchill’s government expected the supply of credits would dry up by mid-1941 and that Britain’s supplies of gold and silver would also be drained. Britain could still pile up boundless debt within its own home territory, but the resources of India, Canada, Asia, Africa, and the Americas would be lost and Britain would have to end its war with Germany and Italy.
This was what Lord Lothian revealed to the world in November of 1940. Churchill sent documents and evidence to Roosevelt in December to prove how dire the situation was. Roosevelt, whose own nation would not be ready for war for two more years—he had staff reports on his desk bearing the date “July 1, 1943”—had to take some action. If he offered direct aid to the British he would face angry political reaction from the American people and be labeled a warmonger by Isolationists. Germany and Italy would, with considerable justification, consider any large-scale support for Britain an “act of war,” since he was essentially robbing Hitler and Mussolini of an opportunity to defeat their greatest enemy. If he did nothing, Britain’s war would end and its blockade of Europe with it. Hitler would be free to use resources from every continent to attack the Soviet Union or southeastern Europe. He would gain access to and might subjugate South America and Africa.
Roosevelt’s solution to this conundrum was the Lend Lease Act, which was announced on December 29, 1940 and passed on March 11, 1941. He gave it a folksy description involving loaning a neighbor a garden hose to fight a fire, but its effects were momentous. Britain, which had been subsidizing its own allies in wars for two hundred years, would be itself subsidized by an open line of credit, beginning with seven billion dollars and eventually totaling thirty-one billion dollars, to purchase war material in the United States. Nominally, this material would be returned after the war, but, even before Lend Lease was passed, no one took this as anything but a political fig leaf. American isolationists and the governments of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union all denounced Lend Lease as a hostile act against the Axis alliance, one guaranteed to bring war to the United States. Roosevelt spoke reassuring words in his radio addresses concerning Lend Lease, but knew the risk he was running.
Ultimately, the isolationists were correct. Hitler was confounded, as he had been the previous summer. His attempt to intimidate the British by bombing their cities had failed. His U-boat campaign was showing some promise, but the Americans had declared a “Neutrality Zone” in the western Atlantic in September of 1939. The growing American navy and army air forces, making good use of the British bases taken over in September of 1940, were providing intelligence to the British and Canadian forces patrolling the north Atlantic. Hitler’s supply lines to the east were secure, but he intended to make them more so by invading Russia in the spring of 1941. This campaign was expected to crush the badly-led Red Army and overthrow Stalin’s communist government by fall.
As before, however, Hitler knew that while he could not lose the war against Britain, he could not win that war unless he could somehow defeat the United States or cut the North Atlantic convoy routes connecting North America and Europe. A week after the passage of Lend Lease, Hitler and Mussolini were in agreement that the only way to defeat Britain was to defeat or at least distract the United States. The only possible way to even attempt this was to persuade their Japanese ally to enter the war. Against Britain, certainly, against Russia, if at all possible. Minimally, Japan had to attack someone, and attacking the United States would do the most good for Germany and Italy.
The first German proposal to Japan for an overt alliance against the United States was made on April 5, 1941. The Japanese foreign minister demurred, promising only that Japan might take action “in a few months.” Hitler’s people and Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, continued to lobby the government of the vacillating Prime Minister Fumimoro Konoe through the spring and summer. Roosevelt and Churchill were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic, but could not reveal how much they knew of the negotiations between Berlin and Tokyo. Roosevelt did know that Emperor Hirohito, Konoe, and the civilians in the Japanese ruling clique considered starting a war with the United States a potentially disastrous act. Japanese generals, led by Army Minister Hideki Tojo, were failing to defeat China after four years of war, but refused to consider simply declaring an end to that war to allow Japan’s battered economy to be healed. They and the admirals in the government hated the Americans, with whom Japan had never fought a war, more than the Chinese, Russians, or British. Japan was dependent on the United States for its oil and iron and it seemed the Americans were endeavoring to ruin Japan’s plans for becoming a great world empire out of moralizing arrogance.
In the end, Konoe, after months of dithering over peace or war, resigned as prime minister of Japan in October of 1941 in favor of Tojo. Hitler and Oshima felt sure this would lead to Japan attacking the United States and joining the war, but neither was privy to the plans of Tojo and his military leaders. They could only wait. Roosevelt, for his part, knew that Tojo’s rise to power meant that war would almost certainly come in a few months. He continued to try to negotiate with Japan, hoping a German defeat in front of Moscow might give the militarists in Japan reason to dither even more, and also hoping that Hirohito might somehow find the courage to restrain Tojo. By November of 1941, the German panzers were approaching Moscow and Roosevelt had little hope left. On November 25th, the Japanese foreign minister asked Germany for guarantees of support in the event that they should attack the Western alliance territories in Asia. That reassurance was given and Roosevelt ordered a “war warning” be sent out to all American bases in the Pacific, including the army and navy bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Hitler, in early December of 1941, was at the Wolfsschanze, in Prussia, issuing orders for the final assault on Moscow. Japanese fleets were moving across the South China Sea, making for Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, or possibly the Philippines. The Japanese First Air Fleet of six aircraft carriers was unaccounted for, but was assumed to be somewhere in the western Pacific supporting the rest of Japan’s navy. Churchill was hoping the sketchy defenses of Britain’s far eastern colonies would hold the Japanese off until reinforcements could be spared; the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse were already at Singapore, but with little air support. The Americans were rushing bomber aircraft to the Philippines by way of Hawaii while American aircraft carriers were delivering aircraft to outlying bases at Midway and Wake Islands.
On Sunday, December 7, the American president was pondering a last letter to Hirohito while American citizens attended church services and contemplated whether the terrible wars in Europe and China were ever going to trouble their peaceful world. When word came over their radios of an attack on a place called Pearl Harbor, many had no idea where that was. Neither did Adolph Hitler. His aides had to locate the Hawaiian Islands on a globe in his office at the Wolfsschanze. He was reportedly delighted at the news, leading his military staff and generals in a round of applause before getting on with planning his conquest of Russia.
After a small celebration, Hitler sent out orders authorizing his U-boats to attack American shipping immediately. The Americans were not prepared for war and, he assumed, would soon have to send all their fleet to the Pacific to fight Japan, so he expected German submarines would fare well over the next few months. He ordered a declaration of war to be drafted and passed in three days time, as he wished to make a grand speech to the Reichstag blaming Roosevelt for the world war in Europe as well as that in Asia. Roosevelt decided to schedule his formal request for a declaration of war against Japan on Monday, December 8th, 1941, in front of a joint session of congress. It was only the fifth time in American history the United States had done this. He did not mention Hitler because he did not need to. Hitler’s intentions were already known to him. He expected a German declaration of war in due time, and would ask congress to make an appropriate response. On this day, of course, Roosevelt intended to address the Japanese threat only, in a message, formal, concise, and utterly clear, to Americans, American allies, and all other potential enemies.
Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives: yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that Nation . . .
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