On that day the Japanese carrier task force sailed for Pearl Harbor. In Washington Hull went to the White House to warn the War Council of the danger confronting the country from Japan and to stress to the U.S. Army and Navy chiefs the possibility of Japanese surprise attacks. In Berlin that day there was a somewhat grotesque ceremony in which the three Axis Powers, amid much pomp and ceremony, renewed the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 -- an empty gesture which, as some Germans noted, did absolutely nothing to get Japan into the war against Russia but which afforded the pompous Ribbentrop an opportunity to denounce Roosevelt as the "chief culprit of this war" and to shed crocodile tears for the "truthful, religious ... American people" betrayed by such an irresponsible leader.
The Nazi Foreign Minister seems to have become intoxicated by his own words. He called in Oshima on the evening of November 28, following a lengthy council of war earlier that day presided over by Hitler, and gave the Japanese ambassador the impression that the German attitude toward the United States, as Oshima promptly radioed Tokyo, had "considerably stiffened." Hitler's policy of doing everything possible to keep America out of the war until Germany was ready to take her on seemed about to be jettisoned. Suddenly Ribbentrop was urging the Japanese to go to war against the United States as well as Britain and promising the backing of the Third Reich. After warning Oshima that "if Japan hesitates ... all the military might of Britain and the United States will be concentrated against Japan" -- a rather silly thesis as long as the European war continued -- Ribbentrop added:
As Hitler said today, there are fundamental differences in the very right to exist between Germany and Japan and the United States. We have received advice to the effect that there is practically no hope of the Japanese-U.S. negotiations being concluded successfully because the United States is putting up a stiff front.
If this is indeed the fact of the case, and if Japan reaches a decision to fight Britain and the United States, I am confident that that not only will be in the interest of Germany and Japan jointly, but would bring about favorable results for Japan herself.
The ambassador, a tense little man, was agreeably surprised. But he wanted to be sure he understood correctly.
"Is Your Excellency," he asked, "indicating that a state of actual war is to be established between Germany and the United States?"
Ribbentrop hesitated. Perhaps he had gone too far. "Roosevelt is a fanatic," he replied, "so it is impossible to tell what he would do."
This seemed a strange and unsatisfactory answer to Oshima in view of what the Foreign Minister had said just before, and toward the end of the talk he insisted on coming back to the main point. What would Germany do if the war were actually extended to "countries which have been aiding Britain"?
Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States [Ribbentrop replied] Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of Germany's entering into a separate peace with the United States under such circumstances. The Fuehrer is determined on that point. [33]
This was the flat guarantee for which the Japanese government had been waiting. True, Hitler had given a similar one in the spring to Matsuoka, but it seemed to have been forgotten during the intervening period when he had become vexed at Japan's refusal to join in the war on Russia. All that remained now, so far as the Japanese were concerned, was to get the Germans to put their assurance in writing. General Oshima joyfully filed his report to Tokyo on November 29. Fresh instructions reached him in Berlin the next day. The Washington talks, he was informed, "now stand ruptured -- broken."
Will Your Honor [the message directed] therefore immediately interview Chancellor HITLER and Foreign Minister RIBBENTROP and confidentially communicate to them a summary of developments. Say to them that lately England and the United States have taken a provocative attitude, both of them. Say that they are planning to move military forces into various places in East Asia and that we will inevitably have to counter by also moving troops. Say very secretly to them that there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon nations through some clash of arms and add that the time of the breaking out of that war may come quicker than anyone dreams. [xiii] [34]
The Japanese carrier fleet was now well on its way to Pearl Harbor. Tokyo was in a hurry to get Germany to sign. On the same day that Oshima was receiving his new instructions, November 30, the Japanese Foreign Minister was conferring with the German ambassador in Tokyo, to whom he emphasized that the Washington talks had broken down because Japan refused to accede to American demands that she abandon the Tripartite Pact. The Japanese hoped the Germans would appreciate this sacrifice in a common cause.
"Grave decisions are at stake," Togo told General Otto "The United States is seriously preparing for war ... Japan is not afraid of a breakdown in negotiations and she hopes that in that case Germany and Italy, according to the Three-Power Agreement, will stand at her side."
I answered [Ott radioed Berlin] that there could be no doubt about Germany's future position. Japanese Foreign Minister thereupon stated that hc understood from my words that Germany in such a case would consider her relationship to Japan as that of a community of fate. I answered, according to my opinion, Germany was certainly ready to have mutual agreement between the two countries on this situation. [35]
ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR
General Oshima was a great lover of German-Austrian classical music and despite the gravity and tenseness of the situation he took off for Austria to enjoy a Mozart festival. But he was not permitted to listen to the great Austrian composer's lovely music for long. An urgent call on December I brought him rushing back to his embassy in Berlin, where he found new instructions to get busy and sign up Germany on the dotted line. There was no time to lose.
