By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Pearl Harbour attack and its consequences Part One

The United States, Hitler had told his foreign minister, was contesting Japan and Germany’s right to exist. He regarded war with Roosevelt as inevitable, and he had already accepted that the campaign in the east would not be completed by the end of the year. Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States, Ribbentrop, therefore, told Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima, Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of Germany’s entering into a separate peace with the United States under such circumstances. The Führer is determined on that point. The Japanese did not tell the Germans that the Combined Fleet had already put to sea. Berlin had, in effect, issued Tokyo with a blank check, which it could cash at a moment of its own choosing. 

Contrary to expectations, the result of the Pearl Harbour came only after five additional days, whereby it was Hiter's declaration of war on the United States, much more than Pearl Harbor, which created a new global strategic reality and, ultimately, a new world. America did not enter “the war,” the conflict with Hitler, on December 7, 1941. Rather, the United States was plunged that day into a new and initially separate struggle against Japan. America did not truly join the war until December 11, 1941, and unlike the First World War, the United States did not take the initiative. It was, as British air marshal Arthur Harris had predicted, “kicked into the [European] war.” Harris was therefore spared the ordeal of eating, as he had vowed to do if the Americans entered the war of their own accord, “a pink elephant, trunk, tail and toenails, and raw at that.” In short, the global significance currently attached to December 7 should be attributed to December 11, 1941. Both Hitler and Roosevelt explained the escalating hostility that led to this dramatic turn of events through conspiracy theory. The Führer was convinced that “the Jews” had suborned Roosevelt. He, in turn, had manipulated the United States into such a hostile attitude toward the Reich that Germany had no choice but to declare a preemptive war. The president, for his part, intimated that it was Hitler who pulled the strings in Tokyo. He did not credit the Japanese with an agency of their own, even though they had indeed planned to attack regardless of the Führer’s intentions and promises. But the comparison ends there. On December 11, having plunged his country into an unwinnable war against the greatest industrial power on earth, and a racially kindred one to boot, Hitler had landed exactly where he did not want to be. Roosevelt, by contrast, would soon have the German dictator exactly where he wanted him. Whether Roosevelt had wanted to enter the war against Hitler as a full-scale belligerent before December 7, 1941, remains unclear. In the words of Rexford G. Tugwell, one of his advisers and subsequently one of his most perceptive biographers, “deliberately concealed the processes of his mind. He would rather have posterity believe that for him everything was always plain and easy, than ever to admit to any agony of indecision.”1

The president did not frankly confide his innermost thoughts to even his closest confidants. At the same time, his political skill enabled him to convince others that he completely shared their views even while scrupulously avoiding commitments to do what they wanted.2

As a result, there is no conclusive evidence either way on whether Roosevelt regarded American intervention in Europe as inevitable. Some analysts emphasize that he stretched executive authority to the limit, infuriating congressional opponents, risking a constitutional crisis, and flouting international law to aid the Allies, to provoke Hitler into attacking American vessels and precipitating a crisis that would unite the country in support of the war. Others, however, argue that even when US warships were sunk in the Atlantic and Americans died, Roosevelt did not fully exploit these incidents, aware that a request for war would encounter serious opposition in Congress and among the wider public even as late as the first week of December 1941.3

So while the president implied to British contacts that “he would not be sorry to see the United States in the war,” he evaded any pledge to request a declaration of war from Congress.4

Surveying the American political scene for Britain’s Ministry of Information, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later recalled that “Roosevelt thought he would win the war without actually fighting it … by supplying the British, but not actually declar[ing war], so no American boys would actually get killed,” eventually leaving him “in the neutral position of being able to dictate the kind of world he wanted.”5

The debate over when, and if, Roosevelt would have directly intervened in the war of his own accord still continues today, but the president’s internal deliberations remain as elusive as ever. His private considerations notwithstanding, it is clear that Roosevelt was committed to Hitler's total and utter defeat, even if his method for achieving this before December 1941 was uncertain. As Tugwell astutely observed, Roosevelt “was apt to see the importance of immediate ends more readily than the consequence of doubtful means.”6

By 1941, Roosevelt had decided that Hitler should be vanquished, but he was flexible about how. While the president hoped to secure victory by aiding Britain and the Soviets as a noncombatant if possible, he was increasingly open to formal intervention if necessary, but only if he could do so with the support of a united nation at home. But he remained doubtful about this unity even after Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, which was why Hitler declaring war neatly solved his most urgent problem. The Nazi dictator ultimately did so out of fear that, if he did not, the United States would overwhelm Germany at a time of its choosing, even though the American president was convinced that only a fait accompli would ensure the congressional and national unity necessary for another war in Europe. On the morning of December 12, an aide reported to the president that “the country’s newspapers give expression to a thrilling and uplifting sense of union …. The United States has again become a community.”7

The president refused to be complacent, however. Over the following weeks, he worked to cement this unity wherever he could. In response to the Republican commitment to cooperate with the administration, Roosevelt announced that partisan politics were now over, for, in wartime, there was “only a determined intent of a united people to carry on the struggle for human liberty.”8

