Some would say in about 1936 when Japan invaded China. Some would say it was September of 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Many Americans would say the first day of WWII was December 7, 1941.
I say the first day of WWII was in fact December 11, 1941. That is the day Germany declared war on the United States. While President Roosevelt asked for and received a declaration of war against Japan on December 8 (text here) , he did not ask for or receive one against Germany on that day, or the next, or the one after that. The world was engaged in numerous regional wars, not one large one.
On December 11, Germany declared war against the United States. On that day, in the pathetic spirit of ME TOO fawning typical of the Mussolini regime, Italy declared war on the US. On that day, President Roosevelt asked for and received (text here) a declaration of war against Germany and Italy.
It was December 11, 1941 when all the small wars became an interlocked WORLD war.
I point this out because it’s a date almost no one is familiar with. It seems quite a good possibilty that America would not have entered the European war at all, or at least not until dealing with Japan first. But Hitler made one of his biggest blunders of all, and declared war first, at a time when neither country was in a position to cause any serious damage to the others, except for the sinking of US merchant shipping by Uboats. What a total fuckhead! The US replied in kind and history took a turn, from what we’ll never know.
I see your reasoning, that being that the declared state of war didn’t have its global reach until December 11, 1941. But I think September 1, 1939 will remain the date that most people will continue to think of as the start of the war, even though France and Britain did not declare war on Germany until September 3rd.
The 1st was the opening of hostilities that had its seemingly inevitable outcome as full scale conflagration in Europe and Africa. Similarly, the events of December 7, 1941 left no doubt that a state of war existed; the declaration had to be made, but by the time the first Japanese bomb fell on Pearl, it was a foregone conclusion.
I think that it can be argued that the US was technically at war with Germany as early as 1940, what with the US’s giving supplies and the Lend-Lease policy with England.
Plus, Japan had signed the whole “Axis-Alliance Treaty” thingee with Germany & Italy, so by declaring war on Japan, the US effectively was also declaring war on Germany. Also, FDR made it clear that the majority and focus of the US’s war efforts would first be focused on Europe, with the Pacific theater coming in 2nd.
IIRC the Axis alliance, and I’m not looking it up right now, since Japan had attacked the U.S., as opposed to the other way around, Germany was not obligated to follow up with their own declaration of war on the U.S.
I disagree, WWII already involved British, French and Dutch dominions all over the world, from Australia, East Indies, Canada, North Africa, Middle East, Indo-China.
The addition of the US only added one more nation to the total of dozens of others already involved.
You might say that with the US then the Pacific island territories were then included, but it seems clear to me that Japan had wider designs already there can be few other explanations for the size of their fleet.
I would say that it was a step up in intensity, but not the biggest surly not, as that came with the attack on Russia.
With all due respect to the size of the British Empire at the time, and the scale of the war, I hardly think US entry was no more significant than adding “one more nation to the total of dozens of others involved”. Surely it was several orders of magnitude more significant than the entry of, say, Brazil, or even collectively the various other Latin American nations that joined the Allies soon after.
I know there’s currently a bit of “bloody-Yanks-think-they-won-the-war-single-handedly” sentiment in the UK air, let’s be fair. First, simply at the level of symbolic significance, US entry represents the completion of the “girdling of the Earth” by the conflict. More significantly, while the invasion of the Soviet Union dramatically increased the scale of land combat and civilian carnage in the war, US industrial capacity was ultimately drastically greater than even the Soviets’. While the US war economy had been mobilizing for over a year, it ramped up exponentially after formal entry into the war. It was that industrial capacity and full committment of military force that ultimately broke the U-boat blocade of Britain, substantially equipped the British and other western Allied armies, and even provided much of the transport that sustained the Soviet army through 1942 (and facilitated the defense of Stalingrad and subsequent Soviet successes). It’s debatable who would have won a one-on-one conflict between Germany and the USSR, or Germany and the US, but that doesn’t make the US nothing more than “just another player on the field.”
Regarding the broader issue of yojimboguy’s post, whether Hitler’s declaration of war on the US was a smart move, much bandwidth has already been spilled on the subject in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=63270
My own thoughts are that the US was already well down the road to entering the European war anyway, and that war with Japan would only have further hastened that eventuality even without Germany’s declaration of war. Hitler certainly believed that the US was headed firmly in that direction (in his mind, due to the machinations of the evil international Jewish cabal). His intent in the declaration of war was likely to galvanize political support for a wider conflict by appearing unafraid of it, as well as to deny the US the benefits of choosing when and where to initiate conflict. The initial “Drumbeat” U-boat did, in fact, catch the US unprepared, and inflicted substantial losses. US industrial capacity, of course, ultimately rendered those losses all but irrelevant.
