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Reviews of Books and Films
a major contribution, nevertheless, one that deserves
to exercise a major influence on the discussion of race
in the U.S.
RICHARD ALBA
State University of New York,
Albany
RICHARD F. HILL. Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor: Why the
United States Declared War on Germany. Boulder,
Colo.: Lynne Rienner. 2003. Pp. vii, 227. $49.95.
Richard F. Hill's book aims to show us that the
commencement of formal hostilities between the
United States and the Third Reich has been fundamentally misunderstood. We all believe that Adolf
Hitler declared war on the United States on December
11, 1941. Scholarly attention has focused on the Fuhrer's motives, since he had deliberately avoided an
outright rupture with the U.S. throughout 1941. Furthermore, the terms of the Axis alliance required
Germany to declare war only in case Japan was
attacked. Given that Hitler did declare war, historians
have viewed the American response as a mere formality. Hill contends otherwise.
Hill argues that Americans at all levels quickly came
to believe that the Germans were responsible for the
Pearl Harbor attack and very likely had led it as well.
Such beliefs produced an outpouring of anger toward
the Nazi regime, reversing almost overnight the longstanding public aversion to full-scale war against Germany. Moreover, Hitler did not in fact declare war on
the United States during his speech to the Reichstag
on December 11, as a clarification issued by Berlin the
next day established. Therefore "the German declaration was actually of little or no. real importance in
deciding U.S. foreign policy in December 1941." Instead the momentous decision to become a full belligerent rested on mistaken perceptions about Germany's
connection to the raid.
Hill provides massive evidence that, from President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and various congressional leaders to ordinary citizens, countless Americans assigned
Berlin responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hill samples opinion very widely; a quick count of his
newspaper citations in one chapter alone yielded twenty-seven different sources. He includes the views of
those across the full spectrum in the bitter debates
over foreign policy that wracked the United States
during the 1939-1941 crisis, although women's views
are underrepresented. Hill organizes his material by
theme. Each chapter addresses a separate aspect of his
overall argument: why Roosevelt did not ask for war
with Germany and Japan simultaneously, the perceived nature of German responsibility for Pearl Harbor, the possible involvement of German forces in the
attack, U.S. beliefs about the nature of the relationship
between Germany and Japan, and so forth. Hill concentrates almost exclusively on U.S. opinion between
December 1941 and early January 1942. This focus is
both a source of strength and a weakness. It has long
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
been realized that some Americans in 1941 thought
Germany must be responsible for the Pearl Harbor
raid. Hill demonstrates that such feelings were more
widespread and prominent than most of us have
acknowledged. But were such perceptions as decisively
important as he indicates?
The book's central weakness is its lack of context,
both explicitly in setting forth the case and implicitly in
making plain the significance of the subject. Hill's
inattention to the matter of the retracted German
declaration of war is astonishing. All we are told is that
a full account will come in a future book. I am no
expert on German history. But Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler makes a compelling case that a declaration of war against America was what the Fuhrer
intended. Moreover, even had Berlin rescinded the
"declaration," who in the United States would have
viewed the action as anything other than German
perfidy? It was not simply their underestimation of the
Japanese that predisposed Americans to see Nazi
handiwork at Pearl Harbor; it was a long history of
German aggression and duplicity. By slighting that
record, Hill conveys a mistaken impression.
And to what end? Hill concludes by insisting that his
evidence supplies a vital missing link in the chain of
reasoning needed to support the hoary "back door to
war" argument of Harry Elmer Barnes and others.
This argument holds that Roosevelt provoked war with
Japan because antiwar opinion stymied his efforts to
join the fight against Hitler. Hill now purports to show
us how an attack by Japan did prompt the U.S. into
declaring war on Hitler. FDR delayed a few days
merely to allow public anger to build and enlarge the
consensus he could expect in Congress. This logic, like
Hill's overall case for the significance of American
beliefs about German involvement in Pearl Harbor,
entirely fails to convince.
JAMES C. ·SCHNEIDER
University of Texas,
San Antonio
KATHLEEN E. R. SMITH. God Bless America: Tin Pan
Alley Goes to War. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky. 2003. Pp. xiii, 274. $45.00.
Wars have often prompted stirring songs in America.
The Civil War inspired "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"; World War I gave us "Over There." No
such blockbuster emerged in World War II, however,
and this troubled some American leaders at that time.
In her book, Kathleen E. R. Smith endeavors to
explain why no memorable song came forth in the
1940s. Concerned as they were with morale, bureaucrats in the Federal Office of War Information were
intensely interested in somehow bringing such a musical piece into existence. They made many efforts; all
failed. There were some songs of the era with a wide
popularity, and Smith acknowledges this. "Praise the
Lord and Pass the Ammunition" was perhaps the
biggest song of obvious war content, and it was widely
FEBRUARY 2004