The United States and World War II
Copyright © Henry J. Sage, 2007
Background: American Foreign Policy 1920–1941
America’s participation in the first World War came relatively late, but by the time the war was over and President Wilson had participated in the writing of the Treaty of Versailles, the result of the war for America was that the nation was more connected with the rest of the world than it had ever been before. The American acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands as an outcome of the Spanish-American War and President Roosevelt’s sponsoring of the Treaty of Portsmouth also contributed to America’s new international standing.
All that did not mean, however, that Americans were prepared to step to the front of the world stage and become involved in international issues as a matter of course. Indeed, for reasons we shall discuss below, the United States to an extent turned its back on the rest of the world and retreated into something resembling its traditional 19th-century mode of isolationism.
United States Diplomacy in the 1920s: The Aftermath of the Great War
In the aftermath of the Great War, as American troops came home from Europe, the United States became permeated by a sense of disillusionment as people observed the turmoil continuing in Europe in the years following that terrible conflict. In 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes called for a naval conference in Washington to address the armaments race that many had seen as an underlying cause of the First World War, the first of many steps taken internationally to try to prevent the outbreak of more war.
The Washington Naval Conference convened in November 1921, and in the opening address Secretary Hughes gave a candid speech in which he declared that “the way to disarm is to disarm,” and that the time to begin was immediately. Thus he proposed a ten-year holiday in the construction of capital ships—battleships and heavy cruisers—and recommended the scrapping of additional ships. One British reporter claimed that Secretary Hughes had in fifteen minutes “sunk more ships than all the admirals of the world have sunk over the centuries.”
Although Hughes’s proposals were welcomed by many peace advocates, traditional naval powers such as Great Britain were less than enthusiastic. Nevertheless, the pressure for disarmament was such that an agreement was finally reached that would limit the ratio of capital ship tonnage among the five major powers: the United States (5), Great Britain (5), Japan (3), France (1.67), and Italy (1.67.) The Five-Power Naval Treaty was signed in February 1922 and was to remain in effect until 1936. The treaty placed a limitation on the numbers and sizes of major warships, although it did not affect smaller vessels such as destroyers, submarines, and cruisers, and it called for a construction “holiday” of ten years.
The conference also agreed on a four-power treaty in which Great Britain, the United States, Japan, and France agreed to respect each other’s interests in the Pacific. Finally, a Nine-Power Treaty endorsed the Open Door policy in China. Those who signed it agreed to respect the “sovereignty, independence, and territorial and administrative integrity of China” and to uphold the principles of the Open Door.
The Washington Conference was a landmark event, and it was followed by other attempts to reduce armaments and control the forces that tended to lead to war. Further conferences were held at Geneva and London, but ultimately none of the agreements ever prevented anything significant. In 1927 with rumblings of discontent in Germany, France approached the United States with a proposal that the two nations enter into a defensive alliance, an obvious attempt to provide protection in advance in case of German retaliation. Secretary of State Kellogg, not wanting to become snarled in an alliance, suggested a wider pact that would “outlaw” war. The resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in 1928, though many realized that its goals were illusory, because its intent was indeed to make war illegal. One U.S. senator claimed it was “not worth a postage stamp”; another called it “worthless but harmless.”
A similar agreement had arisen from a meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925 among representatives of Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. Under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, the meeting settled a number of security issues involving France, Belgium, and Germany. Germany also signed agreements with its eastern neighbors, but just as important was the “Spirit of Locarno” that emerged, an indication that the major powers intended to try to settle future differences peaceably. Following the signing of the Locarno Pact, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. Along with Friedrich Ebert, president of the German (Weimar) Republic, Stresemann showed great statesmanship, but unfortunately for Germany and the rest of the World, Hitler and the Nazis were on the rise in the 1920s.
GERMANY. (See also “The Rise of Nazi Germany”) The Weimar Republic was a courageous attempt at establishing democracy in Germany, but it was doomed because of structural weaknesses and economic disorders stemming from, among other things, the Versailles settlements. In 1924 Germany’s international obligations totaled $132 billion gold marks, and the nation underwent a period of chaotic inflation that wrecked the economy. French troops occupied the Ruhr Valley in 1923 after the Germans defaulted on their obligations, and in response Germans practiced “passive resistance” in the form of sit-down strikes.
