Posted on 12/11/2013 5:51:00 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Editor's Note (1999): In his new book, A Republic, Not an Empire, Patrick Buchanan claims that as of mid-1940 Hitler "was driven by a traditional German policy of Drang nach Osten, the drive to the East." He did not want war with the West, insists Buchanan. (Pp. 268-69.) Why then did Hitler, following Pearl Harbor, declare war on the United States? Buchanan insists this was the irrational act of a madman. In fact, insists Gerhard Weinberg, it was consistent with an objective Hitler had long nourished.
It had been an assumption of Hitler's since the 1920s that Germany would at some point fight the United States. As early as the summer of 1928 he asserted in his second book (not published until I did it for him in 1961) that strengthening and preparing Germany for war with the United States was one of the tasks of the National Socialist movement. Both because his aims for Germany's future entailed an unlimited expansionism of global proportions and because he thought of the United States as a country which with its population and size might at some time constitute a challenge to German domination of the globe, a war with the United States had long been part of the future he envisioned for Germany either during his own rule of it or thereafter.
During the years of his chancellorship before 1939, German policies designed to implement the project of a war with the United States had been conditioned by two factors: belief in the truth in the stab-in-the-back legend on the one hand and the practical problems of engaging American military power on the other. The belief in the concept that Germany had lost the First World War because of the collapse at home -- the stab in the back of the German army -- rather than defeat at the front automatically carried with it a converse of enormous significance which has generally been ignored. It made the military role of the United States in that conflict into a legend. Believing that the German army had not been beaten in the fighting, Hitler and many others in the country disbelieved that it had been American participation which had enabled the Western Powers to hold on in 1918 and then move toward victory over Germany. They perceived that to be a foolish fable, not a reasonable explication of the events of that year. A solid German home front, which National Socialism would ensure, could preclude defeat next time; the problem of fighting the United States was not that the inherently weak and divided Americans could create, field, and support effective fighting forces, but rather that they were so far away and that the intervening ocean could be blocked by a large American fleet. Here were the practical problems of fighting America: distance and the size of the American navy.
To overcome these practical obstacles Hitler built up the German navy and began work on a long-range bomber -- the notorious Amerika Bomber -- which would be capable of flying to New York and back without refueling. Although the bomber proved difficult to construct, Hitler embarked on a crash building program of superbattleships promptly after the defeat of France. In addition, he began accumulating air and sea bases on the Atlantic coast to facilitate attacks on the United States. In April 1941 Hitler secretly pledged that he would join Japan in a war on the United States. This was critical. Only if Japan declared war would Germany follow.
As long as Germany had to face the United States essentially by herself, she needed time to build her own blue-water navy; it therefore made sense to postpone hostilities with the Americans until Germany had been able to remedy this deficiency. If, on the other hand, Japan would come into the war on Germany's side, then that problem was automatically solved.
Hitler was caught out of town at the time of Pearl Harbor and had to get back to Berlin and summon the Reichstag to acclaim war. His great worry, and that of his foreign minister, was that the Americans might get their declaration of war in ahead of his own. As Joachim von Ribbentrop explained it, "A great power does not allow itself to be declared war upon; it declares war on others." He did not need to lose much sleep; the Roosevelt administration was quite willing to let the Germans take the lead. Just to make sure, however, that hostilities started immediately, Hitler had already issued orders to his navy, straining at the leash since October 1939, to begin sinking American ships forthwith, even before the formalities of declaring war. Now that Germany had a big navy on its side (Japan's), there was no need to wait even an hour.
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This article is excerpted from Gerhard Weinberg's Germany, Hitler, and World War II (Cambridge University Press: 1995). It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher and was reposted at TomPaine.com in 1999.
Patton got his start killing Mexicans back in 1916. I can only imagine what a demon he would have been fighting them in WW2.
Almost half of all Americans are of German descent, IIRC. I know I am.
Yes. And that would be expected. But the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, not the Germans. There were a lot of German descent in the US. While we have the benefit of hindsight in knowing the horrors the Nazis were committing, that wasn't the case at the time.
