by Ian Kershaw
He emphasizes the extraordinary significance of the Japanese entry into the war, above all with regard to our U-boat war. Our U-boat commanders had reached the point where they didn’t know any longer whether or not they should fire their torpedoes. A U-boat war can’t be won in the long run if the U-boats are not free to fire. The Führer is convinced that even if Japan had not joined the war, he would have had to declare war on the Americans sooner or later. Now the east Asian conflict drops like a present into our lap. All German agencies have indeed worked to bring it about, but even so it came so quickly as to be partly unexpected. Psychologically, too, that’s of inestimable value to us. A declaration of war by us on the Americans without the counterpart of the east Asian conflict would have been hard to take for the German people. Now everyone accepts this development almost as a matter of course. The Führer has gone through an extraordinarily tough inner struggle in the past weeks and months about this question. He knew that either the U-boat war would be condemned altogether to ineffectiveness or that he would have to take the decisive step to wage war against America. This heavy burden has been taken from him. He views the struggle in the Atlantic now far more positively than previously. He thinks the number of sinkings will rise rapidly. He regards the tonnage problem as altogether decisive in the war effort. The one who solves this problem will probably win the war.165
For Hitler, his remarks make clear, the one-sided state of ‘undeclared war’ was the main reason for his decision. He now had the justification he needed for opening up all-out submarine warfare in the Atlantic and preventing the U-boats being as ‘worthless’ as they had proved in 1915–16.166 In the declaration of war on the United States, too, the reverberations of the First World War that had left such an indelible mark on Hitler could still be felt.
Pearl Harbor provided the occasion. Without the Japanese attack on the United States he evidently would not have felt confident about taking such a giant step. The hasty diplomacy since the first Japanese overtures in early November about firmer military commitments than those stipulated in the Tripartite Pact had presumably been undertaken with an eye on the increasing likelihood of Germany, as well as Japan, becoming involved in hostilities with the United States in the near future. Negotiations had reached the stage where Germany was ready to sign a formal agreement binding her to join the war even if Japan, not the United States, launched the attack. More by good luck than good judgement this agreement had still not been signed when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Hitler was not obliged, therefore, by the Tripartite Pact or any other treaty to do anything at all. He had what he wanted: Japan’s engagement in war against the United States in the Pacific. He could have been content with the presumption that, through the godsend of Pearl Harbor, America would have her energies diverted into the Pacific. He could simply have maintained the existing fraught relations with the United States. Or he could have altered the orders to his U-boats (which Raeder had been clamouring for over the past months) without declaring war–which, in fact, he did do for the two days before his Reichstag speech. But he chose neither to remain passive, nor just to escalate confrontation in the Atlantic (which would have had the likely effect of putting increased pressure on Roosevelt to risk either a declaration of war or a loss of face). Instead, he decided (unnecessarily, therefore, from the point of view of his existing international commitments) on a full declaration of hostilities against the United States. And this was a decision that he evidently took very swiftly, and without consultation.
Even so, there was a delay, despite pressure from Tokyo, before he made the declaration. Hitler knew his speech was a vital one. It would be heard around the world, not least in Japan and America, and it had to have a big impact at home. He had been promising Goebbels for weeks that he would speak to the German people. But things had hardly gone according to plan in the eastern campaign. Now, at last, he had some substance for a speech, something he could turn to good propaganda effect. Ribbentrop told Oshima on 9 December that Hitler was assessing the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States.167 By 10 December, however, the date initially envisaged for the meeting of the Reichstag had to be put back. Hitler had been held up by an endless array of meetings and had not even begun work on his speech.168 He wanted to prepare it especially carefully. So he postponed the Reichstag meeting by a day.169 There were banal reasons, therefore, for the delay in reaching the declaration of war. But there was another, less banal reason. This was the draft agreement, still unsigned, with Japan.
