By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Pearl Harbour attack and its consequences Part Two

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.”79 In particular, the availability of cargo shipping was so restricted that Marshall had been advised by a subordinate that deploying American forces at the level previously envisaged by the Victory Program was incompatible with the country also being the “arsenal of democracy.”80 As a result, the chief of staff told the president that foreign aid allocations must be revised “in light of the vastly expanded requirements of the U.S Military Establishment.”81 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. 

All this had serious implications for the Soviet Union, at least in the short term. On December 20, 1941, the British PQ6 convoy reached Murmansk, somewhat delayed but without further incident or loss. Its precious cargo would help the Red Army hold the line against Hitler. The problem, as the people’s commissar for foreign trade Anastas Mikoyan wrote to Stalin in early January 1942, was not Britain, which was “fulfilling her obligations more or less accurately and carefully.” “The same,” he cautioned, could “not be said of the USA.” Of nearly four hundred aircraft promised by Washington for October to December 1941, “only 204” had been shipped, and ninety-five had so far arrived in the Soviet Union. Between December 13 and 17, Mikoyan continued, the Roosevelt administration had “recalled almost all aircraft supplied from those situated in US ports at the time.” In some cases, he stated, the Americans had “actually unloaded” aircraft already stowed in transports. It was much the same story with tanks.82 Clearly, Pearl Harbor, by diverting US resources to fight Japan in the Pacific, was taking its toll.

THE UNITED STATES was transformed by its entrance into the war. Returning to Washington from the West Coast on December 15, Eleanor Roosevelt wistfully noted that “it seems like a completely changed world.”83 It was now no longer possible for visitors to wander around the White House lawn. There were Secret Service and White House guards at all external gates, and blackout curtains were fitted on all the windows. A special air-raid shelter was hurriedly dug in the vault of the Treasury, although Roosevelt joked to Morgenthau that he would only use it if he could play poker with the secretary’s gold reserves. Huybertie Hamlin, still living with the Roosevelts as a houseguest, noted that each room had a metal pail filled with sand and a scoop shovel, “ready to use when an incendiary bomb drops through the roof.”84 Gas masks were handed out to residents. Security conditions in the capital had changed forever, and life in the United States would never be the same again. For Churchill’s party, used to the far more stringent blackout restrictions of wartime London, their impression on arrival was nevertheless of “the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up.” Churchill’s aide de camp, Commander Tommy Thompson, declared that “Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for five years. My heart filled.”85 The view was made even more spectacular as the British first saw it from the air, having taken the last leg of their journey by plane after anchoring at Chesapeake Bay. The initial plan had been to sail up the Potomac River, but Churchill, according to Moran, “was like a child in his impatience to meet the President. He spoke as if every minute counted. It was absurd to waste time; he must fly.”86

The British prime minister remained alive to the “serious danger that the United States might pursue the war against Japan in the Pacific and leave us to fight Germany and Italy in Europe, Africa and in the Middle East.”87 His mind was put at ease during the first session of the conference when Roosevelt reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to deal with Germany first. Marshall recorded after this initial session that “the President considered it very important to morale, to give the country a feeling that they are in the war, to give the Germans the reverse effect, to have American troops somewhere in active fighting across the Atlantic.”88 Churchill was aware, however, that the president’s strategy remained susceptible to shifts in American public opinion. Therefore, on the second day of his visit he stressed to reporters that, while the remarkable resources of the United States would ensure that soon there would be more than enough supplies for every theater, the most pressing issue now was the allocation of scarce supplies to the fight against Hitler.89 

Churchill followed this up on December 26 in his address to a joint meeting of Congress. He frankly told his audience that it would be “a long and hard war,” but the productive power of the “English-speaking world” would ultimately eclipse “anything that has been seen or foreseen in the dictator states.” His voice rising to a crescendo, he thundered, “What sort of people do they think we are? Is it not possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”90 Roars of approval rang around the chamber, with one Roosevelt administration official describing it as “the first sound of blood lust I have yet heard in the war.”91 The drama of Churchill’s arrival and appearance before Congress captured the broader public imagination. His “presence and actions here seem to have made real for the first time a sense of alliance between the United States and Britain,” Roosevelt was informed by his administration’s Office of Facts and Figures. “The need for the overall planning of grand strategy is now generally recognized,” and, “more than anything else, Mr. Churchill’s words have fostered an awareness that the war is on a planetary scale.”92 

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.” “Notwithstanding the entry of Japan into the war,” they declared, “our view remains that Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory.” Once that had been achieved, the collapse of Italy and Japan would quickly follow. For this reason, the chiefs suggested that “only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interest in other theatres should be diverted from operations against Germany.”93 In other words, the “Germany first” strategy articulated back in February 1941, well before the open belligerency of the United States, was reaffirmed not long after Pearl Harbor. 

Roosevelt and Churchill now moved to formalize the principles for which they were fighting by issuing a joint declaration signed by all the anti-Axis nations. Roosevelt’s continued concern about preserving domestic unity meant he was unwilling to term this an alliance, fearing that it would force him to put a treaty before the Senate, where it was sure to arouse great controversy. For all Churchill’s popular appeal, he remained the embodiment of the British Empire. As Roosevelt privately noted to one adviser during Churchill’s visit, “As a people, as a country, we’re opposed to imperialism—we can’t stomach it.” As a result, “this distrust, this dislike and even hatred of Britain” that Americans traditionally felt “make for all kinds of difficulties” in forging closer Anglo-American relations.94 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.” According to Hopkins, on coining this phrase the president had himself wheeled into Churchill’s guest room to share his idea, only to find him in the bath. Churchill laughed off Roosevelt’s embarrassment by standing, fully naked, and declaring, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States!”95 The story would come to symbolize the growing intimacy of the wartime partnership between their two nations.

