07 December 2006

Shirer's View of Events

7th of December holds special resonance for many Americans, for on that day in 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, which eventually led to the United States of America joining Britain and the Soviet Union in the battle against Nazi Germany.

Roosevelt was able to convince the Congress to declare war on Japan, fortunately for FDR Hitler's reckless nature got the better of him and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, thus sealing their fate.

As William Shirer sums it up:

“Adolf Hitler's reckless promise to Japan had been made during a series of talks with Yosuke Matsuoka, the pro-axis Japanese Foreign Minister, in the spring of 1941 just before the German attack on Russia. The captured German minutes of the meeting enable us to trace the development of another one of Hitler's monumental miscalculations. They and other Nazi documents of the period show the Fuehrer too ignorant, Goering too arrogant and Ribbentrop too stupid to comprehend the potential military strength of the United States - a blunder which had been made in Germany during the First World War by Wilhelm II, Hindenburg and Ludendorff”

[William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Mandarin Paperbacks, 1995, p. 870]

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