America’s interest in the German situation resulted from the fact that the allies owed large sums of money to the United States from loans made during the war, and it was clear that if Germany could not indemnify the allies, they would not be in a position to repay the United States. President Coolidge understood that dilemma, and his policies led to the Dawes Plan—the United States guaranteed that it would loan Germany money and help her reorganize her finances. In 1929 further problems arose, and President Hoover approved the Young Plan, which reduced German debts and set up an international bank for collection. But by the 1930s with the world depression affecting everyone, all debts were eventually defaulted or canceled.
The Good Neighbor Policy. The United States. had a history of intervention in Latin America going back to the time of Andrew Jackson in Florida, when it still belonged to Spain. By the 1920s Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt and many others slowly began to recognize the basic unfairness of America’s Latin American policy. Both Harding and Coolidge had to deal with growing "Yankee-phobia" south of the border. President Hoover rejected Wilson’s interventionist policies and went on a goodwill tour after the 1928 election. The gradual removal of all American occupying forces began and was completed by 1934. The United States also renounced its right to intervene in Cuban affairs by terminating the Platt Amendment. Many problem areas still existed, and the United States had difficult issues to resolve with various individual nations, but the Good Neighbor policy improved relations enormously, so that by World War II the Western Hemisphere was reasonably unified, even though the United States was still seen as the “colossus of the North.”
In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt attended the Buenos Aires Inter-American Conference. FDR’s address to the delegates was well received—he called himself a “traveling salesman for peace” and preached “mutual safety.” The Lima Declaration of 1938 reinforced inter-American solidarity.
America in the 1930s: The Triumph of Isolationism: A “gloomy, pessimistic, negative pacifism”
During the crisis years of 1931–1939, Americans found themselves in the depths of the Great Depression and did not want to think of further war, so the country retreated into a deeper position of isolationism. Americans saw themselves as “innocent bystanders” in world affairs and began to feel as trouble arose in Europe that America’s participation in the First World War may have been a waste. In 1933 the United States finally recognized the Soviet government and established formal relations with the USSR—primarily for business reasons. By 1936, as Hitler was beginning to menace Europe, Americans wanted to stay out of it, but how? Secretary of State Henry Stimson claimed: “The only sure way to stay out of war is to prevent it.” But how was the United States, which had refused even to join the League of Nations and had reduced its armaments to a dangerously low level, supposed to accomplish that?
The Nye Committee Hearings. In 1934 Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota began a series of hearings that tried to show that munitions makers had made “huge” profits during World War I and were therefore somehow responsible for America’s involvement in the conflict. They were called the “Merchants of Death.” Although the results of the Nye Committee investigation were inconclusive, the isolationists won the day, and several Neutrality Acts were the result. The Committee concluded that American freedom of the seas doctrine had become unreasonable because of the submarine. Neutrals, they concluded, should keep out of war zones.
The Neutrality Acts. As the hearings went forward, the isolationists were in control. Reading the political winds, FDR asked the Nye Committee to prepare legislation.
Further neutrality acts were passed in 1936 and 1937, and the net result of those laws was to handcuff the United States, even if it had a legitimate desire to assist nations that were victims of international aggression. President Roosevelt made no attempt to block this legislation, but refused to invoke the laws when Japan invaded China, thereby allowing China to buy arms from the United States.
The Lure of Pacifism
Looking back at World War I as a meaningless effort, many Americans sought security in pacifism as well as in legal neutrality. They wanted a way to ensure that the United States would not be drawn into another European conflict. Most Americans suspected that they had been duped by the politicians, munitions makers, and bankers into going to war in 1917, and resolved never again to fight a meaningless war. Romantic notions of pacifism were not exclusive to the United States: In Great Britain college students pledged that they would never again fight in any kind of war. (Many of those same young men would die during World War II.)
A gradual breakdown of attempts at international cooperation developed as militaristic nations asserted their will with no regard for consequences or for maintaining the peace—conquest and revenge were their motives. The concept of collective security was, in effect, the same idea as the old “Concert of Europe,” but a toothless League of Nations brought nothing but head-in-the-sand optimism, not action. Aggressor nations ignored the League.
