Europe First in WW2

Map of Europe showing divisions between
Allied and Axis powers

The “Europe First” strategy, derived from the ABC-1 Allied Staff Agreement of March 1941, recognized that the Axis center of gravity lay with Germany’s economic ability to prosecute the war with little to no reliance upon Italy or Japan. Therefore, the sooner—and heavier—that Allied warmaking capabilities were deployed to the European theater, the swifter would be the German defeat and the shorter the overall war.

There was dissention among FDR’s military chiefs over the practicality of a Europe-first strategy. Most disagreement stemmed from the psychological angle, meaning that it was the Japanese who actually attacked the nation, not the Germans, therefore we should dispose of the Japanese first. That was the thinking, more or less, of men like MacArthur, King, and Nimitz, to a certain extent. But their thinking was also influenced my military necessity in that, to fight even an economy of force action in the Pacific theater required resources and resources were not to be had in sufficient quantities because of the Europe-first strategy. Moreover, in actually executing the Europe-first plan, the U.S. went to Africa first relying upon the Soviet Union to bleed German Wehrmacht strength before undertaking an actual assault upon the European continent, and even then assaulting weaker Italy than the European mainland, and this almost a full year into the war since Pearl Harbor.


The Africa campaign sprang from FDR’s sense of what was politically, not just strategically, possible. It gave the country the sense that something was being done. It gave Britain and the Soviet Union hope that a second front would soon be opened. It allowed for a modest counteroffensive in the Pacific. And, probably most important, it gave the U.S. Army a chance to pull itself together and gain much needed experience, experience that it would need when it finally encountered the main strength of the German Army on the plains of Europe.

Along with these military efforts, the nation’s economy took time to shift to a war footing. This is often referred to as economic mobilization. Once the country was economically mobilized, the wheels of war turned faster and faster and advantage continually accrued to the Allies. In the beginning however, due to the slowness of reorienting industry and the nation’s economic output toward the prosecution of a world war, a Pacific-first strategy seemed, to some, to make more sense. But this would have prolonged the war and perhaps might have even given Germany the time and opportunity to cross the English Channel and conquer Britain. The Europe-first strategy was therefore both militarily and economically sound.