The “Declaration by United Nations” was issued on New Year’s Day 1942. Recalling the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, 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.”96

The signatories expressed the hope that their declaration “may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which may be rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.”97

Roosevelt managed to convince the atheist Soviets to sign up to a document committed to “religious freedom” by pointing out that this “meant freedom to have a religion or not to, as one saw fit.” The US president’s appeal for India to be included among the signatories, principally to placate American domestic opinion, was accepted by Churchill, although he angrily resisted the president’s additional appeals to go further in the direction of Indian independence.98 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. During the three weeks of Churchill’s stay at the White House, the two men dined together with Hopkins on most days and stayed up to the early hours drinking, smoking, and strategizing most nights. While the principals bonded, their political advisers and the generals formalized the “common-law marriage” established before America’s intervention. 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. Assignments would be decided by a new Joint Munitions Assignment Board, headed up on each side of the Atlantic by Hopkins and Beaverbrook.

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.100

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.101 In his State of the Union on January 6, 1942, the president told Americans that victory was “a task not only of shooting and fighting but an even more urgent one of working and producing,” because “the superiority of the United Nations in munitions and ships must be overwhelming, so overwhelming that the Axis Nations can never hope to catch up with it.” While “Germany, Italy, and Japan are very close to their maximum output of planes, guns, tanks, and ships, the United Nations are not, especially the United States of America.”102

 The production figures announced by Roosevelt were so “astronomical,” according to the US News, that “only by symbols could they be understood: a plane every four minutes in 1943; a tank every seven minutes; two seagoing ships a day.”103 Aware of the impact this looming onslaught of American power would have on the country’s enemies, Roosevelt hoped “that all these figures which I have given will become common knowledge in Germany and Japan.”104 Returning to London “drunk with the figures” and having agreed on a coordinated grand strategy with the Americans that would focus on Germany first, Churchill informed his cabinet that now “nothing would get in the way of defeating Hitler.”105 As the prime minister, the president, and their advisers had agreed that winter in Washington, and as Churchill would later declare in another address to Congress, “It was evident that, while the defeat of Japan would not mean the defeat of Germany, the defeat of Germany would infallibly mean the ruin of Japan.”106 

HITLER’S GLOBAL WAR required a global strategy. On December 13, 1941, he met with the Japanese ambassador, Oshima, to discuss the new situation.107

The Führer stressed the relief that the US entry into the war represented for the Kriegsmarine, which would now be able to attack American shipping at will. Presenting his strategic conception for 1942, he said that major operations in Russia would be resumed in the New Year. In the meantime, Hitler planned to concentrate his attention on the Mediterranean, where he had deployed large numbers of submarines and aircraft. He stated that his “principal aim” was “first the destruction of Russia,” then an “advance cross the Caucasus towards the south” and the “torpedoing of the Anglo-Saxon navies and merchant marine.” His first blow in Russia would be in the south, partly “because of the oil,” to be followed by the strike into Iraq and Iran against the British Empire. On several occasions during this briefing, Oshima suggested that Japan and the Reich coordinate their operations, but Hitler showed little interest. The only thing he specifically asked of the Japanese was that they cut off the supply of American war material to the Soviet Union via Vladivostok, which they never did.

In practice, Hitler struggled to develop a coherent strategy in early 1942. As Walter Warlimont, the deputy chief of the operations staff of the OKW from December 1941, recalls, no thought had been given to the likely American strategy either.108 Hitler did not even issue a fresh directive addressing the new situation. This was because the Führer had no viable strategy for defeating the Americans. They were the world’s greatest economic power, and he was quite simply stumped. “I am not yet sure,” Hitler admitted to Oshima with disarming honesty on January 3, 1942, “how to defeat the United States.”109

In Russia, Hitler confronted a rapidly deteriorating situation. Until December 12–13, 1941, the Wehrmacht was just about holding its own on the central front; thereafter, it began to give way.110

In a report to Stalin on December 12, Zhukov, as commander of the Soviet western front, would claim that his forces had inflicted significant damage on German forces from December 6 to 10, with ground forces alone destroying 271 and capturing 386 tanks, for example. He would go on to claim that more than eighty-five thousand German troops had been killed according to incomplete figures. Zhukov concluded with the statement, “The pursuit and destruction of the retreating German forces continues.”111 “There is only bad news,” panzer group commander Erich Hoepner wrote on December 12, 1941, as the telephone announced one Russian breakthrough after the other. He compared Germany’s situation with that of Napoleon in 1812.112 “The catastrophe,” officer Hellmuth Stieff wrote to his wife the following day, “is at the door,” a deserved punishment, in his view, for Nazi crimes.113 That same day, the mighty Sixth Panzer Division reported a strength of just 350 riflemen and no tanks.114 There were no reserves. All leave was canceled. 

A change of course was clearly needed. On December 16, Hitler issued his legendary “halt order.” To avoid a general route and the loss of irreplaceable equipment, all units were to stand fast, showing “fanatical resistance,” until reinforcements had arrived from Germany and new positions had been prepared to the rear.115 The following day, on December 19, 1941, Hitler sacked Brauchitsch and took over supreme command of the army himself. The winter crisis was not over; on the contrary, it was only just beginning.116 

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.”117

Either the U-boats would sink enough shipping to cut Britain off from its “lifelines,” or they themselves would be sunk in sufficient number to render the destruction of the Reich inevitable. The same logic applied in the air, on the ground, and in all theaters. The fronts were closely connected in Hitler’s mind, not least because of the vast quantities of matériel being supplied to the Russians through Lend-Lease. Right at the end of December 1941, he remarked to Admiral Raeder that he would rather see the sinking in the Arctic of “four ships bringing tanks to the Russian front” than the destruction of much larger tonnage in the south Atlantic.118 