When he met Hitler on the morning of 9 December, Ribbentrop passed on Oshima’s request for an immediate declaration of war on the United States. Whether he was suffering from a belated bout of cold feet, or was simply reminding Hitler of Germany’s strict obligations in such a crucial decision, the Foreign Minister pointed out that there was no commitment to declare war under the Tripartite Pact. That had bound Germany to military aid for Japan only in the event of an attack on her ally. But Japan, not America, had unleashed the conflict. Hitler’s response, however, was that ‘if we don’t stand on the side of Japan, the pact is politically dead’.170
Ribbentrop later claimed that he had tried to dissuade Hitler from a declaration of war. ‘I never wanted the USA to be drawn into the war,’ he claimed, ‘but then, as later, the Japanese had their own ideas.’171 His demeanour at the time lends little credence to this subsequent apologia. He had not demurred from the more binding arrangement with Japan, mooted for over two weeks; he had enthused to Ciano after Pearl Harbor; and, speaking to the Italian ambassador, Dino Alfieri, on 9 December, he had referred to Japan’s involvement on the side of the Axis as ‘the most important event to develop since the beginning of the war’.172 On 8 December, the day before meeting Hitler, Ribbentrop had given Oshima a draft of the proposed new agreement with Japan, and sent it that evening to Ott. He asked for it to be accepted without delay because it ‘may be announced here in a special form’, an evident reference to Hitler’s forthcoming Reichstag speech.173
There were, it turned out, still some small points on which the Japanese wanted clarification. Final authorization only came through on Wednesday, the 10th, and the important agreement was finally signed by Ribbentrop, Alfieri and Oshima on the Thursday, just before the declaration of war. In his speech that afternoon, 11 December, Hitler read out the whole of the agreement.174 It was an indication of the value he attached to it. The key clause was the second: the agreement not to conclude an armistice or peace treaty with the United States or England without complete mutual consent.
This now seemed to Hitler watertight. He had a formal agreement with an ally who had historically proved invincible. The agreement prevented Japan from concluding an early peace with America, as she had done with Russia in 1905. In the First World War, American entry had tipped the balance. With Japan and America now locked in conflict in the Pacific, and with no Japanese ‘get-out clause’ unless Germany agreed, the chances of a repeat seemed, if not altogether eradicated, then at least massively reduced.175 Without such an agreement, there was always the possibility in Hitler’s mind that Japan and the United States could reach some sort of compromise peace that would leave Germany facing the might of America on her own.176 So with the war in the east likely to drag on into the indefinite future, what became dubbed the ‘no-separate-peace treaty’177 seemed a good basis for the declaration of war on the United States to which Hitler was in any case temperamentally inclined. This would ensure that America would be tied down in the Pacific. More than that, she would be unable to concentrate wholly on that theatre, but would be faced with a two-front war. In this way, the weight of American arms, which Hitler anticipated coming online during 1942, could be fully directed neither at Japan, possibly forcing her to sue for peace, nor at Germany before the war in the east was won and Europe lay at her feet.178
One other factor, always important to Hitler, also played a part: prestige. ‘A great power doesn’t let itself have war declare
d on it, it declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop, doubtless echoing his master’s voice, told Weizsäcker.179 It seemed better to Weizsäcker that the declaration should come from America rather than Germany. He did not see the importance of the gesture towards Japan. But such an argument was pointless.180 For Hitler, America had ranked herself squarely among Germany’s enemies, especially over the past eighteen months, and above all with her pointed escalation of aggression during the autumn. Despite the conflict that had now opened up in the Pacific, there was no doubt in his mind that it was only a matter of time–and he presumed it would happen sooner rather than later–before the United States declared war on Germany. Only three days before Pearl Harbor the sensational publication in the isolationist Chicago Tribune of the Victory Program envisaging a mighty army to fight in Europe–a claim not denied by the Roosevelt administration–had come as a revelation of American war aims to Nazi leaders in Berlin.181 It seemed likely that an American declaration of war on Japan would soon be followed by a similar declaration against her partners in the Tripartite Pact. That would have been harder to ‘sell’ at home, Hitler must have calculated, than a declaration, on grounds which he could justify, by Germany herself on the United States.
