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Abstract

On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The following day Britain and the United States declared war against Japan. Three days later Hitler and Mussolini announced hostilities against the United States. The European conflict had been transformed into a wider struggle between the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo ‘Axis’ and the Anglo-American-Russian ‘Grand Alliance’, which dominated the disparate group of states that Roosevelt somewhat optimistically called the ‘United Nations’. But the ‘world war’ remained the sum of distinct, yet interrelated, conflicts fought out simultaneously in Europe, North Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the concomitant requirements of often competing, often poorly coordinated, theatres of war checked the coherence of Allied strategy from the outset.

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© 2003 P. G. A. Orders

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Orders, P.G.A. (2003). Defeat and Recovery. In: Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the Challenge of the United States, 1939–46. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289079_4

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