Reasons for Isolationism:
The Rise of Nazi Germany: The SS-State
Adolf Hitler and his political cronies formed the N.S.D.A.P. (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or “Nazi” Party) in the early 1920s. In 1923 the Nazis tested their power by attempting to take over the government of the state of Bavaria in the “Beer Hall Putsch.” Hitler was arrested and served time in Landsberg prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), in which he outlined his political agenda, praised the sueriority of the Aryan race and claimed that the Jews were responsible for most, if not all, of Germany's ills and needed to be dealt with, "or else!" Hitler was released after less than a year, and the Nazi Party gradually gained strength in the late 1920s and early 1930s through the use of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers or SA known as the brownshirts from their uniforms), who whipped up enthusiasm for the Nazis and intimidated other political groups. Hitler successfully exploited the general discontent in Germany, which had arisen because of economic problems and the festering resentment over the Versailles Treaty.
1933 When the Nazis grew too strong to be ignored, having become the second largest party in Germany, Hitler was invited by German President Hindenburg to become chancellor in a coalition government. Soon thereafter the Reichstag fire was used to expel the Communists from the Reichstag (Parliament). Hitler used Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to get the legislative process suspended, and from that time forward he ruled Germany by decree. Hitler then combined the offices of president and chancellor, abandoned both and began calling himself “The Leader” (Der Führer.) Then he forced all army officers to swear an oath of personal allegiance to him. The Nazi takeover was swift and thorough: Freedom of the press ended—Nazi organs carried news and distributed propaganda. In the last free election in Germany in March 1933, the Nazis got 44 percent of the vote.
Hitler then used the Schutzstaffel,the SS, a special body guard within the SA, to eliminate his political enemies. The SS eventually grew to more than one million men and reached into every facet of German public life having political significance, through direct controls, infiltration, informants, and intimidation. High school and university professors were purged unless they followed the party line. History was rewritten, extolling the virtues of ancient Germans such as “Karl der Grosse” (Charles the Great, otherwise known as Charlemagne.) The Secret State Police (Gestapo) were a subunit of the SS that dominated all German police forces down to the local level. Germans became enamored with Hitler, but many were frightened of what Germany had become, a totalitarian state. Dissent was no longer tolerated; the SS became the guardian of Aryan purity, a state within a state.
Note: Avoid seeing the SS as a super-efficient, well-oiled machine. There was much incompetence, petty bickering, waste, foolishness, backbiting. Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo chief, was keeping a dossier on the whole ménage; he was finally assassinated in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, by Czech commandos, and everyone in the town was executed in retaliation.
Significant Events in Germany’s Rise
1934 “The Night of the Long Knives.” To purge the Nazi party of men whom Hitler saw as too ambitious for his good, if not for their own, he ordered the SS to go out and ruthlessly assassinate hundreds of party leaders during a single night, including SA leader Ernst Röhm, leaving a residue of those whose loyalty he could trust. This organized murder campaign operated with disregard for the law, for the simple reason that Hitler’s SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, and the Gestapo had spread its tentacles into the entire German legal and law enforcement system. The Nazi party was rapidly becoming the law, designed with but one purpose, which was to do Hitler’s will.
Rearmament. After Hitler consolidated his power in 1933–34, he began moving gradually to restore Germany’s military might. Using the SS to carry out various forms of coercion by blackmail or whatever means sufficed, Hitler removed top generals who were unsympathetic to the Nazi goals and replaced them with generals open to the idea of expansion by force. Hitler used the Hitler Jugend—“Hitler Youth,” a kind of Nazi boy scout organization that was mandatory for teenaged youth—as a means of preparing German boys to enter military service, and the German education system in schools and universities was saturated with Nazi philosophy, so that junior enlisted men and officers were also indoctrinated in Hitler’s goals.
Even though many top German officers disapproved of Hitler and his methods, the rapid expansion of the army and the need to develop contingency plans kept high-ranking staff officers busy so that they would not have time to be overly concerned about politics. As a result, the German officer corps, which since the time of Frederick the Great had adhered to the mission of protecting the German state from all enemies, internal or external, failed in its duty by allowing Hitler to bend its will to Nazi ends. No other German institution had the power to stop Hitler.
