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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFunny story... (Hitler was incredibly gullible)
How the USA ended up at war with Germany is one of the many instances of Hitler getting punked by his supposed friends.
At the time of Pearl Harbor Germany was very much at war with Russia, in THE war for national survival that was always what WWII was about.
It was worked out that if ally Japan found herself at war with America that Germany would also declare war on America in exchange for Japan declaring war on Russia.
Germany could surely have used a second front in the Russian war.
So Japan attacked us. We declared war on them. Germany declared war on us, which is probably what it took to get us to declare war on Germany.
And when the dust settled... whoops! It turned out Japan somehow didn't have any good reason to decalre war on Russia. (Russia declared war on Japan later, after she was on the way down, in hopes of nabbing some islands. One of many, many reasons we wanted Japan over quick was that we did not want Russian help invading Japan. Can you imagine North Japan and South Japan? Oy!)
Hitler was so bad at allegiances. His best buddy Italy surrendered to us before we ever set foot on the Italian mainland and Germany had to come in to defend Italy from itself...
snooper2
(30,151 posts)graham4anything
(11,464 posts)FDR would not have let 20 million people die if he had the apparatus to do it discreetly and before the first death occurred.
Stupid he was not.
msongs
(67,462 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)They deliberately let slip some disinformation which pissed off Hitler and made him prematurely declare war on the USA. It was an orchestrated move, one which surely FDR was in on. That's why he did not ask for a declaration of war against Germany and Italy on that December 8th.
He knew they would declare war within days because he was the dealer, he stacked the deck and forced their hands.
It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate.
rug
(82,333 posts)The Soviet Union was required by the Yalta Conference to invade Japan within three months of Gemany's defeat.
Germany surrendered May 8. The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, which was still occupied by a mllion man Japanese army, on August 8. Its purpose was not a land grab by Russia.