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Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
Did German U-boats conduct a ‘clean’ campaign during the Second World War? Or were they guilty of routinely murdering survivors in the water? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence
On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness. As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind. Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position. Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear. The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-544740257-CMYKWeb-Ready-8cbb754.jpg" width="4950" height="3300" alt="A black and white photograph showing a row of young men sitting in a pew in court. The two men in the foreground are looking at each other, and one of them has his hands resting on top of a walking stick. Behind them, a man in full army uniform is standing, looking serious" title="Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck (left), commander of U-852, is tried for war crimes, October 1945. The following month he was executed by firing squad (Image by Getty Images)" /> A bloody exception It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.” Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime. Read more | The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters. Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism? Licence to kill? At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit. Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-466684659-CMYKWeb-Ready-2d13be1.jpg" width="4867" height="3245" alt="A black and white photograph of a marge ship sinking into the sea" title="SS F.W. Abrams lies stricken in the Atlantic following a U-boat attack, June 1942. For much of 1941 and 42, British shipping losses outpaced production (Image by Getty Images)" /> It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence. Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind. Read more | In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why? For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing. In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-537152831-CMYKWeb-Ready-023b7fd.jpg" width="3708" height="2472" alt="Three men in dark coats and military uniform walk in a triangular formation. The man at the front is looking towards the right of the image" title="Admiral Karl Dönitz (left) claimed that the U-boats waged a ‘clean’ war. But was he being economical with the truth? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether. The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”. That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.” Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one. Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy. Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/B4832C-CMYKWeb-Ready-bd6dc39.jpg" width="3557" height="2371" alt="A boat is moored at a harbour. On the boat there is a group of men with their hands behind their backs and heads bowed. A young boy sits on the harbourside looking at them. In the background there is a large bridge and a building with a tall column chimney" title="U-boat crews enter Wilhelmshaven to surrender to Allied forces, May 1945. These men had, for the most part, not used the murderous methods employed by their compatriots on the eastern front, writes Roger Moorhouse (Image by Alamy)" /> This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side. We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east. The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities. Moral outrage Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL2449488-CMYKWeb-Ready-379e129.jpg" width="4400" height="2933" alt="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.” He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his. The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-181456547-CMYKWeb-Ready-ff88d67.jpg" width="4591" height="3061" alt="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" title="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" /> Biological hatred In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just. The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors. The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception. Britain's near-death experience How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign. Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat. Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war. The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic. Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission. In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow. How the Allies turned the tide A timeline of the war against the U-boats 3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
When and why did the US get involved in WW2?
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For two years before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into World War II in December 1941, the nation had been on the edges of the global conflict. Professor Evan Mawdsley explores the arguments that were made for intervention or isolation, and examines President Roosevelt’s steps towards war…
The United States of America officially declared its involvement in WW2 in December 1941, following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December. In his famous “Day of Infamy” speech before Congress on 8 December, President Franklin D Roosevelt called for a declaration of war against Japan – crucially, Roosevelt did not also declare against Adolf Hitler's Germany. In this way Germany and Italy were manoeuvred into taking the first step, declaring war on 11 December 1941. However, the USA's road to WW2 had much longer roots than the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the government under Roosevelt had supported the Allies long before 1941. Here, Professor Evan Mawdsley shares in detail why and how the United States of America became involved in the conflict, the arguments against the USA's involvement in the 'European War', and why they remained neutral as the 1940s began… What was the initial involvement of the USA in WW1, compared to WW2? The beginning of WW1 was simpler than the beginning of WW2. August 1914 saw a ‘big bang’ outbreak, with the five most powerful major European powers thrown immediately into conflict. September 1939 was the beginning of a war between only three major European powers (Britain, France and Germany). They were followed in June 1940 by Italy, in June 1941 by Russia, and in December 1941 by Japan and the USA – though the conflict as a whole had actually began in July 1937 with war between China and Japan. The American entry into World War I was also simpler than the American entry into World War II. By 1917 there was only limited opposition to taking part