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

by Brendan Simms

The Japanese, as we have seen, echoed this rhetoric. In order to survive, the have-nots argued, the Axis powers would have to establish their own empires. This was a self-serving narrative, of course, but it was accepted by enough of what was then the global south to make it plausible.

The most urgent question to address remained that of supplies.

the War Department still holding up shipments in order to repossess materials urgently needed for “our war with Japan.” In New York Harbor, twelve thousand railway carriages of material were backed up, awaiting loading onto ships, with 1,600 additional carloads arriving every day.

Nazi propaganda continued to exploit this.

Stimson was forced to issue a statement admitting that there had been a temporary embargo but that “very substantial quantities of Lend-Lease material” would be released soon.

Ultimately, the actual “repossessions” of British goods were not as bad as initially feared. They principally consisted of small-arms ammunition and aircraft that the Americans urgently needed in the Pacific.

Nevertheless, British officials remained fearful that the bill would yet come due, at a time when Britain’s resources remained dangerously stretched.

The only way to ensure a coordinated approach, as Jean Monnet proposed in the British Supply Council on December 17, was for Churchill to press for the establishment of a “Joint Anglo-American (and possibly Russian) Military Board charged with the responsibility of deciding upon allocations… in accordance with strategic needs.”

In mid-December, General George Marshall told Roosevelt that a temporary redistribution of military supplies from Lend-Lease programs to meet America’s needs was “imperative.”

It remained to be seen whether Lend-Lease, designed to enable Roosevelt to wage economic warfare while the United States was a nonbelligerent, could be converted into an instrument of coalition warfare, or if it would be radically revised in order to prioritize supplies for America’s own armed services.

Pearl Harbor, by diverting US resources to fight Japan in the Pacific, was taking its toll.

Roosevelt reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to deal with Germany first.

Churchill

December 26

address to a joint meeting o...

His “presence and actions here seem to have made real for the first time a sense of alliance between the United States and Britain,”

Five days after Churchill’s speech, on the very last day of the year, the British and US chiefs of staff agreed on an Allied “grand strategy.”

Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory.”

joint declaration signed by all the anti-Axis nations.

continued concern about preserving domestic unity meant he was unwilling to term this an alliance,

Roosevelt

“As a people, as a country, we’re opposed to imperialism—we can’t stomach it.”

Combined with the anxiety, particularly prevalent among conservative Republicans, that a Soviet victory over Germany would lead to the spread of Communism and the historic American aversion to “entangling alliances” in general, this left Roosevelt searching for a different title for the anti-Axis forces. Ultimately, he hit on “United Nations.”

The “Declaration by United Nations” was issued on New Year’s Day 1942.

the signatories committed themselves to “employ the full resources, military or economic” against the members of the Axis with which they were already at war, to cooperate with the other Allied powers, and not to make a separate peace. The declaration was initially signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, Litvinov on behalf of the Soviets, and Hu Shih for China. It was then countersigned by twenty-two other nations the following day to demonstrate that the war “was being waged for freedom of small nations as well as great.”

American anti-imperialism was a major obstacle for Churchill. His was a “vision of the ultimate conjunction of the English-speaking peoples,” joining together to control global affairs after the conflict.99 But this did not prevent an unparalleled integration of the British and American war efforts, in a manner matched by no other two combatants.

The personal rapport between Roosevelt and Churchill was central to this new arrangement.

In an unprecedented step for two great powers at war, a Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington was established to coordinate their grand strategy. An agreement was also reached to cooperate closely on intelligence gathering, and joint committees were set up on shipping and munitions production. Crucially, the British secured American agreement that combined wartime production would be treated as a common pool, with supplies allocated to the forces best placed to advance the overall strategic priorities of the United Nations.

It was by now clear that Lend-Lease would not only continue but be greatly expanded.

Roosevelt told the army that foreign aid shipments must resume without restrictions on January 1 and everything possible done to fill the gaps caused by the temporary embargo. In particular, supply commitments to the Soviet Union, which were already in arrears before Pearl Harbor, must be prioritized and deficits made up as soon as practicable.

To ensure that the United States could maximize its own military commitment and also serve as the “arsenal of the democracy,” Roosevelt, encouraged by Beaverbrook and Monnet, ordered a massive expansion of American industry and production targets.

Oshima suggested that Japan and the Reich coordinate their operations, but Hitler showed little interest.