As Goebbels admitted, a stroke of luck had brought Japan into the conflict.182 That had overnight given a major boost to Germany’s prospects, especially in the critical battle of the Atlantic. As usual, Hitler sought immediately to grasp the opportunity and to recover the initiative in the war which he had seemed in danger of losing. Hitler’s extraordinarily inflated hopes in his Japanese ally led him on 11 December to his fateful choice: all-out war against an enemy whom, as he conceded to Oshima at the beginning of January 1942, he had no idea how to defeat.183
VI
Was Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States on 11 December 1941, then, a puzzle, a grandiose moment of megalomaniac madness? It has often been seen as such. But, in fact, there is no puzzle. From Hitler’s perspective it was only anticipating the inevitable. Far from appearing inexplicable or baffling, Hitler’s decision was consistent with the views he had held on America since the 1920s, and, especially, with his strategic thinking in 1940–41 about the United States, Japan and the future course of the war. It also accorded with his implicit fear that time was not on Germany’s side, that America had to be defeated, or at least held in check, before her economic might could sway the conflict, as it had done in the First World War. Given his underlying premisses, his decision was quite rational.
That does not mean it was sensible. But the lunacy of Hitler’s project was the gigantic gamble of the bid for world power, not just this precise part of it. Certainly, he felt a rush of blood after Pearl Harbor. Neither he nor anyone else in the Nazi leadership had anticipated an attack of such boldness. The very audacity of the Japanese strike appealed to him. It was his sort of move. And, grossly overestimating Japan’s war potential, he thought its effect was far greater than it turned out to be. In those days, reeling from setbacks on the eastern front (the first, devastating Soviet counter-offensive of the war had just begun), he could not have wished for better news than a Japanese assault on the American fleet at anchor. Japan and America at war was exactly what he wanted. The decisions that followed were taken in this mood of exhilaration. But they were not driven by spontaneous, irrational emotion. Letting his U-boats loose on American shipping came first. He had no doubt been itching to do this all autumn. Now he need hold back no longer. This in itself, he imagined, would turn the battle of the Atlantic Germany’s way (and, indeed, a small number of U-boats at work off the north American coast were able to wreak havoc on Allied shipping in early 1942).184 It preceded the bigger decision, to declare war on the United States. Prestige and propaganda considerations dictated that this should come from Germany and that he should not passively await a declaration by America. But Hitler’s own decision–and, as we have seen, it was his, taken without consultation apart from with the subservient Ribbentrop, and presumably also Keitel and Jodl–had been preceded by moves, rational from his point of view, and dating back several weeks, to prevent Japan, once in the war, from leaving it at a time that did not suit Germany. Only when what effectively amounted to a new tripartite pact had been concluded did Hitler declare war.
Were Hitler’s options in December 1941, therefore, as wide open as appears to be the case from the suggestion that his decision was puzzling? We need to return for a moment to the place of the United States in his developing war strategy in 1940–41. He was receiving mainly reliable information from General Bötticher, his well-informed military attaché in Washington, about the pace of American rearmament. But Bötticher misled Hitler in two ways. First, he overrated the importance of the Pacific in American overall strategy, downplaying the commitment to the war in Europe. And secondly, though he left no doubt about the rapid progress being made in the United States’ rearmament, if from a very low initial base, he was adamant that America would not be ready for war before Germany had won it. This was the message he passed to Berlin.185 The miscalculation in intelligence matched Hitler’s own prognosis. Aware of the impending danger from across the Atlantic, to which he had no early answer in terms of weaponry, Hitler’s aim, lasting from his victory over France until the weakening of the Wehrmacht’s advance in the Soviet Union, had been to keep the United States out of the war until German hegemony in Europe was finally established. This had been the strategic idea behind ‘Operation Barbarossa’. With Britain forced to the negotiating table after Germany had crushed the Soviet Union, America would be forced back on her own hemisphere. Sometime, there would be a final showdown between a German-dominated Europe and the United States–the scenario he had depicted in the 1920s–but that would not happen in his lifetime.
