Contextual Essay

VUS.10a - The student will demonstrate knowledge of World War II by: (a) identifying the causes and events that led to American involvement in the war, including military assistance to Britain and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

No discussion of American entry into World War II can rest solely, or even primarily, on discussions of U.S. aid to Britain and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. These developments lay at the end of a historical path that extended back through the 1930s to World War I. Central to this broader story is the sense of revulsion Americans harbored for their participation in that earlier conflict; instead of making the world "safe for democracy," the Great War and the peace that followed dashed American dreams of a just settlement and bequeathed a political order that continued to seethe with ethnic, ideological, and nationalistic rivalries. A desire to remain above the fray—or at least to exert better control over when and how America might enter it—animated U.S. diplomacy during those postwar years.

I. Republican Diplomacy

The nation was hardly isolated in international affairs, however. U.S. military forces were active in the Caribbean, intervening in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Much of this activity grew out of the "dollar diplomacy" practiced during the pre-war era, when a tacit partnership between the nation's public and private sectors allowed the United States to exert military and financial control over the region. Historians have held widely divergent views of these exploits. Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions paints a dark picture of American engagement, charging that U.S. economic hegemony inhibited the growth of democracy and sewed the seeds of later political turmoil. Lester Langley, on the other hand, treats these episodes as exercises in moral reform, with The Banana Wars that the United States engaged in as generally misguided though noble efforts to bring better government to the region. A more textured approach can be found in Emily Rosenberg's work, especially in her Financial Missionaries to the World, which details the public-private network promoting U.S. interests throughout Latin America.

Aside from its economic and military exploits in the Caribbean, the United States played a leading role in international diplomacy during these years. It helped to forge arms control agreements between the Great Powers, reschedule the payment of debts accrued during the war, and outlaw the use of military force as means of national recourse. Still, America consistently sought to lessen the possibility of being drawn into another armed conflict.

Consequently, when fighting in East Asia captured international attention during the early 1930s, American statesmen tried to re-establish the peace and negate the bounty of war through the use of moral suasion. The setting for these hostilities was Mukden, a town in Manchuria through which passed the Japanese-operated South Manchurian Railway. Following a September 1931 bombing of the track-staged by Japanese troops to look like the work of Manchurian patriots-Japanese forces moved into the surrounding region, ostensibly to protect the railway from further assault. By January 1932, the Japanese military had plunged deeper into Manchuria, secured its holdings, and raided the city of Shanghai. President Herbert Hoover and Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson sought to deny Japan the fruits of its aggression by mobilizing world opinion behind a generalized statement of principles. Vowing not to recognize Japan's armed conquest of Manchurian territory, American statesmen did little more than strike a moral pose. Their efforts to counteract the Japanese thrust came with no means for compelling a Japanese withdrawal, leaving Tokyo to its own devices in East Asia. Robert Ferrell's American Diplomacy in the Great Depression illuminates the domestic and international environment in which U.S. statesmen sought to confront the emergence of these new threats.

II. Isolationism

The administration of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt was no more eager to confront aggressors than its Republican forebear. During the first six years of his presidency, Roosevelt took few if any steps to thwart the belligerence of Japan, Germany, and Italy. Similar inaction on the part of British and French diplomats, following the manifest hostility of Italy's assault on Ethiopia, German and Italian aid to Spanish fascists-and especially following Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939-came to be regarded as "appeasement." To what extent, then, was Roosevelt complicit in the appeasement of the fascist and imperial powers and the onset of World War II?

"Appeasement" has come to be a dirty word in the Western political vocabulary. Denoting a reluctance to stand up to aggressor states, the term carries with it a series of maxims: that aggression begets further aggression, that hostile powers respond only to the use of force, and that the early demonstration of such force is necessary to maintain the balance of power. Prior to 1938, appeasement did not have the negative connotation it later possessed; it suggested merely the functioning of diplomacy-the use of negotiation-to defuse a potentially violent situation. The rise of totalitarianism, however, cast doubt on the wisdom of that policy. Hitler's appetite for aggression and expansion, both of which were to prove insatiable, served to qualify, if not invalidate altogether, earlier thinking on the value of negotiation. No amount of diplomacy would deter the Führer in his quest for lebensraum.

