The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Ribbentrop explained to Hitler that he had deflected the Japanese request. There was surely no need for Germany to engage the United States in open war; American naval forces would inevitably be sent to the Pacific to defend U.S. territories there and in the Far East, from the Philippines to Guam and Wake—thus making Britain even more isolated, and more vulnerable to invasion, once the Russian front had stabilized, or the war with Russia was won. In fact Ribbentrop had pointed out to the Japanese ambassador, as he reported to the Führer, that the Tripartite Pact in its extant form still did not commit signatories, unless themselves attacked, to wage war upon each other’s enemies. The Japanese had not been attacked by the Soviet Union, so the Japanese had not felt obliged to declare war on Russia as a third party—to the disappointment of the German government. By the same token, Germany had not been attacked by the United States; Germany was thus not bound to fight America—at least, not now, when it had its hands full in Russia. According to Ribbentrop, Germany was required by the original pact only to supply aid—though a new draft addition was being drawn up, by which each signatory bound himself not to make peace with an enemy without the consent of all.

  Hitler did not wait for Ribbentrop to finish. The Führer, Ribbentrop later recalled, cut him off midsentence. Hitler wanted, he said, an updated pact that he could announce in his forthcoming address to the Reichstag—a pact in which Germany would declare its solidarity with Japan by declaring war on the United States, with or without a Japanese declaration of war on Russia. “If we don’t stand on the side of Japan, the pact is politically dead,” Hitler stated, tellingly.35

  He was the führer: the leader of a great movement in the world, a New Order. He wanted to appropriate the Japanese triumph in the Pacific as part of that New Order, to give the functionaries and population of the Third Reich, and its allies in Europe, a political message: that the Führer knew what he was doing, despite the reverses in Russia; that his world war was on track. Standing tall with Japan and Italy in a Three Musketeers trio would achieve that. Moreover, from a military standpoint, a German declaration of war on the United States would not impose a new burden on the Reich, for the United States would be locked in do-or-die combat in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. In other words, war with the U.S. would be kostenlos—free.

  Herr Ribbentrop did not dare argue. He then left Hitler’s four-hundred-square-meter marbled office, the Reichskanzlei, promising to get Italy and Japan to sign the latest protocols to the Tripartite Pact, committing them to the new agreement—one for all, and all for one—so that the Führer could include such an announcement in his forthcoming speech.

  In his excitement, Hitler seemed completely oblivious to the possible repercussions. At a perilous moment in the Nazi attempt to destroy the Soviet Union—Russian Jews and commissars to be “liquidated” as the armies moved forward, “the intelligentsia” to be “exterminated,” cities razed, the survivors returned to serfdom, but under German rulers36—the notion of a pact with military partners had taken on a new psychological importance for him, given the latest confidential report on public disaffection in the Reich: namely, warnings of a “1918 mentality” or weariness prevalent among German civilians. Pearl Harbor had galvanized the Axis at a critical moment—Germany no longer alone, with Mussolini’s Italy somewhat by its side and a few minor central European satellites. Instead, the Third Reich would henceforth be fighting in a global military alliance with the great Empire of Japan: Japanese forces stretching Britain’s diminishing resources to the breaking point in the Far East, and also diverting American naval and mercantile attention from the Atlantic to the defense of U.S. territories in the Pacific.

  The die, then, was cast.

  No one around the Führer could be in any doubt about his exultant mood. The “East-Asia conflict drops like a gift into our lap,” Hitler assured his propaganda chief in Berlin. The revised pact would, he told Dr. Goebbels, fulfill the strategic war directive he’d issued some eight months earlier. In it he’d laid out, in advance, his global strategy for the victory of the Third Reich. “The aim of cooperation based on the Tripartite Pact,” he’d explained, “has to be to bring Japan to active operations in the Far East as soon as possible. Strong English forces will be tied up as a result, and the main interest of the United States of America will be diverted to the Pacific.”37 Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor had now conformed to that strategic calculation to a T. As Hitler’s adjutant recalled the Führer boasting to his entourage in Berlin on December 9, 1941: “Compelled by the conflict with Japan,” America would “not be able to intervene in the European theater of war.”38

  But if America would not be able to intervene, by virtue of the Japanese triumph at Pearl Harbor, why the need for Germany to go to war with the United States? individuals like Ciano wondered.

