U. S. GRIMLY JOINS WORLD WAR LINEUP
Series of Naval Successes Is Cheering to Washington After Solons Answer Nazi Challenge
Hitler Tells of Pledge For Battle to Finish With United States
BERLIN, Dec. 11. ─ (Official Radio Received by (AP) ─ Adolf Hitler declared war against the United States today and announced that Germany, Italy and Japan were pledged in a new alliance to fight it together to a finish.
In an address to the Reichstag which lasted an hour and a half, Hitler repeatedly and violently attacked President Roosevelt, and expressed, on behalf of "the German people," relief and satisfaction with the Japanese attack on America.
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Before he spoke the declaration of war was handed ─ at noon, Berlin time (3 a.m., EST) ─ to George L. Brandt, charge d'affaires, by Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister.
The declaration, which was not made public until it was announced by Hitler, did not mention Japan, but accused the United States of acts of war at sea against Germany.
It concluded: "The Reich government therefore severs diplomatic relations with the United States of America and declares that under these circumstances, brought about by President Roosevelt, Germany also, commencing today, regards herself in a state of war with the United States of America."
Gets Passport
Brandt was handed his passport at 4:20 p. m. (7:20 a. m. M. S. T.) after Hitler had started speaking in the Kroll opera house.
A number of U. S. citizens in Germany were placed under arrest, a Wilhelmstrasse spokesman declaring that as many were being taken into custody in Germany as German citizens were arrested in the United States. This, by German count, is 400.
A number of Americans, however, were said to remain at liberty. Most American newspaper correspondents were taken from police stations to a suburban Berlin villa. Their treatment, it was states, would depend on the treatment of German journalists arrested in America.
New Pack
One main new fact in Hitler's speech, aside from the announcement of the war declaration, was his disclosure of the new three-power accord which supplements the tripartite pact under which Hitler declared and pledges Germany, Italy and Japan to make common war against the U.S. and Britain, to fight "to a victorious end with all available means;" to "bring about a just order" later and to refrain from concluding a separate peace "without complete mutual consent."
Ceremony Is Lacking as Congress Votes to Fight All Axis
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11. ─ (AP) ─ A series of hammering and destructive blows at Nippon's navy were announced today as Congress took up Hitler's gage of battle and put the United States formally into the war against Germany and Italy.
Official communiques said that:
1. Army bombers sand the 20,000-ton Japanese battleship Haruna off the northern coast of Luzon, Philippine islands.
2. The American forces protecting Wake island, tiny stepping stone halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, repulsed four enemy attacks, and sank a light cruiser and a destroyer from the air.
3. Navy patrol planes scored bomb hits on a Japanese battleship off Luzon, and, in the words of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet, left her "badly damaged."
This battleship was unnamed, but was of the Kongo class, the same class as the Haruna. There are four ships in this category. All were built before the last World War. They were rebuilt during the period of 1926-30 and made more formidable, however.
No Opposition
Without a single vote of opposition, both houses of Congress today passed resolutions making the United States a full and formal participant in the world-wide fight against Axis domination.
President Roosevelt, who had asked for the declaration immediately upon learning that Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States, signed the war resolutions as soon as they were received at the White House.
Thus the tremendous line-up of the world powers for the prosecution of World War No. 2 was complete except for one major exception. Russia, which is at war with Germany and Italy, has yet to declare herself against Japan, but Secretary of State Hull expressed confidence that she would do so.