That realization came late to most Western statesmen, Franklin Roosevelt among them. In the 1960s, historian Arnold Offner charged explicitly that Roosevelt opted for accommodating totalitarian states rather than confronting them. In his book American Appeasement, Offner cites Roosevelt's acquiescence in the face of German re-armament and refusal to do much more than "quarantine" aggressor states as the guiding principles of the president's foreign policy. Avoiding war and maintaining U.S. autonomy, he argues, were incompatible goals and effectively hamstrung American diplomacy. Roosevelt's outright support of the 1938 Munich agreements, in fact, has led scholars to argue that the president became a committed interventionist only after more overt displays of German hostility. More recently, Barbara Rearden Farnham has examined this episode in Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis, a sympathetic portrait of Roosevelt attempting to reconcile the demands of international affairs within the prevailing constraints of American politics.

Those constraints were daunting. The vagaries of public opinion, the anti-interventionist wing in Congress, and continued problems with the Depression at home led Roosevelt to steer a middle-course, bowing to isolationist demands while preparing the nation for the looming struggle ahead. Most notably, he sabotaged the London Economic Conference of 1933, indicating that America would mend its own economy in its own way. Roosevelt's decision to put domestic interests ahead of international ones-even at the expense of the global economy-left a bitter taste in the mouths of Europeans and led many to conclude that America would be of no use in the emerging struggle between democracy and dictatorship.

Adhering closely to the nation's political center, Roosevelt endorsed several neutrality acts that were designed to keep the United States out of war. Enacted first in 1935, these laws sought to limit America's contact with belligerent powers by banning trade in the materials of war, limiting the granting of loans, and forbidding American citizens from traveling on the vessels of aggressor states. Their passage marked an extraordinary moment in American foreign policy and a complete reversal of U.S. neutrality policy, which had previously sought to preserve-rather than forego-opportunities to trade during wartime.

The literature on isolationism reveals its adherents to be from all regions of the country, with different ethnic backgrounds and political persuasions. Justus Doenecke, for instance, prefers the term "anti-interventionism" for those who made their appeals based on economic and strategic arguments. Manfred Jonas's Isolationism in America also distinguishes between more rabid unilateralists and pacifists, both of whom shared an isolationist impulse. Wayne Cole explores the president's strategies and those of his opponents, as well as the nature of isolationism, in his Roosevelt and the Isolationists. In one of the more sweeping accounts of the Roosevelt era, Robert Dallek's Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1933-1945 portrays the president during this period as a committed internationalist, albeit one who recognized the prevailing political winds and sought to tack accordingly. For Dallek, Roosevelt moved publicly into the internationalist camp when France fell to the Germans in June 1940, leaving Britain as the sole barrier between a Nazi-dominated Europe and the Americas. Only then did FDR put the United States on a war footing, concluding the destroyers-for-bases deal with British prime minister Winston Churchill and instituting a peace-time draft.

The tardiness of American mobilization is often cited by historians who find fault with Roosevelt's leadership. While Dallek and Warren Kimball view Rooselvet as a master diplomatist, Fred Marks believes the president was misguided in both his European and Asian policies, appeasing Hitler on the one hand and confronting Japan on the other. Both policies, according to Marks, made a war-for which America was woefully unprepared-more likely. Even James MacGregor Burns, perhaps Roosevelt's greatest biographer, agrees that the president failed to use his bully pulpit to rouse the nation and warn aggressors.

III. Aid to Britain

Churchill would need much more than fifty outdated ships, however, to hold off Hitler's forces-a requirement of which Roosevelt was fully cognizant. But large-scale U.S. aid still awaited a sign that Britain could withstand the Nazi onslaught. With France out of the war, Britain was all that remained between Hitler and complete domination of Europe. Germany sought to remove that obstacle to hemispheric domination during the summer of 1940. Beginning in August, the Luftwaffe launched a series of bombing raids over England, hoping to soften up British defenses in preparation for a ground assault of the island. The invasion never came. Displaying remarkable feats of courage and agility , the Royal Air Force won the battle for the skies over Britain, frustrating Hitler's designs and, ultimately, forcing him to turn his sights eastward toward the Soviet Union.

