Not exactly; Australia & New Zealand hadn’t adopted the Statue of Westminster yet so they were bound by the UK’s declaration of war. Australia adopted in 1942 and backdated it to the start of the war, but New Zealand didn’t until 1947.
Egypt is probably the strangest example of a neutral in World War II. Egypt had been nominally independent since 1922 but Britain still controlled its foreign and military policy. The bizarre result was that when Italy and Germany invaded Egypt, they were fighting the British forces in Egypt not the Egyptian military. Egypt itself remained technically a neutral country even as other countries were fighting major campaigns within its borders.
Egypt finally declared war against the Axis powers in 1945, long after Axis forces had been driven out of North Africa.
Wikipedia’s entry for East African Campaign (World War II).
Switzerland was a bit too much business as usual. They profited massively from being the bankers for Nazi gold and from hanging onto bank deposits of Jewish people killed in the holocaust and making it almost impossible for heirs to collect. Legal battles are still ongoing to this day.
But of course if they didn’t want to be in the war they could adopt the “statute of Westminster” immediately … its really no barrier to getting out of the war…
the real barrier would be the risk of being destroyed during the war and leaving the land without a government… they kept their options open.
The Japanese expansion toward Australia meant that Australia wanted their troops back from Europe to defend Australia, and anyway they wanted to have more control over the Australian military, and more control over their cooperation with the USA… The UK was having trouble with setting precedents that would otherwise be sensible things to do … they were worried it would look contradictory to their policy for the UK !
Don’t forget that the Japanese did actually seize Papua New Guinea which is at its closest point less than 150 km from the tip of Northern Australia. Some of the most brutal and bloody fighting of WWII took place there, especially the Kokoda trail, and it was almost entirely Australian and NZ troops (not british troops).
Technically, the territory of Papua was Australia, in the same way that the Northern Territory is Australia. The home defense (reserve) was called out to defend / recapture Papua. New Gunea was a Protectorate, assigned to Australia.
Early in WWII conscription into the Home Defense force was introduced. The Australian Imperial Force was still volunteer. I don’t know if that changed later.
All the known world was de jure part of China, up until the Convention of Peking in 1860 forced the Chinese government to officially recognise that other independent governments existed. They formed their first department of foreign affairs to deal with their obligations under those treaties: up until that time they handled everyone (including the French and the English) as “de jure part of China”.
The way most written accounts described countries untouched by WW2, it was paradise. The population was still small and manageable, the countryside was sparsely populated. Great for hunting, and camping. Good quality timber and game was plentiful. Culturally, the cities retained vestiges of the age of empire and colonialism.
Best of all, no Maoist or Marxist guerillas kidnapping tourists or extorting revolutionary taxes from businesses, not many uprisings by Muslim minorities.
Interesting - learn something new everyday!
But while wiki confirms it for Australia, this article says NZ did issue its own declaration of war?
According to my late Swiss friend, what Switzerland did was first allow free rail traffic between Germany and Italy. They put their army on high alert and were all prepared to hide in mountain redoubts that would have been impossible–or at least very difficult–to attack and they told the axis that they were prepared to blow up and the rail lines and all the bridges and tunnels in case of attack.
My friend then went on to say that the Swiss were very healthy during the war, because they were limited to foods they grew themselves and not on imports. No chocloate for example. They also profitted from people, not just Jews, who hid their wealth in Swiss banks. So yes, the Swiss did profit from the war, but it also cost them.
That wikipedia article quotes or misquotes the prime minister of Australia without giving a citation. That hurts, because the actual words were so famous in Australia:
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Grammatically, that is a declaration that Australia is at war, so it is sometimes called a “Declaration”, and less commonly, an “announcement”.
It is the nature of neutrality that it never benefits both sides equally. In the real world, neutrality doesn’t even have to pretend to be equal to both sides: it just has to have some fairly well defined and well known rules about military co-operation.
The Swiss were surronded by Axis countries. They were part of the European economic zone, which, at the time, meant the Axis. They imported half their food from the Axis, and paid for it by manufacturing precision millitary equipment for the Germans.
So yes, it did cost the Swiss, and the French-speaking part of Switzerland didn’t like it, but they were neutral on the German side.