On December 15, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, the president issued a public declaration rallying the country to destroy Nazi “barbarism” and defend the principles of liberty. Reversing his strategy of just a few days before, he focused almost exclusively on Germany, referring to Hitler frequently and explicitly while barely mentioning Japan.9

This was designed to ensure that public opinion was not distracted from the broader struggle, and it largely succeeded, with an administration official approvingly noting that press coverage of the speech “subordinated the early narrow sense of outrage against Japan and stressed the need for destroying totalitarianism as a whole.”10

All the same, the official warned that “despite the large measure of unity, the press reveals certain fissures which persist among the American public.” In the early days of the war, there was “almost unanimous endorsement of forceful action against Japan; but the minority groups which opposed the Administration before the attack on Hawaii give evidence that they will continue to resist the larger purpose of the Administration on the war as a whole.” Clearly, he concluded, even “if isolationism, as the commentators insist, is dead, a parochial spirit still exists.”11

Perhaps that is why, when Roosevelt received news that Germany’s allies Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania had declared war on the United States, he “told Cordell [Hull] to take no notice of it and I will not send word to Congress.” Conscious that congressional and public opinion remained potentially volatile, Roosevelt wanted to avoid anything that might provoke disunity. America’s diplomats were even instructed to get the three governments to withdraw their declarations.12

The impact of Hitler’s declaration of war was immediate. The envoys, the attachés, and the journalists departed. US officials and pressmen in Berlin were sent to a freezing hotel in the suburbs, then to the spa town of Bad Nauheim, and then were finally shipped home via Lisbon on a chartered Swedish ship.13

In Washington, the German embassy was closed down. Thomsen and his staff were eventually repatriated to Germany. The Japanese embassy was cut off from all outside contact. After Christmas, Saburo Kurusu was moved with the rest of its staff to Hot Springs, Virginia. Six months later, Kurusu and Ambassador Nomura boarded another Swedish ship for Yokohama.14

Diplomacy and journalism, after playing such a large part in our story, would wait in the wings until the end of the war. As Cordell Hull observed, after December 11, “the roar of the cannon now submerged the voices of diplomacy.”15

THE UNITED STATES was now the Third Reich’s open enemy. In the Nazi view, which Goebbels articulated the day after the declaration of war, the conflict pitted “hungry” Germany against the “satiated” and “plutocratic” United States. This inequality, he claimed, was “the true origin of the war.” It had to be resolved. That same day, Hitler met with the gauleiters in a hastily convened conference. He explained that “even if Japan had not entered the conflict,” he would still “have had to declare war on the Americans sooner or later.” In that context, the Führer continued, “East Asian conflict was like a present from heaven.” The opening of formal hostilities with the United States would enable him to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied commerce. Whether or not the “plutocratic powers,” that is, the United States and Britain, would withdraw entirely from East Asia was unclear, Hitler said. Still, he believed that they would divide their strength across the various theaters of war. This, he explained, would lead to them “dispersing their forces to such an extent that they would be incapable of concerted action on anyone front.” “That,” the Führer concluded, voicing the rationale behind the declaration of war on the United States, “would be the best thing they could do from our point of view.”16

Hitler also told the gauleiters of his intention to “make a clean sweep” in the “Jewish question.” He was referring to central and western European Jewry, the hostages. They were now held responsible for the behavior of the United States, as the Führer had long threatened they would be.17

He reminded the gauleiters of his threat in 1939 to retaliate against Jewry in the event of their “plunging” Europe into war. “The world war is here,” Hitler continued, “[and] the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”18

“The Führer,” the Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg recorded two days later, “said that they [the Jews] had burdened us with this war,” with all its “destruction,” so that “it was no wonder if the consequences should strike them first.”19

In Russia, the Nazis had long treated Jews of both sexes and all ages, in or out of uniform, as enemy combatants or partisans to be systematically killed. Now the Jews of Germany and central and western Europe were to be murdered as well. Whether the entry of the United States into the war was the decisive factor here or merely an accelerant, it is clear that a primary motivation and context for Hitler’s war of annihilation against western and central European Jewry was his relationship with the United States.20

After December 11, 1941, this entered a new and more deadly phase. The murder of the remaining Jews under Nazi control was now a settled matter; all that remained were questions of definition and methods of execution. At least some of the German population were aware of the radicalization of regime policy toward the Jews and its connection to the United States. On December 12, 1941, the same day that Hitler spoke to the gauleiters, the SD Aussenstelle in Minden reported on public opinion in the area. People were “talking a lot,” the report explains, about the deportations “to Russia” in “cattle trucks” and about the sight of Jews trudging through the streets with their household belongings. The SD disapproved of the fact that some Christians showed “strong sympathy” for the victims. These Christians “could not understand” how anybody could be treated “so brutally” because they were all, in the end, “God’s creation.” The SD also noted that people were speaking “a lot” about how Germans in America were allegedly forced “for purposes of identification” to wear a swastika on their left breasts, just like the Jews had to wear the Star of David. The Germans in America, it was felt, would have to “suffer a lot” for the fact that the Jews in Germany were being treated “so badly.”21

Goebbels was also concerned with the situation of the German Americans after the outbreak of war but in a different way. On the same day the Aussenstelle Minden reported on the views of the city’s inhabitants, Goebbels wrote that “the German Americans are putting themselves at Roosevelt’s disposal.” “I expected no less,” he continued, adding that “the American continent has a strange power of assimilation.” “German elements are particularly susceptible to it,” Goebbels went on, noting that “we saw a very similar process during the first world war.”22

Goebbels threw himself into the new propaganda war with gusto. On the one hand, he affected to be unimpressed by American claims “that Germany was a starving country while America was well-fed.” He promised to make that phrase, of a starving Germany and a satiated America, into a “slogan” and “Leitmotiv of the whole war.” It certainly supported Hitler’s “have-not” rhetoric.23

On the other hand, it was obviously risky to let the image of an all-powerful United States go unchallenged. Goebbels told the Propaganda Ministry that the American responsibility for the outbreak of war should be relentlessly hammered home, as should the need to expand the theater of operations. Alleged parallels with the situation in 1917–1918 should be countered by referring to the fact that Germany now controlled “the entire continent” and had reliable allies. A few days later, the ministry was instructed to prepare material that would explain US cultural inferiority to the wider population. Without it, Goebbels feared, the German people, “with the German tendency toward objectivity,” would default to a positive view of the United States.24

While the German press dutifully reported that Hitler’s speech declaring war on the United States had been received with “satisfied relief and deep solemnity” by the German people, in the absence of reliable polls, it is impossible to know what German society actually made of the new war.25

Some Germans affected indifference. When Victor Klemperer asked a Dresden shopkeeper the day after whether war had been declared, the latter simply responded, “I don’t know, I am busy here.”26 T

he report of the SD on December 15 showed a mixed picture. There were those who were happy that Hitler had seized the initiative and who applauded his speech. They were surprised and elated at the quality of their Japanese allies. There was widespread agreement that Roosevelt was now “world enemy no. 1,” perhaps the first time a US president has been so described. But there were also those who were anxious about the acquisition of another enemy. They now expected a much longer war.27

Among those expecting a drawn-out conflict were men on the eastern front. On December 12, the day after Hitler’s declaration of war, General Heinrici wrote to his wife, “How nice it would be if one could once again be in one’s own flat which now stands cold and empty.” “Now that we really have a war,” he continued, “it is almost impossible to foresee when one might once again be able to use it.”28

That same day, and in the same vein, the soldier Ludwig Bumke wrote from Russia that “hopefully that is the last surprise. The Japanese have won some big victories, which pleases us.” “Hopefully they will continue to do so,” he went on, “and it will not become a Thirty Years’ War.”29

In Italy, Mussolini seemed unconcerned by the fact that a colossal new enemy, the United States, had entered the war against him. On December 12, the day after his declaration of war, the Duce argued that things were looking up in North Africa because the Americans and British were now distracted in the Pacific.30

As for American productive power, Mussolini preferred to rely on the advice of Count Giuseppe Volpi, the most important industrialist in the country and head of the Fascist confederation of industry. Volpi, who should have known better, told the Duce that Italian industry was more efficient than that of the Anglo-Americans and would be able to sustain two or three more years of war without difficulty. Mussolini claimed not to think of the Americans as a serious military threat and dismissed reports of their armaments production as mere propaganda. He affected to be much more concerned about the growth of German power, which was causing Italy to be marginalized in Europe.31

The Duce, like the Führer, may just have been putting a brave face on things. Both were perfectly aware of the United States’ immense industrial potential. And Mussolini, like Hitler, had rational grounds not only to fear that Roosevelt intended to join the conflict anyway but also to believe that the outbreak of war with the United States would give him some short-term relief. The Duce had been worried for months that the Americans might land in French North Africa and engage the Italo-German force in a two-front war.32

That threat now receded, at least for the moment, as the Americans were distracted by the Pacific and the British were expected to withdraw men and matériel to deal with the Japanese in Malaya. For the Axis powers and their sympathizers, the war was not merely a geopolitical conflict but also an ideological and racial one. The Third Reich believed it was locked in deadly combat not merely with the Jews and the Slavs but also with the Anglo-Saxon powers, Britain and the United States. From now until the end, whether privately or in formal documents, Hitler spoke of “the Anglo-Saxon powers,” “Anglo-Saxon statesmen,” “Anglo-Saxon forces,” or simply of “the Anglo-Saxons.”33

This was now also the official view from Rome, whose press claimed that “240 million people stand united in their struggle against the Anglo-Saxon powers.”34

The conflict was also, as we have seen, an ideological one against Western “plutocracy.” According to the Nazi narrative, “the Jews” had manipulated the “Anglo-Saxons” into war with the racially kindred Reich. This created some obvious dissonances in German messaging. It was for this reason that Goebbels instructed the Propaganda Ministry on January 13, 1942, that the word “Anglo-Saxons,” which suggested a tribal kinship, should be replaced with the phrase “Anglo-American plutocracy.”35

It was no use. Almost everybody, from the Führer down, continued to refer to them as Anglo-Saxons. In Japan, the conflict continued to be widely perceived as a “war with white people” in general.36