“Japan initiated hostilities, Germany was not obliged to bail them out. In the event, Hitler might feared that the U.S. would finish off Japan and then turn on Germany. Official American policy at the start of the war was to devote 80% of our resources to Europe and 20% to the Pacific. After Midway, the Pacific got more resources, but it was still largely a side show from the bigger war. If the U.S. only had to take on Japan, we would really have steamrollered them, and been left with a big well oiled military machine and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, HMS Great Britain.”
Good point! Japan would have been defeated so quickly that we would never have dropped the atomic bomb on them, perhaps. OR, we would have incurred much greater casualties, invading their home islands and fighting house-to-house.
I've long heard a secret protocol already existed between Mexico and Germany dating back to WWI where Mexicans would grab the southwest as a distraction in the event of a German invasion of North America.
Second, the Third Reich was not a democracy; Hitler was not going to be voted out of office because of some battlefield disaster. The German people were too cowed to express disapproval of Der Fuhrer (consider Stalingrad).
Guess you must have missed the part where Hitler’s own people tried to take him out at least once.
Not to deny that Mussolini lied but in this case it was the old trains schedules that lied. He did indeed make the trains run on time but he did it by a very simple trick. If the 10:12 train always arrived 30 minutes late (and it did) he just changed the schedule to read 12:42. The trains still took the same time to arrive but no one was waiting for it to arrive as 10:12.
Hitler had very little choice. England was being fed and armed by American convoys. Eventually, Hitler knew he would have another active front from a revitalized England. Hitler knew he couldn’t win in Russia and sustain an invasion in France.
Hitler could only slow that by sinking our shipping as it was coming out of American ports before it formed into convoys. Doing so would cause us to declare war, so it was a moot point.
Hitler only needed another year of determined invasion of Russia to secure that front. He was buying time by attacking American shipping.
It's more than just that, though. The U.S. was effectively at war with Germany long before any formal declarations were made anyway. The U.S. was shipping arms to Great Britain across the North Atlantic under U.S. Navy escort.
I've never understood this idiotic infatuation with war declarations or even open military attacks like Pearl Harbor as a benchmark for determining when a war "officially" began.
Western Europeans seem to have great difficulty in envisioning the scale of some of the rest of the world. Rolling through Belgium and France just doesn’t compare to trying to tank across hundreds of miles of steppes, or, over here, land on a continent and then make there way across it’s 3000 some odd miles of just about every topography known to earth.
I have a hard time believing that Hitler ever had any ambition to wage war against the U.S. when Germany's vaunted military machine was seriously lacking in the two types of weapons that would be absolutely essential to such a military campaign: long-range bombers and aircraft carriers.
The Pact presented the condition "ARTICLE 3....to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked..." by a country not already involved in the war,"
Technically though, the US and the allies didn't attack Japan so Germany was not obliged to declare war on the US based on the pact.
FDR was already at war with Hitler — before Pearl Harbor.
Good point. There isn’t a single country in Europe that’s even as large as the state of Texas, so the whole nature of a military campaign would be very different here.
That is a NICE M1!!
None the less, it was still an act of insanity. Germany couldn’t even force a crossing of the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Even the USA and Briton had to use all their resources just to invade France with England as a base.
Exactly RIGHT.
It just goes to show you that there are some things that are so stupid only a Professor would publish them.
Hitler did not know that his double-dealing "allies" in the far east had secretly agreed with the Soviets that Russian denunciation of the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact of April 1941 was just for show. He wanted a second front in his war with the Soviets. As usual, Stalin honored his Japanese treaty the same way he honored The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: by living up to it as long as he was too weak to break it.
Lest anybody think Hitler was alone in his delusions, we made the same mistake on our side. Stalin was given huge inducements to come into the war against Japan, something he did -- like the rape of Poland -- when there was little left to do but divide the spoils.
Hitler didn't even have the sealift capacity to invade Britain across 27 miles of water. How the hell was he going to invade the United States?
Not in the least bit secret: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
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