  Goebbels, however, did not dare question the Führer any more than Ribbentrop had. Instead, Dr. Goebbels attempted to see the new developments through the Führer’s infallible eyes. “Thanks to the outbreak of war between Japan and the USA,” he articulated in his diary that day, after speaking with Hitler, “a complete shift in the general world picture has taken place”—a fact that could soon be trumpeted by his propaganda ministry. Great benefits would accrue, aiding Germany’s battles in the Atlantic, the Middle East, and Russia. “The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile material to England let alone the Soviet Union,” Goebbels summarized the Führer’s thinking.39

  So certain was Hitler that America’s attention would now “switch” to the Pacific, in fact, that he ordered unrestricted submarine warfare against American-flagged vessels in the Atlantic to begin that very day, December 9, 1941, even before he officially declared war on the United States. The “American flag will no longer be respected,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Anyone caught on the way to England must reckon with being torpedoed by our U-boats.”40

  Hitler’s intention had been to address the Reichstag the next day, December 10, 1941—but he didn’t. Did he have second thoughts? Was he still hoping that the Japanese would sign up to declare war on Russia, simultaneously? Or was he simply psyching himself up to deliver a historic speech for the occasion, which he insisted on writing himself?

  No one knew. As the clock ticked in the White House, considerable apprehension arose—as it did in London. Suppose the Führer thought better of his decision? Suppose he was advised there was no real need to go to war with the United States: that only Congress could approve war, and was loath to do so against Germany when U.S. defense forces were now desperately needed to fight Japan’s predations in the Far East?

  It was only the next day, at 8:00 A.M. on December 11, 1941, that the German chargé d’affaires in Washington appeared at the State Department, next to the White House, to deliver an important message. Since Secretary Hull would not receive him, Herr Thomsen was told to wait.

  Eventually, at 9:30 A.M., Thomsen was able to hand over to the head of the European Division of the U.S. State Department his note, explaining that Germany’s patience with the United States was at an end, and that a state of hostilities, of war, now existed between their two countries.

  Simultaneously in Berlin, the U.S. chargé d’affaires was given the same message. Then, at 3:00 P.M. that day, Berlin time, after receiving confirmation that the Japanese had signed the new tripartite agreement—but without the Japanese having agreed, reciprocally, to declare war on Russia—the Führer went before his assembled, fawning “party comrades” in Berlin and ended speculation across the globe. His speech was an hour and a half long—and was soon in the President’s hands. Reading it, Roosevelt was stunned by how personal it was: a speech primarily directed at him.

  “Providence,” the Führer announced, to the Reichstag’s amazement—since Hitler had never shown signs of religious belief—had personally entrusted him “with the waging of a historic struggle which will decisively fashion not only our German history for the next thousand years, but also the history o
f Europe—even the history of the entire world.”

  Following a review of earlier world history, the Führer brought Reichstag deputies up to date on the progress of the war in Russia. He claimed that Stalin had fully intended to attack the Third Reich and conquer Europe, and thus Operation Barbarossa had been but a preemptive spoiling attack: a necessary act of German self-defense that had, however, succeeded in capturing no fewer than 3,806,865 imminent Russian invaders, for the loss of only 158,773 German lives.

  Before the deputies could digest the sheer enormity of these numbers—158,733 Germans killed (which understated German dead by four-fifths), and half a million German casualties since June—the Führer moved on to the president of the United States.