It was also more specifically referred to as a contest with the “Anglo-Saxons.” The Japanese therefore appealed to the racial solidarity of the rest of the world, and to the anti-colonialism of the Indian and Asian nationalists resisting Western imperialism. When Prime Minister Tojo proclaimed the creation of a “New World order” on December 13, 1941, the crowd responded with a “rousing and thunderous banzai for the humiliation of the haughty Anglo-Saxons.”37

As in Germany, the naming of the enemy was important, but Japanese priorities were reversed. General imprecations against white people threatened to offend their European allies and result in mixed messaging. To that end, five days after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, Japanese intellectuals were instructed to drop references to “whites” and “the yellow race” and write instead of “Britain and America” or, simply, “the Anglo-Saxons.”38

The Japanese also launched what they called “Negro Propaganda Operations” to exploit historic discrimination against African Americans. Most of this fell on deaf ears. People like Leonard Robert Jordan, dubbed the “Harlem Hitler,” he looked forward to “President Roosevelt picking cotton and Secretaries Knox and Stimson riding me around in rickshaws,” were very much the minority in the United States. There was no great upsurge of African American support for the Japanese cause.39

Still, enough Black Americans were receptive to Japanese blandishments that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People felt obliged to publish a statement in support of the US war effort in response.40

The Roosevelt administration’s Office of Facts and Figures informed the president in mid-to-late December that Black American newspapers “reveal an intense and widespread resentment against the treatment accorded Negroes in the defense activities of the United States.” In particular, there was vehement protest “against flagrant racial discrimination in the armed forces,” where the administration had bowed to the pressure of W. R. Poage and other southern segregationists to keep Black and white servicemen separate. Roosevelt was told clearly that there was “a strong sentiment among Negroes that democracy, as it is practiced in the United States, has no real meaning for them, that the liberties granted to them here are scarcely worth defending.”41

Within a fortnight, however, the Office of Facts and Figures reported that, “while complaints are still frequent and bitter, the trend seems to be to view the war as an opportunity for Negroes to become a welded, instead of a segregated, part of American society.”42

This report described the green shoots of what would become the “Double V Campaign,” announced by America’s most widely read Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, on the two-month anniversary of Pearl Harbor (February 7, 1942).43

Echoing the rhetoric of US representative Arthur W. Mitchell, the campaign urged Black Americans to give everything for the war effort while simultaneously pressuring the government to make the prose of the Declaration of Independence and the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution a practical reality for all Americans, regardless of race. In Japanese-occupied Asia, particularly in the detention camps holding European prisoners, the traditional racial hierarchy was subverted not just rhetorically but in practice.44

This was widely noted, often with approval. “Although my reason utterly rebelled against it,” a Malay civil servant of Indian origin recalled, “my sympathies instinctively ranged themselves with the Japanese in their fight with the Anglo-Saxons.” In the Philippines, prominent collaborators hailed Japanese advances as a blow to “Anglo-Saxon imperialism” and a “vindication of the prestige of all Asiatic nations.”45

The myth of European invincibility, and with it the legitimacy of colonial rule, had been shattered beyond repair. The irony of supporting the end of white rule in the Far East was not lost on Hitler. He was conscious, he told the gauleiters on December 12, that one might accuse him of acting against “the interests of the white race in East Asia.”46

“Strange,” he remarked shortly afterward, “that we are destroying the bastions of the white race in East Asia with the help of Japan,” while Britain was supporting the “Bolshevik pigs” in their struggle against “Europe.”47

Hitler claimed that he had “not wanted” the end of the British Empire in Asia and Australia, but this was the inevitable result of British policies, beginning with the Western alliance with Japan to exclude Germany from the Far East in World War I and culminating with Britain’s refusal to accept Hitler’s hegemony in Europe.48

He predicted that “the white race” would “disappear” from that “space.” Contrary to myth, however, it was a price the Führer was very happy to pay for the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons; he saw it as a deserved punishment for the British failing to heed his warnings and spurning his hand of friendship. “The interests of the white race,” he insisted, “must take second place to the interests of the German people” and its need for “living space.” “We would ally with anybody,” Hitler continued, “if we could thereby weaken the Anglo-Saxon position.”49

In short, the alignments of December 12, 1941, did not reflect the “global color lines” but transcended them. For the Axis and its fellow travelers, the war remained both a colonizing and a decolonizing project. As the global have-nots, Germany, Italy, and Japan, as they saw it, sought to escape enslavement by the international Anglo-Saxon and Jewish plutocratic ruling class and their Bolshevik auxiliaries. America and Britain, Hitler explained in a speech on January 30, 1942, had “the world at their disposal,” with everything they needed. Not so for what he called the “three great have-nots.”50

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. Nationalist leaders such as Subhas Chandra Bose in India, Sukarno in Indonesia, and the grand mufti of Jerusalem all lined up behind the Axis.51

For some, such as Sukarno, the movie did not much harm their postwar careers, but the association would prove fatal for others, like Bose. WITH HITLER’S DECLARATION of war on the United States, Churchill could finally begin to relax. “I am enormously relieved at the turn world events have taken,” he wrote to Roosevelt on December 12.52

