Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
This 500-page book details what happened between December 7, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, and December 12, the day after Adolph Hitler inexplicably declared war against the United States. Many observers were flummoxed by Hitler’s declaration of war, which did what Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could not do: convince a majority of Americans to want to fight the Germans. The United States in late 1941 was a very isolationist country. Few Americans thought that the conflicts in Europe and the Pacific were any of our business.
The book begins with a look ahead to December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the US. Hitler began his speech by praising the ethnic commonalities of America and Germany. He thought that the United States was pretty Aryan, a good thing. However, the Jews had convinced Woodrow Wilson to push England and France into a war against Germany in WWI so that American Jews could make more money. Many WW I researchers do see the desire of American corporations to make a lot of money supplying things for the war as a major factor in why we participated in the conflict.
The treaty that settled the first world war was really onerous to Germany. It knocked the country off-kilter and opened the way for Hitler to take power. He bided his time in the 1920s, slowly building his brand and the Nazi party, and took advantage of his opportunity to take over the country in the 1930s.
While Hitler blamed the Jews for all that was wrong in the world, white people looked down on “colored people'' as inferior. That included the Japanese, who had done a pretty good job of making their country very successful on the world stage during the first half of the 20th Century. The authors posit that white racism against the Japanese helped ensure the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The inferior Eastern race would show the whites who was superior, at least on December 7, 1941.
The Japanese also were running out of fuel since their island nation had few natural resources. Japan invaded China to get oil, and the war in the Pacific was intended to give Japan access to other countries’ fuel supplies.
Hitler wasn’t too happy about doing business with inferior non-Aryans, but he calculated that becoming allies with Japan would help him conquer Europe and a lot of the rest of the world. He saw Tokyo as an ally against England and a way to keep the United States out of the European war.
In 1939 and 1940, Hitler’s armies conquered much of Europe and Africa. Americans were surprised and alarmed, but still not willing to join in the fight. FDR was trying to find ways of giving Great Britain support in munitions and other things you need to fight a war, but the US public was solidly against any intervention.
Hitler tried to get the USSR to join with him in his global war but Josef Stalin decided that what Adolph wanted – control of most of Eastern Europe, a Russian area of influence – was too steep a price, so the Soviet Union stayed neutral for now.
During the late 1930s, American military leaders warned FDR that the country simply did not have the military capacity to deal with both Japan and Germany, and that it made more sense to help Britain if we did get involved in the conflict. In December of 1940, FDR came up with the Lend Lease Bill, which sent military equipment to Britain at a cost to be paid in the future. This was a bit shaky, but in March, 1941, FDR got it through and American support finally flowed to England.
Something else happened in December, 1940. Hitler decided to invade Russia, which he did in June of 1941. Hitler thought that going after Stalin would keep Russia from supporting Britain. The German leader also wanted the rich minerals and agricultural bounty of Ukraine. Another bonus for Adolph was that he could kill a lot of Soviet Jews as he overran Russia.
Operation Barbarossa, as the offensive was named, started off well, with the Nazis overrunning great swaths of territory. The Germans executed one million Jews during the first months of the operation. So far so good. Eventually, the Russians pushed back and the winter descended onto the battlefield. Hitler was turned back, which led to his defeat in 1945.
By mid-1941, Hitler’s armies had conquered lands where 290 million people lived. England was in trouble. Still, 80% of Americans wanted no part of the war.
In April of 1941, Hitler met with Japanese officials and promised to support them in any conflict with America. He also wanted Japan to attack Russia, which had turned out to be much tougher to defeat than the German high command had thought.
After Russia resisted the Nazi invasion, England and the Allies had to bring Stalin in as a partner against the Germans. No one trusted Stalin, but they needed him to fight the Nazis on the eastern front.
In June of 1941, Japan still had some hope of neutralizing the US as Tokyo took over countries in the Pacific to meet its fuel needs. Once Japan attacked British bases in Indochina, FDR broke off diplomatic relations and froze Japanese assets in the US. The relationship between the two countries deteriorated.