Despite the nasty shock he had received in 1941 regarding the quantity and quality of Russian equipment, Hitler’s main focus was on matching not the output of the Soviets, but that of Britain and, especially, the United States. On January 10, 1942, as the winter crisis raged in the east, Hitler set out his priorities. “The long-term aim,” he decreed, “remains the expansion of the Luftwaffe and the Navy to fight the Anglo-Saxon powers.”119

These goals had not shifted since 1940–1941; all that had changed was the timing. Now, in a concession to the unexpectedly strong resistance put up by the Red Army and the imperative to capture the Soviet resources necessary to outlast the United States and Britain, Hitler ordered that production should concentrate “initially” on the “increased needs” of the army; the other two services were to take a step back, for now.120 Particular attention was paid to the production of ammunition, which was deemed more urgent than tanks.121

To meet the new production requirements, the Reich needed millions of more workers. Hitler proposed to make up the shortfall by drafting Russian prisoners. On Christmas Eve, he issued a formal decree determining that the “decisive” issue for the German war economy was now the question of how to integrate the Soviet prisoners of war into the system of production. This required, he continued, “the provision of adequate rations and banishing the danger of a typhus epidemic.”122

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.

THERE WERE SOME Axis attempts to formalize their collaboration. Ribbentrop and Oshima quickly agreed that they would not consult the Italians. Despite its title, “Military Agreement Between Germany, Italy, and Japan,” the document signed on January 18, 1942, was effectively a Germany-Japan agreement.123 It was decided that everything to the west of seventy degrees east meridian, that is, roughly a line drawn north-south through Karachi, would be the German and Italian area of operations. Everything to the east of it would fall into the Japanese sphere. The agreement specifically permitted both sides to operate across the boundary line in the Indian Ocean, an exemption that was clearly intended to authorize such endeavors by the much larger and more capable Japanese Navy.124

Operationally, the plan was for the Japanese to attack British and American bases in the greater East Asian space and to secure command of the sea in the western Pacific. If the Allies concentrated a large part of their naval forces in the Atlantic, then Japan should detach some of its own units to deal with them, thereafter stepping up its commerce raiding in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The powerful Japanese Navy would thereby compensate somewhat for the global inadequacy of the Kriegsmarine. For their part, the Germans and the Italians would focus on control of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. If the Allies concentrated their fleets in the Pacific, then the Germans and Italians would send some of their ships there to support Japan. Above and beyond that, the three Axis powers committed to sharing information and collaborating in the war on Allied shipping. 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.127

Axis strategic military coordination was thus very limited. In mid-February 1942, the Führer did not respond to the demands of the Japanese military attachés, Vice Admiral Nomura and Lieutenant General Ichiro Banzai, and of his own naval leadership to link up.128

Hitler never really intended to join hands with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean, primarily because he didn’t think he had the capacity to do so in the near future.129 The Führer also believed that he didn’t know enough about Japanese capabilities to make useful suggestions to their high command.130

This may well have been the right decision, because, unlike Britain and the United States, who in many respects had a shared strategic culture, Germany and Japan had no experience of military cooperation or joint values to fall back on. No summits, no hymn singing, hardly any statements, no staff talks worth the name, none of the whole panoply of grand alliance. The planned air bridge between the two halves of the Axis petered out after two flights, both Italian.131

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. THE AXIS JOINT strategy got off to a mixed start. Imperial Japan enjoyed a run of victories after Pearl Harbor. Wake Island was soon subdued and so was Guam. Hong Kong fell before the end of 1941. Although the Japanese met stiff American resistance on the Philippines under General MacArthur, he was soon forced to withdraw from Manila to Bataan. Not long after, the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies and Dutch Borneo. An attempt by Allied naval forces to intervene was crushed in the Java Sea. The Japanese also pushed into Burma and the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. In mid-February 1942, the British surrendered at Singapore. Among those captured by the Japanese forces were Fergus Anckorn and thousands of his Eighteenth Infantry Division colleagues. Their convoy had ultimately been diverted from the Middle East, first sailing to Bombay. Then, after a brigade was split off to defend Malaya, the full division was sent in installments to Singapore to reinforce its beleaguered garrison. After sailing almost eighteen thousand miles and having spent around three months virtually uninterrupted at sea, the Eighteenth Infantry Division reassembled in Singapore just days before the fortress fell. They would soon experience the brutality of Japan’s prisoner of war camps; many, including Anckorn, were forced to work on the notorious Burma railway.133

Three weeks after the fall of Singapore, the Dutch gave up in Java. All this, as the British anti-colonialist historian Margery Perham wrote in March 1942, wrought “a very practical revolution in race relationships.”134

Old hierarchies were suddenly inverted; the “white man” was cast down. Militarily, the Japanese tide seemed unstoppable, and the agreed Allied focus on Europe was increasingly unsustainable. Germany, by contrast, was already in crisis. To be sure, the U-boats enjoyed a brief, happy time slaughtering American shipping before a convoy system was introduced. Elsewhere, though, the news was grim. Rommel was on the back foot in North Africa. Worse still, the whole eastern front was in danger of collapsing. Despite Hitler’s “halt order,” the German line broke in several places. Whole divisions were cut off and had to be supplied from the air. The magnitude of the disaster could no longer be concealed from an anxious German public. Throughout the first three months of the year, the fighting raged in Army Group Center. Stalin hoped, and many Germans feared, that war might end there and then. It took until the end of March 1942 before the Russian front was completely stabilized. 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.135

The assembled bureaucrats discussed definitions of who was a Jew and the modalities of “deportation,” which by this stage meant mass murder. The lists included not merely numbers of Jews in the areas under German control or countries presumably still to be conquered or coerced, such as Sweden. Hitler was clearly determined to eliminate the Jewish presence in Europe, the whole of Europe, for all time. 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.136 

On December 12, 1941, the day after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, the train with Jewish deportees from Kassel had reached the Riga ghetto. The following day, the transport from Düsseldorf arrived.137

