The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [112]
Three days later, in a speech to the Reichstag on the afternoon of 11 December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States, even though Germany was not obliged to come to Japan’s aid under the terms of the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940 if Japan were the aggressor. It seems an unimaginably stupid thing to have done in retrospect, a suicidally hubristic act less than six months after attacking the Soviet Union. America was an uninvadable land mass of gigantic productive capacity and her intervention in 1917–18 had sealed Germany’s fate in the Great War. ‘The Navy and I had no idea that an attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor was planned,’ Admiral Raeder stated at Nuremberg; ‘we learned of this only after the attack had been carried out.’21 This was true, and hardly the way allies should treat each other, giving Hitler the perfect let-out if he had wanted one, but he did not. Instead he exulted in Japan’s ruthlessness, taking it almost as a compliment to himself on the basis of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
By 1943 the number of aircraft lost at Pearl Harbor represented only two days of American production, and in the calendar year 1944, while the Germans were building 40,000 warplanes, the United States turned out 98,000, underlining Hitler’s catastrophic blunder.22 In his 8 December 1941 speech to Congress, Roosevelt had not mentioned Germany or Italy because he did not have the political support necessary for including Japan’s allies in the request for a declaration of war, especially when faced with the powerful America First movement and other isolationist organizations in the United States. Now, the Führer had solved Roosevelt’s problem at a stroke. Hitler believed he was simply normalizing a state of affairs that had already been in de facto existence for many months, and in such a way that gave German U-boats the right to torpedo American warships that had been attacking them for over a year. Direct American support for Britain and the USSR could now be countered actively, even while the United States had her hands full in the Pacific. Hitler had long considered war with America to be inevitable: he thought it better to have the prestige of instigating it and to help the Japanese by forcing on America a war on two fronts.23 Coming within a week of the checking of his offensive against Moscow, when Russians started taking German prisoners for the first time, it is now easy to see precisely when the seeds of Germany’s defeat were sown.
Frederick Oechsner, the Berlin correspondent of United Press International, noted in the late 1930s that, when he was war minister, Blomberg had ‘presented Hitler with 400 books, pamphlets and monographs on the United States armed forces and he has read many of these’.24 It was the very worst time to have mugged up on the American war machine, as it scarcely existed then, with the United States still in the grip of isolationism. If Hitler divined from these monographs a sense of America’s military weakness – the US Army numbered only 100,000 men in 1939 – he was soon to be sorely disabused: by 1945 General George C. Marshall and Admiral Ernest J. King had managed to put 14.9 million Americans into uniform and the Army Hitler had so despised from his reading of soon-to-be-out-of-date pamphlets would in 1952 – while it was still occupying Germany – blow up his beloved Berghof.25 ‘The entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany,’ Hitler had told Molotov in Berlin on 12 November 1940, ‘the United States will not be a threat to us in decades – not in 1945 but at the earliest in 1970 or 1980.’ It was one of the greatest miscalculations of history.
Hitler also won nothing substantial from the Japanese for his declaration of war on America. The Axis consistently