The Japanese military incursions pushed the nation into a corner of its own making. The country needed fuel so it acted to take over other countries' fuel supplies. That action irritated the US so the likelihood of war increased. Compounding the danger was the fact that racist American leaders believed that the Japanese were so inferior to us white folks that Tokyo posed no military threat to our country. American leaders did believe that there was an increasing chance of conflict, so that by late 1940, the US did begin to ramp up its military capacity
Sunday, December 7, 1941. Japan continued to work diplomatic channels with the US even as its aircraft carriers were heading towards Pearl Harbor. Some Japanese leaders had doubts about the wisdom of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. They did not think that Japan could defeat the much larger country. Navy Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, said, “I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.” Some Japanese also thought Hitler’s racism - only white people were any good - would stop him from supporting Japan.
By late 1941, the German supply lines in Russia were becoming overextended so the German troops lacked basic supplies and fuel. The winter was setting in, which would make things even more miserable for the German army. By December, the invasion had stalled. Around this time, Hitler accelerated the rounding up of Jews and ordered the construction of more concentration camps.
Back in the US in November of 1941, anti-Semitic feeling was prevalent. Charles Lindbergh, a national hero, was a person who believed that Jews endangered the United States because they owned too much. Germans played this up in their propaganda in justifying the removal of Jews into camps. The book devotes a lot of pages to detailing anti-Semitism all over the world; it was very real.
Russia wasn’t the only place where Germany’s war effort was stalled. The British defeated General Rommel’s Africa Tank Corps and began to march towards retaking Europe.
By late November, Japan secretly told German diplomats that negotiations with the US were going nowhere. Hitler’s representatives assured Japan that Germany would support Japan in a war with the United States.
Both Germany and Japan believed that if they struck forcibly, Britain and the United States would sit down and negotiate favorable treaties with them. Hitler would get to keep a lot of Europe, and Japan could dominate the Asian theater. Germany and Japan assumed that the United States and Britain were weak and unwilling to put up with a prolonged war, so the war would be over soon. It wasn’t.
On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Great Britain had repelled a quick Nazi advance and was doing well in North Africa, On the other hand, German submarines were sinking a lot of British supply ships and FDR’s Lend Lease program was very slow to get going. Most Americans were still against doing anything in the war besides sending Britain equipment.
Japan was threatening to attack British holdings in Asia, including Singapore. Churchill thought that it would be impossible to defeat a strong Japanese invasion, and he was worried that the US would continue to stay out of the war even with such barbaric Japanese behavior.
Hours before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese diplomats told US Secretary of State Cordell Hull that, since America would not recognize “the certainty of a New Order in Asia'' , negotiations were over. An hour before the bombs fell in Hawaii, Japan attacked the British colony of Malaysia. At the same time, German troops were literally freezing to death in Russia. Over the next few days after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked many targets in Asia including Borneo, Thailand, Guam, the Philippines, and British Hong Kong. World War II really cranked up in December of 1941.
Monday, December 8, 1941 After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Josef Stalin was relieved that the Japanese had not attacked Russia, but he was concerned that Britain and the US might divert resources to fight Japan and not support him against the Germans. He was looking forward to getting some of the Lend Lease equipment. Exiled French leader Charles DeGaulle was delighted. With the power of the United States arrayed against the Axis countries, the war would be won. Winston Churchill was happy. The Japanese did what he couldn't do - get the United States to pay attention to the war. Adolph Hitler was ecstatic. Japan’s attack would tie down American and British resources in the Pacific fight, which would make it easier for Germany to win in Europe.
Churchill was still worried that the US would just concentrate on defeating Japan, thus ignoring his country’s plight. He used diplomacy and personal contact to get FDR to announce formal support, but the American president had a lot on his plate. Some US Senators just didn’t believe that the Japanese - inferior non-whites - were competent enough to attack Pearl Harbor. They thought that FDR was giving out fake news. A bigger problem for FDR was convincing the public that we should be fighting a two-front war. Much as he sympathized with Churchill, he knew that declaring war on Germany would be a tough sell to the American people. Japan, not Germany, had attacked us.
Japanese citizens were at first shocked by Japan’s bombing of Pearl harbor but soon they became ecstatic ad proud of their country’s actions. Years before, the US had imposed sanctions on Japan which rankled the public, and Japanese people knew that they were considered inferior by Americans. The sneak attack was big-time payback.
Of course, the Japanese were as racist as anyone else. They believed that their culture was superior to anyone else’s, and they thought that were smarter than the rest of the world. They were openly hostile to the Chinese and Koreans, whom they regarded as interiors.
Even the day after the bombing, many prominent Americans, including Charles Lindbergh, were not committed to declaring war on Japan. Isolationism was still strong, and very few people wanted to fight Germany.
A bigger issue was that a lot of people serving in Congress wondered how we could allow Japan to wipe out Pearl Harbor. Part of this thinking was shaped by racism, but many Americans had come to believe that we had a strong military and a great Navy. December 7 punctured that balloon. FDR was constantly asked what went wrong, and he could give no good answers.
Japan was pressuring Italy and Germany, the major Axis powers against Britain and the Allies, to declare war on the United States. The Pacific nation would need all the help it could get to win the war.
Hitler ramped up hostilities against the US. He ordered that all American ships were to be attacked as enemies. He also was confident that with America at war with Japan, any potential Lend Lease military equipment would stay with US troops and not help Britain. Initially, that happened, but soon America’s factories were producing enough weapons of war ro supply Britain and the United States.
As the Nazi war effort sputtered, the attack on the Jews ramped up. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to new concentration camps. At this point in late 1941, the Final Solution of extermination had not become policy but tens of thousands of displaced people had been executed. Millions of people were rounded up, with many sent to labor camps to produce things for the war effort.
FDR gave his famous “Day of Infamy” speech. The US Congress passed a resolution of war with one nay vote from a congresswoman who was a pacifist and had voted against our entry into WW I.
Tuesday, December 9, 1941 Japan continued to take over islands all over the Pacific that could be used as staging areas for air and sea attacks on other targets. While Churchill was pressuring the president to declare war on Germany, many US diplomats were cautioning against such action. They argued that it wasn’t our fight and that we would have trouble fighting in Europe and the Pacific.
There was a false report of Japanese planes heading to San Francisco as well as reports of Japanese spies lurking around the nation. There were planes, but they were US Army bombers returning from a training mission. Many cities on the west coast ordered lights out at dark to give any Japanese planes less chance of hitting any significant targets. The nation was scared.
Back in Japan, citizens were relishing the string of their nation’s victories in the Pacific. A respected national poet demanded that the empire “destroy those animal-like, red-headed, blue-eyed, spineless nations.”
Two of the Royal Navy’s best ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were cruising off Malaysia. Some spotters had seen the Japanese fleet in the area, but the captains of the British vessels didn’t think that the Japanese would have any chance in a fight with the manly, Anglo-Saxon ships.
By now, foreign observers had processed the sneak attack. A common consensus was that the Japanese weren’t sharp enough to have come up with this on their own so they must be working closely with the Nazis, who were smart enough to have organized the raid.Some German observers did not share Hitler’s view that America fighting Japan was a good thing. They felt that now this was a world war, not a regional conflict. That would not be good for the Reich. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, was only cautiously optimistic. He thought that the US-Japan conflict was good, at least for now. He wasn’t sure what the long-term consequences would be.
Goebbels also had to buck up the German people who were about to experience a Christmas with short supplies of almost everything. This was the third year of war and many consumer goods were in short supply. Germans love Christmas, but, as one minister pointed out, ”There is therefore an acute lack of presents this year.”
British officials worked frantically to make sure that, at least for now, the US would continue to send whatever munitions and supplies that could be spared. English leaders continued to be amazed at how successful the Japanese onslaught against their Pacific holdings was. They had been caught as flat-footed as the Americans.