in the conflict. In April President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, largely in response to Berlin’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (sinking merchant ships without warning). The declaration was passed by 82 votes to 6 in the Senate, and by 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives. But the neutral USA entered World War II only after many months of argument in Congress and among the general public, and only when a Japanese fleet launched a big surprise air raid against its Pacific naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941. Intervention vs isolation: why didn't America want to get involved in WW2? The outbreak of full-scale conflict between Japan and China in July 1937 had little to do with the USA and its people. Neither did Germany’s pre-war actions in the 1930s: remilitarisation, sending troops into the Rhineland in 1936, forced unification with Austria, and destruction of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Sudenten crisis. Even Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, and the declaration of war by Britain and France seemed to have little relevance to the USA. Yet President Franklin D Roosevelt, a Democrat elected for his second term of office in November 1936, had taken a public position of opposition to aggression by Japan, Italy, and Germany. He made a speech in Chicago in October 1937, when he called for the “quarantine” of aggressive and warlike countries, and he also publicly condemned the nature of the Nazi government in Germany. Congress, however – although both houses were controlled by the Democrats – contained strong voices opposing intervention. This opposition was based on a long-term ‘isolationist’ tradition, whose adherents did not want America – protected as it was by broad oceans – to become ‘entangled’ with foreign countries and wars overseas. Both in Congress and among the American public, this sentiment had been strengthened by the experience of World War I, which isolationists claimed America had only entered in 1917 because US manufacturers wanted to make a profit by selling munitions. Read more: Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War In the 1930s many Americans did not want to become ensnared in a bloody war for the sake of distant China, or in what some Americans saw as war to perpetuate the British empire. In addition, the slow recovery from the Great Depression, with continuing high unemployment and farm problems, seemed to demand a concentration of effort on recovery at home rather than adventures abroad. What changed America's mind about entering WW2? The situation changed drastically in May and June 1940. Many Americans had expected the ‘European War’ to be a protracted conflict, in which the Allies – with larger populations than Germany and global resources – would eventually gain the upper hand. Instead, Adolf Hitler’s armed forces unexpectedly won quick victories, knocking France out of the war. The Third Reich took control of western and central Europe; Mussolini’s Italy opened a new front against Britain in the Mediterranean. All this threatened, perhaps in a few months, to defeat the surviving Ally. Now it seemed that unless help was provided America might have to deal on its own with a German-dominated Europe. The implications of the May–June 1940 upheaval were global. In particular, the resource-rich southeast Asian colonies of France and the Netherlands were suddenly open to control or occupation by outsiders. Even the British colonies would be under threat if the empire’s military resources had to be concentrated in Europe and the Mediterranean. In late September 1940 this potential threat began to become a reality, when Japan sent troops into the northern French Indochina. In the second half of 1940 the US became a vital base of support for Britain, and it grew greatly in importance as a factor in world affairs. In September 1940 Germany and neutral Japan, along with Italy, signed the Tripartite Pact. The intention was to deter the Americans from entering the war, as they had in 1917; the signatories pledged mutual support if the US went to war against any one of them. In the US public opinion was alarmed by Germany’s position in Europe; in addition, the bombing of London and other cities in the summer and autumn of 1940 and increasing submarine attacks on British ships aroused sympathy. Roosevelt nevertheless moved cautiously; there would be a Presidential election in November 1940, and as he was running for an unprecedented third term it could be an uphill fight. He pledged to keep the US out of direct involvement in the war. In the end he took 55% of the popular vote (a decline from 61% in 1936). The Senate remained securely Democratic, but in the House of Representatives the result was only slightly better for the Democrats than in 1938, with the Roosevelt’s party winning 267 seats out of 435. The opposition Republicans won nearly 40% of the seats. "No clear mandate for war": why did Roosevelt advocate neutrality for so long? Victory at the polls allowed the re-elected Roosevelt more freedom of action, but not a mandate to go to war. He did not want to fight Germany and Italy without wide backing. Instead he used his presidential powers to implement a decidedly one-sided neutrality. Already in September 1940 he had provided 50 obsolete American destroyers to Britain. Now, in the winter of 1940–41 he declared that America would be an “Arsenal of Democracy”, and he succeeded by March 1941 in putting through Congress Lend-Lease legislation, providing arms to Britain without direct payment. Secret staff talks were arranged in Washington early in 1941 between British and American military leaders. In July 1941 Marines were sent to Iceland, relieving a British garrison. In August Roosevelt and Winston Churchill staged a spectacular summit aboard warships off Newfoundland; they issued the Atlantic charter, a joint declaration opposing acts of international aggression and openly condemning Hitler and Nazism. From September the president ordered that the US Navy began escorting British convoys. Berlin, meanwhile, strove to avoid the kind of action which had led to the US declaration of war in 1917, notably submarine attacks on US merchant ships. This restraint was motivated by plans to invade the Soviet Union, which were put into effect in June 1941; in Berlin confrontation with America was planned to come only after victory in Russia. Even more directly important were events in the far east, where Washington became in 1941 the main counterweight to Japan. To deter Japan from occupying more Asian territory or entering the war on Germany’s side, Washington made use of powerful economic sanctions. In July 1941 the Japanese moved military forces into southern Indochina, and in response Washington