America enters WWII

5 Key excerpts on "America enters WWII"

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  The Global Village Myth

  Distance, War, and the Limits of Power

  • Patrick Porter(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  To understand globalism’s ascent, it can be plotted around three crucial dates: December 7, 1941, June 25, 1950, and September 11, 2001. On each date, enemies inflicted a surprise attack on American interests, whether the Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, the thirty-eighth parallel line dividing South and North Korea, and, on 9/11, cities on home soil. In the wake of these shocks, Washington strategically reassessed its position, declared a world struggle, and went to war. These conflicts were not equal in terms of scale or type. But each was an occasion where the United States widened its strategic horizons and rededicated itself to a global project.

  1941: Pearl Harbor and the Global Embrace

  Imperial Japan’s surprise strike on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (“12/7”), persuaded Americans that old geographic barriers were obsolete and that a new era of vulnerability had arrived. Americans concluded that new weapons, communication, and transport technologies had eclipsed distance. President Franklin Roosevelt invoked globalism to justify America’s war against the Axis. Pearl Harbor showed that “we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on a map any more.”24 New long-range capabilities, from naval aviation to air power, combined with predatory ideologies such as fascism and the overthrow of the European balance of power meant that American security could no longer be based on continental or hemispheric insulation. For the majority, the assault by a transoceanic predator demonstrated “that the rise of hostile states anywhere in the world could endanger our security.”25 A dominant Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it was feared, could threaten the homeland with encirclement, economic suffocation, or invasion. Great Britain played its part in feeding American fears, as British intelligence forged documents about Nazi plans for political subversion and the creation of satellite states in the Americas.26 The fear of fifth columnists at home and the sighting of Japanese submarines off the west coast quickened the sense of enemies closing in.

  World War II gave rise to the era of national security. This was an idea that would be institutionalized within American government and popularized in wider society. National security supplanted the more limited concept of “defense.” Military “Rainbow” plans of the interwar period had little overall policy direction from the White House or the State Department, were separate and secretive from other branches of government, and the armed services had to guess the contours of national policy.27 The disorder of the 1930s planted the seeds of an intellectual rediscovery of strategy as an intellectual discipline, and new weapons of greater range and lethality stoked fears in defense debate.28 Edward Mead Earle at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, along with Arnold Wolfers and Nicholas Spykman at Yale, led the academic embrace of the concept. But only after the United States formally entered the war did national security become an organizing principle for a new, complex bureaucracy. This would culminate in the formation of the Unified Command Plan of 1946 that placed large parts of the globe under geographically based military commands, and the National Security Act of 1947, establishing the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.29 Once continental and hemispheric, America’s conception of its outer defenses became extraregional.30 “Security” now went beyond the material and territorial. “National security” as a term altered its etymology and associations, pointing to “the shrinkage of space and time.”31

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  America in the World

  A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

  • Jeffrey Engel, Mark Lawrence, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 World War II Before 1941 ended, Germany controlled Europe, having done in weeks what a previous generation of German militarists had failed to accomplish in years: the conquest of rival France and the near capture of Moscow. Among the continent’s great powers, only Great Britain remained beyond Adolf Hitler’s control. Conflict raged in Asia too. Japanese forces had invaded China in 1937. Weak international reaction effectively killed off the dwindling influence of the League of Nations and opened the door to further Japanese aggression. As the global situation grew darker, American policy makers faced monumental questions of war and peace: how to keep out of war; then how to win the war; and finally how to ensure war would not erupt yet again. President Franklin D. Roosevelt strongly believed it was only a matter of time before America entered the conflict, though, as noted in chapter 5, he never seriously feared a direct German (or later Japanese) invasion of the United States. What truly frightened Roosevelt, more than the specter of bombing or direct enemy invasion, was what a full Axis victory in Europe and Asia might mean for American society. To survive in such a world, Roosevelt reasoned, the United States would require authoritarian rule of its own sufficient to create a garrison state capable of withstanding further Axis incursions. To remain free, in other words, would require sacrificing the very way of life Americans valued most. He sided with Britain and its allies not only out of sympathy for their cause but also out of a genuine fear for what their defeat might mean for the United States

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  History of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2: From 1895

  From 1895

  • Jerald A Combs(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Perhaps the best evidence against a Roosevelt conspiracy is that it made no political or strategic sense. If Roosevelt had wanted to galvanize American opinion to fight the Axis, he did not have to sacrifice the fleet; a Japanese attack on an empty harbor would have sufficed. No one knew at the time that the battleships and cruisers lost at Pearl Harbor would prove obsolete and that the carriers would be decisive in the naval war to come. Besides, Roosevelt did not want war in the Pacific; he wanted to fight the far greater threat of Hitler in Europe. There was no guarantee that Pearl Harbor would bring America into the European conflict. It might even have diverted American public attention to the Pacific and made a declaration of war against Germany all the more difficult. Fortunately for Roosevelt, he did not have to request war against Germany as well as Japan. Hitler cheered Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. He had avoided provoking conflict while Roosevelt extended aid to Britain, but evidently he had concluded that war was inevitable. Roosevelt had waited until Japan forced his hand, but now Americans were united in their commitment to World War II.

