April 2004 Newsletter

Why Did the United States Declare War on Nazi Germany? Leading Historians Reverse Themselves

by Richard Hill

Why did the United States declare war on and invade Nazi Germany?(1) At the 2003 SHAFR conference, a panel of the most distinguished historians in the field of pre-World War II U.S. isolationism-Wayne Cole, Manfred Jonas, and Justus Doenecke-participated in a lively debate on this question and actually changed their minds about the primary reason for the U.S. entry into the war.(2)

In their published works, these eminent scholars have all either agreed with or at least never challenged the historiographical consensus that the main reason for the U.S. entry into the war in Europe was Hitler's declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941. But at the recent SHAFR conference they agreed that Hitler's declaration and the events of that week were not really important after all, in the U.S. decision to go to war.

The SHAFR panel members disputed my revisionist thesis, but they did so not by pointing to the explanations they have set out in their published work, which emphasize the importance of Hitler's declaration of war. Rather, they suggested a new explanation for the U.S. entry into the war that reverses what they have argued for decades.

In this session Jonas and Doenecke deferred to Cole as the most eminent historian in the field, as they have elsewhere.(5) For decades Cole has argued that the Axis' actions of December 1941 were the most decisive reason for the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and subsequent invasion of Europe. But in his prepared and extemporaneous remarks at the SHAFR conference Cole reversed himself by arguing for the first time that the events of December 1941 were of little or no importance in provoking the massive U.S. response. He now argues, instead, that the pre-existing Atlantic naval war was the main reason the United States so drastically changed its policy. This new explanation is a thorough revision of the argument he presented in his most important book, Roosevelt and the Isolationists (1983).

At the conference Cole asserted that:

Essentially both Germany and the United States took actions during the six weeks before Pearl Harbor that were barely an eyelash short of war in the Atlantic. In that situation the slightest episode conceivably could set off full scale war between the two countries. Even without the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor it is difficult to see how a war between the United States and Germany could have been long delayed--whether declared or undeclared.(6)

He reinforced this new interpretation by reiterating that the situation concerning US-German relations:

at the beginning of December 1941, provided a condition in relations between the two countries that was perilously close to war. The two states required only the slightest jolt or the briefest time interval to convert that scenario into full scale war. The attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war provided the massive jolts in the briefest of time. Noninterventionists working through the America First Committee were hanging on by their fingernails in their desperate efforts to keep the United States out of the war. Though they never changed their foreign policy views, even before Pearl Harbor they knew that their cause was on the verge of being lost. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war were enough to serve as the coup de grace ending their futile battle against intervention.(7)

Thus, according to Cole at the conference, it was primarily the Atlantic naval war that lay behind the U.S. decision to declare war on Germany. Hitler's declaration of war was of miniscule comparative importance.

This description of the prewar situation Cole gave at the conference, however, is completely at odds with his rendition of it in Roosevelt and the Isolationists, where he wrote that the Axis actions of December 1941 were decisive because there was no chance that Roosevelt could have gotten a declaration of war against Germany without Hitler's declaration and the attack at Pearl Harbor. He repeatedly emphasized then that "at a time when 80 percent of the American people continued to oppose a declaration of war, President Roosevelt's aid-short-of-war tactics provided the maximum involvement that Congress and the public seemed willing to approve before Pearl Harbor."(8) He augmented this accurate depiction of the last weeks before Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States with extensive detail, and repeated his assertion that:

at no time before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, did a majority of the American people favor a declaration of war by the United States on the Axis states. . . . During most of 1940 and 1941 about 80 percent of the American people opposed a declaration of war. At the same time, however, the majority favored extending aid-short-of-war to victims of Axis aggression.(9)

Cole then concluded what every other historian who has published on this subject has concluded: that the Congressional votes on Selective Service extension in August 1941, and especially on Neutrality Revision in mid-November 1941 (which came on the heels of the climax in the Atlantic naval war in 1941, the U.S.S. Reuben James incident) clearly demonstrated that Congress was not ready to approve a declaration of war. The bitter congressional debate following the Reuben James incident showed that:

The margin of the Roosevelt administration's victory was much too narrow to encourage any move for a declaration of war…. Robert E. Sherwood, one of Roosevelt's speechwriters, later wrote of that result: 'The truth was that, as the world situation became more desperately critical, and as the limitless peril came closer and closer to the United States, isolationist sentiment became ever more strident in expression and aggressive in action, and Roosevelt was relatively powerless to combat it. He had said everything 'short of war' that could be said. He had no more tricks left. The hat from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty. The president of the United States was now the creature of circumstance which must be shaped not by his own will or his own ingenuity but by the unpredictable determination of his enemies.'(10)

Cole sums up his 1983 explanation by asserting that: "As noninterventionists they were defeated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and by the decisions of Hitler and Mussolini to war against the United States," and he quotes ex-isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg to the same effect: "At long last, Germany turned upon us and declared war against her most aggressive enemy on earth."(11)

Everything in Cole's massive 1983 study emphasizes that before the second week in December 1941 there was a political stalemate between the interventionists and the isolationists. Moreover, Cole understood that the stalemate was on the issue of aid short of war [italics added]. It was that issue that informed the virtual deadlock on Neutrality Revision in mid-November 1941. But there was no stalemate surrounding the vastly more important question of a U.S. declaration of war on Germany, because there was no chance at all that Roosevelt could have garnered even a slight majority on that question. As Cole repeatedly explained, 80 percent of Americans and their congressmen opposed a declaration of war until Pearl Harbor.(12) Yet Cole completely reversed himself at the SHAFR conference, where he asserted that the United States and Germany were on the verge of total war just before Hitler declared war on the United States, and therefore Hitler's declaration and the Pearl Harbor attack were of little significance for subsequent U.S. policy toward Germany.

Cole was the SHAFR panel's foremost authority on isolationist sentiment, and he reiterated at the conference what he wrote in Roosevelt and the Isolationists, where he accurately stated that the most important isolationists, the America First Committee, "continued their opposition to the president's foreign policies down to the very moment that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941."(13) Yet he also claimed at the conference that those isolationist principles were not actually challenged by anything significantly different in December 1941. If that is so, then those former isolationists of December must not have been principled and rock-ribbed isolationists at all, except for the solitary case of Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin.(14) But that is not how Cole characterized the isolationists in 1983. He wrote then and repeated in 2003 that they firmly believed they had always been right before the second week in December 1941.(15)

The contradictory story that Cole left us with after the SHAFR conference cries out for clarification. Cole has long been the leading historian of pre-war isolationism and the America First Committee, which he correctly asserts "always stood for . . . opposing any legislation which might mean sending our boys to foreign battlefields."(16) But if the AFC opposed Neutrality Revision so strongly, why did it then concede to the vastly more consequential declaration of war just three weeks later, if indeed nothing significant had happened in that interval to upset U.S.-German relations? If the ardent isolationists were not persuaded by the relative "non-events" of that month, as Cole and his colleagues now characterize Hitler's declaration of war and Pearl Harbor, why did they just give up only then? This question is especially noteworthy if, as Cole stated in 1983, the AFC "was larger and more efficiently organized by the fall of 1941 than ever before."(17)

If Hitler's declaration and Pearl Harbor were relatively inconsequential as they regarded U.S.-German relations, as Cole said at the conference, then what exactly did it mean when he quoted the AFC in 1983 as insisting that it "would 'oppose with vigor the passage of a war resolution' . . . if Congress votes for a declaration of war"?(18) If Hitler's declaration and Pearl Harbor were relatively inconsequential, then why did the AFC vote to dissolve only on December 11, 1941, after battling energetically against any intervention or Neutrality Revision in the weeks beforehand?(19) As early as 1953 Cole was writing that "opposition in Congress to the Administration's foreign policy not only remained strong but increased during 1941."(20) He stood by this explanation for fifty years. But at the SHAFR conference he told the assembled scholars exactly the opposite, claiming that the isolationists were actually losing their battle by December 1941.

