AKA: "The Wrong War, at the Wrong Place, etc."
Recently, on Dean's World, Dale Eddy said cited a quotation that Germany and Italy declared war on America after FDR had "preemptively declared war on Germany and Italy."
This turns out not to be the case. Germany, followed by Italy, declared war on the US on December 11. Congress returned the favor that afternoon.
What is interesting is that -as Dean observed in the above comment thread- the United States had agreed with Great Britain (before the US became a belligerent) that Germany was the primary foe. In other words, the US and the UK had agreed that Germany would be the primary objective of Allied strategy.
The reasoning behind that priority was quite simple: Germany was an advanced industrialized power controlling most of the European continent at the time. Recall that Europe was (and is) one of the leading industrial regions of the world. On the other hand, Japan -while increasing her industrial base many times over- possessed merely a fraction of that capability. Simply put, Germany was, by any measure, the stronger foe.
Conclusion: destroy Japan, and Germany is unaffected. Destroy Germany, and the world is free to obliterate Japan.
So yes, we began our conquest of Japan in North Africa. What is not generally known is that there was, at the time, a lot of very elemental disagreement amongst the Allies about how we should go about that. The British Empire wanted North Africa, while a large part of the American military establishment wanted to directly invade Germany. Preferably in 1942.
We should also recall contemporary circumstances of that year: among other problems, the US Navy was just about completely unprepared for convoy duty. They had concentrated on building capital ships (battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers) with meager funds provided during the 20s and 30s, with the assumption that smaller craft classes could be quickly improvised during wartime. It proved to be a costly mistake. German U-boats experienced their greatest successes in the first half of 1942, along the US eastern seaboard; they called that period "the happy time."
If the Republicans had mimicked the modern Democratic Party, they would have roasted FDR for sending our sailors off to die in unprotected (or barely protected) convoys, for not giving them the tools they needed (destroyer escorts, escort carriers, corvettes, and so on) ahead of time, lying to the American people ("I'm not going to send American boys into any foreign wars"), and being diverted from the main enemy: Japan!
We also need to recall that, at the time, the only armies in contact with Germany were Great Britain (in North Africa) and the USSR., and the convoys to the USSR were taking a terrible beating. One convoy - PQ-17 -lost 22 out of 33 ships in July 1942. Still "But Russia, demanding more, had mobilized left-wing opinions in England and the United States behind the cry, "A second front --Now!" (SE Morison, The Two-Ocean War)
In other words: the administration wasn't prepared, rushed to war with "shoot on sight" orders to US Navy vessels in 1941, refused to use multi-lateral diplomacy to defuse the Pacific crisis (caused, I might add, by the United States aggressive unilateral action in freezing Japanese assets in America), and would not focus on those who had attacked us: Japan.
At the time (early to mid-1942) Great Britain didn't have the resources for a new theater of war, and the United States was -literally- just getting started. The British, therefore, had a strong influence on war aims. In this case, they refused to countenance an invasion of Europe in 1942. From their point of view, spring 1943 would be the earliest realistic time frame.
But here's the thing: the Americans (as I said above) wanted to mount an invasion of Europe in 1942. The British flatly refused:
"The Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially Admiral King and General Marshall, felt that if the British would not set a firm date for a major invasion of Europe, we were entitled to renege on the 'Beat Germany First' decision of 1941, to stop preparing for an invasion that might never take place, and concentrate on the Pacific war....
Not only MacArthur, but King, Marshall, and Secretary Stimson strongly opposed the launching of a North African invasion in 1942, as certain to divert and absorb men, ships, aircraft, and materiel that would postpone the direct cross-Channel assault indefinitely."(The Two-Ocean War, p. 221.)
Does any of this sound familiar, yet? It took the direct intervention of FDR, against the advice of the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet Admiral King, General Marshall, and Secretary of War Stimson, to direct that invasion of North Africa would take place.
There is, in fact, to this day a school of thought which claims that we wasted time, resources, and lives, with a "diversion" into North Africa, then Italy. They claim that a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 or early 1943 would have saved tens of thousands of lives, and significantly shortened the war. What this school has never explained is how the Allied armies would have developed the battle experience to meet, and beat, the best of the Wehrmacht; how they would have defeated the U-boat menace a year earlier than actually happened; or how they would have dealt with a still-powerful German Air Force in 1943. Recall that in a single mission over Germany in October 1943, the Eighth Air Force lost over sixty B-17 bombers over Germany during the Schweinfurt raid.
Now, lets scroll back just a tad, and recall the reasoning behind the "Germany First" decision: destroy Japan, and Germany is unaffected. Destroy Germany, and the world is free to obliterate Japan. Jump forward to today, then examine the following proposition:
destroy Al Queda, and Islamofascism is unaffected. Destroy Islamofascism , and the world is free to obliterate Al Queda.Food for thought...