  Controversial Issues

  America’s entry into World War II caused far less historical controversy than its entry into World War I. World War I revisionists Charles A. Beard, Charles Tansill, and Harry Elmer Barnes survived to write parallel denunciations of World War II, but historians dismissed them far more quickly than they had the earlier ones. (These World War I and World War II revisionists are to be distinguished from the more modern revisionists who have been writing since the advent of the Cold War.) Beard, Tansill, Barnes, and their revisionist compatriots denied that either Germany or Japan had posed a serious threat to American interests or security. They admitted that Hitler was a dangerous neurotic, but his major goal had been the destruction of the Soviet Union. If Roosevelt had stood aside, Hitler and Stalin would have demolished each other. If, in the process, Germany and Japan had destroyed the British Empire as well, that was no concern of the United States.

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  From Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond

  War and Politics in the American Experience

  • Donald M Snow, Dennis M. Drew(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The other unique aspect from an American perspective is that the United States was the only Allied power that emerged from the war stronger than it entered. When the United States entered the fray following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the vast (and, thanks to the lingering effects of the Great Depression, underutilized) American industrial base was turned into the “arsenal for democracy.” The conversion and the stimulation it provided the economy ended the depression and allowed the United States to emerge in 1945 as the unquestioned economic colossus of the world. The other Allies were “winners” in the sense of being on the prevailing side, but all the other Allies were wounded seriously by the effort. Britain’s expenditure in blood and national treasure accelerated its gradual decline from great power status, a circumstance with which British governments continue to grapple today. The other major ally, the Soviet Union, arguably emerged more politically unified because of the enormity of effort necessitated by the Great Patriotic War (as the war was officially known in that country), but its land was scourged by the Nazi invasion that left two-thirds of its industry destroyed, countless towns, villages, and buildings reduced to rubble, and nearly 20 million citizens dead.

  The United States avoided those disasters. After the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, American continental soil was never seriously attacked during the war, so that there was no physical reconstruction to deal with after the war’s end. Our materiel contribution to the war had been enormous (the war cost the United States more than $500 billion in the dollars of the day), but our 300,000 casualties were comparatively light; the war did not bleed us dry in the literal sense of that phrase. Moreover, the war effort revitalized an American industrial plant gone flabby during the hard years of the depression. American industry was more productive at war’s end than at the beginning.

  The major effect of World War II was to critically alter the power map of the world. In the broadest sense, the roughly 150 years of European history from the onslaught of the French Revolution through World War II was a contest between France and Germany to dominate the continent and hence to dominate the international system. Ironically, World War II ensured that neither of them would. France had been defeated, humiliated, and occupied, and even though it rode to “victory” on the coattails of the victorious Allies, France clearly emerged from the war diminished in spirit and power. For Germany the outcome was even more disastrous. Its armed forces were decimated, it was occupied by its former enemies, it bore the unique moral stigma of Nazi excesses, and it was once again physically divided. Division was the cruelest blow of all, both because it returned the German people to the weakened status of a divided state and because the shadow of the Nazi past raised serious questions of when, if ever, the international system would allow a German resurgence.

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12  World War II in Asia–Pacific, I

  Japan and the politics of empire

  Reader's guide: The connections between the two wars. The growth of the Japanese Empire. US–Japanese relations and the approach to war.

  Introduction: global war

  In its origins, stakes and purposes, the war in Asia–Pacific was all but entirely unrelated to the war in Europe. Nevertheless, it is still accurate, if strangely so, to regard the war against Japan as an integral part of World War II. The principal connection between the two wars, half a world apart, was that it was only the ongoing war in Europe that emboldened Japan to seek a grand military solution to its strategic problems. Had there been no active conflict in Europe, Japanese prospects for success would have been so poor that war against the European colonial powers and the United States almost certainly would have been rejected as the policy choice. Even as it was, in 1941 Japanese leaders were far from united in a determination to fight. Context is vital. In 1940–1, as Japan's material strategic condition worsened because of American-led economic sanctions, so the radical changes in the global strategic context effected by Germany's victories appeared to offer a unique opportunity for Japan to exploit.

  It is useful to draw attention to an obvious political difference between the war in Europe and that in Asia–Pacific. Certainly by 1939, probably after 1936, or even as early as 1933, with hindsight it is plausible to argue that war in Europe was unavoidable. Germany, which is to say Adolf Hitler, wanted war. He might briefly be deterred tactically, but not strategically or politically. By contrast, Japan did not want war with the United States, though war with the British and the Dutch was unavoidable, given Tokyo's need for reliable access to the raw material resources (especially oil and rubber) of South East Asia. It should have been possible to coerce by menaces, perhaps even to persuade Japan not to embark on the inherently extremely hazardous course of war. But for a potential combatant to agree to be deterred when the stakes are perceived to be of the highest order, it must be deprived of any hope of military success. Also, it should be offered a politically tolerable alternative to war. In 1941, alas, those crucial conditions did not apply, as the world learned on 7 December, when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor.

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