More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As a matter of fact the fire-eating Matsuoka was soon forced out of the cabinet.
Once more Hitler had been bested at his own game by a wily ally.
Immediately after the fall of France in June 1940, Admiral Raeder, backed by Goering, had urged Hitler to seize not only French West Africa but, more important, the Atlantic islands, including Iceland, the Azores and the Canaries, to prevent the United States from occupying them.
On May 22, 1941, Admiral Raeder conferred with the Supreme Commander and reported ruefully that the Navy “must reject the idea of occupying the Azores.”
The Pan-American Neutrality Patrol was making it more and more difficult for the U-boats to be effective.
He saw the Leader again on March 18 and reported that U.S. warships were escorting American convoys bound for Britain as far as Iceland.
On July 9, President Roosevelt announced that American forces were taking over the occupation of Iceland from the British.
A week later, on September 11, Roosevelt reacted to this attack in a speech in which he announced that he had given orders to the Navy to “shoot on sight” and warned that Axis warships entering the American defense zone did so “at their peril.”
But admittedly it was more difficult for the young U-boat commanders, operating in the stormy waters of the North Atlantic and constantly harassed by increasingly effective British antisubmarine measures in which U.S. war vessels sometimes joined, to restrain themselves.
These were the first American casualties in the undeclared war with Germany.
Strangely enough, it never seems to have occurred to him or to anyone else in Germany until very late that Japan had her own fish to fry and that the Japanese might be fearful of embarking on a grand offensive in Southeast Asia against the British and Dutch, not to mention attacking Russia in the rear, until they had secured their own rear by destroying the United States Pacific Fleet.
Secretary Hull learned immediately of this new German pressure, thanks to “Magic,” as it was called, which since the end of 1940 had enabled the American government to decode intercepted Japanese cable and wireless messages in Tokyo’s most secret ciphers—not only those sent to and from Washington but those to and from Berlin and other capitals.
That day the Konoye government fell and was replaced by a military cabinet headed by the hotheaded, belligerent General Hideki Tojo.
On November 19 came the ominous “Winds” message to Nomura from Tokyo, which Hull’s cryptographers promptly deciphered.
Secretary Hull, thanks to the “Magic” code breaker, was much better informed.
Hull and Roosevelt knew they were final because two days later “Magic” decoded for them a message from Togo to Nomura and Kurusu which said so, while extending the deadline to November 29.
In Washington Hull went to the White House to warn the War Council of the danger confronting the country from Japan and to stress to the U.S. Army and Navy chiefs the possibility of Japanese surprise attacks.
Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States [Ribbentrop replied] Germany, of course, would join the war immediately.
Togo’s instructions to Oshima on that fateful Saturday, December 6, which are among the intercepted messages decoded by Secretary Hull’s expert decipherers, give an interesting insight into the diplomacy practiced by the Nipponese with the Third Reich at the eleventh hour.
On that Saturday evening too the Navy Department informed the President and Mr. Hull that the Japanese Embassy was destroying its codes.
The Navy decoders were also deciphering it as fast as it came in and by 9:30 P.M. a naval officer was at the White House with translations of the first thirteen parts.
The report was “probably a propaganda trick of the enemy,” he said, and ordered that he be left undisturbed until morning.
Ribbentrop claimed at Nuremberg that he pointed out to the Leader that Germany did not necessarily have to declare war on America under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, since Japan was obviously the aggressor.
The bombing at Pearl Harbor had taken them off one hook and certain information in their possession led them to believe that the headstrong Nazi dictator would take them off a second hook.
He had a growing hatred for America and Americans and, what was worse for him in the long run, a growing tendency to disastrously underestimate the potential strength of the United States.
There is also no doubt that Japan’s sneaky and mighty blow against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor kindled his admiration—and all the more so because it was the kind of “surprise” he had been so proud of pulling off so often himself.
The Nazi dictator appears to have wanted the two extra days not for further reflection but to prepare carefully his Reichstag speech so that it would make the proper impression on the German people, of whose memories of America’s decisive role in the First World War Hitler was quite aware.
Also on December 9 Thomsen in Washington was instructed to burn his secret codes and confidential papers.
