How did war come to America?

Answer 1

We were attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, early on the morning of December 7th, 1941, in a carrier borne air raid. The next day, President Roosevelt asked for and got a declaration of war against Japan. Two days later, Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy declared war on the United States, ostensibly as part of their Tripartite Pact with Japan. (In fact, since we had not attacked the Germans and Italians nor they us, the Germans and Italians made a tactical mistake by declaring war on us, but their doing so allowed us to pursue a "Germany First" policy that had long been secretly held by our military planners.)

Most historians seem to agree that sooner or later we'd have been dragged into the war one way or another, just as we had been dragged into WW1, mostly by the Germans resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. In WW2, the Germans had been sinking American ships in the Atlantic -- by accident, they said -- and American sympathies ran heavily to England and against Nazi Germany because it was obvious to all but the most obtuse Americans that the Nazis represented a terrible, terrible threat, especially to Jewish Americans. Hitler had already conquered most of Europe, turned on his "ally" Stalin and attacked him, and there was little doubt that once he strangled England he'd come after the United States. Hitler wanted to rule the world. Since it took six years to finally stop this dictator of a country only twice the size of Wisconsin, there's a good chance that had we not gotten in when we did, he would have come after us.

On the morning of December 7th, 1941, our military and intelligence had a pretty good idea that the Japanese were going to hit us somewhere, but we really expected it to be someplace else, such as the Philippines. The attack on Pearl Harbor really did come as a complete surprise. The main thing is that we were in it, and World War 2 was now a true worldwide war.