Toward War

Many political and economic events led to World War II. During World War I (1914-1918), the Allied Powers composed of the United Kingdom (UK), France, Russia (until 1917), Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, United States (from 1917) and their colonies, defeated the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Turkey and their colonies). The victorious Allies punished the former Central Powers by reducing their lands and colonies, some of which were usurped by the Allies as "mandates". They also imposed heavy reparations on them that were impossible to repay and deeply resented by populations of the defeated countries. As the primary Central Power, Germany lost the most under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles signed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Compounding the hardships of all World War I belligerants, both victorious and vanquished, was the Great Depression of the 1930s that reduced living standards around the world, increased popular discontent, polarized political parties into "right" (nationalists, fascists) and "left" (socialists, communists), and increased distrust of governments. The League of Nations was established to promote peace around the world, but lacked resolve and power to solve most international conflicts. The map of Europe looked like this following the war.

While World War I raged, Russia was convulsed by a 1917 revolution that toppled the Tsar, Nicholas II, and established a Bolshevik (Communist) government. The anarchy that prevailed among competing groups for power during this formative period led the Communists to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1917) between Russia and Germany to relieve its forces. This treaty eliminated Russia as a member of the Allies and prohibited it from participating in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that determined boundaries, colony ownership and reparations. Russians would then be convulsed by a Civil War (1918-1923) until the Bolsheviks prevailed and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Following this revolution, political groups with competing "left" and "right" ideologies resulted in much political turmoil and bloodshed in continental European countries that in part hastened the rise of dictatorial governments in Germany, Italy and Spain.

In China, there arose competing dictatorial governments after its republic was founded in 1912. Most prominent among these were the mutually antagonistic Chinese Nationalist Government under Chiang Kai-shek and the revolutionary Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong, which fought each other for supremacy beginning in 1927. Warlords ruled independently in some regions. China was weak economically and politically and unable to withstand foreign domination by European countries and Japan.

Italy received Istria, Trentino-South Tyrol, Trieste, and several Dalmatian Islands from Austria-Hungary as reward for her participation as an Ally in World War I. Because of political unrest and indecision, the National Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini gained power in Italy in 1922. The party thereafter embarked on a policy of dominating the Mediterranean Sea and parts of Africa. It annexed the Greek island of Corfu in 1923 and Fiume on the Dalmatian coast in 1924. It then established Italian Libya in 1934 and conquered Ethiopia in 1936. With military conquest its goal, it withdrew from the League of Nations in 1937. Italy then invaded Albania in 1939, making her a colony and unsuccessfully invaded Greece on October 28, 1940.

During the 1930s, the military established control over the Japanese parliament and its constitutional monarch. This was facilitated by the military reporting directly to the Emperor, who was to "reign, but not rule". Having already annexed Taiwan (1895), the southern half of Sakhalin (1905), Korea (1910), Shantung, China (1919), and the Mariana, Marshall and Caroline Islands (1919), except U.S. owned Guam, Japan embarked on subjugating more asian territories in the 1930s. Manchuria was annexed in 1931 and the Chinese Jehol province was added in 1933. With more military conquests in mind, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933. In 1934 Japan gave notice it was terminatng the 1922 Washington Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armament and continued to increase its arms. When it was sufficiently strong, it invaded and occupied many important cities on the China coast in 1937. This was the the beginning of its strategy to subjugate more countries in Asia for their valuable resources, such as oil, tin, rubber, quinine and copra. In February, 1939, Japan occupied Hainan Island off the China coast and in March of that year claimed sovereignty over the Spratly Islands. By 1939, the Japanese Empire look like this. After the armistice between Vichy France and Germany on June 22, 1940, Japan invaded and occupied Vichy French Indochina on September 26, 1940.