And now, when cornered, Ribbentrop stalled. Apparently realizing fully for the first time the consequences of his rash promises to the Japanese, the Nazi Foreign Minister grew exceedingly cool and evasive. He told Oshima late on the evening of December 1 that he would first have to consult the Fuehrer before making any definite commitment. The Japanese ambassador returned to the Wilhelmstrasse on Wednesday, the third, to press his case but again Ribbentrop put him off. To Oshima's pleas that the situation had become extremely critical the Foreign Minister replied that while he personally was for a written agreement the matter would have to wait until the Fuehrer returned from headquarters later in the week. Actually, as Ciano noted in his diary, not without a sign of glee, Hitler had flown to the southern front in Russia to see General von Kleist, "whose armies continue to fall back under the pressure of an unexpected offensive."
The Japanese, by this time, had also turned to Mussolini, who was not at any front. On December 3 the Japanese ambassador in Rome called on the Duce and formally asked Italy to declare war on the United States, in accordance with the Tripartite Pact, as soon as the conflict with America should begin. The ambassador also wanted a treaty specifying that there would be no separate peace. The Japanese interpreter, Ciano noted in his diary, "was trembling like a leaf." As for the Duce, he was "pleased" to comply, after consultation with Berlin.
The German capital, Ciano found the next day, had grown extremely cautious.
Maybe they will go ahead [he began his diary on December 4] because they can't do otherwise, but the idea of provoking American intervention is less and less liked by the Germans. Mussolini, on the other hand, is happy about it.
Regardless of Ribbentrop's opinion, which Hitler, surprisingly, still paid some attention to, the decision as to whether Germany would give a formal guarantee to Japan could be taken only by the Nazi warlord himself. During the night of December 4-5 the Foreign Minister apparently got the Fuehrer's go-ahead and at 3 A.M. he handed General Oshima a draft of the requested treaty in which Germany would join Japan in war against the United States and agree not to make a separate peace. Having taken the fateful plunge and followed his Leader in reversing a policy that had been clung to stubbornly for two years, he could not refrain from seeing that his Italian ally promptly followed suit.
A night interrupted by Ribbentrop's restiveness [Ciano began his diary on December 5]. After having delayed two days he now hasn't a minute to lose in answering the Japanese, and at 3 o'clock in the morning he sends [Ambassador] Mackensen to my house to submit a plan for a Tripartite Pact of Japanese intervention and the promise not to make a separate peace. They wanted me to wake up the Duce, but I did not do it, and the Duce was very pleased.
The Japanese had a draft treaty, approved by both Hitler and Mussolini, but they did not yet have it signed, and this worried them. They suspected that the Fuehrer was stalling because he wanted a quid pro quo: if Germany joined Japan in the war against the United States, Japan would have to join Germany in the war against Russia. In his telegram of instructions to Oshima on November 30, the Japanese Foreign Minister had given some advice on how to handle this ticklish problem if the Germans and Italians raised it.
If [they] question you about our attitude toward the Soviet, say that we have already clarified our attitude toward the Russians in our statement of last July. Say that by our present moves southward we do not mean to relax our pressure against the Soviet and that if Russia joins hands tighter with England and the United States and resists us with hostilities, we are ready to turn upon her with all our might. However, right now, it is to our advantage to stress the south and for the time being we would prefer to refrain from any direct moves in the north. [36]
December 6 came. Zhukov that very day launched his counteroffensive in front of Moscow and the German armies reeled back in the snow and bitter cold. There was all the more reason for Hitler to demand his quid pro quo. On this question there was great uneasiness in the Foreign Office in Tokyo. The naval task force was now within flying distance of Pearl Harbor for its carrier planes. So far -- miraculously -- it had not been discovered by American ships or aircraft. But it might be any moment. A long message was being radioed from Tokyo to Nomura and Kurusu in Washington instructing them to call on Secretary Hull at precisely I P.M. the next day, Sunday, December 7, to present Japan's rejection of the latest American proposals, and stressing that the negotiations were "de facto ruptured." In desperation Tokyo turned to Berlin for a written guarantee of German support. The Japanese warlords still did not trust the Germans enough to inform them of the blow against the United States which would fall the next day. But they were more worried than ever that Hitler would refrain from giving his guarantee unless Japan agreed to take on not only the United States and Great Britain but the Soviet Union as well. In this predicament Togo got off a long message to Ambassador Oshima in Berlin urging him to somehow stall the Germans on the Russian matter and not to give in unless it became absolutely necessary. Deluded though they were about their ability to deal with the Americans and the British, the Japanese generals and admirals retained enough sense to realize that they could not fight the Russians at the same time -- even with German help. Togo's instructions to Oshima on that fateful Saturday, December 6, which are among the intercepted messages decoded by Secretary Hull's expert decipherers, give an interesting insight into the diplomacy practiced by the Nipponese with the Third Reich at the eleventh hour.