They enjoyed a brief respite in terrible conditions, but the vast majority soon met the same fate as the Latvian Jews who had been murdered to make way for them. During the summer of 1942, the scope of the killing was widened to the entire Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement in Poland. They were deported to, and for the most part murdered in, camps such as Belzec, Treblinka, and, of course, Auschwitz, which became an extermination camp. The corpses were burned in the crematoria that the company of J. A. Topf and Sons had been erecting in December 1941. 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. In March–June 1942, the Axis moved to the next stage of its joint strategy, such as it was. The Japanese carrier strike force, Kido Butai, swept into the Indian Ocean, sank an old British aircraft carrier and two cruisers, and bombarded Ceylon. Further operations were planned south toward the Coral Sea, to cut Australia off from the United States, and east against Midway, to lure the American carrier force out to its destruction. In North Africa, Rommel surged forward and appeared within striking distance of Egypt and Palestine. In the Arctic, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine largely destroyed PQ17, an Allied convoy bringing military aid to Stalin. In Russia, the Wehrmacht captured Sevastopol, and German tanks raced toward the Caucasus. Their target was the oil fields of Maikop and Baku, and ultimately those of Iraq and Persia. It seemed possible that the Axis powers might link up in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. 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.138

In Britain, the bleak strategic picture, particularly in the Pacific, led to a parliamentary challenge to Churchill. The prime minister had returned from Washington to find “an embarrassed, unhappy, baffled public opinion … swelling and mounting about me on every side.”139

In a closed session of the House of Commons during his absence, Chips Channon noted that “there was continued criticism of the Government, a barrage of questions, bickering and obvious dislike …. No Government could survive such unpopularity for long.”140 At the end of January, amid growing disapproval of his government’s conduct of the war, the prime minister effectively told his critics to put up or shut up, demanding a “declaration of confidence of the House of Commons as an additional weapon in the armoury of the United Nations.”141

After a three-day debate, he secured a resounding victory by 464 votes to 1. Yet, with the loss of Singapore in February, which Churchill called the “greatest disaster to British arms” in history, the criticism resumed with a vengeance.142

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.”144

Animosity was particularly pronounced on the Pacific Coast, home to the vast majority of Japanese immigrants. After a government report found extensive espionage by Japanese nationals before the Pearl Harbor attack, this exacerbated existing racial antagonism and fueled further claims, this time false, that Japanese American citizens were engaged in sabotage, presenting a substantial threat to national security. Facing widespread public appeals to act, Roosevelt accepted the War Department’s argument that it was a “military necessity” that 110,000 Japanese be forcibly “relocated” in February to what the president himself called “concentration camps.” Roosevelt only requested that it be conducted as reasonably as possible, and he evinced little concern at the suffering that resulted.145

He was aware that this order violated the Bill of Rights, which he had so publicly invoked just two months previously to justify America’s war effort. It also singled out the Japanese while failing to take similar action against Germans and Italians, provoking inevitable charges of racial discrimination. Yet, as his attorney general Francis Biddle, who alone opposed the policy in cabinet, later wrote, Roosevelt was “never theoretical about things.” With the military claiming it was necessary and the public on their side, “there was no question of any substantial opposition, which might tend toward the disunity that at all costs he must avoid.”146

In fact, there was little real military justification for the policy, and the incarceration would be described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the “worst single wholescale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.”147

It was 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. As Japanese successes continued to mount, so did public pressure for complete American preoccupation with the Pacific, particularly after a valiant stand at the Bataan Peninsula was followed by the capture of thirty-five thousand Americans and Filipinos on April 9, the largest surrender in American history. Roosevelt responded by ordering the dispatch of such a large proportion of American forces to the Pacific that the balance of America’s war effort was slightly tilted toward the region for the rest of the year. With the loss of Singapore signaling the demise of Britain’s status as a major power in East Asia, leading Britain to a renewed concentration on propping up its position in the Middle East and India, the American role in the Pacific became more important than ever, particularly for the protection of Australia. At the same time, Roosevelt remained determined to get US ground forces swiftly into battle against the European Axis, overcoming opposition from his service chiefs to press for a North African offensive that would begin in November 1942 and laying the foundations for an overwhelming shift to a “Germany first” approach from 1943.148 It was the anticipation of the impending arrival of American troops and matériel to bolster both theaters that enabled Churchill to again face down his critics during another secret session of the Commons on April 23. As Chips Channon recorded: “We left the Chamber confident that the war would, after all, be won, thanks chiefly to the stupendous American production.”149 For the rest of that spring, however, as General Alan Brooke recalled, the British were “literally hanging on by our eyelids! Australia and India were threatened by the Japanese, we had temporarily lost control of the Indian Ocean, the Germans were threatening Persia and our oil, Auchinleck was in precarious straits in the desert, and the submarine sinkings were heavy.”150

Churchill dubbed the Japanese Indian Ocean raid “the most dangerous moment of the war.”151 Despite the overwhelming Allied industrial superiority, the outcome still seemed uncertain. In reality, though, the Germans and the Japanese were running on engine fumes, their industrial and raw-material tanks far too empty to deliver the decisive victory they so desperately needed. By early summer, the Axis advance was faltering, and by the autumn it had completely ground to a halt. In the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, the first carrier battle in history, the Japanese were forced to turn back. The Japanese advance toward Port Moresby was halted. A month later, Kido Butai was surprised by American dive-bombers at Midway and annihilated. Four Japanese carriers were sunk. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been avenged. Shortly after, the Americans counterattacked at Guadalcanal. The Royal Navy returned in strength to the Indian Ocean and remained dominant there until the end of the war.152

The Pacific war turned into a war of attrition in the Solomons: on land, at sea, and in the air. This was a conflict that only the United States, with its vast industrial base, would win. Admiral Yamamoto’s prediction had been vindicated. In Hitler’s area of operations, things were no better. A British raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942 suffered heavy casualties but was a portent of the Anglo-American intention to return to mainland Europe. The thrust into the Caucasus was halted well short of Baku in the late summer of 1942. The Wehrmacht now concentrated on trying to capture Stalingrad, itself a poor substitute for Moscow. Plans to finish off Leningrad had to be shelved. In North Africa, Rommel was first checked, and then thrown back at the Battle of El-Alamein. Then the Russians counterattacked at Stalingrad, with the help of vital Allied supplies, cutting off the entire Sixth Army.153

There were still hopes in Berlin that the British could be starved out through the U-boat campaign, but by the following Easter, the tide had turned there too. THE REST OF the conflict consisted of what Churchill later declared in his memoirs as the application of overwhelming Allied force.154 The “war of motors,” which Stalin had spoken of, was won by American production, just as he had said it would be. The American industrial “cauldron,” as Churchill had once described it, bubbled and hissed. It already massively outproduced the combined German and Japanese war economies.155

Despite the millions of slave laborers pressed into service, who, just as the RSHA had feared, made Germany more ethnically diverse than it had ever been before, the Reich could never hope to win this race. Hitler himself was only too conscious of the disparity, and he came back repeatedly to the enormous productive power of the United States until the end of the war.156

This determined the outcome of the conflict in two ways. First of all, directly, through the US armed forces. After a mixed debut in the Pacific and North Africa, American armies increasingly stamped their authority on the war. Together with their British and Commonwealth allies, they cleared the Axis out of Sicily and southern Italy in 1943, knocking Italy out of the conflict. American tanks paraded through the streets of Rome, just as Ciano had said they would. Allied warships and merchant marine had won the battle for the Atlantic by March 1943. British and American bombers then took the war to the enemy, opening up a second front over the Reich, attacking both industrial targets and (especially in the case of the RAF) the civilian population. In 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy and eventually pushed all the way into Germany.

Second, the American war economy had a huge indirect impact through the supply of Lend-Lease equipment to the Soviet Union. The importance of Lend-Lease actually grew as the war continued. This aid came via the Arctic, Iran, and Vladivostok. Unlike 1941, the Red Army now had plenty of home-produced tanks and aircraft. What Lend-Lease gave them was a critical mobility that the Wehrmacht lacked. The speed of the Soviet advances from 1943 to 1945 would have been unthinkable without the American trucks and jeeps that transported men and supplies, the popular ration packs that fed them, or the radios that enabled communication between the spearheads and the generals.157

When reviewing the totals shipped on the Arctic route alone, the naval historian Friedrich Ruge, who had served in the Kriegsmarine throughout the war, was in no doubt that “Anglo-American sea-power exerted a decisive influence on the land operations in Eastern Europe.”158 As we have seen, Stalin was profoundly conscious of the value of Lend-Lease support during the conflict, especially in 1941. For the rest of the war, though, he said little to nothing about Lend-Lease, instead bitterly complaining about the absence of a “second front” until D-Day. During the Cold War, Anglo-American help was downplayed by the Soviet Union.159

“Disagreements over Lend-Lease arose after the war,” Molotov candidly recalled. “We hadn’t noted them before.”160 In fact, Russian president Vladimir Putin recently emphasized that the Western Allies had rendered substantial help to the Soviet Union, which he estimated at about 7 percent of total Soviet military production.161 But the United States didn’t aid the Soviets with munitions alone. By the end of the war, it is estimated that over half of the vehicles in the Red Army were originally American produced. The oil to fuel them also came overwhelmingly from the United States, which produced around 65 percent of the world’s petroleum at this time. By 1944, the country was refining 90 percent of the Allies’ aviation fuel, with oil ultimately making up two-thirds of Lend-Lease supplies.162

“This is a war of engines and octanes,” Stalin again proclaimed, this time while proposing a toast at the 1943 Tehran Conference in the presence of Churchill and Roosevelt. “I drink to the American auto industry and the American oil industry.”163

In late 1942, the Soviet Union went over to the attack. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad capitulated in February 1943, and a major German offensive was halted at Kursk in July. By the end of the year, the Nazis had been driven out of most of the Ukraine. In the course of 1944, the Red Army surged forward again. Leningrad was relieved, after a siege that had lasted more than nine hundred days. The Crimea, site of the murder of the Jews of Simferopol, was liberated. In July 1944, the Russians tore the heart out of Army Group Center in Operation Bagration. The Red Army first reached German soil that autumn. In early 1945, the Russians began their final offensive on the Reich, which ended in the siege and capture of the imperial capital by early May 1945. On the other side of the world, American industry sustained another epic contest. The Pacific Fleet was reconstituted. A veritable armada of aircraft carriers and landing craft was fitted out. The Japanese were driven out of the Solomons; Admiral Yamamoto was shot down during an inspection of the area in April 1943. Slowly but surely, the Americans hopped from island to island. Soon, mainland Japan was in range of the American bomber fleets. In Burma and northeast India, the Japanese were checked and thrown back by the British. The Royal Navy returned in strength to the Far East, this time with a substantial force of aircraft carriers. One Japanese capital ship after the other was sent to the bottom of the sea. The end of the battleship era, which Japanese naval aviators had inaugurated at Pearl Harbor and through the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, was now completed by the US Navy.