German and Italian governments instigated programs of political, economic and military penetration in Latin American countries in the 1930s. They organized Italian Fascist and German Nazi organizations, propaganda news, military missions, arms sales, trade, and control of commercial airlines.^Dallek These events were of major concern to the US government since they posed a hemispheric threat.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) ended with a defeat of the Second Spanish Republic by the forces of General Francisco Franco, who became the country's dictator. German, Italian and Portugese forces assisted his rebellion while Russian and Mexican forces fought for the republic. Spain would remain officially neutral during World War II, but favored the Axis Powers and supplied Germany and Italy with war-making materials, naval bases, and intelligence.

In Germany, a dictatorship supplanted the Weimar Republic when the Nazi Party became dominant and its leader, Adolph Hitler, was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. Germany then withdrew from the World Disarmament Conference at Geneva and the League of Nations in 1933 to rearm without interference. Hitler started a program of public works and military prepardness that improved the prostrate German economy, but alarmed many European nations, but they refused to interfere. Hitler envisioned a German "Third Reich" that aimed to dominate Europe and allow Germans to increase their land and resources by subjugating European countries. In 1936 Hitler rescinded the Treaty of Locarno whereby Germany, France and Belgium agreed not to attack each other and occupied and eventually fortified the demilitarized Rhineland Zone. Germany absorbed Austria in 1938 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, annexing the western Czech portion and creating a Slovak puppet state in the eastern end of that country. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, which provoked declarations of war against it by the UK and France by prior treaty, and effectively began World War II in Europe. In 1940, Germany conquered Norway, the Low Countries, and France, which added to its resources and provided submarine bases on the Atlantic Ocean, a threat to US and UK shipping. Germany invaded and occupied Greece and Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.

Japan and Germany had been collaborating for some time in their strategies of conquest. In 1936, they signed the Anti-Comintern Pact whereby both countries agreed to share information on the Communist International. On September 27, 1940 Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact that bound them into a military alliance. It provided that Japan recognize and respect the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe; that Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in Greater East Asia; and that the three countries assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the powers was attacked by a power not then involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese war. The last of these provisions seemed to be aimed at the United States.^State

The blood and treasure expended by the United States in its participation in World War I coupled with the history of frequent European wars and European and Asian ideological and military struggles created strong isolationist sentiments among many Americans. Thus, while Germany, Italy and Japan armed, the US military remained intentionally weak by comparison to Germany and Japan. The military forces of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, the only European countries with the potential to confront the aggressors with sufficient countervailing force also stagnated until it was too late to effectively act. During the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull attempted on several occasions to promote peace and arms limitations around the world, but these attempts did not arrest the course of Axis aggression. Viewing the military threats to the US, they attempted to increase American military prepardness in the face of the strong isolationist sentiments around the country. The U. S. Congress, reflecting American isolationist views, allowed only minimal increases in arms and passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, which forbade the sale of "arms, ammunition and implements of war" to belligerants. The Neutrality Act of 1936 extended that of 1935 by 14 months and forbade persons from extending loans or credit to belligerants. Congress then passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which had no expiration date, and which extended the act to cover civil wars, such as that occurring in Spain at the time. Additionally, U.S. ships were prohibited from transporting passengers or articles to belligerents, and U.S. citizens were forbidden from traveling on ships of belligerent nations. ^Wiki However, at the time "implements of war" did not include airplanes. Therefore, on July 1, 1938, the Department of State notified aircraft manufacturers and exporters that the United States was strongly opposed to the sale of airplanes and aeronautical equipment to countries whose armed forces were using airplanes to attack civilian populations. In 1939 this "moral embargo" was extended to materials essential to airplane manufacture and to plants, and technical information for the production of aviation gasoline. These measures resulted in the suspension of the export to Japan of aircraft, aeronautical equipment, and other materials. ^State To prevent possible German incursions into Latin America, the president and representatives of the American republics signed the Declaration of Panama on October 2, 1939. It declared a 300-mile safety zone surrounding the countries in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States government thought that the 1911 commercial treaty between the United States and Japan was not affording adequate protection to American commerce either in Japan or in Japanese-occupied portions of China, while at the same time the operation of the most-favored-nation clause of the treaty was a bar to the adoption of retaliatory measures against Japanese commerce. Consequently, in July 1939, the United States gave notice of termination of that treaty at the end of the six-month period prescribed by the treaty. That termination removed the legal obstacle to an embargo by the United States upon the shipment of materials to Japan. As the rearmament program in the United States gained momentum and required more and more available strategic materials, the United States adopted legislative and administrative measures that resulted in a steady decline of exports to Japan of such materials. The Export Control Act of July 2, 1940 authorized the President in the interest of national defense to prohibit or curtail the export of basic war materials. Licenses were refused for the export to Japan of aviation gasoline and most types of machine tools, beginning in August 1940, which were essential to Japan. The act was amended in September to include steel and scrap. This law eliminated shipment of many strategic commodities including arms, ammunition, and implements of war, aviation gasoline, petroleum products, machine tools, scrap iron, pig iron, iron and steel manufactures, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, and a variety of other commodities important to Japan's war effort. These acts put more pressure on Japan to extend its asian conquests to replace the American losses. However, to achieve this objective, the threating American fleet at Pearl Harbor would have to be eliminated. ^State