We would like to avoid ... an armed clash with Russia until strategic circumstances permit it; so get the German government to understand this position of ours and negotiate with them so that at least for the present they will not insist upon exchanging diplomatic notes on this question.
Explain to them at considerable length that insofar as American materials being shipped to Soviet Russia ... they are neither of high quality nor of large quantity, and that in case we start our war with the United States we will capture all American ships destined for Soviet Russia. Please endeavor to come to an understanding on this line.
However, should Ribbentrop insist upon our giving a guarantee in this matter. since in that case we shall have no other recourse, make a ... statement to the effect that we would, as a matter of principle, prevent war materials from being shipped from the United States to Soviet Russia via Japanese waters, and get them to agree to a procedure permitting the addition of a statement to the effect that so long as strategic reasons continue to make it necessary for us to keep Soviet Russia from fighting Japan (what I mean is that we cannot capture Soviet ships) we cannot carry this out thoroughly.
In case the German government refuses to agree with [the above] and makes their approval of this question absolutely conditional upon our participation in the war and upon our concluding a treaty against making a separate peace, we have no way but to postpone the conclusion of such a treaty. [37]
The Japanese need not have worried so much. For reasons unknown to the Tokyo militarists, or to anyone else, and which defy logic and understanding, Hitler did not insist on Japan's taking on Russia along with the United States and Britain, though if he had the course of the war conceivably might have been different.
At any rate, the Japanese on this Saturday evening of December 6, 194 I, were determined to strike a telling blow against the United States in the Pacific, though no one in Washington or Berlin knew just where or even exactly when. That morning the British Admiralty had tipped off the American government that a large Japanese invasion fleet had been observed heading across the Gulf of Siam for the Isthmus of Kra, which indicated that the Nipponese were striking first at Thailand and perhaps Malaya. At 9 P.M. President Roosevelt got off a personal message to the Emperor of Japan imploring him to join him in finding "ways of dispelling the dark clouds" and at the same time warning him that a thrust of the Japanese military forces into Southeast Asia would create a situation that was "unthinkable." At the Navy Department, intelligence officers drew up their latest report on the location of the major warships of the Japanese Navy. It listed most of them as being in home ports, including all the carriers and other warships of the task force which at that very moment had steamed to within three hundred miles of Pearl Harbor and was tuning up its bombers to take off at dawn.
On that Saturday evening too the Navy Department informed the President and Mr. Hull that the Japanese Embassy was destroying its codes. It had first had to decipher Togo's long message, which had dribbled in all afternoon in fourteen parts. The Navy decoders were also deciphering it as fast as it came in and by 9:30 P.M. a naval officer was at the White House with translations of the first thirteen parts. Mr. Roosevelt, who was with Harry Hopkins in the study, read it and said, "This means war." But exactly when and just where, the message did not say and the President did not know. Even Admiral Nomura did not know. Nor far off in Eastern Europe did Adolf Hitler. He knew less than Roosevelt.
HITLER DECLARES WAR
The Japanese onslaught on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at 7:30 A.M. (local time) on Sunday, December 7,1941, caught Berlin as completely by surprise as it did Washington. Though Hitler had made an oral promise to Matsuoka that Germany would join Japan in a war against the United States and Ribbentrop had made another to Ambassador Oshima, the assurance had not yet been signed and the Japanese had not breathed a word to the Germans about Pearl Harbor. [xiv] Besides, at this moment, Hitler was fully occupied trying to rally his faltering generals and retreating troops in Russia.
Night had fallen in Berlin when the foreign-broadcast monitoring service first picked up the news of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. When an official of the Foreign Office Press Department telephoned Ribbentrop the world-shaking news he at first refused to believe it and was extremely angry at being disturbed. The report was "probably a propaganda trick of the enemy," he said, and ordered that he be left undisturbed until morning. [38] So probably Ribbentrop, for once, told the truth when he testified on the stand at Nuremberg that "this attack came as a complete surprise to us. We had considered the possibility of Japan's attacking Singapore or perhaps Hong Kong, but we never considered an attack on the United States as being to our advantage." [39] However, contrary to what he told the tribunal, he was exceedingly happy about it. Or so he struck Ciano.
A night telephone call from Ribbentrop [Ciano began his diary on December 8]. He is joyful over the Japanese attack on the United States. He is so happy, in fact, that I can't but congratulate him, even though I am not so sure about the advantage ... Mussolini was [also] happy. For a long time now he has been in favor of clarifying the position between America and the Axis.
At 1 P.M. on Monday, December 8, General Oshima went to the Wilhelmstrasse to get Ribbentrop to clarify Germany's position. He demanded a formal declaration of war on the United States "at once."