froze Japanese assets and, along with the British and Dutch, cut off oil exports to Japan. American diplomats made morally understandable but diplomatically drastic demands; in the final version, the normalisation of relations and the ending of economic sanctions depended on Tokyo ending the war in China, and pulling out of the Tripartite Pact. Some historians have seen this hard line as an attempt to provoke an attack, which would allow Roosevelt a back-door entry into a war with Germany and Italy. More reasonably, it can be suggested that Washington underestimated Japanese determination and military capabilities. Read more | Why did the Second World War happen? Negotiations in Washington with Japanese diplomats continued, but in the end civilian and military leaders in Tokyo decided to seize direct control of British and Dutch resources in southeast Asia, especially the oil; only in this way could Japan’s position as a major power be maintained. In view of Roosevelt’s hard-line policy, the leaders of Japan concluded that their action would probably provoke an American entry into the war. Meanwhile the strategic position of the American-controlled Philippines had the potential to block shipping routes from southeast Asia to Japan. Tokyo decided to mount pre-emptive attacks, against both the Philippines and the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor: did Roosevelt have knowledge ahead of the attack? The intelligence available to Washington, mainly from communications intercepts by American codebreakers, is a complex topic. Some conspiracy theorists claimed that President Roosevelt had advance warning of the Pearl Harbor attack but let it go ahead, as the outcome would be to rally US public opinion for war; this is certainly not true. The intelligence on hand did indicate imminent Japanese action in southeast Asia (probably against Britain), but not the daring strike against Pearl Harbor. The Pearl Harbor raid was very successful for Japan in a military sense. Politically it was idiotic; it was mounted without a declaration of war, in the middle of negotiations, on a Sunday morning, on US territory, with heavy American loss of life. As the British ambassador to Washington put it in his diary: “If war was to come with Japan I can’t imagine any way in which they could have acted more completely to rally, unite and infuriate American opinion.” Read more | Why didn't America see Pearl Harbor coming? Equally remarkable was the conduct of the European Axis. Roosevelt knew from messages decrypted in the week before Pearl Harbor that Germany and Italy were now prepared to go to war with the US if Japan did so. Shrewdly, in his famous “Day of Infamy” speech before Congress on 8 December, he did not call for a declaration of war against them, but only against Japan. In this way Germany and Italy were manoeuvred into taking the first step, declaring war on 11 December. View Green Video on the source website This is sometimes described as Hitler’s greatest mistake. Germany had not been obliged to go to war with the US under the September 1940 Tripartite Pact; Tokyo had initiated the conflict, not Washington. Nevertheless, Hitler had already opted for war. He did not have advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, but he knew that a major Japanese offensive was planned in southeast Asia; this would likely bring Britain into war against Japan, possibly with US support. Read more | How and when did the Second World War end? Probably the dictator believed that Roosevelt’s hostility to the Nazi regime made war with America inevitable, and that there was little more the US could do to help Britain anyway. But the important thing was that his decision tied Germany (and Italy) to the perfidious Pearl Harbor attackers, and American public opinion rallied behind the global war. A new world order was beginning. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in September 2019 Discover more learning from week one of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign Video lecture: The Decision, with Taylor Downing – watching time 11 mins Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? – reading time 8 mins Barbarossa and Britain – reading time 9 mins Podcast: D-Day: everything you wanted to know – listening time 54 mins
Conspiracy: was Pearl Harbor an inside job?
Journalist Steve Twomey explores the conspiracy theory that suggests President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the surprise Japanese attack
On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. It's one of the most notorious surprise attacks in history, but how much of a surprise was it? Did US President Franklin Roosevelt in fact know that the attack was coming and even encourage it as a means of propelling the US into World War Two? In this new episode of Conspiracy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Twomey joins Rob Attar to tackle the "back door to war" conspiracy theory, explaining why many Americans have been willing to believe in a president's treachery. View Green Video on the source website
In the final episode in our new series on the raid on Pearl Harbor, Ellie Cawthorne speaks to Robert Lyman about the attack’s immediate aftermath and long term legacy
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Pearl Harbor aftermath: the fallout from the attack
How public fury at Japan’s ‘sneak’ strike put an end to American isolationism and cranked the fearsome US war machine into action. Gavin Mortimer explores what happened in the USA after the attack on Pearl Harbor…
Stefanos Vasilakes was the embodiment of all that was great about the United States of America. After arriving from Greece in 1910, he had set up a hot peanuts and fresh popped corn cart on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and East Executive Avenue in Washington DC. The spot was actually White House property, but none of the occupiers minded when he sold the best peanuts in town. Presidents Taft, Wilson, Harding and Roosevelt had all been customers, as had Coolidge, who described Vasilakes as his “contact man” with the American public. To reporters, Vasilakes represented the “little man” of the nation. And on the afternoon of Sunday 7 December the “little man” was livid. When the reporter from Washington’s Evening Star newspaper arrived outside the White House en route to a press conference, hastily called after news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he found an agitated Vasilakes. “Steve was too excited to talk clearly,” wrote the reporter. “And about all he could say was: ‘Just three months, we finish them.’” Read more | Why didn't America see Pearl Harbor coming? The fury of Vasilakes and the rest of the US public at Japan’s ‘sneak attack’ united the country in an instant. On the Sunday afternoon, President Roosevelt met