Winston Churchill could finally get a good night’s sleep. This week (Dec. 11) in 1941, just four days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler and his Axis partner, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, declared war on the United States, thereby joining Japan in a state of war against America and, as of that day, her ally Great Britain.
At last America had joined Great Britain in her lonely effort to stem the seemingly inexorable tide of German expansion in Europe and Japanese expansion in the Far East. Knowing that America was now in the war, something he had worked for ever since he became prime minister in May of 1940, Churchill, as he put it, “at last slept the sleep of the saved.” Churchill had long calculated that once America, an industrial giant of unlimited potential, had committed to full rearmament, Germany, Japan and Italy would be no match for an American and British (and, later, Soviet) alliance.
Churchill immediately solidified that alliance at a conference in Washington, where he and Franklin Roosevelt agreed to pool their resources and develop a joint plan for winning the war. As part of that agreement, American troops would be stationed in Great Britain, from which both British and American military forces would eventually launch assaults against Germany on the European continent.
In retrospect, Hitler committed a huge blunder in declaring war on America. Although he had a military treaty with Japan, it was defensive, not offensive — it only took effect if America attacked Japan. So if Hitler had kept his mouth shut, America would have been trapped fighting against the wrong enemy. Roosevelt knew that Hitler was the greatest danger to world security, but in December of 1941 it was the Japanese, not the Germans, who had spilled American blood and the American public’s thirst for revenge was against the “Yellow Devils,” not the “Krauts.” Only because Hitler declared war on America was Roosevelt able to make Germany the primary enemy.
Interestingly, one reason Hitler declared war on America was his belief that its racial policies — its welcoming of people of all races, creeds and colors to its shores — made it an inferior nation. How, Hitler wondered, could a country with so many blacks, Jews, Poles and Slavs ever stand up to the racially pure Aryan nation that he was building?
He would find out soon enough, as young American soldiers with names like Jerome Johnson, Abe Goldstein, Les Kowalski and Al Dubcek outfought his German armies from the Normandy beaches to the Rhine River.
Partly as a result, four years later, on April 30, 1945 — knowing the war was lost — Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and slept the sleep of the dead.