Ribbentrop replied [Oshima radioed Tokyo] that Hitler was then in the midst of a conference at general headquarters discussing how the formalities of declaring war could be carried out so as to make a good impression on the German people, and that he would transmit your wish to him at once and do whatever he was able to have it carried out promptly.
The Nazi Foreign Minister also informed the ambassador, according to the latter's message to Tokyo, that on that very morning of the eighth "Hitler issued orders to the German Navy to attack American ships whenever and wherever they may meet them." [40] But the dictator stalled on a declaration of war. [xv]
The Fuehrer, according to the notation in his daily calendar book, hurried back to Berlin on the night of December 8, arriving there at 11 o'clock the next morning. Ribbentrop claimed at Nuremberg that he pointed out to the Leader that Germany did not necessarily have to declare war on America under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, since Japan was obviously the aggressor.
The text of the Tripartite Pact bound us to assist Japan only in case of an attack against Japan herself. I went to see the Fuehrer, explained the legal aspect of the situation and told him that, although we welcomed a new ally against England, it meant we had a new opponent to deal with as well ... if we declared war on the United States.
I told him that according to the stipulation of the Three-Power Pact, since Japan had attacked, we would not have to declare war, formally. The Fuehrer thought this matter over quite a while and then he gave me a very clear decision. "If we don't stand on the side of Japan," he said, "the Pact is politically dead. But that is not the main reason. The chief reason is that the United States already is shooting against our ships. They have been a forceful factor in this war and through their actions have already created a situation of war."
The Fuehrer was of the opinion at that moment that It was quite evident that the United States would now make war against Germany. Therefore he ordered me to hand over the passports to the American representative. [42]
This was a decision that Roosevelt and Hull in Washington had been confidently waiting for. There had been some pressure on them to have Congress declare war on Germany and Italy on December 8 when that step was taken against Japan. But they had decided to wait. The bombing at Pearl Harbor had taken them off one hook and certain information in their possession led them to believe that the headstrong Nazi dictator would take them off a second hook. [xvi] They had pondered the intercepted message of Ambassador Oshima from Berlin to Tokyo on November 29 [xvii] in which Ribbentrop had assured the Japanese that Germany would join Japan if she became "engaged" in a war against the United States. There was nothing in that assurance which made German aid conditional upon who was the aggressor. It was a blank check and the Americans had no doubt that the Japanese were now clamoring in Berlin that it be honored.
It was honored, but only after the Nazi warlord again hesitated. He had convoked the Reichstag to meet on December 9, the day of his arrival in Berlin, but he postponed it for two days, until the eleventh. Apparently, as Ribbentrop later reported, he had made up his mind. He was fed up with the attacks made by Roosevelt on him and on Nazism; his patience was exhausted by the warlike acts of the U.S. Navy against German U-boats in the Atlantic, about which Raeder had continually nagged him for nearly a year. He had a growing hatred for America and Americans and, what was worse for him in the long run, a growing tendency to disastrously underestimate the potential strength of the United States. [xviii]
At the same time he grossly overestimated Japan's military power. In fact, he seems to have believed that once the Japanese, whose Navy he believed to be the most powerful in the world, had disposed of the British and Americans in the Pacific, they would turn on Russia and thus help him finish his great conquest in the East. He actually told some of his followers a few months later that he thought Japan's entry into the war had been "of exceptional value to us, if only because of the date chosen."
It was, in effect, at the moment when the surprises of the Russian winter were pressing most heavily on the morale of our people, and when everybody in Germany was oppressed by the certainty that sooner or later the United States would come into the conflict. Japanese intervention therefore was, from our point of view, most opportune. [43]
There is also no doubt that Japan's sneaky and mighty blow against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor kindled his admiration -- and all the more so because it was the kind of "surprise" he had been so proud of pulling off so often himself. He expressed this to Ambassador Oshima on December 14 when he awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle in gold:
You gave the right declaration of war! This method is the only proper one.
It corresponded, he said, to his "own system."
That is, to negotiate as long as possible. But if one sees that the other is interested only in putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is not willing to come to an agreement, then one should strike -- indeed, as hard as possible -- and not waste time declaring war. It was heartwarming to him to hear of the first operations of the Japanese. He himself negotiated with infinite patience at times, for example, with Poland and also with Russia. When he then realized that the other did not want to come to an agreement, he struck suddenly and without formalities. He would continue to go this way in the future. [44]
There was one other reason for Hitler's deciding in such haste to add the United States to the formidable list of his enemies. Dr. Schmidt, who was in and out of the Chancellery and Foreign Office that week, put his finger on it: "I got the impression," he later wrote, "that, with his inveterate desire for prestige, Hitler, who was expecting an American declaration of war, wanted to get his declaration in first." [45] The Nazi warlord confirmed this in his speech to the Reichstag on December 11.