These developments also influenced events on the other side of the Atlantic. Having proved its willingness fight on and ward off the Nazi threat, Britain became the beneficiaries of American largesse. Beginning with a fireside chat in December 1940-having first secured re-election for a third term as president the previous month-Roosevelt made the case for providing England with all aid short of war. He spelled out his vision in a January 1941 speech to a joint session of Congress, calling for a program through which the United States would act as the "Arsenal of Democracy," lending Britain material and financial support in return for payments-in-kind. By March, Congress had voted overwhelmingly to enact the Lend-Lease program, providing Britain with a much needed life-line. David Reynolds's The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance and Warren Kimball's The Most Unsordid Act offer fine accounts of this emerging, if at times uneasy, partnership between America and Britain and the diplomacy of Lend-Lease.

IV. Pearl Harbor

Halfway around the world, Japanese militarists were planning to deal the United States a crushing blow by knocking out its Pacific Fleet and forcing America to sue for peace. Several dynamics led Japan down this treacherous course from Manchuria to inland China, to Southeast Asia, and, finally, to Hawaii. Japan moved into East Asia partly in search of raw materials and expanded markets for its manufactured goods, and partly out of fear that its growing prosperity would be hampered by the emergence of regional trading blocs. Its hope was that economic self-sufficiency would thereby come to this island nation fearful of being cut-off from world commerce. Geopolitical and cultural motives also factored into Japanese thinking. As Japan saw hemispheric power blocs developing throughout the world, it sought one for itself, couching its imperium in terms ostensibly less threatening to those peoples it came to dominate. Japan would Asianize Asia, the rhetoric went, removing Western influence from the continent.

In the end, Japan alienated the very people it had pledged to liberate. Its military plunged deeper into China, with large-scale operations beginning in late summer 1937. In what came to be known as the Rape of Nanjing, marauding Japanese troops slaughtered upwards of 300,000 unarmed soldiers, women, and children. Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking provide a recent account of this atrocity. Roosevelt condemned the brutalities but did little more than call for Japan's diplomatic isolation. Tokyo's creation of a Great East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1938 was to be a springboard for further dominance of the Asia-Pacific region. Yet Japan never did pacify China; Nationalist and Communist Chinese soldiers dug in, turned their enmity primarily, though not wholly, on the Japanese invader, and resisted further conquest. This inability to control China prompted Japanese leaders to look elsewhere for strategic resources, a consideration that led officials to eye British, French, and American holdings in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Japan's move into northern Indochina in July 1940 and its signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy that September alarmed Roosevelt and prompted the United States, over the next several months, to embargo aviation fuel and various metals, including steel, iron, copper, and brass. Michael Barnhart's Japan Prepares for Total War offers a comprehensive recitation of these events. Tokyo's decision to occupy Saigon and southern Indochina in July 1941 then set in motion the dynamics that led to armed conflict between the Japanese empire and the Western powers.

At the time, however, Roosevelt was more fearful that Japan would move north instead of south. An invasion of the Soviet Union-since June 1941, a nominal ally of the United States-would have presented the Kremlin with a two-front war, a strategic disaster that likely would have siphoned off Soviet troops from the Eastern Front at a time when German forces were tearing up the Red Army and heading for Moscow. Regarding an attack on British and American positions as strategically more palatable than one on Russia, Roosevelt took a number of measures which, while designed to forestall any Japanese belligerence, increased the likelihood of Japanese-American hostilities. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States and restricted Japanese access to petroleum products, thereby reinforcing Japan's perceived need to occupy oilfields in the Dutch East Indies. The two nations went through the motions of diplomacy to resolve their differences; talks between American and Japanese representatives, which had been ongoing for most of 1941, continued into the fall, though neither side was prepared to meet the demands of the other. Jonathan Utley's Going to War with Japan highlights the commitment of American officials to economic liberalism, a posture that contributed directly to the coming clash. With no deal in the offing by November 25-the date Japanese officials had established internally as the latest they could wait for a diplomatic breakthrough-the die was cast for Japan's coordinated attacks on Pearl Harbor, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Philippines.

IV. Conclusion

The Second World War did not become a global conflict until the events of December 1941 tied the Western hemisphere and the Pacific to the hostilities then engulfing Europe and Asia. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, these wars were essentially autonomous affairs; thereafter, they would be fought as theater operations in a vast world war that claimed the lives of more than 55 million people. America's entrance into the war, which came about most proximately because of U.S. aid to Britain and Pearl Harbor, gave it that global cast. The events of the previous decade, however, set the stage for those twin developments and go a long way toward explaining how a nation that had so abhorred the prospect of another world war took up arms as part of one for a second time in a generation.

Bibliography

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Utley, Jonathan. Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.