Even though the Russian offensive was going poorly, Nazis still killed tens of thousands of Russian Jews as its military spun its wheels.
Hitler met with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and others to discuss what to do now that the US and Japan were at war. Some at the meeting were appalled at how little the Fuhrer knew about the United States, particularly its industrial capacity and sheer size. Many of Hitler’s advisors urged him to do nothing and let the two countries fight each other, thus keeping them away from the European war. There was a discussion about hammering out a treaty with Japan, to ensure that Germany and Tokyo were on the same side.
Back in Washington, Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador to the United States, met with FDR and told him that Churchill was preparing to sail to America to meet with the president. FDR said that he was too busy until after the new year. Winston of course ignored this and got on a ship and went to America to make his case personally.
President Roosevelt delivered a carefully written fireside chat on the evening of December 9. He explained that now we were engaged in a world war and that all would have to do our very best to prevail. He tied Germany and Japan together as two ruthless countries that would do anything to dominate the world. He also intimated that the two rogue powers were working together in the war effort. This was poppycock, but FDR wanted citizens and everyone on the planet to understand that this was now a world war, not just a regional conflict. He didn’t state that we should be fighting Germany, but he laid the foundation for America’s helping England in its fight against Nazi tyranny. The president desperately wanted to declare war on Hitler but he realized that most of the country was still wary of getting involved in another war.
Just as citizens listened to FDR speak, the Germans were trying to retreat from Russia. It was very difficult since fuel and supplies were scarce and the winter was brutal, often slowing down and stopping the vehicles that still ran. Most of the soldiers did not have winter clothing so freezing to death was common. Army morale was non-existent.
The Japanese had sunk eight battleships at Pearl Harbor, leaving just five left in operation compared to the fifteen the Japanese had. The two British ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, were wandering off the Malaysian coast, terribly vulnerable to attack since they were isolated. Things were not good.
Wednesday, December 10, 1941 FDR was still trying to keep Churchill away from him but he was ignored by the British Prime Minister. In Germany, officials were finishing up the treaty that would make Japan allies with Germany and Italy in fighting the war. There were wild rumors that the Japanese were about to bomb the US east coast cities. Off Malaysia, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were being hunted by Japanese destroyers and airplanes. Within a few hours, both ships sank, with the loss of about half of the crews, well over 1,000 sailors. It was the worst day in the history of the British Navy and marked the end of England as a great sea power.
Churchill was devastated, He was friends with Admiral Tom Powers, who drowned when the Prince of Wales went down. Churchill shared the hubris of his fellow Brits in believing that the Japanese were not smart enough to compete with his people. Stalin also didn’t believe that the Japanese sank the ships. It must have been the Germans who were smart enough to do that.
The Nazis also got things wrong. Joseph Goebbels claimed that Japan now had “complete mastery of the seas.” That wasn't quite right, but the Japanese had used some new techniques to sink the ships and were ahead of the Brits and the Americans in using sea power effectively.
Hitler was writing a major speech that he was set to deliver on December 11. Most of his subjects had no idea how badly the Russian “offensive” (now a retreat) was going and they did know that Japan had dealt the United States a serious blow at Pearl Harbor. He was going to rant about the Jewish conspiracy, the Jew Roosevelt, Germany’s poor treatment after World War I, and his plans to win the current war.
FDR’s fireside chat was broadcast in England the next day. US diplomats reported that it was well received, but many Brits were upset that America still had not declared war against Germany.
On December 10, German U Boats sank many British and other countries’ ships carrying supplies for the war effort. The Royal Navy seemed powerless to stop the submarine assaults. Life was probably worse for the Germans. A general lack of fuel had led to huge supply chain problems, with massive goods shortages both for the war effort and on the domestic front.
