Tokyo officials who assumed that Americans had no will to fight did
not understand the psyche of Japan’s new enemy, including a powerful
self‐righteous certitude that energized people whose homeland had been
treacherously attacked. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the attack,
spent time in America and may have been almost alone in Toyko in
realizing that the attack would arouse a terrible, even overwhelming,
desire for revenge from a society ultimately far better prepared than
Japan for the total war to come.
Ironically, though, this was not the war that FDR wanted. Ongoing
Japanese aggression against China was awful but posed no military threat
to America. The Pacific Ocean might not have shielded Hawaii from
attack, but that wide expanse of water forestalled invasion of the U.S.
homeland. Indeed, Imperial Japan was ill‐prepared to even conquer and
rule Asia, which itself mattered far less to America than did Europe.
And the Second Sino‐Japanese War, usually dated to the Marco Polo
Bridge incident in July 1937, turned into a massive human abattoir,
consuming prodigious quantities of Japanese men and materiel.
Instead of proving to be an easy conquest, as expected, courageous
though ill‐prepared Chinese forces resisted the invaders at great cost.
Brutal atrocities, such as the Rape of Nanjing, stoked resistance. Even
battlefield successes drew Tokyo’s military deeper into China, making
victory more distant. When Japan surrendered nearly four years after
striking Pearl Harbor, the bulk of its army remained mired in China.
Estimates of theater casualties for Japan range widely, with a Chinese
reexamination of Tokyo figures running an astonishing 2.2 million.
But war with Japan did not mean war with Nazi Germany. The two were
linked (along with Italy) only loosely by the Tripartite Pact. Germany
was not bound to back its ally against America — after all, Tokyo did
not join the assault on the Soviet Union six months before. And with
Pearl Harbor the former chose to head south against the U.S. and
European states rather than north against the USSR.
This left FDR with a significant problem. He was determined to
sustain the United Kingdom, threatened with isolation and even
starvation by the ongoing “Atlantic War,” and had made America an
undeclared naval belligerent. But the incidents that resulted — with the
U.S. Navy aiding British convoys — had been insufficient to justify war
with an American public still determined to stay out of the military
madness raging from the Atlantic to the Pacific in Eurasia. Without
Washington involved in the European theater, that conflict still looked
like a probable German victory.
Before launching Operation Barbarossa against the USSR, Adolf Hitler
declared, “We have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten
structure will come crashing down.” He unleashed an invasion of four
million soldiers and 3600 tanks; few observers believed that the Soviet
Union would survive. The Wehrmacht won monumental victories in its more
than five‐month march across the vast Soviet plains. Fearing his
capital’s capture, Joseph Stalin evacuated many government functions and
industrial operations.
But the German offensive on Moscow halted on December 5. The Red Army
paid an extraordinary price to save Moscow: Casualty estimates for the
city’s defense ranged between 650,000 and a million. The USSR remained
battered but standing. Pushed back by Soviet reinforcements drawn from
Siberia — freed by Japan’s decision to attack America rather than the
Soviet Union — the German military would never again threaten the Soviet
capital.
Still, at the time it was not evident that this marked the
Wehrmacht’s high‐water mark. It was obvious that Germany would bid for
victory again the following year when better weather arrived. As it was,
Berlin continued to win significant victories and maintained the
strategic initiative even through the (losing) battle of Kursk in July
and August of 1943. The Red Army even ran short of new troops as it
forced back the Wehrmacht. Suffering years of prodigious slaughter in
what remains the most terrible, brutal, and cruel campaign of modern
times, the Soviet Union found that its human resources were not
inexhaustible.
Without America’s entry into the European war Berlin may well have
triumphed. To be sure, there is a common assumption that Moscow’s
victory was ensured once Stalin survived Hitler’s initial onslaught. But
that reflects the performance of the USSR backed by the United States.
Of course, it still was the Soviets who did the fighting — and suffered
the most grievous human and materiel losses from nearly four years of
vicious combat on a front that for a time extended nearly 2,000 miles.
But the fact that the Red Army was able to fight so bravely so long
highlighted the role of allied support, both direct and indirect.
Had America fought only Japan there would have been no second front,
which ultimately occupied a third of Germany’s army. As long as the
British could feed themselves, they could dominate the seas and fight
for North Africa, but alone could not contest Berlin’s continental
control. The lack of allied troops fighting in North Africa, Italy, and
France would have allowed the Wehrmacht to even the odds on the Eastern
front. And not just for the army. Without the U.S. bombing campaign to
supplement the UK’s air war, the Luftwaffe would not have needed to
shift as many luftflotte westward to defend the homeland and
especially the armaments industry. Germany might have been able to
maintain air superiority over the Soviet Union throughout the contest.
Although the USSR’s larger population ensured the Red Army’s
numerical edge, the loss of so much European territory denied the Soviet
regime access to substantial manpower. The country’s industrial
capacity was still vast, but alone would not have overwhelmed a Nazi
Germany able to concentrate on the Eastern front. Particularly
important, there would have been no Lend‐Lease shipments from the U.S.
to the Soviet Union, which made the Red Army mobile, giving it a notable
advantage over the Wehrmacht, which still relied on horses for much of
its transport.
Adolf Hitler’s misjudgments would still have hampered Germany’s
chances. He had lost his surprisingly deft political and military touch,
evident before and early in World War II. For instance, his order that
the Wehrmacht divert south into Ukraine lost the chance to take Moscow
in late summer 1941. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht remained a superior
force and might have succeeded in creating a relatively stable front by
gaining Moscow, Leningrad, and the Caucasus. Over the long term, Germany
likely would have found such a vast and hostile empire impossible to
sustain, but the world still would have looked very different than the
one that emerged after Germany’s actual surrender in May 1945.
Why did Germany lose when and how it did? Because of the second declaration of war.
Japan attacked the U.S. on Sunday, December 7, before its embassy in
Washington was able to decipher the message from Tokyo for the Roosevelt
administration ending negotiations and effectively breaking relations.
On Monday, December 8, FDR addressed Congress, which declared war on
Japan. The resolution’s lengthy title, which was almost as long as the
resolution, was clear:
“Joint Resolution Declaring that a state of war exists between the
Imperial Government of Japan and the Government and the people of the
United States and making provisions to prosecute the same.”
Germany was not mentioned. On Tuesday, December 9, however, Hitler
told his closest associates that he intended to declare war on the
United States. Alerted to this decision by intelligence intercepts, FDR
gave a fireside chat in which he prepared the
public: “Remember always that Germany and Italy, regardless of any
formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United
States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war
with Britain or Russia.”
Still, nothing was inevitable. Roosevelt could not take military
action without German action. Then, on Thursday, December 11, Adolf
Hitler called the Reichstag into session and declared war on America.
Why did he do so? Several theories have been advanced over the years.
One is loyalty to Japan, though, as noted earlier, he was under no
obligation to join Tokyo against the United States.
More likely, the idea of a global struggle excited him, since he
viewed himself as a man of destiny. His hubris was overweening and on
full display before the Reichstag: “I can only be grateful to Providence
that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle
which, for the next five hundred or a thousand years, will be described
as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of
Europe and indeed the whole world.”
Indeed, he saw this as the culmination of his life’s work:
