We cover a lot in this episode, including the fall of many neutral countries, Italy and Japan officially aligning with Germany, and preparations made by the Corps before the US officially entered the war. On December 8th, President Roosevelt delivered his famous "Day of Infamy speech." It's included at the end of the episode.
No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s-breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists. No doubt it would take a long time. I expected terrible forfeits in the East; but all this would be merely a passing phase. United we could subdue everybody else in the world. Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end.
Silly people—and there were many, not only in enemy countries—might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins, I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.” Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
― Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War
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References:
Beevor, A. (n.d.). The Second World War. United States: Little, Brown.
Commager, H. S., Miller, D. L. (2010). The Story of World War II: Revised, Expanded, and Updated from the Original T. United Kingdom: Simon & Schuster.
Davis, K. C. (2020). Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy. United States: Henry Holt and Company (BYR).
Dix, A. (2014). The Norway Campaign and the Rise of Churchill 1940. United Kingdom: Pen & Sword Military.
Churchill, W. (1948). The Second World War: The gathering storm. United States: Cooperation Publishing Company [by] Houghton Mifflin.
Dower, J. W. (2000). Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. United States: W. W. Norton.
Fanning, W. J. (1997). The Origin of the Term “Blitzkrieg”: Another View. The Journal of Military History, 61(2), 283–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953968
Foreign Trade of the United States in the Fiscal Year 1921/22-1931. (1922). United States: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Förster, J. (2004). From “Blitzkrieg” to “Total War”: Germany’s War in Europe. In R. Chickering, S. Förster, & B. Greiner (Eds.), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Publications of the German Historical Institute, pp. 89-108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139052382.006
Glassheim, E. (2016). Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland. United States: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Gooch, J. (2020). Mussolini's War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse: 1935-1943. United Kingdom: Pegasus Books.
King, T. (2017). World War 2: The Most Important Events of World War II. (n.p.):
Masato Shizume, 2009. "The Japanese Economy during the Interwar Period: Instability in the Financial System and the Impact of the World Depression," Bank of Japan Review Series 09-E-2, Bank of Japan.
Moorhouse, R. (2019). First to Fight: The Polish War 1939. United Kingdom: Random House.
Overy, R. (2011). The Third Reich: A Chronicle. United Kingdom: Quercus Publishing.
Toland, J. (2003). The Rising Sun; the Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. United Kingdom: Random House Publishing Group.
Traverso, E. (2016). Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. United Kingdom: Verso Books.
Van de Ven, H. (2018). China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China. United States: Harvard University Press.