Ukraine was a particular problem for the Nazis who had conquered the territory. The Germans were met with a tough resistance movement but, being Nazis, they arrested and executed lots of people, essentially wiping out the intelligentsia. Ukrainian pushed back hard, and the Nazis’ control of the country was shaky. The lesson then, as it is now, was don’t mess with Ukrainians.
The war effort highlighted racial issues in the United States. Many southern US senators insisted that Negroes not be allowed to participate in the war effort, implicitly because they were inferior to white folk. FDR did not share that view but he had to carefully navigate the racist waters that swirled around him.
FDR was still trying to convince Winston Churchill to wait until next year for a meeting, but the argument fell on deaf ears. England needed American materiel support now. Similarly, Josef Stalin made a persuasive argument that Russia needed American weapons to defeat the Germans. President Roosevelt knew that each of these leaders was right, but, even after Pearl Harbor, most Americans still wanted nothing to do with the war against Germany.
The Japanese continued their march across the Pacific. Their initial attack on the US-held Wake Island ¬– a key piece of the Japanese plan to dominate the region – was repulsed, the first defeat of the Japanese since Pearl Harbor.
In Berlin, Germans were pressuring American diplomats to leave the country. Once the Nazis arrested the US State Department envoys (“for their own safety”), they couldn’t leave the country. Similarly, American journalists were also arrested, so they too were stuck in Germany. After a few days, the Americans were allowed to go home, but it was tense for a while in Hitler’s Germany.
Thursday, December 11, 1941 German submarines had been targeting American ships in the Atlantic Ocean for two days now but there were very few U boats in the area so shipping was safe for now. The British continued to drive the Germans out of North Africa. In the Far East, the Japanese continued to roll over countries, many of which were under British control. Leaders in Singapore finally convened a council of war to figure out what to do in the face of the imminent Japanese onslaught to the region. It turned out that they couldn't do anything except surrender. Thailand, which had been run over by the Japanese, declared war against England and the US.
FDR had sent some communications to Churchill, implying that Lend Lease would resume as soon as possible. Churchill was getting desperate since England depended on the United States for key materials for war production.
Churchill addressed Parliament and the nation, acknowledging that the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse was a serious blow to the British Navy, and that winning the war would be a challenge, but that the UK would prevail.
Germany, Italy and Japan agreed on the details in their mutual support treaty, thus formally creating the Axis nations that would fight the Allies for the next four years. At 3 PM the Fuhrer was going to give a major speech in the Reichstag which was eagerly anticipated by the German people.
Around the same time Hitler began his speech, commanders of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland were developing protocols to select the people who would be assigned to do labor. The rest would be executed.
The setting for the speech was uber-Teutonic, with flags and tapestries, martial music, and lots of pageantry. Hitler began by acknowledging that the Russian offensive had stalled. He also said that 800,000 soldiers had been killed, wounded or missing in action. He then moved on to criticize Roosevelt as part of a Jewish cabal that was out to get the Germans. The speech had constant references to Jews as being the source of evil in the world. These were interesting comments coming from the man who orchestrated the killing of millions of people, most of whom were Jewish, in concentration camps.
The speech made the point that Hitler, who grew up in modest means, was fighting for the little guy, while Roosevelt, the product of an elite, wealthy family, was out to hurt the regular folks so that he and the Jews could get richer. Hitler ended the speech to thunderous applause as he declared war on the United States.
Japanese leaders were relieved at the declaration of war because now the US would have to fight the war on two fronts. Josef Stalin was happy because now Russia would have some serious help in fighting the Germans. Exiled in London, Charles DeGaulle was delighted with Hitler’s war declaration. In occupied France, the Vichy government quislings, who were aligned with the invading Nazis, were nervous because they believed that the US would prevail. While many Germans were proud that their leader had declared war, some leaders were dismayed because now their country had one more enemy. It was one thing to beat Britain; it was quite another to defeat a major power like the United States.
President Roosevelt sent a short message to Congress informing them that we were at war and notifying them that his administration would crank out the executive orders needed to put the country onto a war footing.
The authors make the point that December 11, 1941, was the most important day in history. When it began, there was no certainty about the shape and logistics of the war. Twenty-four hours later, the die was cast for World War II, the most momentous conflict in human existence.
The World of December 12, 1941 Hitler’s declaration of war had immediate consequences. German and American diplomats suddenly were recalled home. Now that the war was fully fleshed out, the Nazis formally adopted the Final Solution and developed plans to systematically exterminate every Jew in Europe. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, began to develop false information about the United States, making up bad things about our country so that the German people would come to hate the enemy.
The Germans were in full retreat by the middle of the month and Russia was beginning its counteroffensive that would eventually lead the Soviets to liberate Berlin in 1945. Many historians see Germany’s defeat in Russia as having weakened the army so much that the entire war effort was damaged.
Winston Churchill came to visit President Roosevelt on December 22. They made war plans and settled on a “Germany First” strategy that prioritized beating the Nazis. On December 24, the two leaders lit the White House Christmas tree. On December 26, the British Prime Minister dazzled Congress with a great speech that turned any doubters into enthusiastic war supporters.
In January’s State of the Union speech, FDR talked about the need to produce enough goods to win the war, to become a true “arsenal of democracy” for the world. By 1943, this country was producing a plane every four minutes, a tank every seven minutes, and two ships a day. That made the difference in the war.
Hitler never figured out how to work effectively with the Japanese. They were allies in name only. He had no viable strategy for beating America; Germany just reacted to whatever the Allies were doing. Hitler did order that Russian war prisoners be assigned to work in factories producing war goods.
After losing the Russian campaign, Hitler went east, towards the rich oil field of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. The army made solid progress until it didn't. Once again, the Russians stopped the Germans and deprived them of desperately needed petroleum.
The last paragraph of the book says a lot:
“Conflict between the Axis powers and the United States was inescapable for geopolitical, economic, and ideological reasons. Their defeat was also inevitable, but Germany and Japan could still choose the manner of their destruction, and they chose the most terrible.”
Bob's Take
Racism and anti-Semitism. There was a lot of it everywhere.
• Hitler was virulently anti-Jew and blamed them for everything he didn’t like in the world. The book documents the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews even before there was a policy to do that. There were massive killings on each day recounted in the book.
• Americans thought the Japanese and Russians were inferior to our people.
• American whites thought Blacks were inferior.
• Many Japanese thought that westerners were inferior to their great culture which went back thousands of years.
• The Japanese also thought Chinese and Koreans were inferior.
There was a strong belief among white people that non-whites were by definition not as bright as white folk. Leaders in England, France, the US, and Germany did not believe that the Japanese were competent enough to pull off Pearl Harbor or sink big British battleships.
The German leadership thought that everyone except them was inferior. That was the basis for the ill-fated invasion of Russia in June of 1942 which ended up in a chaotic retreat with a million German casualties as a result. Hitler and crew thought that Slavs – Russians – were a sub-race compared to the Aryans.
Poor communication. Most of the time, leaders didn’t know what was going on in real time. Phones and telegraphs were often not reliable and the changes in time zones across the globe interfered with accurate information-gathering.
The Allies really needed Hitler to do something dumb early. He did. Years after the war, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then a Roosevelt advisor, recalled that the attack on Pearl Harbor threw our government completely off kilter. There was chaos and confusion about what to do. FDR agonized about not being able to help England because the country did not support that. The authors write: “Galbraith said that, to the amazement of the president and his advisers, Hitler made the ‘truly astounding’ and ‘totally irrational’ decision to declare war on the United States. Galbraith remembered an indescribable ‘feeling of triumph’ upon hearing the news from Berlin. ‘I think it saved Europe.'”
A great book. I really enjoyed this although it was a bear to get through. There was excruciating detail – which Bob in the Basement really likes – but it was all interesting. The two authors are young scholars, one at the University of Cambridge and one at King’s College, London. Despite their youth, their grasp of historic detail is amazing. As we say in Boston, they are “wicked smaht.”