Manfred Jonas responded to Cole's startlingly revisionist comments at the conference with approval. "In response to Wayne Cole's paper," he said:

I am tempted merely to say amen. . . . Prof. Cole, whose contributions to that consensus have been substantial, found Hitler's declaration marginally significant only because it led the non-interventionists finally to throw in the towel. In actual substance, we have no real disagreement. Hitler's declaration of war was not an act of great significance and certainly did not change the course of history.(21)

Yet in his 1984 book Jonas wrote that, before Hitler's declaration of war on the United States:

Neither is it clear when, if ever, the United States would have reached the point of actually declaring war on Germany. The logic of the American position required a declaration if aid short of war proved insufficient to prevent a British defeat. But in December 1941 such defeat was not imminent…. Germany and the United States had thus reached the brink of war with each other but might well have teetered on that brink for months or even years to come.(22)

But at the conference, however, Jonas said that "Hitler's declaration of war was not an act of great significance and certainly did not change the course of history."

In his comments at the conference Jonas also endorsed Thomas Bailey, a legendary historian who Jonas said explained these momentous events clearly, and he recommended Bailey's A Diplomatic History of the American People.(23) He summed up that book by stating that Bailey "describes a seamless progression from non-neutrality in thought to full involvement in World War II. The various declarations of war were markers along the way, but had no causal significance."(24) But Bailey actually asserted the opposite, that Hitler's declaration of war on the United States was of decisive significance. He wrote that:

An angry debate in Congress over a war resolution against Hitler and Mussolini would have added to the national disunity. But on December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. . . . Germany and Italy, the Axis partners of Japan, likewise spared the United States the agony of a decision. . . . This unprecedented [Congressional] unanimity was largely a recognition of the fact that war had already been declared on the United States, and that the only possible response was retaliation in kind.(25)

Bailey further clarified his position on the importance of Hitler's declaration of war in compelling detail in Hitler vs. Roosevelt: The Undeclared Naval War:

Obviously, if Hitler (and Mussolini and Japan) had not declared war on the United States first, a war resolution could hardly have passed Congress, at least at that time. . . . Many members of Congress would have argued that the United States already had a real war [with Japan] on its hands, so why take on two more foes? The Japanese were the real enemy, for they had delivered a smashing blow below the belt at Pearl Harbor. The Germans and the Italians had not committed a remotely comparable outrage.(26)

Bailey then reiterated this conclusion, writing that "Hitler declare[d] war on the United States and [took] Roosevelt off the hook with the noisy isolationists."(27) Whereas Jonas said in 2003 that Bailey considered Hitler's declaration of war unimportant, Bailey himself wrote that Hitler's declaration was a "disastrous blunder-declaring war on a United States that otherwise would have been torn by disunity and doubt in debating a formal declaration of hostilities."(28)

Bailey asserts that because of Hitler's declaration, Congress felt it had no choice but to declare war: "That body was forced to respond as expected after Japan, Germany, and Italy had first declared war on the United States."(29) He also elaborates upon the irreconcilable opposition of the isolationists before Pearl Harbor, arguing that "their opposition was so rabid that Roosevelt could hardly have hoped, as we repeatedly have seen, to extract a declaration of war from Congress prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration against the United States."(30) But Prof. Jonas asserted at the SHAFR Conference that Bailey supported his contention that Hitler's declaration was unimportant. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The analysis offered by Justus Doenecke, the SHAFR conference's third expert on the subject of pre-World War II U.S. isolationism, was no less confusing. Doenecke's comments implied that he agreed with Cole, although he implicitly rejected his main point about the unimportance of Hitler's declaration.(31) He seemed to stress its importance when he made a point of rejecting my argument that Hitler had retracted his declaration the day after he made it,(32) saying that "I would argue that the Germans are not denying or retracting anything."(33) Similarly, he seemed to stress the importance of Hitler's declaration in his popular book From Isolation to War, which devotes two entire pages to examining this apparently momentous question of "Why, within four days after the attack, did Hitler declare war on the United States?"(34)

Doenecke's recent book, Storm on the Horizon, also deals with events leading up to that apparently significant month of "December 1941, when the United States entered World War II as a full-scale belligerent."(35) In the preface to this book Doenecke promises to focus on the underlying assumptions informing U.S. isolationism in 1941.(36) But unfortunately, nowhere does he focus on or even address the most fundamental question of all: if the isolationists were so resolutely opposed to a declaration of war on and a ground invasion of Germany before December 1941,(37) why then did they so willingly concede to that in December?(38)