  “The course of these two lives!” the Führer said, comparing their careers—and worldviews. Acknowledging that “the philosophy of life and the attitude of President Roosevelt and my own are worlds apart,” Hitler proceeded to defame the U.S. president as the dupe of “members of the same people that we once fought in Germany as a parasitic phenomenon of mankind, and which we had begun to remove from public life”: the Jews. Sneering at the New Deal, the Führer claimed that Roosevelt had “increased the national debt of his country to enormous proportions, devalued the dollar, continued to ruin the economy, and maintained unemployment”—thanks to “those elements which, as Jews, have always had an interest in ruin and never in order.”

  The Führer then pointed out that there were many isolationists in America who held similar racist views to his own. “Many distinguished Americans agree with this assessment, or rather, realization. A threatening opposition hangs over the head of this man,” he claimed—and accused the President of “sabotage” of “all possibilities for a policy of European pacification,” as he put it: possibilities of peace destroyed by Roosevelt’s insistence on helping governments in exile, and supplying American weapons to those who were holding out against Nazi “pacification” efforts.

  The December 7 attack on America was thus fully deserved, Hitler declared, getting to the point. “I think that all of you felt relieved that now finally one state has protested, as the first, against this historically unique and brazen abuse of truth and law,” the Führer said, congratulating Germany’s ally, Japan. “It fills all of us—the German Volk and, I think, all decent people of the world—with profound satisfaction that the Japanese government, after negotiating with this falsifier for years, has finally had enough of being derided in so dishonorable a manner. We know what force stands behind Roosevelt. It is the eternal Jew,” a race whose international tribe had “destroyed people and property in the Soviet Union,” where “millions of German soldiers” had witnessed for themselves what Jewry had wrought: Bolshevism. “Perhaps the president of the United States himself has failed to understand this,” Hitler speculated. “This speaks for his mental limitations,” he sneered. And with that, the Führer poured scorn on the Atlantic Charter principles for postwar peace—“a new social order” that was, in Hitler’s view, “tantamount to a bald hairdresser recommending his unfailing hair restorer.”

  Reichstag deputies tittered at the simile. In contrast to the homilies of the Atlantic Charter, the Third Reich and its New Order represented the wave of the future, the Führer proudly claimed. “Thanks to the National Socialist movement,” he declared, Germany had “never been as united and unified as it is today and as it will be in the future. Perhaps never before has it been so clear-sighted and rarely so aware of its honor.”41

  The Führer came then, at last, to the climax of his speech. “I have therefore had passports sent to the American Chargé d’Affaires,” he confirmed—together with a copy of the four new articles of the Tripartite Pact, “signed today in Berlin,” which he proceeded proudly to read out: “Article 1: Germany, Italy, and Japan will together fight this war, a war that was forced upon them by the United States of America and England, and bring it to a victorious end by employing all instruments of power at their disposal . . .”42

  It was, then, global war—a war that Germany, Italy, and their noble ally, Japan, would win. “Today,” the Führer boasted, “I head the strongest army in the world, the mightiest air force, and a proud navy.” Anyone in the Third Reich or elsewhere who criticized the “front’s sacrifices” or sought to “weaken the authority of this regime” would be executed, he warned—without mercy. “The Lord of the Worlds,” he ended, “has done so many great things for us in the last years that we bow in gratitude before Providence, which has permitted us to be members of such a great Volk. We thank Him that, in view of past and future generations of the German Volk, we were also allowed to enter our names honorably in the undying book of German history.”43

  Surprised by Hitler’s affirmation of an Almighty, but puffed up by his references to the German Volk, and anxious not to be accused of criticizing the Führer, or “weakening” his authority, the Reichstag deputies gave him a great ovation.

  Hitler’s remarks about “many distinguished Americans” or isolationists were not entirely wrong.