As a student of history, as we all should be, and also being a student majoring in Government and International Relations at George Mason University (yes, I know punha), I would argue that the first day of World War II was not in December of 1941, nor was it in 1936 when the Japanese invaded and occupied Manchuria, nor was it in 1939 when Hitler rolled into Poland. IMHO, the beginning of WWII was November 11, 1918… the day of the signing of the Versailles Armastice ending WWI (and the subsequent peace treaties which were signed in 1919, 1920, and 1923). Why this day? Because of the penalties placed on Germany (most specifically) by the victorious Allied Powers. France seemed to gain a particular glee essentially raping the Germans by stealing the Saar region from them, stripping them of their foreign colonies, etc. etc. This left Germany in a horrendous state… massive war repairations, and no possible way of paying them. It is no wonder that the Weimar Republic failed and an Austrian-born zealot (one Adolf Hitler) rose to power on the promise that Germany would once again raise itself to dominence over its neighbors.
The entry of the US merely added to the scale of war, rather than its dimensions.
Look at the numbers game, the US population is tiny when compared to the numbers already engaged in combat and production.
True that the US capacity was greater than any other nation, but in terms of geography and numbers involved it still is only another extension of the conflict rather than a defining one.
China and India are orders of magnitude greater in those terms, include Russia, Burma, etc and then tell me that only the inclusion of the US made it a world war.
casdave- I think what the point may be is that, while numerically only one more nation, no other nation on earth could have swung the tide of battle so decisivly.
the UK, while doing well to defend The British Isles, was not goign to be in a position to liberate France anytime soon, if ever. China was loosing. Soviet Union, while fighting strongly, was not doing well for quite some time.
However, the US entered the war, and fought both major aggresors, supplied material to the other allies, and invested hundreds of millions (billions?) into Weapons Research.
To say that World War II did not start until 1941 implies to me that it was not a world war beforehand. Yet, with one notable exception, the participants were the same before that time, and war was spreading on three continents. Nobody could question the impact of the US on the war, but I’m not sure why the addition of one country from a continent that was already supplying participants makes it a world war where none existed before.
yojimbo - The party was already in full swing by the time the Americans got their formal invitation on December 7th, 1941 although they would have been welcomed much earlier by everone except the Axis powers…
Maybe WW2 started on March 15-16, 1939 when Germany invaded Chechoslovakia.
Many Canadians would say that WW2 started September 3, 1939 - this is when England, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany. Canada actually made it’s formal declaration of war on Sept 10.
On September 5th the United States declared it’s neutrality.
On July 10, 1940 the first German bombs began falling on Britain and by August the Battle of Britain was well under way. By this time France, Chechoslovakia, and Poland were under German rule as were Norway, Holland, Belgium.
One must applaud President Roosevelt who knew America’s turn was coming, conscription was made law in September of 1940 and he approved the lend lease in March of 1941. I believe he faced a great opposition from the isolationists in the government who did not want to involve themselves in what they considered to be a “foreign” conflict.
By December 11, 1941 there wasn’t a small war going on - just about everyone else was already involved.
To matt_mcl:
My apologies for thoughtlessly slighting the Canadians (though I do confess to often forgetting that the west coast of Canada exists… Sorry Vancouver ). I was thinking of the metaphorical “girdling” in terms of conflict, rather than merely land mass. Britain, France, and the Netherlands all had possessions in the Western Hemisphere, after all, but the “war zone” seems to me to have run from the Atlantic convoy routes to the coasts of Asia until December 7th.
For the record, I do think that it’s kind of hairsplitting to assert that the war against the Axis wasn’t a world war until the US formally joined the Allies, given the scale that things had obviously already attained by December 6, 1941. My prior post was primarily inspired by my taking issue with casdave’s assertion that the US was merely “one more nation” added to the list of combatants.
To casdave:
I would add to Tristan’s comments that US war production even at the outset of its involvement was likely exceeded only by the Soviet Union among the Allies, and ultimately outweighed all of the other Allied nations combined. Moreover, US entry into the war came at a pretty crucial time in terms of making that production capacity fully available to both the British and the Soviets. While US troop strength likely never outnumbered that of China, its real combat strength was vastly greater than China’s or India’s, and ultimately at least comparable to that of the Soviets. The US Navy, in turn, was numerically comparable to the Royal Navy by war’s end, and I would argue outweighed all of the other Allied fleets combined in terms of overall firepower (submarines, carrier-based air, etc.). If much of this military and industrial strength was still merely potential as of December 11, 1941, it was precisely that potential that made the US more than just another combatant.