As the tide turned, the cities of the Axis were subjected to a terrible retribution. In the early summer of 1942, Cologne, from which a transport of Jews had departed on December 7, 1941, was hit by a devastating RAF “thousand-bomber raid.” By the end of the war, most of the city center had been leveled; only the iconic cathedral loomed out of the rubble, apparently undamaged. A year later, Hamburg, from which the transport arriving in Riga had originated, was struck by a blizzard of RAF incendiaries. Düsseldorf, from which another transport had departed on December 11, 1941, was also badly hit by Allied bombing. General Heinrici’s Münster, already badly damaged when he was writing in December 1941, was wrecked by the end of the war; half the city and nine out of ten houses in the old city had been leveled. The imperial capital, Berlin, was struck on many occasions; in October 1943, one of the raids heavily damaged the new Japanese embassy.164 Japan, too, was mercilessly firebombed, in this case by the Americans. The wooden houses of Japan burned intensely, just as Friedrich Kellner had suggested they would. In March 1945, for example, the writer Kafu Nagai’s home was incinerated in a US air raid.165

Japan was not just “ground to powder,” as Churchill had predicted, but burned to ashes. Slowly, resistance to Hitler mounted. Count Sponeck, who had played such a baleful role in the murder of the Crimean Jews, shortly afterward defied an order that would have led to the destruction of his division and was jailed in 1942. He was then killed in the aftermath of the abortive July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, and history has been kind to him as a consequence. Hellmuth Stieff, who had suffered so much at Moscow, was closely involved in the July plot. Despite sustained Gestapo torture, he refused to betray any of his comrades before he was executed. The clerical opposition that the security services had grappled with in December 1941 was treated with some circumspection; Hitler vowed to settle the account after the war had been won. None of these efforts, however, came close to dislodging the German dictator. At the end of April 1945, as the Russians closed in on his bunker, Hitler committed suicide. In his “Political Testament,” the Führer returned to the themes he had elaborated upon on December 11, 1941 (and, of course, on many occasions before and after). Hitler reiterated his view that the war was “desired and provoked solely by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or who worked for Jewish interests.” “I never wanted,” Hitler continued, “that the first unholy world war” should have been followed by “a second one against Britain or even America.” He lamented that German cities and cultural treasures had been reduced to “ruins,” that millions of adult males had died at the front, and that hundreds of thousands of women and children had been burned in their cities, but he reminded his readers that he “left no one in any doubt” that the “real guilty party,” the Jews, “would have to pay for his guilt,” if “by more humane means.” This was an oblique, but unmistakable reference to his mass murder of the Jews in the gas chambers. Strikingly, this last will and testament made no direct mention of either Communism or the Soviet Union but inveighed instead against those Hitler saw as the real villains, “international money and finance conspirators” who treated the “peoples of Europe” like “blocks of shares.” Four months later, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. “Tokyo is a long way from Nagasaki,” Admiral Ugaki had written back in December 1941 about the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, “but vengeance may be exacted far from the scene of the original offence.”166

Now the United States had exacted its revenge at Nagasaki, far from the original site at Pearl Harbor. A few days after that, the Red Army attacked and defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Stalin had finally broken his agreement with Tokyo, honoring the spirit of his commitment to Chiang in late 1941 and the letter of his promise to the Allies at Yalta that he would declare war on Japan the moment Germany had been defeated. By the middle of the month, Japan had surrendered. On hearing the news, Admiral Ugaki embarked on a final fatal suicide mission. A fortnight later, a Japanese delegation, including Toshikazu Kase and the new foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, signed the official document of surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. BY THE AUTUMN of 1945, the world had been partitioned, but not in the way the Axis alliance of December 1941 had envisaged. The new dispensation both reflected and created new global realities. Most European Jews had been murdered. Germany had been utterly vanquished and partitioned into four zones of occupation; the anti-Nazi diarist Friedrich Kellner’s son Fred, now a US citizen, served in the American one. The European center had collapsed. The western half of the continent was dominated by the Anglo-Saxons, the eastern half by the Soviet Union. If the Germans and Japanese had previously reckoned themselves leaders of the global have-nots, then the little they had had now been taken from them. Western colonialism was briefly reinstated in East Asia, but its nimbus had been destroyed forever, shattered by the fall of Singapore and the other military humiliations inflicted by Japan on the white man in 1941 and 1942. The Anglo-Saxons still dominated most of the world, but the balance between the British Empire and the United States had shifted decisively toward the latter. Most of this was inevitable after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. It was by no means a forgone conclusion on December 6, or even on December 8, just after Pearl Harbor. As we have seen, many alternative outcomes were discussed at the time. The world of August 1945 was only one of several that seemed possible in early December 1941. Japan might have attacked the Soviet Union to avenge the defeats of 1938–1939. Russia might have declared war on Japan in solidarity with the Western Allies. Hitler might have backed out of declaring war on the United States.167

Japan could have attacked the British Empire only, and not the Americans. Each of these alternatives, and their permutations, would have produced a substantially different world in 1945. If Japan had attacked Britain but not the United States, Churchill’s nightmare scenario and one that Hitler had promoted in 1940 and early 1941, it would have been an even greater disaster than British planners had expected. Roosevelt would have struggled to persuade the US public to join the war. India might have fallen. A linkup of the Axis partners in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf would have been quite feasible. British resources would have been stretched to the breaking point, damaging Britain’s capacity to fight Hitler. This was why Roosevelt feared any such Japanese move and did his best to deter it. This option was considered but rejected by Tokyo out of fear that the United States would intervene on Britain’s behalf. Roosevelt’s bluff had worked.

Though Pearl Harbor clarified the relationship between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers, the future still appeared open in other respects. Churchill’s other nightmare, and the two were not mutually exclusive, was that the United States would not formally enter the European conflict after Pearl Harbor, unless Hitler did him the favor of declaring war. In that event, the confrontation between the US Navy and the Kriegsmarine in the Atlantic could have been wound down as Congress and public opinion forced Roosevelt to concentrate on defeating the Japanese. The resulting diversion of American industrial capacity would have either ended or seriously reduced the Lend-Lease program. If that had happened, the British would have struggled in the Atlantic, they would have been much weaker in the skies over Europe, and they would have had fewer tanks and guns to deploy in North Africa. In that event, Stalin might have been able to hold the line in 1942–1943, but offensives of the kind he actually mounted in the last two and half years of the war would have been impossible. The course of military operations would have been completely different. Nobody can be sure how European Jewry would have fared if Hitler had not declared war on the United States on December 11, or on some later date. The Soviet Jews under Nazi control had already been murdered, and so had many others. But most European Jews were still alive, and Hitler’s plans for them were closely connected to his relationship with the United States. The deportation of the central and western European Jews had been planned some time before December 11, 1941, but as Hitler’s remarks on December 12 show, their situation deteriorated markedly from that day.