In the whirlwind of early German successes in the Soviet Union in June and July 1941, he had temporarily deviated from this distant grand vista. A joint enterprise with the Japanese to destroy the Soviet Union and then turn together on the United States in the near future seemed for a while an attractive proposition. But the Japanese, their thinking in any case impenetrable to Hitler, did not move against Siberia, just as they had earlier not followed the German invitation to make an early strike at Singapore. Meanwhile, the German advance had started to run into trouble in the Soviet Union. The eastern campaign, against all prognoses, was not going to be won easily–and not that year. It was going to be a long haul. And it seemed to Hitler that, exploiting the circumstances, Roosevelt was now openly provoking him through intensified aggression in the Atlantic, about which in the current circumstances he could do nothing.
Japan’s intentions were still not clear. She made aggressive noises, but at the same time, it appeared, was prepared to negotiate with Washington. By autumn, however, the situation had finally become clarified. Relations between Japan and the United States had irredeemably broken down. War was now highly likely. In changed circumstances in the east, Hitler had to consider the role of Japan in a new light with regard to America’s place in his own strategy. America, it was by now obvious, could not be kept out of the war indefinitely. The question was only when she would join it. He had said more than once that he expected her to be ready for war by 1942. The United States, it was increasingly certain, would have to be faced before, not after, the war against the Soviet Union–Hitler’s ‘real’ war–was over. The role of Japan in his thinking was now, therefore, to tie the Americans down as long and as completely as possible in the Pacific, and thoroughly weaken the British in the Far East, taking their possessions, undermining their bastions and eventually destroying the heart of their Empire, India.186 Germany’s role, in supporting Japan by entering a war against America which, to Hitler, was inevitable anyway, was to prevent the Americans defeating the Japanese or forcing them to agree terms, before turning on Germany. The United States, through the German intervention, would be forced into a war across two oceans.187
This, Hitler calculated, would give him time to finish off th
e unexpectedly resilient Soviets or at least reach a satisfactory point where he could conclude the eastern campaign, perhaps by some sort of deal with Stalin, but on his own terms. Japan’s entry into the war in December 1941 gave him that chance, as he saw it; hence, his elation at the news of Pearl Harbor. From his perspective, therefore, the declaration of war against the United States at this juncture was no great gamble, let alone a puzzling decision. He felt he had no option. The decision seemed to him to open up the path to victory which was beginning by autumn 1941 to recede. For him, therefore, it was the only decision he could make.
Despite his own construction of possibilities, did he objectively have the option of refraining from a declaration of war, a decision which might have given Germany new chances in the conflict? Objectively, of course, he was not compelled to take Germany into a war with the United States. A German declaration of war did not have to follow the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even Ribbentrop, as we noted, pointed out to him that there was no treaty obligation to do so. But what might have ensued had he chosen not to declare war on the United States? Is it likely, had Hitler not been so rash in declaring war, that the United States would have retreated from the Atlantic theatre, pulled back aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, left Europe alone and concentrated on the Pacific, allowing the Nazi leader to get on with his war against Bolshevism? Might Roosevelt have refrained from pressing for his own declaration of war out of fear of a defeat in Congress? Would the war, in other words, have taken an entirely different turn had Hitler been less ready to rush into Japan’s arms when he had no need to do so? In a guessing-game, there are many possibilities. But there are fewer likelihoods. And the actions as well as the reflections of those close to the decisions at the time provide few hints that a completely different scenario might have emerged.
Of course, cooler heads might have chosen other options. Weizsäcker, in the Foreign Office, for one thought it would be better to wait for an American declaration of war. That would surely have been a more sensible ploy. Roosevelt would have been left with the predicament of whether to try to persuade both Congress and the American public, overnight preoccupied with the new war in the Pacific and the desire to take revenge on Japan, that Germany was still the main enemy, and that a declaration of war on the European Axis powers was necessary. Had such a declaration been forthcoming, clever German propaganda could have turned it to advantage: a war that Germany had not wanted and done everything to avoid being forced upon the country by American plutocracy, and now requiring a backs-to-the-wall fight. That type of propaganda was lost because of Hitler’s insistence upon the prestige of a German declaration.