And that changes the fact that Germany declared war in the United States... how?
US ships also fired on no German submarines before the first American ships were torpedoed.
Technically true, but, if you will forgive me, misleading. American destroyers were hunting for U-boats, pinging them with sonar, and then signaling Brittish ships to come do the actual shooting. Despite the fact no ordinace is launched, this is an act of war. Its a matter of the historical record that Roosevelt deeply wanted to get involved in WWII. On 31 October 1941 (note date), the USS Reuben James was torpedoed by German submarine U-552 near Iceland. It was escorting convoy HX-156, full of war material, to England, (a violation of neutrality and an act of war) when it interfered with a wolfpack attack by positioning itself between it and the convoy. A torpedo put her down. Had the circumstances not been such a blatant violation of international and American law, FDR would have pressed for a declarion of war based on this incident, as well as the Greer incident, and many others. That he did not tacitly acknowledges that it was the US that declared war on Germany - just without the courtesy of a declaration, (isn't that what we allegedly got so mad at the Japanese for?)
"forced Japan into war with us - as he had to know from Purple and Magic intercepts, Germany was obligated to declare war on us if that happened."
Japan was under no obligation at all to go to war with the United States.
Got a news flash for you - America was at war with Japan 4 DAYS before the Pearl Harbor attack. America was part of a secret allieance with Britain, Nationalist China, and the Dutch, (the ABCD pact) that commited all parties to share intelligence, resources, bases, AND committed all parties to the pact to go to war together if Japan committed any number of acts, including having military forces cross various lines of longitude and latitude. On December 3, Dutch instalation in the East Indies detected the Japanese naval force steaming for Pearl Harbor and notified Washington of the same, invoking the war clause of the ABCD pact.
It was a decision made largely out of their sense of national honor.
It was an inevitable response to the 8 action items contained in the McCollum memo - all 8 were impimented by FDR with the express purpose of leaving Japan with no choice but to go to war.
As I stated before, Germany was under NO treaty obligation to go to war with the United States. The Tripartied Agreement contained no such language, and there is absolutely no evidence that there were any secret agreements between Japan and Germany/Italy to that effect.
True, but we were not only shipping munitions, fuel, and war ships (ON CREDIT!) to his adversary, (an act of war), American pilots were flying American planes (PBY Catalinas, although marked as British) on combat missions against German ships. What did he have to lose, verses gaining the freedon to torpedo the supply convoys all the way back to the ports.
"numerous POWs deliberately starved to death by Eisenhower."
Ah, the claims of James Bracques. Mr. Bacques work has been discredited as a work of fiction. If you really like fictional accounts of war, I'd suggest reading Killer Angles.
You may wish to read John Keegan's take on those claims.
Bracques' work definately has its flaws - but so do his rebutters. this review puts it better than I can:
"This may seem like a very obscure debate but it goes to the heart of what we know, or think we know, about WW II, as for example the relative fighting effectiveness of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. It makes a big difference whether a million soldiers surrender, or die fighting. It also makes a considerable difference whether the Soviets held a million foreigners prisoner and denied the fact, or not. Our history books are full of what amount to vague guesses, many of them wrong.
What is particularly disturbing is that Bacque has since made even larger claims, about postwar starvation of German civilians (in his later book Crimes and Mercies), and these claims have been handled in even less convincing fashion (mainly silence) by his critics. We know that there was starvation in Germany as late as 1947 and 1948, and we know that the official numbers put out by the occupation governments of the time are absurd and wrong. We can not trust Bacque or his critics to get at the truth by themselves. We are left with the uncomfortable suspicion that millions of people may well have died, in part at least due to official American, British, or French policy, and that the truth of their deaths has remained hidden -- a vast campaign of revenge against the German people. But we do not know this, and the real explanation might easily prove (like the missing death notices) much less scandalous."
