I could be mistaken , but I'm pretty sure that the treaty between Germany and Japan stipulated that Germany would declare war ONLY IF JAPAN WAS ATTACKED. Since Japan attacked the U.S. FIRST, Germany was not required to declare war on America.
You are correct. "Is attacked" is the probably universal English translation. The German version reads "angegriffen wird" and the italian "venisse attaccata". I don't know Japanese, but may investigate that version later. So now we can ask, just exactly what do "angegriffen" and "attaccata" mean? Or even the English "attack". How did the signers understand the words? The word is not defined in the document itself. "Attack", as in 'launch a violent military assault' is one interpretation, and seems to be the first choice in dictionaries for eingreifen and attaccare. But rare are the words of any language with a single meaning, even though context narrows them down. Besides "attack", eingreifen is also translated as "intervene", "interfere"; and attaccare as "engage", or "assault" either physically or verbally, the same as the English "attack". There are tamer translations as well. I believe the signers intended the word to mean a direct physical attack. I also believe that, psychologically, they would have viewed a declaration of war as the equivalent of such. In the case of Japan, the U.S. had been conducting an economic, resource, and trade war for some time already. The Japanese direct physical "assault" (attack) was intended to loosen the United States' "interfering" (begreifende) "attachment" (attaccato) to Japan's desired resources and trade partners.
While the movie "Saving Private Ryan" is a fiction , it is based on the true story of Private Frederick "Fritz" Niland. After the "Sullivan Incident" where 5 brothers were killed when their ship was torpedoed and sunk in the Pacific. It was decided that groups of brothers would no longer be in a single unit. Hence, the Niland Brothers were spit up and assigned to other units. The War Department received a report that 3 Niland Brothers had been killed in combat. As the only remaining son, Private Frederick Niland was rescued from Normandy and sent home . A year later, it turned out that one of the 3 brothers, was NOT K.I.A. but had been in a Japanese P.O.W. camp in Burma. He too returned home. PS: In honor of the Sullivan Brothers, in 1995 built and commissioned the U.S. Navy named a guided missile destroyer, The Sullivans.
Anyone remember the WW11 Vets attacking the WW1 vets in DC.? Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur ,etc led the way.
I remember reading about this in uncensored accounts of our domestic history. It is disgusting. Promises made to our brave soldiers were not kept and some of those 'heroes' you cite led the way in knocking them down. I think truth is very often painful.
Yes at times the truth hurts. Then again, they are taught to follow orders, but this is one of those times they may have done better to remember the other part of their oath they took, " both foreign and domestic" kind of thing.
The Chindits. A army that fought behind the Japanese lines. Mostly forgotten about now. Chindits - Wikipedia