War Plan Orange refers to a series of United States Joint Army and Navy Board war plans for dealing with a possible war with Japan during the years between the First and Second World Wars. It failed to foresee the significance of the technological changes to naval warfare including the submarine, air support and aircraft carriers, and although the Battle of Midway was important, and the US Navy did "island-hop" to regain lost territory, there was no culminating "showdown" battle as anticipated by Plan Orange.
Europe first, also known as Germany first, was the key element of the grand strategy agreed upon by the United States and the United Kingdom during World War II. According to this policy, the United States and the United Kingdom would use the preponderance of their resources to subdue Nazi Germany in Europe first. Simultaneously, they would fight a holding action against Japan in the Pacific, using fewer resources. After the defeat of Germany—considered the greatest threat to the UK and the Soviet Union—all Allied forces could be concentrated against Japan.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States military Joint Army and Navy Board developed a number of color-coded war plans that outlined potential U.S. strategies for a variety of hypothetical war scenarios. The plans, developed by the Joint Planning Committee, were officially withdrawn in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II in favor of five Rainbow Plans developed to meet the threat of a two-ocean war against multiple enemies.
The Casablanca Conference or Anfa Conference was held at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, French Morocco, from January 14 to 24, 1943, to plan the Allied European strategy for the next phase of World War II. In attendance were United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. Also attending were the sovereign of Morocco Sultan Muhammad V and representing the Free French forces Generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, but they played minor roles and were not part of the military planning. USSR general secretary Joseph Stalin declined to attend, citing the ongoing Battle of Stalingrad as requiring his presence in the Soviet Union.
The Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory is the argument that U.S. Government officials had advance knowledge of Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Ever since the Japanese attack, there has been debate as to how and why the United States had been caught off guard, and how much and when American officials knew of Japanese plans for an attack. In September 1944, John T. Flynn, a co-founder of the non-interventionist America First Committee, launched a Pearl Harbor counter-narrative when he published a forty-six page booklet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor.
The New Order of Europe was the political order which Nazi Germany wanted to impose on the conquered areas under its dominion. The establishment of the Neuordnung had already begun long before the start of World War II, but was publicly proclaimed by Adolf Hitler in 1941: "The year 1941 will be, I am convinced, the historical year of a great European New Order!"
The First Washington Conference, also known as the Arcadia Conference, was held in Washington, D.C., from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942.
The Allies of World War II were a group of countries that together opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War (1939–1945). The Allies promoted the alliance as a means to defeat Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, Fascist Italy and their allies.
The McCollum memo, also known as the Eight Action Memo, was a memorandum, dated October 7, 1940, sent by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, who "provided the president with intelligence reports on [Japan]... [and oversaw] every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House" in his capacity as director of the Office of Naval Intelligence's Far East Asia section. It was sent to Navy Captains Dudley Knox, who agreed with the actions described within the memo, and Walter Stratton Anderson.
The military history of the United States in World War II covers the war against the Axis Powers, starting with the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. During the first two years of World War II, the United States had maintained formal neutrality as made official in the Quarantine Speech delivered by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, while supplying Britain, the Soviet Union, and China with war material through the Lend-Lease Act which was signed into law on 11 March 1941, as well as deploying the US military to replace the British forces stationed in Iceland. Following the "Greer incident" Roosevelt publicly confirmed the "shoot on sight" order on 11 September 1941, effectively declaring naval war on Germany and Italy in the Battle of the Atlantic. In the Pacific Theater, there was unofficial early US combat activity such as the Flying Tigers.
During the Second World War (1939–1945), "Arsenal of Democracy" was the slogan used by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a radio broadcast delivered on 29 December 1940. Roosevelt promised to help the United Kingdom fight Nazi Germany by selling them military supplies while the United States stayed out of the actual fighting. The president announced that intent a year before the Attack on Pearl Harbor, at a time when Germany had occupied much of Europe and threatened Britain.
The following events occurred in December 1941:
The Third Washington Conference was held in Washington, D.C from May 12 to May 25, 1943. It was a World War II strategic meeting between the heads of government of the United Kingdom and the United States. It was the third conference of the 20th century, but the second conference that took place during the US involvement in the Second World War. The delegations were headed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, respectively.
A series of events led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation's military forces planned for in the 1920s. The expansion of American territories in the Pacific had been a threat to Japan since the 1890s, though the real tension did not begin until the rejection of Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal and the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941. The U.S. military suffered 18 ships damaged or sunk, and 2,400 people were killed. Its most significant consequence was the entrance of the United States into World War II. The US had previously been officially neutral but subsequently entered the Pacific War, the Battle of the Atlantic and the European theatre of war. Following the attack, the US interned 120,000 Japanese Americans, 11,000 German Americans, and 3,000 Italian Americans.
This is a timeline of events that occurred during World War II in 1943.
In the beginning of World War II the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with the largest number of warships built and with naval bases across the globe. Totalling over 15 battleships and battlecruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines. With a massive merchant navy, about a third of the world total, it also dominated shipping. The Royal Navy fought in every theatre from the Atlantic, Mediterranean, freezing Northern routes to Russia and the Pacific ocean.
The diplomatic history of World War II includes the major foreign policies and interactions inside the opposing coalitions, the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers, between 1939 and 1945. The military history of the war is covered at World War II. The prewar diplomacy is covered in Causes of World War II and International relations (1919–1939). For the postwar see Cold War.
The third presidential term of Franklin D. Roosevelt began on January 20, 1941, when he was once again inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, and the fourth term of his presidency ended with his death on April 12, 1945. Roosevelt won a third term by defeating Republican nominee Wendell Willkie in the 1940 United States presidential election. He remains the only president to serve for more than two terms. Unlike his first two terms, Roosevelt's third and fourth terms were dominated by foreign policy concerns, as the United States became a belligerent in World War II in December 1941.
The foreign policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1933 to 1945, under the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first and second terms, and the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, third and fourth terms. Roosevelt kept personal control of foreign-policy in the White House, and for that he depended heavily on Henry Morgenthau Jr., Sumner Welles, and Harry Hopkins. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cordell Hull handled routine matters; the president ignored Hull on most major issues. Roosevelt was an internationalist, and Congress favored more isolationist solutions, so there was considerable tension before the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. During the war years, treaties were few, and diplomacy played a secondary role in high-level negotiations with the Allies of World War II, especially Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin.
