But that reflects the performance of the USSR backed by the United States. To be sure, there is a common assumption that Moscow’s victory was ensured once Stalin survived Hitler’s initial onslaught.
Without America’s entry into the European war Berlin may well have triumphed. Suffering years of prodigious slaughter in what remains the most terrible, brutal, and cruel campaign of modern times, the Soviet Union found that its human resources were not inexhaustible. The Red Army even ran short of new troops as it forced back the Wehrmacht. As it was, Berlin continued to win significant victories and maintained the strategic initiative even through the (losing) battle of Kursk in July and August of 1943. It was obvious that Germany would bid for victory again the following year when better weather arrived. Still, at the time it was not evident that this marked the Wehrmacht’s high-water mark. Without Washington involved in the European theater, that conflict still looked like a probable German victory. Navy aiding British convoys - had been insufficient to justify war with an American public still determined to stay out of the military madness raging from the Atlantic to the Pacific in Eurasia. But the incidents that resulted - with the U.S. He was determined to sustain the United Kingdom, threatened with isolation and even starvation by the ongoing “Atlantic War,” and had made America an undeclared naval belligerent. This left FDR with a significant problem. and European states rather than north against the USSR. And with Pearl Harbor the former chose to head south against the U.S. Germany was not bound to back its ally against America - after all, Tokyo did not join the assault on the Soviet Union six months before. The two were linked (along with Italy) only loosely by the Tripartite Pact. and world were saved by the second declaration of war.īut war with Japan did not mean war with Nazi Germany. Estimates of theater casualties for Japan range widely, with a Chinese reexamination of Tokyo figures running an astonishing 2.2 million. When Japan surrendered nearly four years after striking Pearl Harbor, the bulk of its army remained mired in China. Even battlefield successes drew Tokyo’s military deeper into China, making victory more distant. Brutal atrocities, such as the Rape of Nanjing, stoked resistance. Instead of proving to be an easy conquest, as expected, courageous though ill-prepared Chinese forces resisted the invaders at great cost. And the Second Sino-Japanese War, usually dated to the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937, turned into a massive human abattoir, consuming prodigious quantities of Japanese men and materiel.
Indeed, Imperial Japan was ill-prepared to even conquer and rule Asia, which itself mattered far less to America than did Europe. The Pacific Ocean might not have shielded Hawaii from attack, but that wide expanse of water forestalled invasion of the U.S. Ongoing Japanese aggression against China was awful but posed no military threat to America. Ironically, though, this was not the war that FDR wanted. Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the attack, spent time in America and may have been almost alone in Toyko in realizing that the attack would arouse a terrible, even overwhelming, desire for revenge from a society ultimately far better prepared than Japan for the total war to come. Tokyo officials who assumed that Americans had no will to fight did not understand the psyche of Japan’s new enemy, including a powerful self-righteous certitude that energized people whose homeland had been treacherously attacked.
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