Paul W. answered • 05/21/19
Dedicated to Achieving Student Success in History, Government, Culture
World War II began in Europe in September, 1939 when the Third Reich (Nazi Germany) invaded neighboring Poland. In turn, France and Great Britain, both of whom had guaranteed Poland's safety, declared war on Germany.
This presented a serious problem for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fiercely opposed to democracy and dedicated to wars of aggression, the Third Reich presented a clear threat to Western nations, including the United States. But the majority of the people of the United States were opposed to their country becoming involved in what they viewed as a 'European War.' This was due to the disillusionment felt by the U.S. public in the wake of their participation in World War I.
The people of the United States entered World War I with idealistic hopes of fighting 'The War to End All Wars' and 'Making the World Safe for Democracy.' To the U.S. public, the Versailles Peace Treaty that officially ended the war was primarily concerned with France and Great Britain taking revenge on the Central Powers. The people of the United States felt betrayed, they felt they had been used by the European nations to achieve a victory that served the interests of France and Great Britain, not the United States. This experience is what led a large proportion of the U.S. population during the period between the outbreak of the war in Europe and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (September, 1939 to December, 1941) to insist on strict neutrality.
Not long after Hitler's attack on Poland, President Roosevelt oversaw the passage of the Neutrality Act of 1939. This upheld a policy that was begun earlier, 'Cash-and-Carry.' It was widely believed that the purchase of munitions on credit from U.S. businesses by Britain and France during World War I was a major factor in bringing the country into the war. The policy of Cash-and-Carry meant that the nations involved in the war in Europe could only purchase munitions in the U.S. if they paid for them at the time of purchase and not through the use of credit. Moreover, these munitions could only be transported to Europe on ships owned by the countries involved in the war, not on U.S. merchant ships (thus avoiding the sinking of U.S. merchant ships by German U-Boats, which was the chief reason for the United States entering World War I). Because Great Britain's Royal Navy made certain that no ships of any kind could reach German controlled ports (as they had during World War I), Cash-and-Carry clearly helped Britain and France rather than the Third Reich.
President Roosevelt would have liked to have done much more to assist France and Great Britain, but the members of Congress were being told by their constituents in their voting districts that they didn't want the United States involved in the war. As such, whatever President Roosevelt would have liked to have done, he knew that stronger measures to help Britain and France would be voted down in Congress.
Up until May, 1940, President Roosevelt could at least feel confident that the military and naval forces of France and Great Britain would keep Hitler's aggression in check. The French Army was almost universally viewed as the most modern, most professional, and, therefore, the strongest army in the world. To everyone's complete surprise and shock (including Hitler's), the German forces decisively defeated the French Army in a matter of weeks, forcing the French Government to surrender. What the German Army of World War I had tried to do over a period of four years, resulting in complete failure, they had achieved in a few weeks in 1940.
During World War I the United States had had years, the period between August 1914 and April, 1917, in which to prepare for the possibility of fighting in the war. President Roosevelt, and just about everyone else, expected a similar course of events in which the Germans on one side and the British and French on the other, locked in a stalemate on the Western Front, would give the United States a number of years to prepare the nation for the possibility of entering into the war.
But the fall of France changed everything. The odds of Great Britain holding out against the Third Reich on its own (though it had the resources of a Global Empire) were not good. President Roosevelt was now faced with the likelihood of the entire continent of Europe under the control of Hitler. Roosevelt desperately wanted to do everything in his power short of going to war to prevent the fall of Great Britain. But U.S. public opinion continued to stand in the way.
In September, 1940, President Roosevelt was able to initiate the 'Destroyers-for-Bases' deal with Great Britain. British naval bases located mainly in the Caribbean were leased to the United States Armed Forces for ninety-nine years. Isolationists - those in the U.S. who were dead set against the country becoming involved in the war - were happy with this arrangement because it didn't place U.S. forces in the line of fire between the Germans and the British. President Roosevelt was pleased with the deal because it enabled him to transfer fifty warships - Destroyers - to the Royal Navy, thus helping Britain to continue to hold out. Though obsolete in design (they were originally built during World War I), the fifty Destroyers could easily be refurbished and would play a vital role in contributing to the escorts necessary for protecting the convoys of merchant ships on which the survival of Britain depended.
Fortunately for President Roosevelt - and, whether they knew it or not, for all of the people of the United States - by early-1941 public opinion within the nation had begun to shift in favor of helping Great Britain. A national poll in February, 1941, showed that while 22 % of Americans were opposed to any aid for the British, 54 % favored providing Britain with aid without any qualifications. The following month, March, 1941, President Roosevelt signed into law the 'Lend-Lease' Act, which allowed him to sell, lease, lend, or give away any arms or equipment in the possession of the U.S. Armed Forces to another nation in the name of the defense of the United States. Through Lend-Lease, Great Britain and, in October, 1941, the Soviet Union (which Hitler had invaded in June) could obtain all manner of munitions and supplies regardless of what they could afford to pay for.
President Roosevelt had already declared the establishment of a 'Pan-American Security Zone' within which the Armed Forces of the nations of the Americas were authorized to respond to any hostile acts by any nation currently fighting in the war - meaning, of course, the naval forces of the Third Reich and Fascist Italy (which had joined Germany in the war in June, 1940). In April, 1941, Roosevelt announced the extension of the boundaries of the Pan-American Security Zone to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that U.S. Navy warships would now be escorting convoys of merchant ships coming from the Americas and heading to Great Britain as far as the halfway point in the Atlantic Ocean.
Needless to say, neither Germany nor Italy were willing to confine the operations of their submarines to only half of the Atlantic Ocean. As such, it was only a matter of time before U.S. warships escorting convoys and Axis submarines seeking to attack convoys engaged in one another in battle. On 17 October, 1941, the U.S.S. Destroyer Kearny, while dropping depth charges on a U-Boat, was hit by a German torpedo. Later that month, on 31 October, a U-Boat sunk the U.S.S. Destroyer Reuben James, resulting in the death of 100 U.S. sailors. In other words, three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States was involved in an undeclared war with the Axis powers.
Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was severely constrained in what he could do to provide help to Great Britain and France. Therefore, at first the United States only provided limited and qualified assistance to Britain and France. But the fall of France illuminated more than anything else the danger presented by Hitler's Germany. After the fall of France and throughout the Battle of Britain, the sympathies of the people of the United States shifted decisively in favor of the British. This provided President Roosevelt with the political support for measures designed to keep Great Britain from being defeated. By late-1941 the United States was in essence fighting a naval war alongside Great Britain in the Atlantic Ocean against the Axis powers.
