Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War

by Brendan Simms

Roosevelt accused Germany of instructing Tokyo to attack the United States in order to share the spoils of war, informing his audience that Germany and Italy considered themselves at war with the United States, even without a formal declaration.

It would therefore not be sufficient, he continued, to defeat Japan if Americans “found that the rest of the world was [still] dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.” This was a massive escalation in Roosevelt’s rhetorical warfare with Hitler as he sought to educate Americans on the global situation. But, crucially, he stopped short of asking Congress for a declaration of war. In order to overcome his anti-interventionist opponents and bring the country into the war in Europe united, he was still reliant on Hitler making the decisive move.

If the intelligence was incorrect or Hitler reversed himself, as he had done so many times before, the Anglo-Americans would face difficult choices. Roosevelt was far from confident that he could continue to s...

As the president was speaking, Halifax cabled Churchill to the effect that Roosevelt had confided “they would have to make certain demands on us from Lease-Lend during the next three weeks.”14 Roosevelt hoped to resume full deliveries by the new year, as he moved American industry onto a twenty-four-hour, seven-day schedule. Still, the interruption might have...

Force Z had been annihilated. It was one of the biggest disasters the Royal Navy has ever suffered, emblematic for some of Britain’s decline as a maritime and colonial power.

Eden was instructed “not, repeat not” to offer ten squadrons of British aircraft to Stalin.

“everything is in flux with United States supplies.”

the sinking of Force Z.

The strategic consequences were dire: “There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor,

from Africa eastwards to America through the Indian Ocean and Pacific we have lost command of the sea.”

Stalin was under strong American pressure to declare war on Japan, which would make the president’s task of selling continued support to the Soviets much easier. The dictator refused.

As we have seen, there was ambivalence on the Anglo-American side about any Soviet entry into the war with Japan, because it might distract Stalin from concentrating on Hitler. Worse still was the possibility that the Soviet dictator might take advantage of Pearl Harbor and the looming US-Germany conflict to come to terms with Hitler. He had, after all, done so once before.

Ciano and Darlan met in Turin’s opulent Palazzo Madama.

The Frenchman was full of bile against Britain and America and especially Roosevelt, whom he described as “a madman.” Darlan also exulted in the Japanese victories, which he regarded as “sensational and depressing defeats for the Anglo-Saxon world,” a term he used at least twice during the encounter. That said, Darlan was apparently unyielding on the key points. He refused to allow the Axis use of ports in Tunisia for fear that British would respond by treating Vichy France as a belligerent and attack Dakar or some other part of the French colonial empire.

Darlan secretly permitted the Italians to transport food, clothing, and trucks via Tunisia, something he had repeatedly denied the Germans.

If Darlan could improve relations with Italy and maintain his so-far-cordial connection with the United States, then the prospects for unoccupied France were better than they had been for some time.

It had been Hitler’s intention that the Reichstag should meet this day, but he was not ready. He had been so taken up with meetings that he had only just started drafting his speech. Despite the entreaties of the Japanese to hold the session earlier, the meeting of the Reichstag was delayed again, and scheduled for 3 p.m. on the next day (December 11). The timing was dictated not so much by the need to reach a German audience, but by the necessities of global messaging.

The reason Hitler took so much trouble was that this speech was in many ways the most important of his career. The themes he was planning to address in it—the supposed power of international Jewry, the evil of plutocracy, the hostility of Roosevelt, the centrality of race and space—were those that had dominated his thinking for more than twenty years,

and in the case of the American president for the last four (since the Quarantine Speech).

The trajectory was clear: from 1937 to 1941, the United States had framed the Third Reich first as contagious and then as downright criminal.

UK Ministry of Information’s survey of British opinion,

Resentment was expressed at the “remarkable unanimity of the Americans in going to war when they are directly threatened, after the years in which they appeared content to let other people do their fighting for democracy.” These sentiments were reported to be “strongest among working people, who most admire the Russian resistance.”

there was a great deal of anger, even contempt, at what was regarded as a lack of American preparedness.

the Jews, who were held responsible both for local resistance and for the global coalition against the Third Reich (which Hitler had in fact brought down on his own head).