After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was…
While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took place in Germany under National Socialist leadership, President Roosevelt did not succeed in bringing about even the slightest improvement in his own country…
In a European state he would surely have come eventually before a state court on a charge of deliberate waste of the national wealth; and he would scarcely have escaped at the hands of a civil court on a charge of criminal business methods. Hitler knew that this assessment of the New Deal was shared, in part at least, by the American isolationists and a considerable portion of the business community and he sought to make the most of it, ignorant of the fact that on Pearl Harbor Day these groups, like all others in America, had rallied to the support of their country.
Adolf Hitler, who a bare six months before had faced only a beleaguered Britain in a war which seemed to him as good as won, now, by deliberate choice, had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in the world in a struggle in which military might depended largely, in the long run, on economic strength.
He mentioned only that in the evening he attended a lecture by a naval captain on the “background of the Japanese-American sea war.”
Did he “believe that the enemy will in the near future take steps to occupy the Azores, the Cape Verdes and perhaps even to attack Dakar, in order to win back prestige lost as the result of the setbacks in the Pacific?”
Nomura replied that Matsuoka “talked loudly for home consumption because he was ambitious politically.”
He stated that he could not, for anything in the world, live in a country like the U.S.A., whose conceptions of life are inspired by the most grasping commercialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music.”
The Germans had no long-range bombers capable of reaching the American coast from the Azores—much less getting back—and it is a sign of the warping of Hitler’s mind by this time that he conjured up the nonexistent “long-range bombers.”
There seemed to be a strong feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that the country ought to concentrate its efforts on defeating Japan and not take on the additional burden of fighting Germany at the same time.
He served Hitler to the end—from 1943 to 1945 as the Nazi ambassador to Franco Spain.
The text of the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt had drawn up on August 19, had come as a heavy blow to them, especially Point 8, which had stipulated that Germany would have to be disarmed after the war pending a general disarmament agreement.
Surrounded by his own S.S. bodyguards and declining to use one of the army group’s automobiles to drive in from the airfield—he had sent ahead his own fleet of cars for this purpose—he gave the two officers no opportunity of getting near him.
To prepare for The Day he intended to be in top physical trim and would have a minor operation to put him in shape.
Like Frederick the Great—and many others—Witzleben was troubled by hemorrhoids.* The operation to correct this painful and annoying condition was a routine case of surgery, to be sure, but when Witzleben took a brief sick leave in the spring to have it done, Hitler took advantage of the situation to retire the Field Marshal from active service, replacing him with Rundstedt, who had no stomach for conspiring against the Leader who had so recently treated him so shabbily.
Most of the resistance leaders, being conservative and well on in years, wanted, for one thing, a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. But for a long time they could not agree on which Hohenzollern prince to hoist on the throne.
All were in accord that the Kaiser’s fourth son, Prince August Wilhelm, or “Auwi,” as he was nicknamed, was out of the question since he was a fanatical Nazi and a Gruppenfuehrer in the S.S.
He understood the twentieth century, was democratic and intelligent. Moreover, he had an attractive, sensible and courageous wife in Princess Kira, a former Russian Grand Duchess, and—an important point for the conspirators at this stage—he was a personal friend of President Roosevelt, who had invited the couple to stay in the White House during their American honeymoon in 1938.
It restored individual freedom and pending the adoption of a permanent constitution provided for the supreme power to rest in the hands of a regent, who, as head of state, would appoint a government and a Council of State. It was all rather authoritarian and Goerdeler and the few trade-union representatives among the conspirators didn’t like it, proposing instead an immediate plebiscite so that the interim regime would have popular backing and give proof of its democratic character. But for the lack of something better Hassell’s plan was generally accepted at least as a statement of principles
...more
They had all acknowledged General Beck as such not only because of his intelligence and character but also because of his prestige among the generals, his good name in the country and his reputation abroad.
As Popitz says, a man of tactics but little will power.” This judgment, as it turned out, was not an ungrounded one and this quirk in the General’s temperament and character, this surprising lack of a will to act, was to prove tragic and disastrous in the end.
It was Adolf Hitler who at this unfolding of spring, the third of the war, had plans—and the fierce will to try to carry them out.