first with his cabinet and then with a delegation from the House of Repres­entatives and the Senate. The next day, Congress voted on whether to sanction FDR’s wish to go to war with Japan, and only the pacifist Jeannette Rankin dissented. For that stance she was scorned by the American people, as were the few isolationists who continued to argue against involvement in armed conflict. One of the most vociferous of these prior to Pearl Harbor had been the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, an ardent admirer of Nazi Germany and a man who used his fame to demand that Roosevelt keep the country out of a European war. In May 1940, Lindbergh, a prominent figure in the isolationist America First Committee, had addressed the nation in a radio broadcast, ridiculing FDR’s warnings that the US was in danger. The country was under threat from no one, said Lindbergh (pictured right in April 1941), unless “American peoples bring it on”. He added: “There will be no invasion by foreign aircraft, and no foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts.” But Japan had dared, and with devastating consequences. As one newspaper, the Wilmington Morning Star, put it in an editorial: “Japan’s Sunday attack on American outposts ended American isolationism. Leaders of that movement, with the exception of Charles Lindbergh, who has gone into seclusion, lost no time in making it clear that they underwent a change of heart forthwith.” Aiding the allies This transformation was welcomed by Roosevelt, who from early in the war had recognised the danger posed by the ruthless ambition of Nazi Germany. In September 1940, Adolf Hitler had signed a Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, and on 29 December that year – following his recent historic re-election to a third term of office – Roosevelt addressed the nation in one of his ‘fireside chats’ on the radio. “If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the high seas,” he warned. “It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/12/TYPEYA-retouched-d2512c9.jpg" width="5709" height="4379" alt="Water-cooled machine guns just arrived from the US under the Lend-Lease policy are checked at an ordnance depot in England. (Photo by Topfoto)" title="Water-cooled machine guns just arrived from the US under the Lend-Lease policy are checked at an ordnance depot in England. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> Such rhetoric not only angered isolationists, it infuriated the Nazis. In September 1940, FDR had signed the Destroyers for Bases Agreement with Great Britain, transferring 50 destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for land rights on British possessions. In March 1941, he got his Lend-Lease bill through Congress in the face of fierce opposition from isolationists. Finally he was able to provide aid and military equipment to America’s allies, principally Britain. By the time the US declared war on Germany and Italy on 11 December 1941, responding to declarations from those nations, the Nazis were putting their own spin on events, with Reich radio accusing Roosevelt of “continually war-mongering” since 1939. As a consequence, it said, the president “has at last got the war he has always been looking for”. Read more | The lion and the rising sun: Britain and Japan's 400-year relationship The anger that surged across the United States on 7 December was visceral but controlled. The Evening Star reported that Major Edward Kelly, superintendent of the metropolitan police, was summ­oned to the White House because there was “fear of a popular demonstration” against some of the Axis embassies. Guards were posted, but no baying mob appeared in search of bloody vengeance. The reporter from the Star was surprised. So he toured downtown Washington to gauge the mood, and in doing so encountered “something of the strange psychological phenomenon” that was so palpable in London during the Blitz of 1940. “Folks wanted to be together,” he wrote. “Strangers spoke to strangers. A sense of comradeship of all the people was apparent.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/12/GettyImages-53378967-4eaf338.jpg" width="2337" height="2048" alt="FDR’s Lend-Lease bill also shipped food – such as the cheese in the sandwiches enjoyed by these children in England’s Blitz-hit north. (Photo by Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" title="FDR’s Lend-Lease bill also shipped food – such as the cheese in the sandwiches enjoyed by these children in England’s Blitz-hit north. (Photo by Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" /> This feeling strengthened in the days that followed the Pearl Harbor attack, as stories emerged of unimaginable grief and suffering. In Wisconsin, Mr and Mrs Barber learned of the deaths of three of their sons, all firemen aboard the USS Oklahoma. “I’m glad they died like men and could give their lives for their country,” said their father, who just days before had received a photo of his sons aboard their ship. “When their [younger] brothers are old enough, I’m sure they will avenge their deaths.” If the people responded to the attack with a dignified restraint, the same could not be said of many media outlets. Sens­at­ionalism abounded in those first frenetic hours after the attack, with fake news spreading like wildfire. “Japanese para­chute troops are reported in Honolulu,” reported CBS. “At least five persons have been reported killed in the city of Honolulu. The Japanese dive bombers have been making continuous attacks, apparently from a Japanese aircraft carrier.” Read more | Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War Some news­papers spewed hatred, like the fiery editorial in the Los Angeles Times on 8 December. “Japan has asked for it,” stormed the paper. “Now she is going to get it. It was the act of a mad dog, a gangster’s parody of every principle of inter­national honour.” Other papers expressed dismay that the States had been suckered by the Japanese. “It now turns out that Japan was one of our customers who wasn’t right,” said the Arkansas Gazette, a reference to the raw materials that had been shipped to Japan and then returned in the form of bombs. But a common thread in the analysis was relief that the divisive question of whether the US should join the war had been settled. “The air is clearer,” declared the New York Herald Tribune. “Americans can get down to their task with old controversies forgotten.” If Roosevelt was reassured with this unanimity, across the Atlantic in London, Winston Churchill was discreetly elated. He phoned FDR on Sunday evening to offer his sympathy and support. “We’ve got at least 2,000 men lost; we’ve lost three destroyers, four battleships,” explained a dazed Roosevelt. “That’s fine, Mr President; that’s fine,” replied Churchill, trying his best to soothe and reassure his friend and ally. The British prime minister had suffered similar agonies in his 18 months in the job, and while he was sincere in his grief for the president and his people, he knew what it meant for his beleaguered country now that the most powerful nation in the world had joined the fight. That evening, Churchill would later write, “being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/12/GettyImages-514699770-2580c00.jpg" width="3618" height="2807" alt="A cafe in Boston, Massachusetts, slaps an impromptu notice in the window on 9 December 1941 as anti-Japan hysteria reaches its peak. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="A cafe in Boston, Massachusetts, slaps an impromptu notice in the window on 9 December 1941 as anti-Japan hysteria reaches its peak. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Churchill’s immediate concern, however, was the news that, following Japan’s invasion of northern Malaya the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Britain was now engaged in war with two formidable adversaries. In a statement to the House of Commons shortly after the attack, Churchill said: “When we think of the insane ambition and insatiable appetite which have caused this vast and melancholy extension of the war, we can only feel that Hitler’s madness has infected the Japanese mind and the root of the evil and its branch must be extirpated together.” Describing the attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of “calculated and characteristic Japanese treachery”, the prime minister was at his bellicose best in issuing a solemn warning. “No one can doubt that every effort to bring about a peace­ful solution had been made by the government of the United States and that immense patience and composure had been shown in the face of the growing Japanese menace. Now that the issue is joined in the most direct manner, it only remains for the two great democracies to face their task with whatever strength God may give them.” But what military strength did the United States have? Thanks to Roosevelt’s foresight, more than its enemies imag­ined. In September 1940, Washington had passed the Selective Training and Service Act – the first peacetime conscription in US history, whereby all men between the ages of 21 and 36 were compelled to register with local draft boards; if drafted, they served on active duty for 12 months. This was expanded to 30 months in August 1941, and following the attack on Pearl Harbor, an amendment to the act made all men between the ages of 20 and 44 liable for military service. There had been much grumbling among draftees before Pearl Harbor, but not afterwards, as outraged young men flocked to the colours. By May 1945, America boasted nearly 8.3 million active-duty soldiers, whereas six years earlier its army of 187,893 soldiers had been smaller than Portugal’s. Firing on all cylinders The US had the men to fight both the Japanese and the Germans, but did it have the machines and munitions? As Roosevelt told Congress a few weeks after the declaration of war, “Powerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced.” It was a repeat of what he had told Americans in his fireside chat of 29 December 1940: that Britain was asking “for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security…. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” In May 1940, after Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, the president had stated his wish “to see this nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year”. Once war broke out, a revol­ution in the workplace was needed to achieve this. With young white men enlisting in their hundreds of thousands, their places on the production lines were taken by women and African-Americans – two demographics hitherto largely excluded from such employment. Both groups, especially the latter, encountered prej­udice, so FDR passed Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in federal defence industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee. By 1943, some 310,000 women were working in the US aircraft industry – around 65 per cent of the industry’s total workforce, compared with just 1 per cent in the 1930s. For the majority, the work brought fulfilment and freedom. “My mother warned me when I took the job that I would never be the same,” said Inez Sauer, a tool clerk at Boeing. “At that time, I didn’t think it would change a thing. But she was right, it definitely did. At Boeing I found a freedom and an independence I had never known... The war changed my life completely. I guess you could say, at 31, I finally grew up.” As the workers gained in confidence, the American war machine expanded, thanks to their industry in meeting Roosevelt’s demands. He wanted 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and 125,000 the year after, and he nearly got them, with the production of 171,257 aircraft by early 1944. That year alone, the US produced more planes than the Japanese did in the entire war. As for ships, the industry underwent an astonishing transformation at the hands of Henry J Kaiser, who hired most of his workforce from the “destitute labourers of the Dust Bowl states”. In 1941, it took 200 days to assemble one of Kaiser’s Liberty ships, weighing between 9,000 and 10,5000 tons; by November 1942 it took just five days, and by 1943 these supply vessels were entering service at the rate of 140 a month. Read more | The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” cost money, of course, and to raise it, his government came up with several strategies, including the rationing of several important commodities, and the sale of war bonds to individuals and financial institutions. Selling the bonds relied on appealing to the nation’s patriotism, as they yielded a 2.9 per cent annual return with a 10-year maturity. Advertising campaigns helped with this – posters were emblazoned with the words: “The greatest investment on earth: For your country, your family, yourself.” But while Roosevelt braced himself for a long and bitter struggle, he also yearned for a quick retaliatory strike. Four days before Christmas, he summ­oned his military chiefs to the White House and demanded they come up with a way of hitting the Japanese in their own backyard. The result was the ‘Doolittle raid’ of April 1942, when 16 modified B-25 bombers, led by Lieutenant Colonel James H Doolittle, took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and flew 650 miles to strike targets on the Japanese mainland. The material damage inflicted on Japan was slight, but the psychological hurt was immense. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor, said it was “a disgrace that the skies over the imperial capital should have been defiled without a single enemy plane being shot down”. Above all, the Doolittle mission was a huge fillip to Americans back home, one seized upon by the media. Describing the attack as a “daring raid”, Washington’s Evening Star showed no sympathy for Japan, which had, it said, “experienced for the first time in her history the destruction and terror of air assault which she has visited on scores of cities”. Vasilakes, the presidential peanut vendor, had called on his compatriots to finish off Japan in three months. It would take four years – and an apocalyptic new weapon – for that to happen, and neither he nor President Roosevelt would live to see the end of a war that, for Americans, began with a day of infamy one December Sunday. The injustice of internment On 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted his secretary of war, Henry L Stimson, “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he, or the appropriate military commander, may determine”. In short, anyone considered an enemy alien could be rounded up and incarcerated in what were euphemistically called ‘relocation centres’, but in reality were internment camps. Particularly affected was the large Japanese-American community living on the Pacific coast: not only were an estimated 110,000 people interned, but the US Department of the Treasury froze the assets of all citizens and resident aliens who were born in Japan. One of those detained was 28-year-old Roy Matsumoto – despite the fact he had been born and schooled in California. “It was very hard when I lost my freedom,” he recalled. “I lost just about everything – almost all my personal property and financial assets. The government’s excuse: it was enemy alien property. I was so mad.” Matsumoto was one of the ‘lucky’ internees – in that, as a fit young man, he was given the chance to join the military as a ‘Nisei’ (US-born children of Japanese immigrants) interpreter. He subsequently served with distinction in Burma with the special forces unit Merrill’s Marauders, winning a Bronze Star for his courage. But most Japanese-Americans remained interned for the war’s duration. It wasn’t until 1976 that President Gerald Ford officially rescinded Executive Order 9066, and in 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, acknowledging that a “grave injustice” had been inflicted on Japanese-Americans during the war. Gavin Mortimer is a bestselling writer, historian and television consultant. His books include The Long Range Desert Group in World War II (Osprey, 2017) This article was taken from the BBC Collector's Edition Pearl Harbor bookazine
Alternate history: what if Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor?
Early in the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941, hundreds of Japanese aircraft launched a surprise assault on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing more than 2,400 Americans. Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Robert Cribb about whether the United States would still have entered World War II without, as their president put it, a “date which will live in infamy”
Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Robert Cribb about what might had happened had Japan not bomed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 Sunday, 7 December 1941: a day that changed the course of World War II. Japan launched a daring surprise strike on the chief US naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor – near Honolulu, Hawaii – killing more than 2,400 Americans and ending the United States’ policy of neutrality. The next day, Congress declared war. At the most extreme, no attack on Pearl Harbor could have meant no US entering the war, no ships of soldiers pouring over the Atlantic, and no D-Day, all putting ‘victory in Europe’ in doubt. On the other side of the world, it could have meant no Pacific Theatre and no use of the atomic bomb. This all depends on whether the US would have stayed out of the fight. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, planned in response to debilitating US economic restrictions, aimed to knock out the Pacific Fleet and crush American morale in one fell swoop. But the plan very possibly could have been shelved. “Many Japanese leaders, including Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, were keen to avoid a long war against the United States, conscious of the huge disparity in economic power between the two,” says Robert Cribb, professor in Asian history at the Australian National University. “Their preference was for agreeing [to the US demand] to wind back their presence in China in exchange for a loosening of the embargoes.” Pearl Harbor podcast series Member exclusive | Browse and listen to all episodes in our podcast series on the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor Listen to all episodes now Emperor Hirohito similarly had misgivings about going to war, so Pearl Harbor may just have been spared if he had imposed his will on his government. Without that commitment to pre-emptive military aggression, the imperial leadership may have looked to agree to US demands, but in a “partial, half-hearted and insincere way that was nonetheless sufficient to placate the US”, according to Cribb. If this successfully eased tensions, they could turn their attention to winning the war that had been raging against China since 1937. “Japan’s practice had always been incremental expansion – Taiwan, then Korea, then the attempt in Siberia, then Manchuria, then slices of north China,” says Cribb. “The Sino-Japanese War was not in their playbook and they hoped to find Chinese partners with whom to sign a peace.” Any kind of deal with the Chinese nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek may have preserved some of Japan’s interests but, Cribb adds, would have been near to impossible following the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, which had seen the mass killing and ravaging of many thousands of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by the Japanese Imperial Army. Was war between the US and Japan inevitable? In truth, the economic restrictions placed on Japan – an embargo on the sale of oil, the freezing of Japanese assets in the US, and the Panama Canal being closed to Japanese shipping – left its empire vulnerable. Supplies of natural resources needed to be secured for any hopes of expansion. With Russia an unlikely option after a recent chastening defeat by the Soviets, the Japanese would always look to Southeast Asia. Japan occupied French Indochina in 1940 and was targeting the Philippines. But this was a US protectorate, meaning Japan would still come into conflict with the US, even if not at the headquarters of their Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. It was not just the US that the Japanese would be taking on. Expanding into Southeast Asia meant facing the British in Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, and the Dutch. “The most useful alternative development for Japan would have been to engineer a coup in the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia],” says Cribb. “It might have given Japan access to crucial oilfields, but such a coup would have been difficult and the US was unlikely to permit the Japanese to bypass the embargoes in that way.” The WW2 battle of Okinawa: the bloodiest assault of the Pacific War Even without the Pearl Harbor attack then, the US may have been driven to war by aggression in Southeast Asia. A deeply antagonistic relationship with Japan had developed in the 1930s, since the invasion of China. “Japan’s great strategic error was to join the Tripartite Pact in September 1940,” states Cribb. “The Pact [forming the Axis Powers with Nazi Germany and Italy] was of no strategic use to Japan, but it had the effect of confirming the US view that Japan was the enemy.” Did you know? Of the 2,403 official fatalities suffered by the US in the attack on Pearl Harbor, 1,177 were on board the USS Arizona. The battleship was struck by several bombs including a direct hit that ignited the forward magazine, causing a huge explosion. US President Franklin D Roosevelt recognised the threat of the Axis Powers and was stretching the limits of US neutrality by supporting Britain. Through Lend-Lease, the US supplied weapons, vehicles, food and other resources to help with the war effort, making the country the “arsenal of democracy”. But FDR struggled to convince isolationists that US involvement was imperative. Without such a shocking attack as Pearl Harbor, winning this support would be more difficult. It is extremely unlikely that a Japanese attack on the Philippines, Dutch East Indies or British-controlled parts of Southeast Asia could provoke the same reaction for revenge. Yet FDR was committing support to the Allied forces and eager to persuade the isolationists that joining the war was essential to US interests, says Cribb. The chances are that the US would still have entered the war, but by a longer road. Pearl Harbor: 5 frontline stories from people who were there If that meant the war went on for longer, then Japan would have faced steadily greater difficulties in maintaining control of Southeast Asia, claims Cribb. The “immense disparity between the US and Japanese economies” would still have given the Americans a key advantage. However, if the war progressed without the attack on Pearl Harbor, the closing stages may still have seen the US and Japan with a shared desire, too – keeping the Soviets’ role at a minimum. As Cribb notes: “The Japanese authorities desperately wanted to avoid being occupied by the Soviets, while the US was keen not to share the occupation.” In context Tensions between the US and Japan had been growing since the 1930s, following the Japanese invasions of Manchuria, China and French Indochina. Then, in September 1940, a year after World War II began, Japan sealed its alliance with Germany and Italy. The US responded with a host of economic restrictions. With the two nations edging closer to war, Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the home of the US Pacific Fleet, on the morning of 7 December 1941. Two waves of hundreds of aircraft bombarded the navy vessels docked on ‘Battleship Row’ and strafed the airfields. Within 90 minutes, more than 2,400 people were dead. President Franklin D Roosevelt addressed Congress the next day, calling 7 December 1941 a “date which will live in infamy”, and the US – which had officially maintained a policy of neutrality, despite supplying Britain with resources through the Lend-Lease system – declared war on Japan. Robert Cribb is a professor in Asian history at the Australian National University. He was speaking to freelance writer Jonny Wilkes This article was first published in the November 2020 edition of History Revealed Subscribe to BBC History Revealed to get more content like this
Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War
On 11 December 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States of America, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four days earlier. There is a strong case to be made, says historian Laurence Rees, that December 1941 was the most decisive month of the entire Second World War…
Winston Churchill instantly knew what Pearl Harbor meant for the British. He later wrote that when he heard the news that now that the United States was “in the war, up to the neck and in to the death” he felt the “greatest joy” because it meant that “we had won after all” and “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live”. But while the benefits to Britain of the entry of the US into the war were clear, it is sometimes forgotten that Pearl Harbor also had an enormous impact on two other countries: Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affected the Soviet Union in two important ways. First, it confirmed that Japanese forces would no longer pose any foreseeable threat to the Soviet Union in the Far East. Indeed, reports two months earlier from Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Japan, that the Japanese intended to attack in the south rather than invade the Soviet Union, had informed Stalin’s decision to move divisions from the Siberian border to help in the defence of Moscow. In early October 1941, Vasily Borisov was a soldier in a Siberian division in the remote east of the Soviet Union where, he says, “we were expecting Japan to attack”. But on 18 October his unit received orders to board trains immediately and head west to face a different foe: “In the summer [of 1941] we knew the Germans were advancing very fast and were capturing Soviet territory and we knew they were technically more advanced than us… we knew that the situation was bad”. As they travelled towards the west, Borisov and his comrades thought “that a lot of us would be killed. We knew that the war would be hard, and that’s what it turned out to be. It was very hard… we felt fear”. But in the freezing Soviet winter, all the Germans’ technological advances counted for nothing. This was a more straightforward struggle – one in which the Red Army could compete on equal terms. And once Red Army soldiers began to counterattack against the Germans outside Moscow on 5 December, they became more and more confident. “We are very strong and very fit,” said Vasily Borisov. “This is Siberian spirit. This is how people are raised from childhood. Everyone knows that Siberians are very tough… I am a true Siberian, everyone knows that we are tough”. Vasily Borisov believed that he and his comrades held firm during the battle for Moscow because of this “Siberian stubbornness… The commanders used to say that the Siberian divisions saved Moscow…” The second reason that Pearl Harbor had an instant