For Stalin, the threat of a Japanese attack receded after December 7, 1941, but it was still a possibility. He also had to deal with initial American pressure to declare war on Japan in solidarity. Given that Stalin had bested the Japanese twice in the 1930s, any such war would probably have ended in a Soviet victory, but its impact in late 1941 and early 1942 would nevertheless have been substantial. Conflict would certainly have led to the closing of the Vladivostok aid route from the United States. It would have forced Stalin to transfer forces back east when he was grappling with Hitler in the west.

Of course, the future was not actually as open as it seemed on December 6, 1941. Hitler believed that war with the United States was inevitable, and he had promised the Japanese that he would support them. Thanks to their intelligence reports, Churchill and Roosevelt strongly suspected this. Likewise, Stalin knew that the Japanese were not planning to attack him in the east. But neither the two Western leaders nor the Soviet dictator could be entirely sure. Churchill did not sleep as soundly the night of Pearl Harbor as he subsequently claimed, and he had good reason not to do so. The United States had long stood on the cusp of world power, but it was Hitler’s December 11 declaration that supplied the final push. It was only then that the United States became fully engaged in the war, against every Axis power and in every theater, and could deploy its preeminent economic power to create the most powerful military machine in global history. It is often claimed that Hitler attacked the United States in ignorance or in spite of its immense power. This is not so. As we have seen, he declared war on the United States because of its colossal industrial and demographic potential. In late 1941, the Führer saw a narrow window of opportunity not to defeat the United States outright but to create a self-sufficient Axis bloc strong enough to withstand it. Otherwise, he risked gradual strangulation. Thanks not least to Roosevelt’s skillful messaging, Hitler committed suicide for fear of dying. It was he, and not the president, who had ultimately brought the United States into the war, dooming the Third Reich. Likewise, the Japanese felt the only alternative to accepting American hegemony was a desperate and probably doomed attempt to secure the economic basis for an independent existence. Like the Germans, they saw a choice, as one Japanese statesman had put it before Pearl Harbor, between becoming “gradually poor” and becoming “utterly poor.” That has been the fate of the have-nots down the ages. 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.

 

79. Draft memo, Marshall for President, circa December 13, 1941, sub: Aid to Russia, quoted in Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 552.

80. Memo, Somervell for Chiefs of Staff, December 11, 1941, sub: Shipping Situation, quoted in Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 209.

81. Draft memo, Marshall for President, circa December 13, 1941, sub: Aid to Russia, quoted in Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 552.

82. Mikoyan report to Stalin (extract), January 9, 1942, in Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 171.

83. Quoted in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 298.

84. Huybertie Hamlin, December 18, 1941, “Visit at the White House,” Hamlin Papers, box 358, folder 15, Library of Congress.

85. W. H. Thompson, Assignment: Churchill (New York, 1955), 246. As Britain’s war with Germany had begun just over two years before, Thompson was slightly exaggerating.

86. Moran, Churchill, 11.

87. Churchill, Grand Alliance, 641.

88. Notes, G. C. M. [Marshall], December 23, 1941, sub: Notes on Mtg at White House with President and Br. Prime Minister, Presiding, quoted in Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 105.

89. “Churchill Calls for Knockout War,” New York Times, December 24, 1941, p. 4.

90. “The Speech to Congress,” December 26, 1941, in Winston S. Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches, ed. Charles Eade (London, 1942), 339–340.

91. Lilienthal, Journals, 1:418.

92. Alan Barth to R. Keith Kane, “Survey of Intelligence Materials No. 3,” December 29, 1941, Office of Facts and Figures, box 161, Franklin Roosevelt Papers, PSF, 1933–1945, FDR Library.

93. “Memorandum by the British Chiefs of Staff,” December 24, 1941, WW-1 (U.S. Revised), Grand Strategy: Establishment of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, FRUS, Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, 210.

94. Quoted in Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 324.

95. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 442.

96. This was proposed by Attlee to Churchill and, by extension, to Roosevelt, who agreed that it was “a distinct advantage to have as long a list of small countries as possible.” Initial quote in “The British Lord Privy Seal (Attlee) to Churchill, December 25  1941,” and Roosevelt’s response in “The President to the Secretary of State, December 27 1941,” both in FRUS, Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, 364–370. To list them in the order in which they appeared on the UN Declaration: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, and Yugoslavia.

97. Dan Plesch, America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace (London and New York, 2011), 33–37 (quotes 34).

98. Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 319.

99. This is a quotation on Churchill’s outlook by Sir Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to Churchill’s war cabinet, and referenced in Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 103.

100. Herring, Aid to Russia, 53.

101. Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 197.

102. State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942, PPA, vol. 11, 1942, 36–37.

103. Quoted in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 313.

104. State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942, PPA, vol. 11, 1942, 36–37.

105. First quote in Moran, Churchill, 24 and second quote in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (London, 1951), 78.

106. “Address to Congress,” May 19, 1943, in Winston S. Churchill, Onwards to Victory: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill (London, 1994), 93.

107. Discussion with Oshima, December 13, 1941, in Staatsmänner und Diplomaten, 1:682–688.

108. Matthias Rawert, “Die deutsche Kriegserklärung an die USA 1941,” Militärgeschichte: Zeitschrift für historische Bildung 3 (2011): 19.

109. Discussion with Oshima, January 3, 1942, in Staatsmänner und Diplomaten, 2:41. See also Bernd Wegner, “Hitlers Strategie zwischen Pearl Harbour und Stalingrad,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, 6: 97–107.

