The United States in World War II Lesson 34

America Moves Toward War Part 1

Back in America, the people still did not want to get involved. President Roosevelt knew that the allies needed help. So he talked Congress into allowing the allies to buy American arms. They would have to pay cash and carry them back on their own ships.

Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, March, 1941 allowing America to lend or lease arms to countries that were vital to American security. The U.S. Navy began escorting British ships. Hitler began ordering his submarines to sink any cargo ship.

President Roosevelt compared it to “lending a garden hose to a next-door neighbor whose house is on fire.”

From the spring through the fall of 1941, individual surface attacks by individual U-boats gave way to what became known as the wolf pack attack. At night groups of up to 40 submarines patrolled areas in the North Atlantic where convoys could be expected. Wolf packs were successful in sinking as much as 350,000 tons of shipments in a single month.

Japan had begun expanding in 1931 when they took over Manchuria in Northern China. Then they went after the rest of China. The Japanese then decided to go after the European colonies in Southeast Asia.

The Americans had found out about this by cracking a Japanese secret code. They were worried about losing the Philippine Islands and Guam. The U.S. began sending aid and advisors to the Chinese. When the Japanese took over French Indochina in July, 1941, Roosevelt cut off oil shipments to them.

The United States refused to recognize Japanese conquests in Asia and imposed an embargo on exports of oil and steel to Japan, which Japan desperately needed.

Roosevelt began planning for the war he was certain would come. He proposed to extend the term of draftees passed in the House of Representatives by only one vote.

While Congress voted on the extension of the draft, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly in August, 1941, at a summit aboard the battleship USS Augusta.

Roosevelt and Churchill secretly met and signed a declaration called the Atlantic Charter. The Atlantic Charter upheld free trade and allowed people the right to choose their own government. Although Churchill hoped for a military commitment, he settled for a joint declaration of war aims, called the Atlantic Charter. Both Britain and the US pledged the following: collective security, disarmament, self- determination, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas.

Roosevelt disclosed to Churchill that he couldn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, but “he would wage war” and do “everything” to “force an incident.”

The Atlantic Charter became the basis of a new document called “A Declaration of the United Nations.” The term United Nations was suggested by Roosevelt to express the common purpose of the Allies, those nations that had fought the Axis powers.

On September 4 th, 1941, a U-boat fired on a U.S Navy destroyer. Roosevelt told the U.S. Navy to shoot on any German submarines on sight. This was somewhat of an undeclared war at sea with the Germans.