U.S. War with Germany Inevitable Even Without Hitler’s Declaration
By Vlae Kershner
A question that sometimes comes up on forums including Reddit and Quora, is what would have happened if Germany hadn’t declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor.
A popular answer is that the U.S. would have focused on Japan with only limited naval warfare in the Atlantic to secure Lend-Lease convoys for the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Gemini summarized the situation this way:
Without Hitler’s formal declaration of war on December 11, 1941, securing a congressional declaration of war against Germany would have faced intense political resistance from America First isolationists who argued the U.S. response should be restricted to avenging Pearl Harbor.
This is just plain wrong.
The Gemini answer lists as its primary source the isolationist criticism of the Roosevelt administration after the Chicago Tribune bombshell report on December 4 that the government had drawn up war plans for an invasion of Europe by July 1, 1943. (That turned out to be 11 months early.)
However, the idea that there was U.S. opposition to fighting Germany ignores how much Pearl Harbor changed attitudes. I’ve been reviewing newspapers during the critical four-day period and could not find one word of opposition to war with Germany. Sentiment on December 7–10 seemed to regard war with Germany as inevitable even if Hitler hadn’t moved first.
The U.S. was already fighting an undeclared naval war against Germany in the Atlantic, with the destroyer USS Greer getting into a shooting battle with a U-boat on September 4. A “shoot on sight” policy was announced by President Roosevelt on September 11.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally (D-Texas), said on leaving a White House meeting the evening of December 7 that a declaration of war by either Germany or the United States was in the offing. The story added that many members of Congress were in favor of a war with Germany on the grounds it incited Japan’s attack.
Their view was that by saddling the U.S. with a Pacific war, Germany thought Lend-Lease aid to Britain and the Soviet Union would be disrupted. (To draw a parallel with the present, this is similar to how the U.S. war with Iran has reduced the shipment of Patriot missile interceptors to Ukraine.)
The Axis nations didn’t make much secret of their plans, either. A December 8 United Press story out of Berlin said “the (German) press hinted that Germany might aid Japan under the Axis alliance.” Japan openly asked Germany to declare war on the U.S. as part of its military assistance treaty.
Both the Roper and Gallup polls found the public believed Germany was more of a threat than Japan, with the Roper poll finding 69% believed Pearl Harbor was part of Germany’s strategy.
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On December 9, a Washington state veteran’s group asked the U.S. to declare war on Germany and Italy to forestall another surprise attack.
Even the leading isolationists expressed no opposition to expanding the war during those four days.
The face of the America First movement, aviator Charles Lindbergh, issued a call for national unity. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a Montana Democrat who led the isolationist bloc, called for the U.S. to “lick hell” out of Japan. He added: “I had sincerely hoped we could avoid war in both the Atlantic and the Pacific,” which indicates resignation it was too late to avoid an Atlantic war as well.
Far from urging the war be limited to Japan, the America First Committee cancelled rallies and on December 11 dissolved itself.
Nebraska Senator George Norris, a Republican-turned-independent who had voted against the U.S. entering WWI, blamed the Germans. “If we don’t fight now, we might as well sink our Navy, dissolve our Army, haul down the American flag, and heil Hitler.”
The previously isolationist New York Daily News (cross-owned with Robert “Colonel” McCormick’s Chicago Tribune under a family structure) treated the German declaration as a big yawner. It editorialized on December 12, “these war declarations were, of course, only formalities for the record.” It noted a policy to shoot against German naval forces in the Atlantic interfering with convoys to Britain already had been announced on September 11, and said the declarations didn’t much change the military situation.
The Springfield (Mass.) Republican noted on December 8, “We have been as much as enemy to Germany, Japan, and Italy as if our troops had been in the field against them, and the actual outbreak of war in the Pacific is actually no more than a development in a much larger campaign.”
The change of sentiment can be shown in two front-page political cartoons from the conservative, Roosevelt-hating Tribune, thought leader of the non-interventionist movement.
September 13, 1941
December 8, 1941:
Polling had steadily been moving toward intervention since the fall of France in 1940. In fact, after Pearl Harbor, the public thought Roosevelt should have beaten Hitler to the punch. A Gallup survey taken December 12–17 found an overwhelming majority of 91% said the president should have declared war on Germany as well as Japan.
So what would have happened if Hitler hadn’t declared war? While we can never know, most likely, the next time a German U-boat fired on an American convoy-guarding warship in the Atlantic, Roosevelt would have asked Congress for a war declaration, it would have passed overwhelmingly, and the fighting would have gone on pretty much the same way as it did.