"We will always strike first," he told the cheering deputies. "We will always deal the first blow!"
Indeed, Berlin was so fearful on December 10 that America might declare war first that Ribbentrop sternly admonished Thomsen, the German charge in Washington, about committing any indiscretion which might tip off the State Department to what Hitler planned to do on the following day. In a long radiogram on the tenth the Nazi Foreign Minister filed the text of the declaration he would make in Berlin to the U.S. charge d'affaires at precisely 2:30 P. M. on December 11. Thomsen was instructed to call on Hull exactly one hour later, at 3:30 P.M. (Berlin time), hand the Secretary of State a copy of the declaration, ask for his passport and turn over Germany's diplomatic representation to Switzerland. At the end of the message Ribbentrop warned Thomsen not to have any contact with the State Department before delivering his note. "We wish to avoid under all circumstances," the warning said, "that the Government there beats us to such a step."
Whatever hesitations led Hitler to postpone the Reichstag session by two days, it is evident from the captured exchange of messages between the Wilhelmstrasse and the German Embassy in Washington, and from other Foreign Office papers, that the Fuehrer actually made his fateful decision to declare war on the United States on December 9, the day he arrived in the capital from headquarters on the Russian front. The Nazi dictator appears to have wanted the two extra days not for further reflection but to prepare carefully his Reichstag speech so that it would make the proper impression on the German people, of whose memories of America's decisive role in the First World War Hitler was quite aware.
Hans Dieckhoff, who was still officially the German ambassador to the United States but who had been cooling his heels in the Wilhelmstrasse ever since both countries withdrew their chief envoys in the autumn of 1938, was put to work on December 9 to draw up a long list of Roosevelt's anti-German activities for the Fuehrer's Reichstag address. [xix]
Also on December 9 Thomsen in Washington was instructed to burn his secret codes and confidential papers. "Measures carried out as ordered," he flashed to Berlin at 11:30 A.M. on that day. For the first time he became aware of what was going on in Berlin and during the evening tipped the Wilhelmstrasse that apparently the American government knew too. "Believed here," he said, "that within twenty-four hours Germany will declare war on the United States or at least break off diplomatic relations." [xx]
HITLER IN THE REICHSTAG: DECEMBER 11
Hitler's address on December 11 to the robots of the Reichstag in defense of his declaration of war on the United States was devoted mainly to hurling personal insults at Franklin D. Roosevelt, to charging that the President had provoked war in order to cover up the failures of the New Deal and to thundering that "this man alone," backed by the millionaires and the Jews, was "responsible for the Second World War." All the accumulated, pent-up resentment at a man who had stood from the first in his way toward world dominion, who had continually taunted him, who had provided massive aid to Britain at a moment when it seemed that battered island nation would fall, and whose Navy was frustrating him in the Atlantic burst forth in violent wrath.
Permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representative in that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war ...
I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was ... First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack -- in the approved manner of an old Freemason ...
Roosevelt has been guilty of a series of the worst crimes against international law. Illegal seizure of ships and other property of German and Italian nationals was coupled with the threat to, and looting of, those who were deprived of their liberty by being interned. Roosevelt's ever increasing attacks finally went so far that he ordered the American Navy to attack everywhere ships under the German and Italian flags, and to sink them -- this in gross violation of international law. American ministers boasted of having destroyed German submarines in this criminal way. German and Italian merchant ships were attacked by American cruisers, captured and their crews imprisoned.
In this way the sincere efforts of Germany and Italy to prevent an extension of the war and to maintain relations with the United States in spite of the unbearable provocations which have been carried on for years by President Roosevelt have been frustrated ...
What was Roosevelt's motive "to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of war"? Hitler asked. He gave two explanations.
I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt's ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. I was only one of those who carried out orders as an ordinary soldier, and naturally returned from the war just as poor as I was in the autumn of 1914. I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand.
After the war Roosevelt tried his hand at financial speculations. He made profits out of inflation, out of the misery of others, while I ... lay in a hospital ...
Hitler continued at some length with this singular comparison before he reached his second point, that Roosevelt had reverted to war to escape the consequences of his failure as President.
National Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President ... He took over a state in a very poor economic condition, and I took over the Reich faced with complete ruin, thanks to democracy ...
While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took place in Germany under National Socialist leadership, President Roosevelt did not succeed in bringing about even the slightest improvement in his own country ... This is not surprising if one bears in mind that the men he had called to support him, or rather, the men who had called him, belonged to the Jewish element, whose interests are all for disintegration and never for order ...
