Was the US in World War 2?

Answer 1

Yes, the US entered WWII after being attacked by the Japanese in 1941.

"A day that will live in Infamy"

The Japanese attacked on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on 7th of December 1941. The Japanese have since claimed that as far as they were concerned they had declared war; the Americans denied this, and certainly any declaration that the Japanese had considered as a formal declaration of war did not look much like it to westerners. Too bad.

After that the question of declarations of war seemed pretty academic.

At that time the Japanese and the European Allies were already at war, but the Americans had not yet made up their minds what to do about the war in Europe, partly because their minds were concentrated on the Japanese. Then however, Hitler pushed them in there decision to enter with the European Allies by having declared war on the US, apparently in solidarity with the Japanese a day or two later. It is hard to say just what he had in mind though but if Europe fell under Hitler then all of us would be speaking German or Japanese today.

The most disastrous of many disastrous decisions that he made was getting the U.S involved in a war, especially with the economic downturns of the 30s which would have kept America under as the German's and Japanese became more powerful.

However America entered the War in the Pacific and the War in Europe considerably late, the Russians, the Chinese and Philippines and other East Asian areas were resisting or surrendering to the Japanese and Germans. However Britain did not surrender and without this great country America would not of had a base from which it could start attacking the Germans. As for Russia they did not surrender and manged to push the Germans all the way back to Berlin where they closed to roads and stopped the allies from getting there so they could utterly destroy the city. When you look at the statistics the British and Canadian killed many more Germans then the Americans and also claimed many more towns and city's then the Americans did.