The President of the United States had a strategic dilemma throughout the beginning of World War II. President Roosevelt secretly aided the British in their war against Nazi Germany. I did not want war with Japan, because he could stop this if I had to confront Germany.
The American public did not share his sense of urgency to help Europe. The European war seemed distant and absent. The American public blamed the Europeans for this war.China, where forgotten during the invasion of Poland, the fall of France, and the Battle of Britain, most Americans seemed to be the war that the United States must fight, if they had to fight.
The American public was tremendously shocked by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was seen as a cowardly and treacherous attack at a United States of America nothing prepared. While President Roosevelt was accused of having allowed the attack had happened in December 1941, the American public united against Japan in a way that a week before would have seemed impossible.
For Roosevelt, it was the wrong war at the wrong time. If in 1941, Roosevelt had gone to Congress with a declaration of war against Germany, when they overcame the Japanese everywhere, he would have lost the crucial support of the Congress.
Hitler gave the answer. On December 11, 1941, declared war on the United States of America. Their U-boats attacked American ships in the Caribbean to Iceland, sinking a large amount of new vessels in a happy moment for the Germans.
Even with the German declaration, Roosevelt found himself unable to honor agreements made with the first Churchill defeating Nazi Germany. The weak position of the allied forces made the majority of men and material would have to go to the Pacific. The commander of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Ernest King, was constantly sent to operations in the Pacific, while George C. Marshall agreed with Roosevelt that Germany was the main threat.
In the first year of war, the Pacific received the majority of men, ships, tanks and planes that went out of production lines in the U.S.. Especially after November 1942 (the landings in North Africa) increasing the potential for the U.S. war was sent to Europe. The Army General Douglas MacArthur, Vice Admiral William Halsey and Admiral Chester Nimitz complained, and require more men and more equipment for the Pacific theater.
What nobody could have imagined in 1942 was that the Americans revolutionize the concept of total war. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had secretly asked the members of his team to convert America into a war footing in 1939. Marshall had developed a plan that would convert a highly motivated civilian population in armed force of twelve million and enough material for a range of 2000 divisions.
In June 1944, when the United States could support the Normandy landings and a month later operations in southern France, a major amphibious operation was carried out in the Mariana Islands. While the Japanese could only build two aircraft carriers and seven light aircraft carriers, the United States had the capacity to build more than 100 carriers of all types during the war, and over 100,000 aircraft.
