Norway and Italy declare war on Japan

On 6 July 1945 the government of Norway, back in office in Oslo for a few weeks, announced that the Kingdom of Norway was in a state of war with Japan. According to compilations of Second World War declarations of war, the act was retroactive – the state of war was deemed to have existed since 7 December 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Allied press reported the news over the following days (the Australian Canberra Times on 9 July), which is why some chronicles date the Norwegian declaration to 8 or 9 July.

Eight days later, on 14 July 1945, the Italian Council of Ministers under Ferruccio Parri decided to declare war on Japan; according to most sources the state of war took effect the following day, 15 July. Italy, which less than two years earlier had been Tokyo’s ally under the Tripartite Pact, thus formally changed sides in the Far East as well.

Neither decision altered the military situation in the Pacific. Neither Norway nor Italy sent troops of its own against Japan, and only a few weeks of the war remained. Both acts belonged to the last wave of belated declarations of war – gestures whose significance was above all legal and political: for citizens held by the Japanese, for seized ships, and for the place of both states in the post-war order.

The belated declarations of war of 1945

From February 1945 war was declared on the Axis by countries that had for years remained neutral or had gone no further than breaking off diplomatic relations. The immediate spur was the Allied decision that states which declared war on Germany or Japan by 1 March 1945 would be invited to the founding conference of the new international organisation in San Francisco. Hence the wave of declarations in Latin America – by Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay – and the decisions of Turkey (23 February), Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Argentina declared a state of war on 27 March, and Chile declared war on Japan in April.

After Germany’s capitulation in May 1945, Japan was the only enemy left. In June Brazil declared war on it – on 6 or 7 June, according to the compilations – even though it had been fighting Germany and Italy since August 1942 and had so far merely broken off relations with Japan. Norway and Italy joined this group in July. The last state to declare war on Japan was the Soviet Union, which did so on 8 August 1945, beginning the Soviet–Japanese War; Mongolia followed two days later.

The motives varied. The states of Latin America and the Middle East were chiefly after a seat in San Francisco. Norway was already a founding member of the UN – its representatives had signed the Charter of the United Nations on 26 June – while Italy had not been invited to San Francisco at all. In both cases, therefore, something else was at stake.

Norway: the merchant fleet and interned seamen

After the capitulation of the Norwegian forces in June 1940, King Haakon VII and Johan Nygaardsvold’s government continued the war from London. Their most valuable asset was the merchant fleet – one of the largest in the world – which the government-in-exile requisitioned and placed at the Allies’ service through the state shipping organisation Nortraship. Norwegian ships, especially tankers, sailed on every ocean, including the Indian Ocean and the waters of South-East Asia.

When war broke out in the Pacific in December 1941, the Norwegian government in London sided with the United States and Britain, and its relations with Tokyo effectively ceased, but it did not formally declare war on Japan, nor did Japan declare war on Norway. Even so, Norwegian seamen suffered losses from the very first days: ships were sunk by Japanese submarines and aircraft, and others were seized in East Asian ports. Some crews fell into Japanese hands indirectly – German raiders (PL) operating in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific brought prisoners from sunken ships to Japanese ports and handed them over there. According to figures cited in Norwegian government studies on compensation, nearly 900 Norwegians – seamen, missionaries and other civilians – were held in Japanese captivity or internment in 1941–1945, and more than 130 of them died. The absence of a formal state of war left their legal status unclear.

In May 1945 Norway was liberated. The government returned to Oslo on 31 May and Haakon VII on 7 June, and on 25 June Nygaardsvold’s cabinet was replaced by a coalition government under Einar Gerhardsen; the foreign minister remained Trygve Lie, later the first Secretary-General of the UN. It was this new government that on 6 July declared a state of war with Japan with effect from 7 December 1941.

The retroactive date had – as studies of the subject emphasise – a practical dimension. It regularised the status of the Norwegians held by the Japanese: as citizens of a belligerent state they were to be treated as prisoners and internees of an Allied power, covered by repatriation and by later claims. It also gave Norway a title to take part in the settlement with Japan after its capitulation, including compensation for lost ships and cargoes. Finally, it was a gesture of solidarity with the allies who were still fighting in the Pacific, alongside whom the Norwegian merchant fleet had sailed throughout the war.

Italy: from the Tripartite Pact to co-belligerence

Italy’s case was the reverse. Rome and Tokyo were bound by the Tripartite Pact of September 1940, and on 11 December 1941 Italy declared war on the United States in Germany’s wake in support of its Japanese ally. Everything changed on 8 September 1943, when Italy’s capitulation was announced. Japan, like Germany, did not recognise the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio and maintained relations with Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic, set up shortly afterwards.

This had painful consequences for Italians in East Asia. The Japanese occupied the Italian concession in Tianjin without a fight and interned diplomats, servicemen and civilians who refused to swear loyalty to Mussolini’s republic – in camps in Japan itself and in the occupied territories. The crews of Italian ships and warships lying at Shanghai, including the liner Conte Verde and gunboats, scuttled most of them to keep them out of Japanese hands; the Japanese later raised some of them. The colonial sloop Eritrea managed to escape from Sabang to Ceylon. Submarines in Singapore and Sumatra were seized and handed over to the Germans, and after Germany’s capitulation in May 1945 two of them, including the Comandante Cappellini, were taken into service by the Japanese navy.

Meanwhile, on 13 October 1943, Badoglio’s government declared war on Germany, and the Allies recognised the Kingdom of Italy as a co-belligerent – not as an ally. After the Allies entered Rome in June 1944 Badoglio was replaced by Ivanoe Bonomi, and after Mussolini’s death and the liberation of the north of the country, on 21 June 1945, Ferruccio Parri, one of the leaders of the resistance, became head of government. The foreign minister in Bonomi’s second cabinet and in Parri’s government was Alcide De Gasperi.

The Parri government’s decision

For the government in Rome, a formal state of war with Japan was the natural completion of its break with the Axis. Italy, bound by the terms of the armistice and supervised by the Allied Control Commission, did not conduct a fully independent foreign policy, and the declaration of war was made in agreement with the Allies. Parri’s government hoped that a contribution – even a symbolic one – to victory over the last Axis power would strengthen Italy’s position ahead of the peace negotiations and bring it closer to the UN, to which, as a former aggressor, it had not been invited. Practical matters were also important: the fate of citizens interned in Japan, and claims for seized ships and property.

The act adopted by the Council of Ministers on 14 July 1945 was purely formal. Italy had no forces capable of fighting in the Pacific, and Japan had in any case not recognised the government in Rome since the autumn of 1943. In Italian memoirs of those years it is sometimes called “a purely formal act” – its weight was measured in diplomats’ offices, not at the front.

Significance

The July declarations by Norway and Italy did not hasten the end of the war – that was decided over the following weeks by other events in the Pacific and in Manchuria. They did show, however, how in the final phase of the conflict a declaration of war had become above all a legal instrument: a way of settling the fate of citizens in captivity, securing claims and taking a seat at the table where the post-war order was to be decided.

For Norway this aim was achieved. Norwegian seamen and civilians regained their freedom after Japan’s capitulation in August and September 1945, and in 1951 Norway was among the signatories of the peace treaty with Japan. Italy’s road was longer. Its status as a co-belligerent and its belated declaration did not spare it the harsh terms of the peace treaty signed in Paris in February 1947, which stripped it of its colonies and part of its territory. Italy was not invited to San Francisco in 1951, though it pointed to its declaration of 1945; it restored relations with Japan only in the early 1950s and was admitted to the UN in December 1955. The July declaration of 1945 thus remained a symbolic end to the road Italy had travelled from alliance with Japan to war against it.