Roosevelt's New Deal legislation was all wrong. There can be no doubt that a continuation of this economic policy would have undone this President in peacetime, in spite of all his dialectical skill. In a European state he would surely have come eventually before a state court on a charge of deliberate waste of the national wealth; and he would scarcely have escaped at the hands of a civil court on a charge of criminal business methods.
Hitler knew that this assessment of the New Deal was shared, in part at least, by the American isolationists and a considerable portion of the business community and he sought to make the most of it, ignorant of the fact that on Pearl Harbor Day these groups, like all others in America, had rallied to the support of their country.
This fact was realized [he continued, alluding to these groups] and fully appreciated by many Americans, including some of high standing. A threatening opposition was gathering over the head of this man. He guessed that the only salvation for him lay in diverting public attention from home to foreign policy ... He was strengthened in this by the Jews around him ... The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied around this man, and he stretched out his hands.
Thus began the increasing efforts of the American President to create conflicts ... For years this man harbored one desire -- that a conflict should break out somewhere in the world.
There followed a long recital of Roosevelt's efforts in this direction, beginning with the "quarantine" speech in Chicago in 1937. "Now he [Roosevelt] is seized," Hitler cried at one point, "with fear that if peace is brought about in Europe his squandering of millions of money on armaments will be looked upon as plain fraud, since nobody will attack America -- and then he himself must provoke this attack upon his country."
The Nazi dictator seemed relieved that the break had come and he sought to share his sense of relief with the German people.
I think you have all found it a relief now that, at last, one State has been the first to take the step of protesting against this historically unique and shameless ill treatment of truth and of right ... The fact that the Japanese Government, which has been negotiating for years with this man, has at last become tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way fills us all, the German people and, I think, all other decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction ... The President of the United States ought finally to understand -- I say this only because of his limited intellect -- that we know that the aim of his struggle is to destroy one state after another ...
As for the German nation, it needs charity neither from Mr. Roosevelt nor from Mr. Churchill, let alone from Mr. Eden. It wants only its rights! It will secure for itself this right to live even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it ...
I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American charge d'affaires today, and the following -- [46]
At this point the deputies of the Reichstag leaped to their feet cheering, and the Fuehrer's words were drowned in the bedlam.
Shortly afterward, at 2:30 P.M., Ribbentrop, in one of his most frigid poses, received Leland Morris, the American charge d'affaires in Berlin, and while keeping him standing read out Germany's declaration of war, handed him a copy and icily dismissed him .
... Although Germany for her part [said the declaration] has always strictly observed the rules of international law in her dealings with the United States throughout the present war, the Government of the United States has finally proceeded to overt acts of war against Germany. It has, therefore, virtually created a state of war.
The Reich Government therefore breaks off all diplomatic relations with the United States and declares that under these circumstances brought about by President Roosevelt, Germany too considers herself to be at war with the United States, as from today. [47]
The final act in the day's drama was the signing of a tripartite agreement by Germany, Italy and Japan declaring "their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the joint war against the United States and England reaches a successful conclusion" and not to conclude a separate peace.
Adolf Hitler, who a bare six months before had faced only a beleaguered Britain in a war which seemed to him as good as won, now, by deliberate choice, had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in the world in a struggle in which military might depended largely, in the long run, on economic strength. Those three enemy countries together also had a gre3t preponderance of manpower over the three Axis nation3. Neither Hitler nor his generals nor his admirals seem to have weighed those sobering facts on that eventful December day as the year 1941 drew toward a close.
General Halder, the intelligent Chief of the General Staff, did not even note in his diary on December 11 that Germany had declared war on the United States. He mentioned only that in the evening he attended a lecture by a naval captain on the "background of the Japanese-American sea war." The rest of his diary, understandably perhaps, was taken up with the continued bad news from most sectors of the hard-pressed Russian front. There was no room in his thoughts for an eventual day when his weakened armies might also have to confront fresh troops from the New World.
Admiral Raeder actually welcomed Hitler's move. He conferred with the Fuehrer on the following day, December 12. "The situation in the Atlantic," he assured him, "will be eased by Japan's successful intervention." And warming up to his subject he added:
Reports have already been received of the transfer of some [American] battleships from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is certain that light forces, especially destroyers, will be required in increased numbers in the Pacific. The need for transport ships will be very great, so that a withdrawal of American merchant ships from the Atlantic can be expected. The strain on British merchant shipping will increase.
Hitler, having taken his plunge, and with such reckless bravado, now suddenly was prey to doubts. He had some questions to put to the Grand Admiral. Did he "believe that the enemy will in the near future take steps to occupy the Azores, the Cape Verdes and perhaps even to attack Dakar, in order to win back prestige lost as the result of the setbacks in the Pacific?" Raeder did not think so.
The U.S. [he answered] will have to concentrate all her strength in the Pacific during the next few months. Britain will not want to run any risks after her severe losses of big ships. [xxi] It is hardly likely that transport tonnage is available for such occupation tasks or for bringing up supplies.