For now, most Jews to the west of the German-occupied Soviet Union were still alive, but their existence was desperately precarious.

The murder of the Jews involved large parts of the German military and state apparatus. There were few open protests, but there was some unease.

The quandary of whether to concentrate on Japan or Germany, and how to proceed on Lend-Lease, was known to and discussed by the wider public.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roosevelt had established a strategic munitions board

many critical items that were previously destined for Britain and the Soviet Union were canceled. Rather than following the schedules agreed to before Pearl Harbor, allocations would now be made on an ad-hoc, day-by-day basis.

Selling war with Germany, by contrast, was not so straightforward.

In this context,

the continued reports of German involvement in the Japanese offensive across the Pacific took...

unsubstantiated reports, and others, were seized on by those who had long warned about the German threat.

There remained considerable congressional opposition to greater American engagement in the war with Germany.

Among the leading figures in America First, differences of opinion were emerging over the group’s position now that the nation was at war.

The prevailing opinion among America First’s leading figures in Congress was that the group should wait a “week or two” before deciding how to proceed.

Sensing the British and Soviet predicament, German propagandists continued to bombard the airwaves with gloating accounts of the impact that American fighting in the Pacific would have on Lend-Lease supplies and shipping capacity in the Atlantic.

It was thus becoming increasingly clear to Roosevelt administration officials that they could no longer maintain the facade that the Lend-Lease program had continued uninterrupted.

Consequently, the British Supply Council was informed that Roosevelt would announce at his next press conference that, “as a precautionary measure, immediate shipments of Lend-Lease materials to the British Empire were temporarily suspended pending a rapid examination of our most pressing requirements in the light of the Japanese attack.” In order to demonstrate to the administration’s isolationist opponents that Britain was making every effort to be helpful, the president would also publicize that Churchill “was fully aware of the advisability of such a step” and that his government “had already issued instructions to prepare a list of British War materials which could be made immediately available to us in the event we desired them.”

Ribbentrop also sent a dispatch to Thomsen, instructing him to hand a declaration of war to Cordell Hull or his representative at 15:30 German time the following day, that is, when Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag was already underway. Before then, no contact with the State Department should be initiated, and no communications from the American side should be accepted, probably in order to avoid muddying the waters or giving the game away.

A visit from the British prime minister would be less likely to antagonize majority opinion if the United States was already at war with all the Axis powers than if it was suspected that Britain was scheming to have the United States formally intervene in Europe. Consequently, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s assessment that the “naval situation and other matters of strategy require discussion.” In a final flourish, he stated unequivocally: “Delighted to have you here at the White House.” And he signed off by assuring Churchill, “The news is bad but it will be better.”

In Düsseldorf, just over a thousand Jews were herded in the rain out of the slaughterhouse where they had spent the night.

for their deportation

So far as we know, none of Düsseldorf’s non-Jewish population protested against the deportation of their fellow citizens,

The report from the internal surveillance agency spoke of great popular enthusiasm for the Japanese victories, which had pushed the stalemate in Russia and the retreat in North Africa into the background.35 Across Germany, people pored over maps supplied by the regime to follow the Japanese advance vicariously.

Germany, Italy, and Japan all agreed to wage war against the British Empire and the United States to a successful conclusion. They also promised not to enter into separate peace negotiations without the agreement of their allies. Finally, all three committed themselves “to collaborate closely also after the end of the war for the purpose of establishing a just new order” in the world.

The Führer cast the war as a generational struggle that had been forced upon him by the perfidy of Roosevelt and the manipulation of the Jews.

It was, Hitler claimed, the revolt of the “have-nots” against “the American president and his plutocratic clique.”

As Goebbels noted, the purpose of these arguments and the new Axis treaty was to present an alternative to “similar agreements”—that is, the Atlantic Charter—on the Allied side. Hitler was signaling that Germany, Italy, and Japan would offer the world a different form of coexistence and international justice. The resources of the world would be redistributed more equitably, or at least away from the “old” Western democracies toward the “younger” rising powers in Europe and the Far East.

Finally, Hitler framed the war as a racial struggle between two “fragments” of “Germanic ethnicity.”