Hitler's American Gamble

TIME ZONES

Footnote

i During World War II, British Double Summer Time—two hours ahead of GMT—was temporarily introduced for the period when ordinary daylight saving would normally be in effect. During the winter months, clocks continued to be one hour ahead of GMT to enhance productivity. See “Why Do the Clocks Change?,” Royal Museums Greenwich, www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/british-summer-time-bst-daylight-saving#:~:text=During%20the%20Second%20World%20War,of%20GMT%20to%20increase%20productivity.

PREFACE

The five days from the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor to Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States were among the most fraught, but remain some of the least understood, of the twentieth century. The dominant narrative holds that Japan’s surprise attack led inexorably to the outbreak of a truly global conflict. In this view, American opposition to involvement in both the Pacific and European wars simply melted away on December 7, 1941. As the stridently anti-interventionist Senator Arthur Vandenberg subsequently claimed in an oft-quoted remark: “That day ended isolationism for any realist.”1 It is assumed that the United States’ entry into the war against Germany was inevitable from the moment that Japan struck Pearl Harbor. This perspective has been encouraged by no less a witness than Winston Churchill himself, who later spoke of having “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful” after hearing the news of Japan’s attack. In his memoirs, he would declare that “now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!”2

Yet at the time, Churchill did not regard America’s full-scale entry into the war against Germany as a foregone conclusion. Nor was he alone. Across the world, politicians and military leaders tried to fathom what had happened in Hawaii and where it might lead. In fact, it would take almost one hundred hours from Pearl Harbor for the situation to resolve itself—five agonizing days in which the fate of the world hung in the balance. In the end, it was Hitler who declared war on the United States on December 11, rather than the other way around. Among those who do remember this order of events, the declaration is considered an inexplicable strategic blunder by Hitler, sealing the fate of his regime. But in reality, Hitler’s declaration of war was a deliberate gamble, driven by his geopolitical calculations, his assessment of the balance of manpower and matériel, and, above all, his obsession with the United States and its global influence.

The world that emerged on December 12, 1941, was not inevitable a week earlier, nor even immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. Before December 1941, Asia and Europe were the scenes of cataclysmic conflicts, but these struggles raged across the Eurasian landmass and on the surrounding oceans, essentially siloed in their separate theaters. Between the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, five days passed during which the future of those disconnected struggles was decided, and every major power was forced to commit to one of two camps.3 This interval was the crucible for a new global alignment that would dramatically alter the course of the conflict and reverberate far beyond the war, with implications we still feel today.

Churchill’s actions and comments during this pivotal period demonstrate unease and anxiety more than triumphal relief. Immediately upon hearing news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill made urgent plans to travel to Washington. As he informed King George VI, he was desperate to ensure that the influx of aid from the United States, on which Britain’s fighting capacity depended, “does not suffer more than is, I fear, inevitable.”4 His fears were exacerbated when, on the night of December 7, the US Army and Navy stopped all defense aid shipments to foreign governments to ensure that sufficient supplies were available for America’s own war in the Pacific. From Washington, the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, warned Churchill that Roosevelt was reluctant to agree to his visit. The American public, Halifax said, was now focused on Japan. Worse, many Americans remained unconvinced that the United States needed to entangle itself in an additional conflict with the German Reich. Indeed, Senator Vandenberg himself wrote in his diary on December 8 that although he and his fellow “non-interventionists” were now ready to “go along” with war against Japan, they remained wedded to “our beliefs.”5 They showed little sign of embracing a wider war.

President Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of the national mood. Roosevelt had spent more than a year carefully educating his fellow countrymen about the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany. He had established the United States as the “arsenal of democracy,” providing as much aid as was politically feasible to the Allied nations fighting Hitler. While Roosevelt prioritized Europe, he had evinced comparatively less concern about Japanese ambitions in the Pacific. But now, on December 7, 1941, the United States found itself at war not with Nazi Germany, against whom Roosevelt had devoted so many American resources, but with Imperial Japan. An immediate declaration of war on Hitler was a tremendous political risk at a time when the nation’s attention and anger were directed against Japan.

