The US declares war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania

On 5 June 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed three joint resolutions of Congress formally declaring that the United States was at war with Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. All three countries had already declared war on America in December 1941, following Germany and Italy. Washington waited almost six months to respond. The resolutions of 5 June 1942 are the last formal declarations of war in the history of the United States: in none of its later wars, from Korea to Iraq, did Congress again pass a declaration of war, only authorisations for the use of force.

The December declarations

When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, Berlin instructed its ambassadors to persuade the smaller allies that had joined the Tripartite Pact to take the same step. Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Romania proclaimed a state of war with the United States on 12 December. On 13 December the Bulgarian National Assembly approved the motion of Bogdan Filov’s government to declare war on Great Britain and the United States. Bulgaria, which had joined the pact in March 1941, was not fighting the USSR and maintained diplomatic relations with it, and in Sofia the declaration against distant America was regarded as a gesture without practical consequences. The Hungarian prime minister, László Bárdossy, first broke off diplomatic relations and then, under German and Italian pressure, announced on 12–13 December that Hungary considered itself at war with the United States; sources date this step differently, because Bárdossy acted without the consent of parliament. Slovakia and Croatia did the same, but the United States never recognised these states and did not respond to their declarations.

Congress had responded at once to the declarations of war by Japan, Germany and Italy: on 8 December with war on Japan, on 11 December with war on Germany and Italy. Towards Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania Roosevelt did nothing. Britain had been at war with Romania and Hungary since 7 December, after an ultimatum that neither country accepted, and on 13 December it responded to Bulgaria with war. Washington remained silent.

Why America waited

The official explanation was contained in the President’s own message: Roosevelt believed that the governments of the three countries had not acted of their own free will. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s State Department also hoped that restraint would leave the way open to an understanding with these countries should they wish to break away from Germany. Domestic considerations played a part too: hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Hungary and Romania and their descendants lived in the United States. Washington also had special ties with Hungary, since the United States, which had not ratified the Paris peace treaties, had concluded a separate peace treaty with it in 1921.

By the spring of 1942 this restraint could no longer be maintained. Romania had been fighting the USSR since the first day of Operation Barbarossa; it had taken back Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, occupied Odessa, where its troops murdered tens of thousands of Jews, and was administering Transnistria. Romanian divisions now stood before Sevastopol and in the Crimea. Hungary had been at war with the USSR since 27 June 1941, and from April 1942 the government of Miklós Kállay was sending east the entire Second Army of General Gusztáv Jány, some 200,000 soldiers, who were to take part in the German summer offensive. Both armies were fighting an ally of the United States which had been receiving Lend-Lease aid since the autumn of 1941 and was demanding the fullest possible commitment from the West. At the turn of May and June 1942 the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, was in Washington, having come there straight from talks in London. Roosevelt sent his message to Congress immediately after Molotov’s departure, and some historians see the June declarations above all as a gesture of solidarity with the USSR, to which he could not yet promise a second front. The coalition against the Axis was growing elsewhere in those weeks as well: on 22 May Mexico declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan.

The message and the votes

On 2 June 1942 Roosevelt sent Congress a short message. In it he wrote that the governments of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania had declared war on the United States, and added: “I realize that the three Governments took this action not upon their own initiative or in response to the wishes of their own peoples but as the instruments of Hitler.” He also stated that these governments were engaged in military activities directed against the United Nations and were planning to extend them, and he therefore recommended that Congress recognise a state of war with each of the three countries separately. The words about extending military activities referred to the preparations for the summer offensive on the Eastern Front, in which Hungary and Romania were to field entire armies.

The House of Representatives passed the three resolutions on 3 June without a single dissenting vote: according to the House’s records, 357 to 0 on Bulgaria, 360 to 0 on Hungary and 361 to 0 on Romania. The Senate adopted them unanimously the next day. On 5 June the President signed all three as Public Laws 563, 564 and 565. Their text followed the pattern of December 1941: since the government of the country concerned had formally declared war against the government and people of the United States, the state of war which had thus been “thrust upon the United States” was formally declared. The President was authorised to employ the entire armed forces and resources of the nation, and Congress pledged to place all the country’s resources at his disposal to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

The votes went through almost without debate, and the press gave them little space. Americans’ attention in those days was taken up by news from the Pacific, where the Battle of Midway was under way.

The first bombs

The declarations had a very rapid military consequence. Romania was Germany’s main European source of oil, and its refineries around Ploiești had been regarded since the beginning of the war as one of the most important targets on the Continent. On the night of 11–12 June 1942 thirteen B-24 Liberator bombers of the so-called HALPRO detachment under Colonel Harry Halverson took off from the airfield at Fayid in Egypt and at dawn attacked Ploiești and the port of Constanța. The detachment had originally been intended to bomb Japan from China, but Japanese advances in Burma and China had put an end to that plan, and the detachment was held in the Middle East. The damage proved negligible, and some of the crews did not return to base but landed in Iraq and in neutral Turkey, where they were interned along with their aircraft. It was, however, the first American bombing raid on a target in Europe, carried out a week after the declarations were signed.

Place in the war

The June declarations completed the formal side of the United States’ participation in the war: from then on America was at war with all the Axis states whose existence it recognised. Bulgaria, which was not fighting the USSR, felt the reality of war only later. Sofia and other Bulgarian cities were bombed by American and British aircraft from November 1943, with the greatest force in the winter and spring of 1944.

On 1 August 1943, 177 American Liberators attacked Ploiești from low level in Operation Tidal Wave. The refineries were quickly rebuilt, and the Americans lost more than fifty aircraft. The Hungarian Second Army, sent east in the spring of 1942, was destroyed on the Don in January 1943. Kállay’s government began secretly seeking contact with the Western Allies, which ended in the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. In August 1944 King Michael I had Antonescu arrested, and Romania went over to the Allied side. In September the USSR declared war on Bulgaria, where the Fatherland Front soon took power. The United States signed peace treaties with all three countries in Paris on 10 February 1947, by which time they were already in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Since Congress has passed no declaration of war since 1945, the resolutions of 5 June 1942 remain the last in the history of the United States. In the wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq the American authorities relied on presidential decisions, UN mandates and acts authorising the use of force.