A book supplied by a correspondent and detailed at reference 1. 400 pages of text, 100 pages of stuff at the end. The text comprising introductory material, a chapter for each of the five days 7th to 11th December and closing material. Written by a couple of history academics, one from Cambridge, one from King’s College London, both with a Peterhouse flavour.
The story of Hitler declaring war on the US just a few days after Pearl Harbour; arguably his biggest single mistake in the second world war, perhaps after after his invasion of Russia. A gesture of support for his Japanese allies and it might have freed his hands a bit in the Atlantic, but it didn’t have much else to be said for it.
Highlights
German restraint vis-à-vis the Jews gave/might have given them some leverage over the US. Go easy on that front and the US might not join in the European war. Regarding numbers, at reference 3 Wikipedia says that in 1942 there were around 9m Jews in Europe, 4m in the US and 2m elsewhere. Of the European Jews, 3m in Poland, 2.5m in Russia, 0.75m in Rumania. Substantial movements since 1900, with the US gaining 2.5m. Possibly confused by boundary changes between Poland and Russia. Figures plausible, but provenance unknown.
In any event, it was certainly the case that Hitler’s extermination campaign moved into a higher gear at the end of 1941.
Contrariwise, Hitler needed all his Russian prisoners to help with his war effort. So he had to start treating them better than he had been. While some of his Nazis worried about the race pollution that this was likely to entail.
Economics was important. In particular, access to food, steel, coal and oil supplies. Of the belligerents, only the US was self sufficient in all four. Japan was the most exposed – and for oil they looked to the south, to what is now Indonesia.
Most of the people of the US were opposed to going beyond giving the Allies supplies. There was plenty of opposition to sending armies to fight anywhere. Let Europe sort out its own mess. There was plenty of antipathy towards the UK and its empire – a subject on which Churchill was well behind the times. But there was also plenty of opposition to Hitler and his brutal methods, not least with regard to the Jews, of whom there were plenty in the US. Notwithstanding, Roosevelt had his political work cut out to maintain these supplies.
So neither Churchill nor Stalin slept easy until Hitler made his move.
All the belligerents had their problems at the end of 1941. The future was very uncertain. Not helped by the fact that none of them trusted each other. Most of them kept several irons in the fire. But while the Allies had their problems, they worked together in a way that the Axis powers did not.
Hitler bangs on about his war of the have-nots against the haves. With himself being one of the former – not that implausibly and I think his own private lifestyle was fairly modest – and the evil Anglo-Americans, backed by international Jewry, being the latter. While Japan played the evil whites card – which found some resonance in the colonies – once nations – of south Asia. At least until the brutal reality of their occupations sank in.
Both Hitler and Japan gambled on being able to win enough to hold before the US war machine could crank up and overwhelm them. A gamble they lost. While Stalin did not grapple with the Japanese until he had got Hitler more or less under his belt.
Lowlights
The British in Malaya were very complacent, very dismissive of the Japanese and failed to move into the defensible south of (neutral) Thailand. In a word, incompetent. While the admiral in charge of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse didn’t bother with air cover, despite the very recent lesson of Pearl Harbour, despite its being more or less available. He went down with his ships.
[Battleship HMS Prince of Wales lowering a Supermarine Walrus amphibian aircraft over her side, early 1941]
In his defence, had he made it to the Japanese invasion fleets to the north, his big guns would have done enormous damage. As it was, the loss of these two capital ships did enormous damage to UK prestige in parts east.
While Mrs Greville, of Poleseden Lacey fame, was caught making a very crass remark at an upper crust dinner party, shortly before her own death, concerning the loss of those two ships.
Winston Churchill may have loathed the Soviet Union and all it stood for – but he recognised early on that helping them was his best bet in the war against Germany. So British made tanks took part in the battle for Moscow in the winter of 1941-42. Maybe this has something to do with the oddly positive references to Churchill in one of Putin’s essays, noticed at reference 4.
And shortly after Hitler had declared war on the US, Churchill made a combative speech to the Houses of Congress which went down well. And helped along the allied policy of Germany first then Japan, a policy which saved our – and Stalin’s – bacon. More by luck than judgement, as he had wanted to go over a few days earlier, when his reception would have been much more frosty. He was, in the event, invited shortly before Hitler made his speech to the Reichstag declaring war on the US, and arrived shortly after.
On the other hand, on the day of Pearl Harbour, worried that supplies for Europe might get diverted to the Pacific, he starts to panic a bit by the evening, even going so far as to offer the Free State a united Ireland if they joined in and allowed us back into their ports on the western approaches. De Valera declined the offer – despite being dependent on allied convoys for his oil.
The Japanese royal family was more visible in government and in the military than was the case in this country, where the doctrine of constitutional monarchy had been in place for a couple of hundred years.
A lot of space is given to public opinion at this time in the US, the UK and Germany. Which some people at the time took seriously, and which mattered in the US where congressmen could be sensitive to what they were hearing from their voters, congressmen who could make life difficult for their president. While Goebbels rather ruefully remarked that Churchill’s relative honesty, his blood, sweat and tears, was more helpful when things got difficult than Nazi bombast. Interesting in its way, but does not bear on the fact that Hitler had already made his mind up about the important point, about declaring war on the US.
It seems that all the Allies made the mistake of thinking that Hitler was pulling the strings in Tokyo. The white mindset could not cope with Asians doing well by themselves. But helpful to the UK and Russia in that it helped push the US into the Germany first policy.
On page 268, a curious use of the obscure word campanalismo. How many readers will know what this means without looking it up? As this one had to: parochial pride in one’s own village, one’s own bell tower, to the exclusion of others, of other considerations. Perhaps an academic flourish which the editor should have struck out.
Making decisions
It is possible to try too hard to explain decisions, in this case Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US. That is to say, both in individuals and in groups, decisions may mysteriously emerge after long and inconclusive discussions – and then just be adopted without further ado. And then be justified after the event. One can never be sure exactly how or why the decision was taken. It just emerged from the individual or collective unconscious.
And even in the case that one has a visible scoring system, as in many procurement processes, the business of coming up with the system and coming up with the component scores is subject to the same qualification. And systems can be manipulated: I can make my decision and then, more or less covertly, subvert the scoring system to produce that decision. Something I have done, from time to time, myself.
In this case, Hitler made his own mind up more or less immediately after hearing about Pearl Harbour, which he thought was a fine coup. But which got everybody else in a great old stir while they waited for him to pronounce – and in the event to make one of his biggest mistakes.
Conclusions
A book which is a little longer than it might have been, but we are told a good story – a story which we here in the UK are rather too prone to put our own gloss on, rather to the exclusion of others.
A story which encapsulates the second world war through the lens of the four or five days between Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag.
The high tide for the Axis was the middle of 1942. After that, it was just a case of grinding them down, albeit at a high cost, particularly to the Russians. All nicely summarised in a very few pages. But the closing words on page 399 strike an odd note. Violent and exultant: just the sort of talk that the Axis leaders went in for.
References
Reference 1: Hitler’s American gamble: Pearl Harbour and the German march to global war – Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman – 2021.
Reference 2: Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order - Charlie Laderman - 2019. Concerning the Anglo-American response to the Turkish massacre of approximately one million Armenian Christians during the First World War.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jewish_population_comparisons.
Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/75th-anniversary-of-great-victory.html.
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