To Eden, still at sea en route to Moscow, the prime minister declared, “The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory.”53

Since assuming the premiership, Churchill’s strategy had been based on holding out long enough against Hitler until, as he phrased it in his famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech, “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”54

In the dark days of 1940, the expectation of future American intervention in the war had encouraged his determination to fight on.55

In pursuit of American participation, he had felt compelled to concede British bases and overseas assets for weapons and warships, to compromise his imperial ideals to sign a charter committed to “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live,” and to call on the president with increasing urgency to intervene.56

Now, an exultant Churchill told Clement Attlee, “We have no longer any need to strike attitudes to win United States’ sympathy. We are all in it together.”57

When one of the chiefs of staff urged continued caution in Britain’s dealings with America, a “wicked leer” came into Churchill’s eye. “Oh, that is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her,” he said. “Now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!”58

Yet, amid Churchill’s jubilation, there remained a lingering concern: that Americans’ simmering fury at Pearl Harbor, and their increased sense of vulnerability now that the Japanese Navy dominated the Pacific, would force Roosevelt to concentrate on Japan, despite his previous commitment to a “Germany first” strategy. At lunch with King George VI on December 12, Churchill reported that he was departing for the Clyde estuary in Scotland that evening and would sail for Washington in the morning. He would take Harriman, Beaverbrook, and the chiefs of staff with him. The king recorded that Churchill was confident the “Libyan situation is going well” and “he can do more good going to talk to F.D.R. at this moment.” The prime minister would tell the US president that “we must have our food and armaments.” With the US Atlantic Fleet now moving to the Pacific to replace losses, Churchill was adamant that he and Roosevelt “must make a plan for the future as they are the only two people who can.” The king also noted, with satisfaction, that “the Germans are in a mess in Russia.”59

The American entry into the war closely coincided with the end of the German advance and the success of the Soviet counteroffensive before Moscow. Contrary to widespread belief, the German high command did not perceive any deep sense of crisis at the start of the offensive on December 5–6.60

It was only in the middle of the month, a week after Pearl Harbor, that Hitler and the supreme military leadership finally registered the true state of affairs. First, as we have seen, the Führer admitted the casualties the Wehrmacht had sustained so far in his speech to the Reichstag on December 11. Second, Hitler was forced to intervene personally, this time not to restart the advance but to prevent what threatened to be a chaotic retreat. In the Soviet Union, victory was made “official” by a Kremlin announcement on December 13 that the Germans were in retreat from Moscow.61

The extent of their disaster on the central front was now clear for all to see. In Germany, the anti-Nazi Friedrich Kellner exulted. “Those whom God wishes to destroy,” he wrote in his diary on December 12, “he has in all ages first made blind.” At best, Kellner thought, the move could only “prolong the war.” He was sure that the “final result,” could only be “the total defeat” of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was, Kellner continued, “a harsh punishment to be born in Germany. These people have gone completely insane.” He was upset by the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse. “Where were the aircraft carriers to protect these battleships,” Kellner wondered, “and where were the fighter aircraft on the island of Malacca?” Kellner demanded that the Allies should “chop the Japs to pieces.” There should be large-scale air attacks on Germany and Japan. Japanese houses, he pointed out, were made of wood and should be burned.62

Pavel Luknitskiy, the special TASS correspondent in Leningrad, was equally ecstatic. That day, he heard the “wonderful news” on the radio. The Germans had been “crushed” near Moscow, Hitler had given a “hysterical speech” on December 11, and the United States had entered the war with Germany and Italy. “This is a big development,” Luknitskiy wrote. “It will speed up the defeat of Hitler and the full destruction of the Fascist Empire.” “The start of victory,” he said with pride, “is laid here, in Russia.” “All else now is a question of time,” he concluded, because he could “see victory.”63

In occupied Poland, the news reached Zygmunt Klukowski a day later. “America is at war with Germany!” he wrote in his diary on December 13. “The mood is brilliant,” he continued. “All have taken courage and are full of hope that this will hasten the end of the war, which must result in a complete defeat for Germany.”64 

There was some speculation about whether Tokyo and Moscow would commence hostilities and close the circle. It seemed logical after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. “One of these days,” Luknitskiy wrote, “there will be war with Japan,” before adding the qualifier “probably.”65

That was certainly the hope of the Americans and of the Chinese nationalists, both of whom demanded that the Soviets take on the Japanese. Stalin, though, had no intention of adding to his burdens until he had sorted out the Germans. “Russia today,” he explained to Chiang, “has the principal burden of the war against Germany” and should “not divert its strength to the Far East.” “I beg you therefore not to insist,” he implored the Chinese nationalist leader, “that Soviet Russia at once declares war against Japan.” Stalin did add, though, that “Soviet Russia must fight Japan” eventually, “for Japan will surely unconditionally break the Neutrality Pact.”66