  “I was somewhat surprised at Germany and Italy declaring war upon us,” admitted Hiram Johnson to his son in California—blaming his own country, rather than Hitler or Mussolini, since “we had been guilty of many breaches of peace, and have given the greatest causes for war that, under international law, can be given.” Still and all, the U.S. senator confessed, “I did not think they would declare war”—in fact, “the day before, when I had made my objections” to a new American Expeditionary Force or AEF, he was confident he had up to “ten votes with me in the Senate,” whereas the “day after when war was declared [by Hitler], I did not have a single damned vote.”44

  This, in truth, was the measure of the Führer’s historic miscalculation. Without a German declaration of war, Congress would not have authorized the President to declare war on Germany, given the disaster at Hawaii and the worsening military situation in the Philippines and Pacific Islands. Hitler could thus have gotten America off his back, for free. Instead, by declaring war on the United States he now silenced America’s isolationists like Senator Johnson—and just as importantly, provided the President with the power to act not simply as president, but as the world’s most powerful commander in chief, sending American forces into combat on a global scale.

  Shortly before 3:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on December 11, 1941, the President therefore sent over to Congress, in response to Hitler’s declaration of war, his formal, written request that Congress “recognize a state of war between the United States and Germany,” as well as “between the United States and Italy.” Not he, but the dictators—the Japanese, and now the Germans and Mussolini’s Italians—had chosen to wage war on the United States. In a unanimous voice-vote in the House of Representatives and a unanimous recorded vote in the Senate, the U.S. legislature gave its approval to the President’s request. Senator Johnson even withdrew his opposition to an American Expeditionary Force—which would be under the President’s sole direction.

  “Those who know,” the senator confided to his son, “claim that this will be a long war. . . . I doubt this. I think it will be fast and furious for a time, and then it will begin to crumble. . . . We may be certain of one thing, however,” he added in one of the most celebrated mispredictions of a member of the august U.S. Senate. “It will last long enough to demolish our internal economy; and we’ll find at its conclusion little value to our money and less to our properties.”45

  PART THREE

  CHURCHILL IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  4

  The Victory Plan

  UNTIL EARLY ON December 22, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt had not even been told that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would be staying at the White House. The President had, however, recently spoken with Malvina Thomson, his wife’s secretary, asking idly whom the First Lady had invited to stay over Christmas, Eleanor recalled, “as well as the people invited to dinner.”

  Who to dinner? “In all the years that we had been in the W
hite House he had never paid much attention to such details,” Mrs. Roosevelt reflected, “and this was the first time he had made such a request of Miss Thomson.” Since the President “gave no explanation and no hint that anything unusual was going to happen,” the First Lady and Miss Thomson could only conclude that the President “felt a sudden curiosity.”1

  Given Mrs. Roosevelt’s work for civilian defense, the many causes she supported, as well as her efforts to keep the members of the large Roosevelt family connected with each other and with their paterfamilias, her lack of particular concern was understandable.2 The nation, after all, was now at war. She’d ordered blackout curtains to be made for the White House. She had watched while antiaircraft guns were placed on the roof, gas masks were distributed, three-inch bulletproof glass was installed, and a tunnel was constructed to an air raid shelter beneath the building next door, on the orders of the Treasury secretary, Mr. Morgenthau, who was responsible for the President’s physical security. (The President had not been amused. “Henry, I will not go down into the shelter,” Roosevelt warned Morgenthau when refusing to have anything to do with such a scheme. Then, smiling, he added: “unless you allow me to play poker with all the gold in your vaults.”)3 But about a visitor from England, not only to dine but to stay with them, barely two days before Christmas, she had had no idea.

  The British ambassador to the United States, by contrast, had known about Churchill’s upcoming visit ever since the President issued the invitation. “After lunch I had twenty minutes with the President about plans for the talks this week,” Lord Halifax had noted in his secret diary on December 21, the day before the Prime Minister’s arrival. “The arrangements are all a bit fluid,” he’d added, “depending on what time the people concerned can get here, and I foresee a good many last minute changes.”4