To Wandering Agnostic:
I would agree that the Versailles Treaty was a significant contributing cause of World War II, but to assert that the war started on that date seems a bit of a reach… kind of like claiming that World War I began with the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War (similarly fostering Franco-German enmity), or that the American Revolution began with the conclusion of the Seven Years War/French and Indian War (which fueled English desire for the North American Colonies to fund their own defense, in spite of lacking parliamentary representation. Coincidentally, a case is sometimes made for the Seven Years War and related Anglo-French conflict as being the real “First World War”, due to its global sweep).
There’s no such thing as a “Versailles armistice”. IIRC, the armistice was signed in Rethondes (I’m too lazy to check). More important, the peace terms weren’t defined on the 11/11/18. Apar from the restoration of Poland independance, IIRC. So, regardless whether your statement about the end of WWI being the beginning of WWII makes sense or not, your choice of a date in incorrect. You should have refered to the 1919 Versailles treaty you mentionned.
With respect to Wandering Agnostic’s claim that WWII started with the end of WWI, why not lump them together and say that the world wars of the Twentieth Century began on June 28, 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? At least in Europe, the second war started largely as a result of the burdens placed on Germany after the first, and the two wars moved the world from an era of empire building to today’s globalization and the modern (ca. 1940-1990) idea of of a world community.
With respect to Wandering Agnostic’s claim that WWII started with the end of WWI, why not lump them together and say that the world wars of the Twentieth Century began on June 28, 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? At least in Europe, the second war started largely as a result of the burdens placed on Germany after the first, and the two wars moved the world from an era of empire building to today’s globalization and the modern (ca. 1940-1990) idea of of a world community.
I haven’t posted anything that would attempt to diminish the effect of US entry into WWII since that is unquestionable.
Just that the OP made a point that WWII was not really such a thing until the US effectively united all the regional conflicts into one.
My point is that all those regional conflicts were interlinked, Japan might well have kept it’s attacks far more local were it not for the war in Europe, and Germany must have been heartened by the far East conflicts enough to agree mutual defence with Japan.
I might add that it was more US materials strength that changed things, since the Sino-British reorganised themselves and were making very serious inroads into Japanese conquered territory from 1942 onwards(read up about General Slim), and Russia was doing the same thing at the same time to Germany.
I would also add that from 1943 onwards UK production exceeded that of Germany and was more efficient, but it relied very heavily on methods and machinery introduced from the US.
Had Operation overlord not ocurred then Germany would still have been overrun, but Europe would have been a far differant place, the vast majority would have become part of the Soviet bloc and the war games played out in Germany with NATO could not have happened.
It’s in the “relatedness” of Germany and Japan’s wars pre-Pearl Harbor (and Japan’s near-simultaneous attacks on Britain) that I think the only argument can be made as to whether what was going on was yet a single “world war”, or rather two big hemispheric regional wars. I agree that it’s a semantic distinction at best, given the obvious interconnections of the two in terms of diplomatic cooperation and conflict. Germany and Japan each believed that they had an opportunity to benefit from British/Soviet/US preoccupation with the other hemisphere. In fact, the two-sided threat fostered cooperation and coordination of response well before the Allies were fully, formally allied.
I agree that the US re-equipped British army was a significant force in Africa, Europe, and Burma. I had the impression, though, that the fighting in Burma remained a see-saw all the way into 1944 (when I believe Slim took charge, and when Japanese supply lines became truly tenuous). Also, as far as the Chinese army is concerned, while US resources probably helped forestall their collapse, I think the Japanese continued to dominate in the field, and achieved significant (though ultimately irrelevant) territorial gains from a major offensive in 1944-45.
Also, I agree that if Overlord had been indefinitely postponed, or had failed, the Soviets would have gone on to conquer Germany by themselves. But I think that’s clear only because of the scale of German committment to the defense of the west (somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 divisions by D-Day, including the SS panzer “fire brigade” divisions once the invasion was believed imminent). In a scenario where that committment was for some reason unnecessary, I think it’s an open question whether the Germans could have held the Soviet Union to a stalemate.
Whilst he did take command in 1942, it is true that things started to look bad for the Japanese late into 1943 when he began to take the initiative, which was not too succesful at fist but, as you say, the turnaround came in mid 1944 when the Japanese were run out of Burma.
). I was thinking of the metaphorical “girdling” in terms of conflict, rather than merely land mass. Britain, France, and the Netherlands all had possessions in the Western Hemisphere, after all, but the “war zone” seems to me to have run from the Atlantic convoy routes to the coasts of Asia until December 7th.