Were the Axis Powers really obligated to attack USSR and USA?
Upvote:8
As you asked, They did not have a treaty that "made" them attack their targets at specific times (they did have treaties of mutual protection though).
But to answer why they did, Germany at that time figured that they had Britain bottled up and blockaded so it could do no harm to them, and they already controlled all of mainland Europe. They attacked the USSR because they knew if the US, Britain and the USSR all started fighting them, they would lose (which they rightly feared seeing the outcome of WWI); So they saw the Russians as the weakest link in the group. Britain was protected by being an island, the US was too far away, but the USSR was poorly equiped, corrupt, and was slow to mobilize. They only lost to the USSR because of the climate and that when the USSR actually mobilized they pushed the Germans back and ended the German blitzkrieg they had been running since 1939.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor for almost the same reasons. They, like the Germans, were out of options. They had been trying to get a treaty with the US for two years, but it always fell through. They weren't surrounded like the Germans, but they didn't have their own oil supplies. So they decided to attack the US fleet in the Pacific and hoped to ruin it, so that they could take over US islands in the Pacific and gain oil and other resources it needed.
Japan prepared for war. On 20 November it presented an interim proposal as its final offer. It called for the end of American aid to China and the supply of oil and other resources to Japan. In exchange they promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw their forces from their threatening positions in southern Indochina. The American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers. That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China, or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force; the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.
To Sum it up: Germany thought the USSR would be a push over for them, just like it was in WWI. Japan thought the US would back down and not continue the scene they were causing even before Pearl Harbor.
EDIT: The reason Japan didn't help Germany attack the USSR was because Japan already fought them in the decades leading up to WWII, and had a peace agreement with them. But it sounds like there is a misconception: Germany and Japan weren't allies because they were friends with each other and decided they would mutually defend each other, they were really just allies because they had similar goals and good politics in their respective countries to have an ally in Europe and Asia. They really didn't have much internal agreement at all with each other. You seem to think they had the relationship of Italy and Germany in WWII where they were coordinating efforts, Japan was really an outsider in the Axis powers, just like the USSR in the allied powers
More post
- 📝 Why were the British so reluctant to allow Jewish migration to Palestine?
- 📝 In the US Constitution, did the Three-Fifths Compromise apply to Native Americans?
- 📝 Were there political parties in ancient Greece?
- 📝 Was American slavery economically advantageous primarily due to being able to also sell offspring?
- 📝 How were British personnel employed in the colonies after independence
- 📝 Did the Yuan Dynasty ever occupy Hainan?
- 📝 Was there risk of revolution in France at end of World War I?
- 📝 Was Pythagoras against traditional/contemporary Greek education?
- 📝 How do we know that prostitutes were very common/popular in Corinth around Jesus' time?
- 📝 How did Egypt become a protectorate of the British empire?
- 📝 Morse code is a ternary human-optimised code, is there a binary, non-machine optimised code?
- 📝 Did Japanese officers refuse to engage in kamikaze attacks?
- 📝 Why did the the US House of Representatives stop reading George Washington's farewell address on his birthday?
- 📝 Why didn't the Roman Princeps restructure or dismantle the Praetorian Guard?
- 📝 Did any civil resistence against the allied occupation of Japan exist?
- 📝 Were the lands of the Teutonic Knights part of the Holy Roman Empire?
- 📝 What was the Nove / Millar debate, how is it important to the historiography of the Soviet Union?
- 📝 What was the biggest shipbuilding centre in Europe during the Second Industrial Revolution?
- 📝 How was the first official geographical border established in Europe?
- 📝 What was the perception of the average British person of the Boston Tea Party?
- 📝 Why is the border between Myanmar and Thailand so long?
- 📝 Newton, Galileo, and Gravity
- 📝 What happens to interned military personnel if war is declared post-internment?
- 📝 Where does Akbar the Great's "Great" come from?
- 📝 Why did archery not make a comeback when armor was phased out in the 18th century?
- 📝 Were poor Georgians mainly "neutral or friendly" to the Union in 1864?
- 📝 What kind of wood was the standard decking for aircraft carriers in World War 2?
- 📝 Nationalisation during wartime in the West: With or without compensation?
- 📝 How have terms of English governance of Ireland been viewed in history?
- 📝 Did Truman threaten a nuclear strike if the Soviet Union didn't withdraw from Iran in 1946?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Were the Axis Powers really obligated to attack USSR and USA?
- 📝 Why were schoolchildren in the USA taught virtually nothing about the Holocaust during the fifties and sixties?
- 📝 How did diplomats of the Axis powers travel and communicate among themselves in World War II
- 📝 Did the Founding Fathers of the USA really make a distinction between a Republic and a Democracy (and despised the latter)?
- 📝 What benefits were there to the USA of developing both Uranium and Plutonium bombs in World War 2?
- 📝 Did teenagers in the USA in the 1960s and 1950s really engage in dangerous, reckless driving to this extent?
- 📝 Why were the military and civil powers split in the Late Roman Empire?
- 📝 How did the Apollo-Soyuz test project affect the relationship between the USSR and USA during the cold war?
- 📝 To what extent is a coincidence that the Dec. of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the USA Dec. of Independence were approved so close in time?
- 📝 Can we meaningfully compare the poverty levels in the USSR to those in the USA at the same time and to those in the USA today?
- 📝 Why did relations between the USA and the USSR break down in 1945?
- 📝 What were the technological differences between Japan and the USA in World War 2?
- 📝 How did the USSR manage to innovate in an environment characterized by government censorship and high bureaucracy?
- 📝 Why didn't the US and USSR jam each other's early-warning radar?
- 📝 When and how did the USA and the UK become allies?
- 📝 Why were helmets and other body armour not commonplace in the 1800s?
- 📝 In the "Christmas truce" of 1914 were there any football (soccer) matches between British and German troops?
- 📝 Why were the drawings of Colossus burnt after WW2 and why was its very existence "of course" kept secret?
- 📝 Why were British ships not of the same quality as French and Spanish ships until the latter part of the 18th century?
- 📝 How were the cities of Milan and Bruges spared by the Black Death?
- 📝 Were Russians in the cold war era USA discriminated against for their ethnicity?
- 📝 Were there any Germans in Japan after the surrender of Germany in May, 1945 and if so, what happened to them?
- 📝 In WWII, what were the major differences in tank combat on the eastern and western fronts?
- 📝 Why were Royal Navy ships forbidden to attack the ARA Veinticinco de Mayo in Argentinian waters?
- 📝 Why are the USA and Canada's states border so straight?
- 📝 Were Alexander the Great and Hephaestion lovers?
- 📝 How many lives were estimated to have been saved by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?
- 📝 What were the EMP effects, if any, of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- 📝 When and where were the first coins made showing the currency or a face value?
- 📝 Why were the Germans and Russians so fixated on an unlikely "separate peace" in 1945?