Cables from Berlin to Tokyo, intercepted and decoded by US intelligence, suggested that Germany would join any war that Japan fought against the United States, but Hitler’s behavior was not so easy to predict. As Roosevelt’s speechwriter Robert Sherwood later noted, the Nazis “were in honour bound by their pledges to the Japanese, but they had not previously shown much inclination to let such bourgeois-democratic considerations interfere with their own concepts on self-interest.”6

Japan’s leadership was no more certain that Hitler would keep his word. Emperor Hirohito and other members of the Japanese elite had repeatedly expressed their fear that Hitler, who had previously described the Japanese as a second-class race, would reconcile with the other “white powers”—the “Anglo-Saxon” United States and British Empire—leaving Japan to fight alone.7 There was indeed considerable ambivalence in Berlin about helping to bring down the so-called white British Empire, even though Hitler had increasingly reshaped himself as the defender of those he termed the global “have-nots” against the Anglo-Saxon “haves” as the war progressed.

Moreover, Hitler was being advised that, as Japan had initiated the conflict with the United States, Germany was under no obligation to support its ally by joining in a declaration of war. German diplomats made their leader aware that Roosevelt was determined to avoid simultaneous hostilities in the Pacific and Atlantic and had no intention of issuing a declaration against Germany. If Germany avoided a formal state of war with the United States, then, with America’s attention fixed on Japan, Britain might be deprived of any further meaningful support from Washington and left isolated against the Axis powers in the Atlantic. Keeping the struggles separate might well give Germany the advantage against the British and the Soviets.

In Moscow, Pearl Harbor came at a time when the tide of war with Germany seemed to be turning. Stalin’s master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had previously reported that the Japanese intended to strike against the Anglo-Americans and not the Soviet Union, and the attack vindicated Stalin’s decision to move much of the Far Eastern army west to deal with the Germans. Yet Pearl Harbor triggered profound anxiety in the Kremlin. First, because it brought American pressure to declare war on Japan and thus plunge the Soviet Union into a two-front war after all. Second, because the new needs of the US armed forces, and those of the embattled British Empire in Asia, threatened to reduce the flow of vital military aid to the Soviet Union.

The world, then, held its breath. The global sense of confusion and unpredictability after Pearl Harbor was captured by the American diplomat George Kennan, then stationed at the US embassy in Berlin. With all communication lines now cut by the Nazis, Kennan and his colleagues could only speculate whether a US-German war was imminent, debating among themselves whether to burn their diplomatic codes and declassified files lest they fall into enemy hands. As Kennan later recalled, “We lived in excruciating uncertainty.”8

On December 11, 1941, it was Hitler who let Roosevelt, the American interventionists, and the Allies off the hook. His declaration of war on the United States turned two potentially separate conflicts into a truly world war. For almost every other major world leader, the Pearl Harbor attack initially brought confusion. For Hitler, it was a moment of “murderous clarity.”9 The terrible consequences were felt not only by combatants and the civilian population the world over, but also by European Jews. The Nazi dictator was convinced that the US president, international “plutocratic” capitalism, and “world Jewry” were together bent on his destruction. For Hitler, Jews were not only responsible for the actions of Roosevelt, but potentially a weapon that could be used against him. For three years, Hitler had explicitly held European Jewry hostage to secure the good behavior of the Americans. Inspired by his conspiratorial view of worldwide Jewish influence, Hitler believed that the threat of further violence against European—especially central and western European—Jews would deter their supposed agent, President Roosevelt, from intervening directly in the European war.

Of course, Hitler’s genocidal ambitions had already been barbarically and brutally demonstrated well before December 1941. The murders of at least a million mainly Soviet Jews were proof of his long-standing intentions. But as 1941 came to an end, millions of western and central European Jews were still alive, if in great peril. Nazi leaders had discussed their systematic destruction for some time, but the timing and technical details were still not agreed, and, most important, the Führer himself had not yet communicated a final decision to the party leadership. Following his declaration of war on the United States, Hitler would tie the fate of surviving European Jewry inextricably to the collapse of US-German relations. When he declared war on the United States, he also pronounced a sentence of death on the Jews of western and central Europe. In 1939, Hitler had delivered his infamous warning that the consequences of a world at war would be the annihilation of the Jews. In the subsequent two years, he had repeatedly invoked this “prophecy,” which was by its very nature, for someone with his radically anti-Semitic worldview, ultimately a self-fulfilling one. But it was only after his declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941, that he would move to fully realize this apocalyptic vision.

