DECEMBER 8 | 2005-12-09
On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
On December 8, 1941 the United States Congress declared war on Japan. The one dissenting vote was, interstingly enough, the same woman who voted against declaring war in 1917. It was also interesting because in 1917 very few women had the vote, but she was in congress.
She was a consistent pacifist.
But something else happened in those twenty-four hours between December 7 and December 8. President Roosevelt was desperately trying to realize his dreamof getting the United States into the war against Germany. But, even at the height of war hysteria, he could not get the votes.
Remember, this was the pre-World War II generation, and they were not blindly obedient. So from December 7 to December 11 the United States was at war only with Japan. I say December 7 because the declaration said specifically that a state of war had existed from the moment the Japanese attacked.
That was a critical period. Newt Gingrich even wrote a novel that was based on the idea that Hitler never declared war on the United States, so the German Reich was still in existence in the 1990s.
On December 11, 1941, Hitler gave Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin the greatest gift they had ever received. He did what Roosevelt had tried so hard to do on December 7. He declared war on the United States, a white country, "on the side of heroic Japan."
If Hitler had not given this gift to Roosevelt, the very victory he had fought for and lost, the United States' full militray effort would have been in Asia. Even after Hitler's declaration, newspapers complained about the effort the United States was putting in backing Britain's war in Europe and how we were ignoring the heroes the Japanese held as prisoners who survived the Bataan Death March.
If Hitler had not declared war, every ounce of effort Roosevelt put into Europe would have been subject to the complaint that it was not going into the war effort, the war against Japan.
It is impossible to explain why Hitler took Roosevelt's side this way and backed Roosevelt, but may have been the greatest strategic blunder in history.
Instead of a united Communist Empire, the world would have had a mutually hostile Germany and Russia.