With the generals on board, Hitler renounced the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty and began the rearmament process. The German army, which had been limited to a strength of 100,000, was rapidly expanded, using the existing army as a cadre from which to build a much larger force compatible with Hitler’s designs. In 1935 Hitler resumed the draft, raising the army to 500,000 for “defense.” The army was streamlined and condensed; every officer and NCO was ready to assume higher rank and responsibility as the ranks filled. Factories began turning out weapons and military vehicles, and the shipyards turned to rebuilding the German navy. Submarine production went into high gear, and the massive battleship Bismarck was launched in 1939.
1935 Nuremberg Laws. In September 1935 the Reichstag began passage of a series of laws that stripped Jewish people of their citizenship and basic human rights. From that time on, Jews would be unable to escape intensified persecution. Marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans was prohibited, as were extramarital relations between Jews and gentiles. Jews were not allowed to fly the German flag or to display Reich colors. Citizenship became limited to “only that subject of German or kindred blood who proves by his conduct that he is willing and suited loyally to serve the German people and the Reich.” A November 1935 law declared that “A Jew cannot be a Reich citizen. He is not entitled to the right to vote on political matters; he cannot hold public office.”
1936 Hitler took complete control of German foreign policy. His goals included the readjustment of eastern boundaries and the restoration of Germany to great power status. He repudiated the Locarno Treaty and ordered the army to reoccupy the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. The general staff was reluctant to carry out the order, arguing that the army was not yet prepared for a confrontation with the French. Hitler ridiculed his officers to their faces, declaring them cowardly and announcing that the French and British would do nothing, and that his officer corps needed to take on his fearless demeanor. The Rhineland was reoccupied, the French and British did nothing, and the League of Nations denounced Hitler’s action but also took no action, with the result that Hitler was emboldened to go further.
1936 The Spanish Civil War. When a leftist government took over Spain, the army under General Francisco Franco rebelled. Germany and Italy rallied to Franco’s cause, which they identified as having common goals with their fascist philosophies, and the conflict became a testing ground for German and Italian soldiers, pilots, weapons, technology, and tactics. The United States, Great Britain, and France decided to stay out to “localize” the conflict, but Russia supported the central government. Franco’s forces were victorious in 1939. The Spanish Civil War clearly demonstrated that the United States was now prevented from helping even friendly nations.
1937 In 1937 Hitler continued his campaign of purging Germany of what he saw as the poisonous influence of the Jews. The SS, cooperating police forces now under the heel of the SS, and hired thugs carried out what became known as Kristallnacht—the “Night of Broken Glass.” Windows of Jewish businesses were smashed; Jews were dragged out of their homes and beaten, arrested, hauled away, and otherwise terrorized. The world was beginning to see Nazism for what it really was.
1938 In March Hitler completed the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria. He announced as one of his major goals the unification of all German-speaking peoples under a common flag. Following an intensive propaganda campaign in Austria, supported by Austrian officials sympathetic to the Nazi movement, the German army, again over the protests of the general staff who declared they were not yet ready for action, moved into Austria. But instead of being greeted with animosity, Hitler rode through the streets of Vienna in an open car, returning the Sieg Heil salute given along the way and waving to thousands of Austrians, who in return waved Nazi flags and cheered Hitler as he rode by triumphantly. (Hitler had been born in Austria and was returning “home.”)
1938 September: Appeasement
The next crisis in European affairs focused on Germany’s neighbor, Czechoslovakia. In the Czech Sudetenland lived 3.5 million German-speaking people, the Sudeten Germans. Hitler’s threats to take over the Sudetenland caused British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to travel to Germany to meet with Hitler in an attempt to resolve the crisis, telling Hitler his proposals were not acceptable. When Hitler refused to back down, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini suggested that Hitler hold a four-power conference of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy in Munich. On September 29, 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier capitulated to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland. In return, Hitler promised not to make any further territorial demands in Europe. It was a grievous error. Chamberlain returned to Great Britain claiming “Peace for our Time,” but it was to be short lived. Within a few months Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, and at this point France and Great Britain decided that Hitler had gone too far, but the policy of appeasement had backfired.
The Failure of Appeasement: How Did Hitler Succeed?
America and World War II | Updated
March 30, 2009