Hitler had a more important question to pose. "Is there any possibility," he asked, "that the U.S.A. and Britain will abandon East Asia for a time in order to crush Germany and Italy first?" Here again the Grand Admiral was reassuring.
It is improbable [he answered] that the enemy will give up East Asia even temporarily; by so doing Britain would endanger India very seriously, and the U.S. cannot withdraw her fleet from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleet has the upper hand.
Raeder further tried to cheer up the Fuehrer by informing him that six "large" submarines were to proceed "as quickly as possible" to the east coast of the United States. [48]
With the situation in Russia being what it was, not to mention that in North Africa, where Rommel was also retreating, the thoughts of the German Supreme Commander and his military chiefs quickly turned from the new enemy, which they were sure would have its hands full in the Pacific far away. Their thoughts were not to return to it before another year had passed, the most fateful year of the war, in which the great turning point would come -- irrevocably deciding not only the outcome of the conflict which all through 1941 the Germans had believed almost over, almost won, but the fate of the Third Reich, whose astounding early victories had raised it so quickly to such a giddy height and which Hitler sincerely believed -- and said -- would flourish for a thousand years.
Halder's scribblings in his diary grew ominous as New Year's, 1942, drew near.
"Another dark day!" he began his journal on December 30, 1941, and again on the last day of the year. The Chief of the German General Staff had a presentiment of terrible things to come.
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Notes:
i. The italics are Hitler's.
ii. Hull made the remark to the new Japanese ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, in the presence of Mr. Roosevelt on March 14. Nomura replied that Matsuoka "talked loudly for home consumption because he was ambitious politically." (The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, pp. 900-01.)
iii. Mussolini had told him, he informed Hitler, that "America was the Number One enemy, and Soviet Russia came only in second place."
iv. Or of anything else about the United States. His weird conception of America -- by this time Hitler had come to believe his own Nazi propaganda -- was given further exposition in a talk he had with Mussolini at the Russian front late in August 1941. "The Fuehrer," the Italian records quote him indirectly as saying, "gave a detailed account of the Jewish clique which surrounds Roosevelt and exploits the American people. He stated that he could not, for anything in the world, live in a country like the U.S.A., whose conceptions of life are inspired by the most grasping commercialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music." (Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, pp. 449-52.)
v. The author's italics.
vi. News of the signing in Moscow of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact caused considerable alarm in Washington, where Roosevelt and Hull were inclined to take a view similar to Hitler's -- namely, that the treaty would release Japanese forces earmarked for a possible war with Russia for action farther south against British and perhaps American possessions. Sherwood discloses that on April 13, when the news of the conclusion of the pact was received, the President scrapped a plan for launching aggressive action by U.S. naval ships against German U-boats in the western Atlantic. A new order called merely for American warships to report movements of German naval vessels west of Iceland, not to shoot at them. It was considered that the new Japanese-Soviet neutrality agreement made the situation in the Pacific too dangerous to risk too much in the Atlantic. (Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, p. 291.)
vii. Ribbentrop kept trying all that fall and several times during the next two years to induce the Japanese to fall upon Russia from the rear, but each time the Tokyo government replied politely, in effect, "So sorry, please."
Hitler himself remained hopeful all through the summer. On August 26 he told Raeder he was "convinced that Japan will carry out the attack on Vladivostok as soon as forces have been assembled. The present aloofness can be explained by the fact that the assembling of forces is to be accomplished undisturbed, and the attack is to come as a surprise." [11]
The Japanese archives reveal how Tokyo evaded the Germans on this embarrassing question. When, for instance, on August 19 Ambassador Ott asked the Japanese Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs about Japan's intervention against Russia, the latter replied, "For Japan to do a thing like attacking Russia would be a very serious question and would require profound reflection." When on August 30 Ott, who by now was a very irritated ambassador, asked Foreign Minister Admiral Toyoda, "Is there any possibility that Japan may participate in the Russo-German war?" Toyoda replied, "Japan's preparations are now making headway, and it will take more time for their completion." [12]
viii. The Germans had no long-range bombers capable of reaching the American coast from the Azores -- much less getting back -- and it is a sign of the warping of Hitler's mind by this time that he conjured up the nonexistent "long-range bombers."
ix. It might be noted here that on the stand at Nuremberg Admiral Raeder insisted that he did everything possible to avoid provoking the United States into war.
x. "History has recorded who fired the first shot," Roosevelt declared in reference to this incident in a Navy Day speech on October 27. In all fairness it would seem that in dropping depth charges the United States fired the first shot. According to the confidential German Navy records this was not the first such occasion. The official U.S. naval historian confirms that as early as April 10 the Niblack (see above, p. 880) attacked a U-boat with depth charges. (Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations ill World War II, Vol. I, p. 57.)