effect on Stalin, and increased the chances of the Red Army winning against the German Wehrmacht, was because it led almost immediately to Germany declaring war on America, and so brought Stalin an unexpected ally of colossal potential power. Hitler’s decision to declare war on America, announced on 11 December 1941, has often puzzled people who are not aware of the details of the history. Why, as German forces faced the immensity of the challenge of the war on the eastern front, did Hitler voluntarily add such a powerful additional enemy to his list of adversaries? Why did Hitler declare war on America on 11 December 1941? The answer is straightforward. Hitler, like Stalin, was a political leader who had an eye for reality, not just rhetoric. And to Hitler it had been obvious that war with the United States was inevitable. The key moment on that road to war had occurred not at Pearl Harbor but several months before, when President Franklin D Roosevelt had ordered American warships to accompany British convoys to the middle of the Atlantic. As Winston Churchill noted, by the time of the Atlantic Conference in August 1941, Roosevelt was determined “to wage war, but not declare it”. This was also the conclusion the German Grand Admiral Raeder had reached, and he had told Hitler months prior to Pearl Harbor that unless U-boats were allowed to sink American ships, the battle of the Atlantic could not be won. Read more | The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War Inevitably, following Roosevelt’s decision to order American warships to patrol the western Atlantic in support of convoys, a series of incidents followed – notably a U-boat attack on the USS Greer in September and the sinking of the USS Reuben James, causing the deaths of more than 100 American sailors, on 31 October 1941. So, by December 1941, Hitler must have felt that by declaring war on America he was doing little more than accepting the inevitable – with the added benefit of retaining apparent control of events. Hitler further reasoned that the immediate entry of the US into the war would do nothing substantively for at least a year to alter the course of the struggle in the Soviet Union – and it was this fight against Stalin that he believed would decide the entire conflict one way or the other. Moreover, he thought the Japanese would now tie down the American fleet in the Pacific and threaten British interests in the Far East. Hitler also drew another devastating conclusion from the entry of America into the war. For Hitler this was proof that “international Jewry” had orchestrated a world conflict, and in a radio broadcast to the German people immediately after the declaration of war he explicitly stated that “the Jews” were manipulating President Roosevelt just as they were his other great enemy, Joseph Stalin. View Riddle on the source website Hitler went still further in a speech he gave to the Nazi leadership, both Gauleiters and Reichleiters, the following day. He now linked the outbreak of this “world war” with his prophecy uttered in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 in which he had threatened that “if the Jews succeed in causing world war” the result would be the “extermination of the Jews of Europe”. On 13 December, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not an empty phrase. The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality.” Further proof that the air was thick with talk of “extermination” that week is provided by a speech that Hans Frank, ruler of a part of Poland the Nazis called the “General Government”, made to senior Nazi officials in Krakow on 16 December: “As an old National Socialist, I must state that if the Jewish clan were to survive the war in Europe, while we sacrificed our best blood in the defence of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success. With respect to the Jews, therefore, I will only operate on the assumption that they will disappear… We must exterminate the Jews wherever we find them”. Frank, who had been one of those briefed by Hitler on 12 December, also added that “in Berlin” he had been told that he, and people like him, should “liquidate the Jews… themselves”. Read more | Your guide to the Holocaust The events of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent decision by Hitler to declare war on Germany did not ‘cause’ the Holocaust. Many Jews had already died before this date – Nazi killing squads, for instance, had been murdering Jews behind the lines on the eastern front since the start of the German invasion in June 1941. But what happened at Pearl Harbor and immediately afterwards brought a murderous clarity to Hitler’s thinking. And it was surely no coincidence that the year of the greatest killing in the Holocaust – 1942 – was just about to begin. Much of the content of this article is taken from two books written by Laurence Rees: Auschwitz, the Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (BBC books, 2005) and World War Two – Behind Closed Doors (BBC books 2008). Rees is also the author of The Holocaust: A New History (Viking/Penguin, 2017)
Pearl Harbor episode 3: Countdown to the raid
In the latest episode in our new series on the raid on Pearl Harbor, Steve Twomey speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about the immediate run-up to the attack, revealing how inch-perfect Japanese planning and complacent oversights by American military figures co...
In the latest episode in our new series on the raid on Pearl Harbor, Steve Twomey speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about the immediate run-up to the attack, revealing how inch-perfect Japanese planning and complacent oversights by American military figures combined to leave Pearl Harbor naval base a sitting duck for Japanese bombers. Listen to the podcast now: Download as MP3 Want to hear more? Browse the rest of the episodes in our podcast series on Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor episode 2: America on the eve of war
In the latest episode in our new series on the raid on Pearl Harbor, Dayna Barnes speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about the United States in the years and months leading up to the attack. They discuss the American perspective on the disintegrating relationsh...
In the latest episode in our new series on the raid on Pearl Harbor, Dayna Barnes speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about the United States in the years and months leading up to the attack. They discuss the American perspective on the disintegrating relationship with Japan, get to grips with US thinking on the eve of the attack, and ask: why was the American public blindsided by the Japanese raid? Listen to the podcast now: Download as MP3 Want to hear more? Browse the rest of the episodes in our podcast series on Pearl Harbor