The Soviet dictator also told Eden, on December 16 after his arrival in Moscow, that while he could not help against Japan yet, “he might be able to in the Spring.” Like Roosevelt, Stalin doubted that Tokyo was truly the master of its own fate, suggesting that “the Germans were running the Japs’ airforce and campaign for them.” Despite Stalin’s conviction that Hitler was reorganizing for a fresh offensive on Moscow in early 1942, Eden noted that he did not “press at all for our airforce or men to be sent to Russia but he would still like more tanks.”67

“Hitler’s failures and losses in Russia are the prime fact in the war at this time,” Churchill observed that same day aboard the HMS Duke of York on his way to the United States. He was adamant that the United States and Britain must send “without fail and punctually, the supplies we have promised,” as this was the only way “we hold our influence over Stalin and be able to weave the mighty Russian effort into the general texture of the war.”68

Despite the dangerous voyage, as the Duke of York, dodged detection by German U-boats and bomber squadrons, “the P.M. was in constant high spirits and never turned a hair,” noted Sublieutenant Vivian Cox, a Churchill aide who was responsible for setting up a floating map room belowdecks for him. After nineteen months as the solitary leader of an empire fighting for survival, Churchill spent the journey strategizing how Britain would soon take the fight to the Axis alongside its powerful allies. Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran, reflected that “he is a different man since America came into the war.” Moran recalled that “the Winston I knew in London frightened me …. He was carrying the weight of the world,” but now “the tired, dull look has gone from his eye; his face lights up as you enter the cabin.”69

Surveying the new international picture, the prime minister declared, “This is a new war, with Russia victorious, Japan in and the Americans in up to the neck.”70 

Churchill’s fellow countrymen, still in the dark about his clandestine trip, we're also struggling to make sense of the new global conflict. That week’s Economist noted that some were baffled by “Hitler’s greatest blunder.” Yet its editors cautioned that “it would be wise to assume that Hitler and his General Staff do not commit blunders, they seldom make ordinary mistakes.” Instead, “if Hitler thinks that a Japanese attack on America serves his purpose, it is more probable that he is right than wrong.” Too many Britons had made the simple assumption that the United States, previously out, was now in the war. In reality, the United States had already been engaged in Europe “with nearly all the weapons she has presently ready,” and Hitler saw Japan’s intervention as a way “to pull her out of the war in Europe and Africa by engaging her attention elsewhere.” Stressing the limited American munitions currently available, the Economist argued that the balance of supplies had altered over the past week “in Hitler’s favor and the democracies’ disfavor.” Despite Roosevelt’s pledge to continue Lend-Lease, “hard strategic facts and the shock sustained by the American peoples will give ‘America First’ a new and very real meaning.” The claims of the United States and its Pacific front would inevitably take precedence over those of the Allies and the Atlantic. Rather than blundering, therefore, Hitler was “gambling—gambling on time, short-term against long-term, immediate results against future hazards.” It would be “folly” to underestimate the Axis, given its past record. In time, the vast productive potential of the United States could supply the armaments to sweep the dictators away. Still, immediate plans needed to be established for “countering the worldwide plan of the Axis with a grand design for the grand alliance.”71

As the words went to press, the prime minister was already on his way to Washington to do just that. 

Now that it could be done openly, establishing a concerted grand strategy with the Americans was a priority for British officials. The day after Hitler declared war, after months of secret liaisons, the Roosevelt administration was finally prepared to publicly recognize the existence of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington.72

The most urgent question to address remained that of supplies. Shortly after Hitler declared war, the British Ministry of Supply cabled its consolidated list of orders, emphasizing those whose “non-fulfillment would seriously impair our fighting effort or gravely interrupt vital production here.” The army required tanks, tank transporters, heavy trucks, and ammunition to reinforce British forces in the North African campaign immediately. Equally, the RAF needed aircraft and component tools for Britain’s production to step up its bombing raids against German industry while the Luftwaffe was engaged on the eastern front. And with Britain’s shipping losses intensifying, the Admiralty was demanding carriers, torpedoes, and engines. On December 14, a member of the British Purchasing Commission in Washington wrote back to London that “the events of the week have made a tremendous difference in the atmosphere here, but it is too early yet to say precisely how our operations are going. To be affected.” However, it was essential for there to be “a pretty rapid development in the way of closer cooperation, if the joint effort is to be properly conducted.”73 

These sentiments were shared by Edward Stettinius. On December 16, the Lend-Lease administrator expressed alarm at the “considerable uncertainty” caused by the War Department still holding up shipments 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.74

Nazi propaganda continued to exploit this. Among the enemy broadcasts “designed to spread defeatism,” an aide informed Roosevelt, “most significantly of all, perhaps, the Berlin broadcasts declare that Lend-Lease aid must now be decreased.”75

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.76 

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. Less than half were eventually requisitioned of the 1,200 aircraft that the US War Department demanded of Arthur Harris immediately after Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, British officials remained fearful that the bill would yet come due at a time when Britain’s resources remained dangerously stretched. As the British official history put it, “If the inroads made by the American Services went too far, if the flow of the vital supplies to Britain and Russia were not maintained,” then “defeat in 1942 was a distinct possibility.” Of course, the American services in the Pacific required immediate reinforcement, and, in general, US forces needed to receive a far greater proportion of American production than during the period of neutrality. Yet, “if Suez was lost, if the Red Army were driven into Siberia, if India and Australia fell to the Japanese, if the Battle of the Atlantic were lost or Great Britain successfully invaded, it would be poor consolation to see the American Army emerge a mighty force in 1943.”77

Even if these fears seem overblown in retrospect, they were genuine at the time.