In practice, Hitler struggled to develop a coherent strategy in early 1942.

the Führer had no viable strategy for defeating the Americans.

On December 16, Hitler issued his legendary “halt order.”

all units were to stand fast, showing “fanatical resistance,” until reinforcements had arrived from Germany and new positions had been prepared to the rear.

The following day, on December 19, 1941, Hitler sacked Brauchitsch and took over supreme command of the army himself.

Hitler saw the new conflict as primarily one of attrition. The key to victory therefore lay in production and destruction, with shipping a critical front.

Hitler saw the “tonnage problem” as “the decisive question of the conduct of the war.” Whoever solved it would “probably win the war.”

To meet the new production requirements, the Reich needed millions more workers.

The racial hierarchy at the start of Barbarossa had thus been reversed. Then, Hitler had planned to starve the Slavs of the Soviet Union to death but keep the Jews of central and western Europe alive as hostages. Now the Soviet Slavs would live, if only to work, and the Jews would die.

Source?

Unlike the United States and Britain, though, the Third Reich never developed a worked-out strategy with its partners.125 The Japanese constantly pressed for closer coordination, but Hitler showed little interest. The reasons for this were simple. Hitler hesitated to support Tokyo’s demand for an all-out attack on British India because he still hoped for a negotiated settlement with London.126 Hitler also largely ignored Japanese suggestions of a compromise peace between him and Stalin in order to focus on the Anglo-Americans, because he did not think that one could be had without giving up the Ukraine, which in his eyes was a vital counterbalance to Britain and the United States. The Japanese, for their part, did not respond to Hitler’s attempt to mediate between Tokyo and Chiang Kai-shek, for the related reason that control of China was central to their conception of an empire large enough to stand up to the Anglo-Saxons.

The geo-ideological alignment between the two main Axis powers, by contrast, was close.132 They envisaged the establishment of a new world order in which the German Reich dominated Europe and the Japanese Empire the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” Together, they would claim their fair share of the world’s resources and global recognition. The United States and the British Empire would not be broken up entirely, but rather confined to a much smaller global zone of influence. There would not necessarily be Axis world domination as such, but rather—from their point of view—a more equitable distribution of global power and global goods. Anglo-Saxon hegemony would give way to Axis-led multipolarity. The agreement of January 18, 1942, should therefore not be seen as a worked-out plan for victory, but rather as a partitioning of the globe between Germany and Japan.

Meanwhile, the radicalization of policy toward the Jews, announced immediately after the declaration of war on the United States, proceeded apace. On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich finally held his long-planned conference in the villa on the Wannsee.

A Rubicon had been crossed. Despite the slaughter of Soviet and Serbian Jewry in 1941, most European Jews were still alive at the start of 1942; by the end of the year, most of them would be dead.

Over the next three and half years or so, the vast majority of Jews under Nazi control were murdered, a crime primarily, though not exclusively, driven by Hitler’s anti-Semitic antagonism toward the “plutocratic” powers, which culminated in his declaration of war on the United States.

Again no source…

Meanwhile, Hitler escalated his foreign propaganda. Within Europe, Nazi agitators targeted Bolshevism, international capitalism, and the Jews. In the rest of the world, they primarily took aim at the British Empire, the United States, international capitalism, and the Jews. As the Germans prepared to attack the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Persia—with Afghanistan apparently in contention—much of the focus was on the area east of Libya and west of India. For this reason, Nazi propagandists bombarded Arab audiences throughout the summer of 1942 with stories about the “Jewish” White House of President Roosevelt.

The ferocious Japanese offensive across the Pacific also put serious pressure on the Roosevelt administration to switch to a Pacific-first strategy. While in late December, polling had shown roughly 60 percent of Americans accepted the administration’s argument that Hitler was the main enemy, by February the majority opinion was reversed, with more than twice as many respondents wanting to concentrate America’s war effort against Japan as against Germany.143 “Only by an intellectual effort had the Americans been convinced that Germany and not Japan was the most dangerous enemy,” Stimson later told Churchill. “The enemy whom the American people really hated,” the war secretary continued, “was Japan which had dealt them a foul blow.”

110,000 Japanese be forcibly “relocated” in February to what the president himself called “concentration camps.”

an illustration, above all else, of just how far Roosevelt was willing to go to prevent substantial domestic dissension that he felt might undermine the prospect of winning the war.