More Events Leading up to War

In Europe and the Pacific

French Indochina

• 1940 Churchill becomes Prime Minister in GB

• Japan Looks to expand in French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia)

• Japan begins to negotiate for trade. US sold scrap iron and crude oil to Japan, but did not sell arms.

• 1940 FDR decides to stop trading those items with Japan. Japan want the ban lifted, but US says no way until they stop Aggression.

• Japan used the scrap iron to build ships.

Help for GB and France

• FDR encourages congress to repeal portion of Neutrality Act.

• The change would provide GB and France opportunity to purchase arms from the US on cash and carry basis.

• 1940 Executive agreement FDR agreed to lease 50 old destroyers to GB for 99 years.

• This helps GB and creates need for US to modernize Fleet.

• June 1940 France overrun by Germany.

• Spring of 1940 sees Germany overruns Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Holland, and Luxemburg.

The French Maginot Defense Fails.The Maginot Line was built between 1929 and 1940. It was built to protect France from her longtime enemy, Germany, and to defend the traditional invasion routes across her eastern frontier. The Maginot Line was built to provide time for the French army to mobilize and to make up for a potentially disastrous shortfall of manpower predicted for the late 1930s. Most of all, it was built to provide a place behind which the French army could hide, a so-called "Great Wall" of France where the nation could feel secure in its doctrine which would become known as the "Maginot" mentality.

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Battle of Britain and War Build-up

• Germany attempts to bomb GB into submission.

• Daily bombing and the use of the V-1 Rocket- the idea was an attempt to terrorize GB.

• 1940 FDR ask congress for

1. Naval build-up

2. First peace time selective service act

Commission Establish to Plan for Mobilization in Case of War

• Plan for transportation

• Manufacturing

• Food sullies for an arm

• Mobilize people to help

• Plan propaganda

• Must be able to move quick in case of war

Tripartite TreatyTripartite Treaty was a pact signed in Berlin, Germany on September 27, 1940 by Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy entering military alliance and officially founding the Axis Powers of World War II that opposed the Allied Powers.

The agreement formalized the Axis Powers' partnership, and can be read as a warning to the United States to remain neutral in World War II — or become involved in a war on two fronts.

Axis Powers want US to Fight a Two Front War

• Japan is in US trying to negotiate a trade agreement while at the same time planning war.

• Practiced attacking Pearl Harbor by making a model from Ford island.

• Pearl Harbor very shallow, and torpedoes from planes ran too deep. Planes had to fly low.

• Coordinated attack with machine guns and bombs.

Hideki Tojo in 1940 and held ministerial posts, where he urged an alliance with Germany and Italy against the Allied forces. Tojo became Prime Minister in 1941 and within two months ordered a surprise attack on U.S. naval forces in Hawaii. (The subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.)

After the war the Allies found Tojo guilty of war crimes and hanged him.

U.S. Isolationist

• Famous people fought against military build-up

• Charles Augustus Lindbergh creates America First Committee to prevent war

• This causes problems for FDR’s effort to prepare for war.

• Pearl Harbor Attacked Dec. 7, 1941