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.”78

As British officials knew, the Americans had already set up their own strategic munitions board. Unless Britain’s representatives were added, much of the British share risked being swallowed by the American services. With West Coast aircraft factories vulnerable to air raids, fears of a second Japanese assault on Hawaii’s naval installations, and reports of Axis task forces lurking off the coast from Alaska to the Panama Canal, the overriding priority of the US generals were to consolidate their forces. Furthermore, the situation in the Pacific was growing worse by the day, as Japanese forces surged with brutal efficiency through Malaya and the Philippines.

 

Continued in: The Pearl Harbour attack and its consequences Part Two.

 

1. Rexford Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York, 1957), 15.

2. As his interior secretary Harold Ickes once told him, “You won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly. You never put them on the table.” Ickes, Secret Diary, 2:659 (recording conversation with FDR on June 21, 1939).

3. An overview of these competing interpretations are sketched out succinctly in Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge, 2015), 171–183; and Harper, American Visions of Europe, 73–76. For the argument that Roosevelt continued to hope the United States could avoid formal intervention right up until early December 1941, see Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994), 240–241; and Reynolds, Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 212. For the argument that Roosevelt was moving, at least from mid-1941, toward entrance into the war, see Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 265, 267, 285–289; Patrick Hearden, Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: America’s Entry into World War II (DeKalb, 1987), 201; and Trachtenberg, Craft of International History, 129.

4. Memo of conversation with FDR, March 25–26, 1939, by Sir Arthur Willert, quoted in Harper, American Visions of Europe, 73.

5. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2004), 386.

6. Tugwell, Democratic Roosevelt, 97.

7. “Editorial Opinion on Foreign Affairs: The Nation Rallies,” December 12, 1941, Alan Barth to Ferdinand Kuhn Jr., Treasury-Morgenthau Henry Jr.—Editorial Opinion Reports, box 80, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, FDR Library.

8. Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 317.

9. “Radio Address on 150th Anniversary of Bill of Rights (speech file 1404),” December 15, 141, Franklin D. Roosevelt Master Speech Files, 1898–1945, box 64, FDR Library.

10. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 2,” Office of Facts and Figures, December 22, 1941, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers.

11. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 1,” Office of Facts and Figures, December 15, 1941, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers.

12. This proved unsuccessful, despite a prolonged campaign, and the United States eventually reciprocated with declarations of war on all three in June 1942. Weinberg, World at Arms, 263.

13. Lochner, Always the Unexpected, 275.

14. Clifford and Okura, Desperate Diplomat, 124–125, 139.

15. Hull, Memoirs, 2:1100.

16. Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, pp. 494–495.

17. Martin Moll, “Steuerungsinstrument im ‘Ämterchaos?’: Die Tagungen der Reichs- und Gauleiter der NSDAP,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 49 (2001): 238–243.

18. Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, p. 498.

19. Alfred Rosenberg, “Vermerk über Unterredung beim Führer am 14.12.1941,” in Alfred Rosenberg: Die Tagebücher von 1934 bis 1944, eds. Juergen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr (Frankfurt, 2015), 579.

20. See the contrasting views of Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate all European Jews,” Journal of Modern European History 70 (1998): 759–812, and Hermann Graml, “Ist Hitlers Anweisung zur Ausrottung der europäischen Judenheit endlich gefunden?,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 7, 352–362.

21. Report, SD Aussenstelle Minden, December 12, 1941, in Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten, 477.

22. Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, p. 491.

23. Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, pp. 490–491.

24. Boelcke, Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?, 198–199. See also Willi A. Boelcke, ed., Die Macht des Radios: Weltpolitik und Auslandsrundfunk, 1924–1976 (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1977), 381–382.

25. Thus, Landsberger General Anzeiger, December 12, 1941, p. 1.

26. Klemperer diary, December 12, 1941, p. 694.

27. December 15, 1941, Meldungen aus dem Reich, 8:3089–3091.

28. Heinrici to wife, Grjasnowo, December 12, 1941, in Notizen aus dem Vernichtungskrieg, 117–118.

29. Quoted in Stahel, Retreat from Moscow, 31.

30. Thus, Gooch, Mussolini’s War, 211.

31. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1981), 272–274.

32. See Hans Woller, Mussolini: Der erste Faschist (Munich, 2016), 224–226. Our views on this have also been influenced by the unpublished paper of Bastian Scianna, “Mussolini and the US: From Wilsonianism to Pearl Harbor.”

33. Quoted in Simms, Hitler, 446.

34. DNB, December 12, 1941, p. 44.

35. See Guenter Moltmann, “Nationalklischees und Demagogie: Die deutsche Amerikapropaganda im zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Das Unrechtsregime: Internationale. Internationale Forschung über den Nationalsozialismus. Band I. Ideologie—Herrschaftssystem—Wirkung in Europa, ed. Ursula Buettner (Hamburg, 1996), 223; and Simms, Hitler, 47, 617–618.

