ABSTRACT
In nearly every quarter of the globe the world was at war on this November 30, 1941. In Europe, the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria had been followed by the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the ill-fated Munich conference later that year. In September 1939, the Wehrmacht opened the Second World War by attacking Poland from the west while the Red Army beset it from the east, thus achieving a fourth partition of Poland. America was neutral, but there was little doubt where her sentiments and interests lay. There was support for embattled Britain and sympathy for the Chinese. All this expressed itself in a US embargo on the scrap metal and iron needed to feed resource-poor Japan's armaments industry. The United States would cooperate in the sale of commodities to Japan, restoring commercial relations, supplying Japan with "a requisite quantity of oil", and the United States would take no action prejudicial to peace talks between China and Japan.
