Peal Harbor Surprise Japanese Attack on the US Pacific Fleet and European Colonial Forces in Asia – Germany, Italy and other Axis Countries Declare War on the United States
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On December 7th, 1941, As Hitler’s military forces, well armed, thanks to the massive investments and joint venturings of major American industrialists, were besieging Moscow and Leningrad and ‘exterminating’ communists and Jews throughout European Russia, the equally fascist Japanese Empire, which American capitalists had for decades nurtured as an Asian fellow trade exploiting concessionary in China, abruptly bombed US Navy warships in Pearl Harbor, bombed the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island with near simultaneous landings in Malaya, Thailand and Hong Kong – and declared war on the United States and Great Britain.
United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and various other states, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Netherlands, Nicaragua and the Philippines, formally declared war on Japan. In solidarity with Japan, Germany, followed by the other Axis states, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia and Albania declared war on the United States, citing as justification the American attacks on German war vessels that had been ordered by Roosevelt.[198]
Despite declaring war, the Nazis made no attempt to confiscate any assets, and throughout the war companies like GM remained sole proprietors of their German outposts. [Helms, “Ford und die Nazis,”] And many experts believe that the best and brightest technological advances of the time from Ford and GM, along with others, went to benefit Germany rather than the US. (Nazis & America:The USA’s Fascist Past” James Hardy. September 14, 2016, History Cooperative)
On 1 January 1942, the Allied Big Four—the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom and the United States—and 22 smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations subscribing to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter, agreeing not to sign a separate peace with the Axis powers, and accepting that United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China would make the major decisions. It was the first official use of the term “United Nations.”
The Asian Theater of World War Two
By the end of April 1942, Japan and its ally Thailand had almost fully conquered Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Papua New Guinea, inflicting severe losses on Allied troops and taking a large number of prisoners. Despite stubborn resistance by Filipino and US forces, the Philippine Commonwealth was eventually captured in May 1942, forcing its government into exile. Japanese forces also achieved naval victories in the South China Sea, Java Sea and Indian Ocean, and bombed the Allied naval base at Darwin, Australia.
While the Japanese painted themselves as heroically freeing the peoples of Asia from the enslaving occupation and yoke of white racist plundering colonialism, the Western colonial powers could renew the claim of manifest destiny. They brought back the fear engendering ‘yellow peril’ slogan that alleged danger that predominantly white Western civilization would be overwhelmed by Asian peoples led by the evil minded and cruel Japanese, who had distinguished themselves with their massacre of Chinese at Nanjing. Thus, the war in the Pacific was promoted as a noble war by both sides.
In early 1942, the governments of the smaller colonial powers successfully pushed for an inter-governmental Asia-Pacific war council, which was formed in Washington in April 1942, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and representatives from Britain, China, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Canada. It was also in April 1942, that 16 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, 600 miles (970 km) from Japan, and bombed Tokyo. The raid inflicted minimal material damage, but was a huge morale boost for the United States; it also had major psychological repercussions in Japan, in exposing the vulnerabilities of the Japanese homeland.[204]
Over the next three years, American aircraft carriers would be most instrumental in destroying the Japanese Navy and eventually its army’s capabilities, until by spring of 1945, Japan lay blockaded and unprotected from US air attacks.
Americans as Belligerents in the European War Less Anti-Soviet
American anti-Semitism never approached the intensity of the Jew-hatred promoted in Nazi Germany, but pollsters found that many Americans looked upon Jews unfavorably. A much more threatening sign was the presence of anti-Semitic leaders and movements on the fringes of American politics, including Father Charles E. Coughlin, the charismatic radio priest, and William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts.[204a]
However, the Nazi German genocidal use of its military in Poland and Russia that included the mass murder of Jews had reawakened the anti-German sentiment that had indoctrinated Americans by the US press during the First World War. The promotion of fascism as a counterweight and/or destroyer of condemnable revolutionary socialism in Russia was put on hold. The deadly animosity toward the Soviet Union that had been clearly expressed in the American press along with the hope for a long, drawn-out conflict between Berlin and Moscow reflected in many newspaper articles abated, and the initially much-publicized remark uttered by Senator Harry S. Truman on 24 June 1941, only two days after the start of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides,” was made to be forgotten. [205] The US government promoted pro-Russian sentiment in the film Mission to Moscow already mentioned. As a 12 year old, your author read a comic book titled ‘Uncle Joe,’ which portrayed Joseph Stalin as a heroically affable, kind and protective.
There was therefore a temporary lull in the decades long virulent anti-Soviet propaganda and an amnesia like press black out of the business ties of nearly all of the greatest US corporations with Nazi Germany. Corporate leaders as patriotic Americans would now lead a united world to victory against the evil insanity of a Hitler dictatorship of a marauding mass murderous Nazi Germany.
Leading segments of the power elite in the United States of America were happy to be at war again and looking forward to great profits. The government virtually guaranteed contractors against loss by insuring their investments in war equipment. The extra profits made by corporations were not, for the most part, distributed to their shareholders. This huge amount of liquid assets in the hands of business executives, this critical power that goes with possession of this huge pile of money, is the real significance of war profits in a system of colonial capitalist imperialism that actively seeks out opportunities for war to invest in. [206]
Meanwhile, 1942 June 2, The BBC reports that 700,000 Jews have been exterminated
End Notes Chapter Fourteen – Pearl Harbor
- Marle Klooz; Evelyn Wiley, (1944),“Events leading up to World War II – Chronological History,” 78th Congress, 2d Session – House Document N. 541, Director: Humphrey, Richard A., Washington: US Government Printing Office, p. 31
- Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan.(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2002), p. 648. ISBN 0-674-00334-9.Marius Berthus Jansen was an American academic, historian, and Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Princeton University
204a. The Silver Shirt Legion of America was a white supremacist organization founded by William Dudley Pelley (1890-1965) in 1933
- Levering, Ralph, American opinion and the Russian alliance,1939-1945, (Publication date 1976)
“HARRY S. TRUMAN: DECISIVE PRESIDENT” – The New York Times, Dec 27, 1972
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/27/archives/harry…
- George Soule, “From Profits by the Billion” The New Republic, (January 7, 1946) A report on war prosperity accomplished by facts and figures, are contained in the series of articles of which this is the first. https://newrepublic.com/article/93520/profits-the-billion. “Profits, by common consent, are the heart of the “private-enterprise system.” What are the facts regarding them? How big were war profits? What was done with them? What is the financial position of business now that peace has come? Can higher wages be paid? Can business finance full production and full employment? Can it survive a depression? Are profits, as many corporations say, nobody’s business but their own, or are they of public concern? What Was Done with the Profits? The extra profits made by corporations were not, for the most part, distributed to their shareholders. They salted away profits at the rate of nearly $1 billion a year, and came out of the war period with a total addition to surplus of $4,925 million [nearly $5 billion]. It is probable that smaller concerns held back an even larger percentage.”
J. Jankovsky-Novak aka Jay Janson spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh, and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist unaccusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: [email protected] .