110. Schmider, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation, 350–351.

111. “Report of the Commander of Forces of the Western Front to the Supreme High Commander on the Results of the Counteroffensive of the Front from 6 to 10 December, 12 December 1941,” in Russkii Arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. T.15 (4-1). Bitva pod Moskvoi. Sbornik Dokumentov, ed. V.A. Zolotarev (Moscow, 1997), 178–179. We thank Alexander Hill for supplying us with this reference. He notes that while these figures may be exaggerated, they nonetheless give some idea of Soviet perceptions of the success of their operations to date.

112. Bücheler, Hoepner, 162.

113. Stieff to wife, December 13, 1941, in Hellmuth Stieff, 143.

114. Reinhardt, Moskau, 206.

115. Stahel, Retreat from Moscow, 110.

116. Thus, Stahel, Retreat from Moscow, 131, 142.

117. Thus, Goebbels diary, December 13, 1941.

118. Quoted in Werner Rahn, “Seestrategisches Denken in der Deutschen Marine, 1914–1945,” in Politischer Wandel, ed. Ernst Willi Hansen, 157.

119. Quoted in Simms, Hitler, 456.

120. Guntram Schulze-Wegener, Die deutsche Kriegsmarine Rüstung, 1942–1945 (Hamburg, Berlin, Bonn, 1996), 19.

121. Thus, Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 568–569.

122. “Zurverfügungstellung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener für die Rüstungswirtschaft,” December 24, 1941, in Führer-Erlasse, 214–215.

123. Martin, “Die Militärische Vereinbarung,” 134–144.

124. Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War (Stuttgart, 1981), 19.

125. Werner Rahn, “Japan and Germany, 1941–1943: No Common Objective, No Common Plans, No Basis of Trust,” Naval War College Review 46 (1993): 47–68.

126. Thus, Johannes H. Voigt, “Hitler und Indien,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19 (1971): 55–57.

127. See Glang, “Germany and Chonqing,” 885–886.

128. See Alan Donohoe, “Hitler as Military Commander: From Blau to Edelweiss, January–November 1942” (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2015), 251.

129. Hauner, India in Axis Strategy, 20–55, 173–192, 479–509.

130. Thus, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, Die unheimliche See: Hitler und die Kriegsmarine (Munich, 1952), 51.

131. See Herde, Planungen und Verwirklichung, 14–101.

132. Thus, Rotem Kowner, “When Economics, Strategy, and Racial Ideology Meet: Inter-Axis Connections in the Wartime Indian Ocean,” Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 228–250.

133. “Anckorn, Fergus Gordon (Oral History),” 22926, Reels 1–5, Imperial War Museum, Production Date, April 16, 2002, www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80021489.

134. Quoted in Thorne, “Racial Aspects,” 377.

135. Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London, 2003).

136. Gerlach, Extermination, 99–100.

137. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 126–128.

138. Jeffrey Herf, “Hitlers Dschihad: Nationalsozialistische Rundfunkpropaganda für Nordafrika und den Nahen Osten,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2 (2010): 259–286, especially 266–274.

139. Churchill, Second World War, 4:54.

140. December 18, 1941, in Henry Channon, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James (London, 1967), 315.

141. “War Situation,” Commons Sitting, HC Deb, January 27, 1942, Hansard, vol 377, cc619.

142. Churchill, Second World War, 4:81.

143. December poll in Gallup Organization, Gallup Poll #1941-0255: World War II/Employment, Gallup Organization, dataset (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 1941). February poll in Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 331.

144. Quoted in Mark Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance and US Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 110.

145. Quotes in Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 334–336. For more extensive accounts, see Stetson Conn, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast (1942),” in Command Decisions, ed. Kent Roberts (New York, 1959), 88–109, and Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York, 1971). An overview of the documentary record in their collections is provided by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum’s online exhibit, Confront the Issue: FDR and Japanese American Internment, www.fdrlibraryvirtualtour.org/page07-15.asp.

146. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (New York, 1961), 212–216, 235–238.

147. Quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940–1945 (London, 1971), 216.

148. O’Brien, How the War Was Won, 109–201.

149. April 23, 1942, in Chips, 327.

150. Danchev and Todman, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, 248.

151. See John Glancy, The Most Dangerous Moment of the War: Japan’s Attack on the Indian Ocean (Philadelphia, 2015).

152. Boyd, Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, 355–399.

153. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, 403–432.

154. Churchill’s central analysis is confirmed by Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 347–357.

155. See O’Brien, How the War Was Won.

156. Simms, Hitler, 456–457, 497–498, 502, 525.

157. See Hill, Red Army and the Second World War, 180, 220, 313, 360, 442, 467, 486, 493, 505, 508–509.

158. Quoted in Ian Campbell and Donald MacIntyre, The Kola Run: A Record of the Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945 (London, 1958), 230.

159. E.g., Geschichte des Großen vaterländischen Krieges der Sowjetunion. Volume 2. Die Abwehr des wortbrüchigen Überfalls des faschistischen Deutschlands auf die Sowjetunion. Die Schaffung der Voraussetzungen für den Grundlegenden Umschwung im Kriege (Berlin, 1963), 226–227. 1

60. V. M. Molotov and Feliz Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Chicago, 1993), 61.

161. Vladimir Putin, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” National Interest, June 18, 2020.

162. All these figures can be found in Thompson, A Sense of Power, 196–197. See also Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 355, and Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1995), 228–234.

163. Quoted in Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York, 1991), 364.

164. Nobuo, “Die japanische Botschaft in Berlin,” 69.

165. Hotta, Japan 1941, 13.

166. Ugaki diary, December 10, 1941, pp. 49–50.

167. The counterfactual is posed in Robert Farley, “What if Hitler Never Declared War on the US During World War II?,” National Interest, September 2, 2016.

 

 

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