[Condor51]

"...We obviously needed to defeat Germany as well."

With all due respect, 'we' didn't need to defeat Germany - England & Russia did. And if FDR wasn't illegally giving arms & aid to GB from the get-go (in violation of the Neutrality Act) our ships wouldn't have been attacked by the U-Boats and Raiders.

Which also brings up WHY Japan attacked us in the first place; FDR's asia policy was openly hostile to Japan as FDR pretty much declared Economic War them a long time before 1941. 'He' was choking them off from vital necessities for survival (like oil & rubber) and it guaranteed that they'd respond - and not with a nasty letter.

Anyway, after Dec 7th Germany was forced compelled to declare war on us do to their pact with Japan.

NOTE: I'm not justifying anything that Germany or Japan did (I still HATE detest the Japs). My point is that FDR was determined to get us into the war one way or another. And like a typical DemoncRAT -- the Law, Congress or 'the peoples will' be damned, he wanted us in and he got us in.

[Law is not justice but process]

With all due respect we DID need to defeat Germany. Any nation that believed in human rights needed to defeat Nazi Germany. Auschwitz is the one-word justification for our need to defeat Germany.

Ironically, we needed to defeat the USSR as well. The entire moral argument for war on Germany also applied to the USSR. Someone I know once expressed it as "we allied ourselves with the second worst dictator of the 20th Century [Stalin] to defeat the third worst [Hitler] and inadvertently paved the way for the worst [Mao]."