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By Root 1711 0

failed to act as close allies during the Second World War, with dire consequences for them all. Had Japan attacked the USSR in the east simultaneously with Barbarossa, it could have forced Stalin into a potentially disastrous two-front war, and taken the rich mineral and oil reserves of Siberia. Similarly, if Japan’s attacks on eastern India and Ceylon had been co-ordinated with a German advance through Egypt, Iran and Iraq – prior to Operation Barbarossa – the British Empire could have been severely threatened in northern India. Hitler ‘kept the foreign office out of the military’, the Reich’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told his Nuremberg psychiatrist, when complaining that he had not had more than a day’s warning of the invasion of Norway. ‘The same with the Russian war. I never knew about it until 24 hours before it happened.’26 Their utter inability to trust each other and co-ordinate their efforts left the Axis fighting two entirely separate wars, while the Allies fought on two flanks of the same war.

Hitler’s great error – perhaps the second worst of his many blunders of the war next to invading Russia prematurely – was not to appreciate the potential capacity of American industrial production. This is all the more surprising given the chapters on American capitalism that he had written in his then unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf known as ‘The Second Book’. ‘The size of the internal American market and its wealth of buying power and also raw materials’, he wrote in 1928, ‘guarantee the American automobile industry internal sales figures that alone permit production methods that would simply be impossible in Europe. The result of that is the enormous export capacity of the American automobile industry. At issue is the general motorization of the world – a matter of immeasurable significance.’27 Plenty more along those lines made it plain that Hitler had at least understood the power of American production in 1928, and although the Great Depression had thrown this off course, by 1941 it was far stronger than ever before.

Certainly Hitler’s senior advisers were well aware of the economic dangers posed by the military productive capacity of the United States even before the Führer had declared war. Ernst Udet, the head of the Luftwaffe procurement organization at the Air Ministry, shot himself on 17 November 1941 after his warnings about the Anglo-American air programme had been consistently ignored; General Friedrich Fromm, head of the central administrative office of the Wehrmacht, was talking about the need to make peace in November 1941; General Georg Thomas of the supply side of OKW was deeply defeatist by January 1942; Fritz Todt, the Reich Armaments Minister, told Hitler as early as November 1941 that the war in Russia could not be won; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was equally pessimistic, though more diplomatic; the great steel producer Walter ‘Panzer’ Rohland believed, as he told Todt, that ‘the war against Russia cannot be won!’; the Economics Minister Walther Funk spoke at Göring’s birthday party of the ‘misfortune that had broken over the nation’. In the view of the historian of the Nazi economy, ‘the vast majority’ of the Nazi leaders understood ‘the pivotal importance of the United States economy’.28 Yet they did not apprise Hitler of their feelings, or at least not strongly enough to force him to see sense, except Todt, who (probably coincidentally) died in a plane crash less than two months later, and Udet, who at least emphasized his point in an unmistakable manner. The claims of many at Nuremberg to have tried to dissuade Hitler from declaring war on the United States are highly suspect, not least because he seems to have taken few soundings before making the announcement.

The Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop claimed in his memoirs that ‘war was declared on the USA despite my advice to the contrary’, but the evidence in fact points the other way. When the Italian Foreign Minister, Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, rang him up in the middle of the night to tell