If for Hitler the die was cast, things were still very much uncertain in Washington and London. At the start of December history seemed open, and this sense of uncertainty persisted in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor as well. Yet over time, the participants would remember their experiences in ways shaped by the outcome. Memories and stories came to reflect the ultimate, decisive defeat of the Axis nations by the combined Allied powers. Looking back, the Axis fate appeared inescapable, and so the uncertain events that led to it seemed inevitable.10 This tension between determinacy and contingency is what makes these five days in December so dramatic—and why we must unpick the days, hours, and minutes to turn back the clock and get closer to the truth of these moments as they were lived.

Powerful narratives like Churchill’s “sleep of the saved” have distorted our memory of this period, but history was being rewritten before 1941 was even over. Days mattered. For example, Roosevelt’s trusted pollster Hadley Cantril, on whom the president relied to gauge public opinion before embarking on any major policy decisions, would also contribute to the impression that an American declaration of war against Germany was inevitable as soon as the Pearl Harbor attack occurred. In his survey of American public opinion around World War II, Cantril would reproduce a poll, ostensibly from December 10, 1941, in which an overwhelming 90 percent of respondents were in favor of Roosevelt asking Congress for a declaration of war on Germany as well as Japan.11 Historians have pointed to this poll as evidence that American public opinion was settled on the question of war with Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor assault and that a declaration of war by Roosevelt was imminent, irrespective of what Hitler did.12 Yet Cantril’s account of the poll’s date was misleading. The poll question was finalized on December 10, but it was not actually put to Americans until two days later. That is, the question was asked on the day after Hitler declared war on the United States. A resounding affirmative response was, therefore, unsurprising. Those Americans polled on this question between December 12 and 17 were, in effect, simply validating what their government had already done in answering Hitler’s declaration of war on December 11 with a reciprocal American declaration that same day.13

For five momentous days, while clocks ticked in chancelleries and war rooms across the world, the minds of the major leaders inevitably went back to the last great conflict, which many had experienced firsthand, either as soldiers or statesmen. To truly comprehend the mentalité of these men at this time, we must first understand how the global strategic picture had evolved in the almost quarter century since the First World War and the ways in which these powerful individuals experienced, and contributed to, that transition. We begin, therefore, by charting the emergence of an Anglo-American world hegemony, which was furiously resisted by the self-described have-nots of the international system: Imperial Japan, Italy—another Fascist regime in Europe that saw territorial expansion as the route to great-power status—and, above all, the Third Reich.

Our story thereafter is largely metropolitan in focus, concentrating not only on the battlefronts but on how the political intrigue and breaking news was reported and received by the leadership, the press, the military, and the wider public in major capitals around the world. We draw on a broad range of often neglected sources, especially German, British, and American, the three powers at the center of our story. Of particular significance is the correspondence of the German Foreign Office; the records of those responsible for the procurement and distribution of American military aid on both sides of the Atlantic, which, while largely overlooked by other analysts of this critical juncture, reveal the potentially fatal threat posed by the new US-Japanese war to vital defense support to Britain and the USSR; the papers of Roosevelt’s domestic political opponents; and the files of leading Americans in Germany and Italy who, more than most, experienced the “excruciating uncertainty” of those momentous days. We also draw on diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports, and other accounts by individuals across all the major combatant nations to show how the events of these five days were perceived and experienced by ordinary people across the globe.

Above all, this book emphasizes and recreates the uncertainty of these five crucial days in global history. It is the first study to investigate this critical period in such extensive detail.14 Rather than adopting a geographical approach, we provide an hour-by-hour and sometimes minute-by-minute account of these days in a truly global and nonstop narrative. The fate of the world hung on decisions made in multiple countries but, between December 7 and 11, Britain was the only power at war in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Consequently, each day begins at midnight in London, by which time it is already 1 a.m. in Berlin and Rome, 2 a.m. in Moscow, and 8 a.m. in Tokyo, but still 6 p.m. the previous day in Washington. This blow-by-blow account enables us to reconstruct the drama and complexity of the events as they unfolded, sequentially and sometimes simultaneously, across four continents and more than half a dozen time zones. What played out over these five days was as consequential as any crisis in twentieth-century diplomatic history, because it transformed that century’s second great conflagration into a war that was even more destructive and world-encompassing than the first. In challenging the prevailing deterministic interpretation of this critical turning point in the Second World War, our book uncovers the rationale behind what proved to be Hitler’s greatest strategic error and offers a new perspective on the background to America’s rise to world power.