36. DNB report, December 12, 1941, p. 44.

37. Quoted in Yellen, “Japan and the ‘Spirit of December 8,’” 65.

38. Quoted in Keene, So Lovely a Country, 17.

39. “Trial Bares Dream of Harlem Nazi’, New York Times, December 16, 1942.

40. See Sato Masaharu and Barak Kushner, “‘Negro Propaganda Operations’: Japan’s Short-Wave Radio Broadcasts for World War II Black Americans,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 1 (1999): 5–26 (especially 7–8).

41. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 2,” December 22, 1941, Office of Facts and Figures, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, FDR Library.

42. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 4,” January 5, 1942, Office of Facts and Figures, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, FDR Library.

43. “Democracy at Home Abroad,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 7, 1942, p. 1. For more on this campaign, its origins, and its legacy see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What Was Black America’s Double War?,” Root, May 24, 2013, http://www.theroot.com/what-was-black-americas-double-war-1790896568.

44. See Yoji Akashi and Mako Yoshimura, eds., New Perspectives on the Japanese Occupation in Malaya and Singapore, 1941–1945 (Singapore, 2008). We thank Ce Liang for drawing our attention to this work.

45. Quoted in Thorne, “Racial Aspects,” 344 and 370.

46. Thus, Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, p. 495.

47. Hewel diary, December 16, 1941, Archiv Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich, ED 100 Hewel 78, fol. 192.

48. Adolf Hitler, December 18, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–1944: Aufgezeichnet von Heinrich Heim, herausgegeben von Werner Jochmann (Munich, 2000), 69. The “Table Talk/Monologues” should be used with caution; see Mikael Nilsson, Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks (London, 2021).

49. Thus, Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941, p. 495.

50. Quoted in Simms, Hitler, 450.

51. See generally, Motadel, “Global Authoritarian Moment,” 843–877.

52. Churchill to Roosevelt, December 12, 1941, CHAR 20-46-85.

53. Churchill to Eden, December 12, 1941, CHAR 20-46-88-89.

54. Quoted in Churchill, Never Give In!, 179.

55. Reynolds, “Churchill and the British ‘Decision’ to Fight On,” 147–167.

56. For a critique of Churchill’s American diplomacy, see John Charmley, “Churchill and the American Alliance,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (2001): 353–371, especially 355–361 for the prelude to US intervention. For a more positive recent interpretation of Churchill’s policies prior to US intervention, see Roberts, Churchill, 517–707 (particularly 640, 676). On the background to Anglo-American relations in this period, see also Reynolds, Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, and Kimball, Forged in War.

57. Churchill to Clement Attlee and Lord Woolton (Churchill Papers 20/36), December 12, 1941, in Churchill War Papers, 1612.

58. Quoted in Danchev and Todman, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, 209. Although a number of scholars have assumed this statement was made on December 8, it’s not clear exactly when it was made, with Alan Brooke simply saying it occurred “at one of our meetings shortly after the USA had come into the war.”

59. King George VI private diary, Friday, December 12, 1941, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle.

60. Schmider, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation; Stahel, Retreat from Moscow, 53.

61. Overy, Russia’s War, 120.

62. Kellner diary, December 12, 1941, pp. 207–208.

63. Luknitskiy diary, December 13, 1941. We thank Kristina Nazariyan for drawing our attention to this source.

64. Klukowski diary, December 13, 1941, p. 319.

65. Luknitskiy diary, December 12, 1941. We thank Kristina Nazariyan for drawing our attention to this source.

66. Quoted from Butler, Roosevelt and Stalin, ccxxvi.

67. Oliver Harvey diary, December 16, 1941.

68. C-145x, December 16, 1941/ TOR Dec. 22–25 in Churchill and Roosevelt, 1:294.

69. Baron Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London, 1966), 10.

70. Moran, Churchill, 13.

71. “World War” and “The Battle for Supplies,” Economist, December 13, 1941, pp. 707–709, 713.

72. B.A.D. Washington to Admiralty, December 11, 1941, “Extract from Chiefs of Staff Meeting (41), 418, December 12 1941,” W.G. Sterling to F. E. Evans, “12 December 1941,” all in CAB 121/340, UK National Archives.

73. British Purchasing Commission Washington, DC, (Archer) to Ministry of Supply (Palmer), December 14, 1941.

74. Stettinius to William Knudsen, “Memorandum: Request for Inventor of Lend-Lease Materials Now at Ports,” December 16, 1941, Stettinius Papers, University of Virginia, box 143, Folder 11: Dec. 17, 1941.

75. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 1,” December 15, 1941, Office of Facts and Figures, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, FDR Library.

76. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Intelligence Report No. 2,” December 22, 1941, Office of Facts and Figures, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, FDR Library.

77. Hall and Wrigley, Overseas Supplies, 171–172.

78. Minutes of Meeting Held at Washington, Wednesday, December 17, 1941, AVIA 38/1049 in JMDS-13, British Supply Council Minutes, Jean Monnet Duchêne Sources, Historical Archives of the European Union, European University Institute.

 

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