“War is hell,” says the old saying.
And while I can’t say that’s wrong, history shows that occasionally war can also be a useful technical loophole.
Like a time in 1941 when one of the United States recognized a state of war for a very technical reason, months before the country formally entered the second World War.
The US may not have been fighting the war at that point, but it was definitely preparing.
The country began drafting men into the military in 1940, around the time it announced a policy of providing direct military aid to allied nations like the UK.
Some of the draftees who had to leave their civilian jobs ended up taking pay cuts, which left their households running short on funds.
The state of Vermont wanted to help.
In September 1941, the state legislature took up a proposal to provide an extra $10 a month to those who had been drafted.
Back then, ten bucks was a pretty useful bit of money for a household.
The catch was, under Vermont’s Constitution, lawmakers could only appropriate that kind of money for that kind of reason by voting to institute a new tax.
And lawmakers then, as now, generally didn’t like to vote for new taxes when they didn’t have to.
But the Vermont Constitution said the state could award bonuses without a new tax during a state of armed conflict.
The lawmakers pointed toward an order President Franklin Roosevelt had issued just a few days earlier, ordering the US Navy to fire on Nazi warships found inside American waters.
The Vermont legislature said, well, then technically, we are in a state of armed conflict, and they voted for the $10 a month bonuses.
Vermont’s governor made national news when he said he hadn’t expected the legislature to declare war.
To be clear, Vermont wasn’t sending troops any earlier, and the issue became moot a couple months later, when the US declared war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But technically the Green Mountain State was a little ahead of the rest of the country.
I guess Calvin Coolidge was right when he called Vermont a “brave little state.”
In 1943, a top intelligence official in the UK had to head off one of the strangest assassination plots of all time.
MI5 had learned that the Nazis were trying to blow up Prime Minister Winston Churchill by hiding explosives under a layer of dark chocolate!?!
They took the necessary steps so that the death-by-sweets scheme turned sour.
Why Vermont Declared War on Germany Months Before Pearl Harbor (New England Historical Society)
Hitler Plotted to Kill Churchill With Exploding Chocolate (Smithsonian)
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