12. The Myth Spreads Despite Its Irrationality
FDR saw Nazi Germany as the world’s greatest menace, and was busily rearming and preparing the country for what he deemed the inevitability of war against fascism. However, there is no causal nexus between allowing the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor, and the US going to war against Nazi Germany. It was Germany that FDR wanted to fight, not Japan. The Japanese attacking the US would have led to war against Japan, not war against Germany.
The US ended up in a war against Germany only because Hitler, to the consternation of his generals, gratuitously declared war on the US when he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose from doing so. Absent that irrational decision on Hitler’s part, there is little reason to think that Congress would have declared war against Germany after the attack on Pearl Harbor, since it was the Japanese, not the Germans, who had attacked us.