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, which was followed by declarations of war against Germany by the United Kingdom and France. By prior treaty, Russia joined in the attack on Poland from the east on September 17. Consequently, at the US President's request, the Neutrality Act of 1939 was passed by Congress that allowed arms to be sold to belligerants on a "cash and carry" basis. This effectively eliminated the arms embargoes of the previous neutrality acts and began American mobilization for defense of the country. Thereafter, the UK and France besieged American ship, aircraft, and arms builders with production orders for arms and arm-building plants with which to fight Germany. After France fell to the German armies in June of 1940, many of its unfulfilled orders would be assumed by the UK, which stood alone against German aggression. These British and French orders provided valuable industrial and military experience for American defense prepardness.

Germany's invasion and occupation of western Europe in 1940, giving it access to Atlantic Ocean ports for submarine bases, and Japan's expansion in Asia finally alarmed the U.S. government into taking more serious defensive actions, including the partial mobilization of its armed forces and industries. Although the UK remained free in Europe to oppose Germany and Italy, its ability to withstand a successful German invasion of its country was questionable. The Destroyers for Bases Agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom of September 2, 1940, lent 50 World War I destroyers from the United States Navy in exchange for lease rights on British possessions in Newfoundland, the Caribbean Sea and British Guiana for the protection of the western hemisphere. This policy saved the UK's rapidly depleting foreign exchange and gold while it armed. In February 1941 the U.S.Army and Navy organized the Caribbean Defense Command to protect the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico, and the Gulf coast. In June President Roosevelt agreed to dispatch American troops to relieve the British garrison in Iceland and North Ireland. Within the United States the Army created four strategic areas known as defense commands, refined plans to protect the country against possible ground and air attack, and began reinforcement of the outlying Caribbean and Pacific garrisons. ^Army To assist its Allies without their having to spend their depleted treasuries, on March 11, 1941, Congress passed the "Lend-Lease" Act, which allowed the President to sell, exchange, lease, and lend any defense article to any government whose defense was considered vital to the defense of the United States. In April, this policy was extended to China (and later, to Russia). On April 10, 1941, the United States was granted permission by Denmark to occupy and build air bases on Greenland, which would help protect American and British merchant ships against German submarines. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia. Japan attacked and substantially destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. thereby declared war on Japan on December 8. Honoring its treaty, Germany and Italy declared war on the U. S. on December 11, which was reciprocated by the US on the same day. America was now engaged in two wars, oceans apart. Isolationism in America was dead. Defense was no longer the objective. The U.S. prepared to attack and defeat its enemies around the world. All-out mobilization began.