xi. "I credit Nomura," Hull wrote later in his memoirs, "with having been honestly sincere in trying to avoid war between his country and mine." (The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, p. 987.)
xii. Prince Konoye's postwar memoirs reveal that as early as August 4 he was forced to agree to a demand of the Army that if, in his proposed meeting with Roosevelt, the President did not accept Japan's terms, he would walk out of the meeting "with a determination to make war on the United States." (Hull, Memoirs, pp. 1025-26.)
xiii. Hull says that he received a copy of this message through "Magic." Thus Washington, as well as Berlin, knew by the last day of November that the Japanese might strike against the United States "quicker than anyone dreamt." (Hull, Memoirs, p. 1092.)
xiv. It was long believed by many that Hitler knew in advance the exact hour of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I have been unable to find a single scrap of evidence in the secret German papers to substantiate it.
xv. In Tokyo at the same time Foreign Minister Togo was telling Ambassador Ott, “The Japanese Government expects that now Germany too will speedily declare war on the United States." [41]
xvi. My own impression in Washington at that moment was that it might be difficult for President Roosevelt to get Congress to declare war on Germany. There seemed to be a strong feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that the country ought to concentrate its efforts on defeating Japan and not take on the additional burden of fighting Germany at the same time.
Hans Thomsen, the German charge in Washington, who, like all the other Nazi envoys abroad, was usually kept ignorant of what Hitler and Ribbentrop were conniving, reported this sentiment to Berlin. Immediately after the President's speech to Congress on the morning of December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan Thomsen radioed Berlin: "The fact that he [Roosevelt] did not mention Germany and Italy with one word shows that he will try at first to avoid sharpening the situation in the Atlantic." On the evening of the same day Thomsen got off another dispatch on the subject: "Whether Roosevelt will demand declaration of war on Germany and Italy is uncertain. From the standpoint of the American military leaders it would be logical to avoid everything which could lead to a two-front war." In several dispatches just prior to Pearl Harbor the German charge had emphasized that the United States simply was not prepared for a two-front war. On December 4 he had radioed the revelations in the Chicago Tribune of the "war plans of the American High Command on preparations and prospects for defeating Germany and her allies."
Report confirms [he said] that full participation of America in war is not to be expected before July, 1943. Military measures against Japan are of defensive character.
In his message to Berlin on the evening of December 8, Thomsen stressed that Pearl Harbor was certain to bring relief to Germany from America's belligerent activities in the Atlantic.
War with Japan [he reported] means transferring of all energy to America's own rearmament, a corresponding shrinking of Lend-Lease help and a shifting of all activity to the Pacific.
For the exchange of dispatches between the Wilhelmstrasse and the German Embassy in Washington during this period, I am indebted to the State Department, which gave me access to them. They will be published later in the Documents on German Foreign Policy series.
xvii. See above, p. 888.
xviii. "I don't see much future for the Americans," he told his cronies a month later during a monologue at headquarters on January 7, 1942. "It's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together -- a country where everything is built on the dollar." (Hitler's Secret Conversations, p. 155.)
xix. Dieckhoff, whom Hassell thought "temperamentally submissive," had drawn up just a week before at the request of Ribbentrop a long memorandum entitled "Principles for Influencing American Public Opinion." Among his eleven principles were: "Real danger to America is Roosevelt himself ... Influence of Jews on Roosevelt (Frankfurter, Baruch, Benjamin Cohen, Samuel Rosenman, Henry Morgenthau, etc.) ... The slogan for every American mother must be: "I didn't raise my boy to die for Britain!" (From the Foreign Office papers, not yet published.) Some Americans in the State Department and in our embassy in Berlin thought rather highly of Dieckhoff and believed him to be anti-Nazi. My own feeling was that he lacked the guts to be. He served Hitler to the end -- from 1943 to 1945 as the Nazi ambassador to Franco Spain.
xx. Thomsen also urged Berlin to arrest the American correspondents there in retaliation for the arrest of a handful of German newsmen in the United States. A Foreign Office memorandum signed by Undersecretary Ernst Woermann on December 10 declares that all American correspondents in Germany were ordered arrested as "a reprisal." Excepted was Guido Enderis, chief correspondent in Berlin of the New York Times, "because," Woermann wrote, "of his proved friendliness to Germany." This may be unfair to the late Enderis, who was in ill health at the time and who mainly for that reason perhaps was not arrested.
xxi. Two days before, on December 10, Japanese planes had sunk two British battleships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the coast of Malaya. Coupled with the crippling American losses in battleships at Pearl Harbor on December 7, this blow gave the Japanese fleet complete supremacy in the Pacific, the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. "In all the war," Churchill wrote later of the loss of the two great ships, "I never received a more direct shock."