"Until December 1941, the battlefield of the Second World War was exclusively European and Atlantic; thereafter it became also Asiatic and Pacific." Critically examine.

Answer:

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the war and joined the Asian and European conflicts into a single global struggle. The statement is broadly accurate, though fighting in Asia had in fact begun considerably earlier.

The case for the statement

• Until 1941 the main theatres were western and eastern Europe, North Africa and the Atlantic.
• Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought America into the war.
• Japan swiftly overran Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Burma and the Dutch East Indies.
• The Pacific became a major theatre, with Midway in 1942 the turning point.
• Germany's declaration of war on the United States linked the theatres formally.

A qualification

• Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937.
• The Sino-Japanese War had already caused enormous casualties before 1941.
• Some historians therefore date the war's true beginning to 1937 in Asia.
• The statement reflects a Eurocentric view of when the conflict became 'the war'.

How the theatres fused

• Germany declared war on the United States days after Pearl Harbor.
• American industrial power was then applied to both theatres simultaneously.
• The Grand Alliance of Britain, the USSR and the USA coordinated global strategy.
• Colonial troops from India and Africa fought in both hemispheres.

The statement is thus correct in its essentials but Eurocentric in emphasis. As historians increasingly stress, the Asian war was already several years old by December 1941; what changed was that American entry fused the separate conflicts into one genuinely global war.