Historians need coherent answers to these most important questions. Cole's stunning reversal should lead the historical community to hope that he will expand upon the assertions he made at the conference and soon publish his new explanation of why the United States entered into a total war with Germany. Jonas's and Doenecke's supportive comments indicate that they too need to explain exactly why they believe the United States decided to invade Europe in December 1941, and then reconcile their past work with their new analyses. The membership of SHAFR should ask that this issue be thoroughly aired, discussed, and debated. The recent SHAFR panel made only the most tenuous start on this most important historical question.

1. On December 11, 1941, the US Congress legislated two war resolutions. The first was a declaration of war on Germany, and the second was a repeal of that section of the Selective Service Act of 1940 that forbade the deployment of an American expeditionary force outside of the Western Hemisphere or U.S. territories. It was this second act, not the first, which actually constituted the U.S. decision to invade Europe and Germany. Nevertheless, historians have generally referred to the decision to allow troop deployments as being synonymous with the declaration of war. Therefore, this paper will concede to that consensus understanding, or rather misunderstanding, by similarly referring to the momentous decision on December 11, 1941, to invade Europe as the declaration of war.

2. SHAFR Conference, June 6, 2003, George Washington University, Washington DC, Panel Session 7, "What was the Significance of Hitler's Declaration of War on the U.S.?"

3. Richard F. Hill, "Hitler's Misunderstood Declaration of War," SHAFR Newsletter, June 2002; and idem, Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor: Why the United States Declared War on Germany (Boulder, 2003).

4. Hill, "Hitler's Misunderstood Declaration of War," 3; Samuel Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York, 1950).

5. Justus Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: the Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941 (Boulder, 2000) x, xiii; Manfred Jonas, "Comments: SHAFR Meeting, Washington, 2003," June 6, 2003 (unpublished) 7, 9.

6. Wayne S. Cole, 2003 SHAFR conference comments, "America's Path to War with Germany, 1941," June 6, 2003 (unpublished) 2.

7. Ibid.,3.

8. Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945 (Lincoln, NE, 1983), 12.

9. Ibid., 364.

10. Ibid., 454.

11. Ibid., 506-7.

12. Ibid., 12, 364, 449, 465, 480, 481.

13. Ibid., 12-13.

14. Ibid., 508.

15. Ibid., 437.

16. Ibid., 448.

17. Ibid., 450.

18. Ibid., 504-5.

19. Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 (Madison, WI, 1953), 197. See the identical assessment in Thomas Bailey and Paul Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt: the Undeclared Naval War (New York, 1979), 265.

20. Manfred Jonas, "Comments: SHAFR Meeting," 7, 9.

21. Manfred Jonas, The United States and Germany: a Diplomatic History (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 257, 258.

22. Jonas, "Comments: SHAFR Meeting," 4.

23. Ibid., 6.

24. Thomas Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York, 1964), 741.

25. Bailey and Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt, 251.

26. Ibid., 252.

27. Ibid., 255, 260-1, 267

28. Ibid., 263.

29. Ibid., 261.

30. Justus Doenecke, 2003 SHAFR conference comments (unpublished). Doenecke has also published his support of Cole's analyses and in his recent book refers to Cole as "the dean of scholars of World War II anti-interventionism" and "the nation's leading scholar of isolationism." Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, x, xiii.

31. Hill, "Hitler's Misunderstood Declaration of War," 2; see also idem, Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor; Doenecke, 2003 SHAFR comments, 5.

32. Justus Doenecke and John Wilz, From Isolation to War, 1939-1941. 2nd ed. (Arlington Heights, IL, 1991), 176-7.

33. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, ix.

34. Ibid., xi.

35. Prof. Doenecke's only allusion to the issue of Hitler's declaration in this book is on the final page, where he writes that "when the United States entered the war without reservation, anti-interventionists felt a profound sense of personal tragedy. Their anxiety was compounded by the fact that on 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States," Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, 328. See also ibid., 268-9.