{"id":18915,"date":"2019-12-30T23:31:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T23:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/12\/30\/four-days-in-december-germanys-path-to-war-with-the-us\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:11:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T19:11:06","slug":"four-days-in-december-germanys-path-to-war-with-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/news\/your-navy\/2019\/12\/30\/four-days-in-december-germanys-path-to-war-with-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Four days in December: Germany\u2019s path to war with the US"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States<\/b> at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, simultaneously invading the Pacific holdings of Great Britain and the Netherlands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four days later, Germany handed declarations of war to the American charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires in Berlin and to Secretary of State Cordell Hull<\/a> in Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reich\u2019s partner, Italy, did the same in Rome and the American capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, as now, these moves might seem an impulsive display of Axis solidarity. The reality is quite different. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler had long recognized that his hopes and plans for world domination necessitated war with the United States. As he stated explicitly in a follow-up volume to Mein Kampf<\/a> written in 1928, preparing for war with the United States would be a central responsibility of any National Socialist government. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The days after Pearl Harbor brought to a crescendo the dictator\u2019s protracted effort to orchestrate an international conflict to suit his and Germany\u2019s purposes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Two of the Axis leaders, Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. (From Eva Braun’s photo album, now in the collections of the National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The surprise for Hitler was not that Japan attacked the United States, but how and when. He learned of Pearl Harbor the way millions did: from someone who had heard a radio report about the raid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese had not given their allies any precise information on what they planned, so the bombing and torpedo assault itself startled Germany and Italy\u2014hardly unusual. Neither had ever notified Tokyo in advance of intended attacks, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news flash came soon after the German leader returned to the Wolf\u2019s Lair, his headquarters deep in a forest near Rastenburg. Hitler had traveled to East Prussia from the Eastern Front, where he had gone to address firsthand the crises arising from successful Soviet counterattacks at Rostov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The setbacks to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of Italian forces amid a British offensive in North Africa had left personnel at the Wolf\u2019s Lair feeling gloomy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late on Dec. 7, Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich brought Hitler the news about Pearl Harbor. Hitler asked Dietrich to confirm the bulletin, but already word of the Americans\u2019 undoing was enlivening the atmosphere at the Wolfsschanze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA delirium of joy embraced everyone as far as one could see in the headquarters,\u201d <\/a>Gen. Walter Warlimont, a deputy chief of operations in the OKW, the High Command of the German Armed Forces, noted in his memoirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exuberance erupted from certainty that the real fight \u2014 against the mongrel giant of the west \u2014 at last had begun. Hitler, who saw his life as a constant war, would not be cheated again, as he had been in 1938 when Allied appeasement over the Sudetenland spoiled his plans to invade Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler and other German leaders so thoroughly expected the Reich to fight America that, after the initial delighted outburst, they gave Pearl Harbor scarcely a thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Army chief of staff Gen. Franz Halder, for example, merely noted in his diary entry for Dec. 8 that \u201cJapan appears to have opened hostilities against America and England by surprise air attacks and warship attacks on Honolulu and also against Shanghai and against Malaya.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halder\u2019s entry devotes more attention to the Eastern Front and to North Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Dec. 9, Halder writes that he conferred with an assistant on a \u201cdirective for conversations with attach\u00e9s [of other countries] on the entrance of America into the war.\u201d The next day Halder briefly notes major Japanese successes, and on Dec. 11 records that he heard a naval officer\u2019s report about \u201cbasic factors in the Japanese-American naval war.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His Dec. 12 entry notes a report on the \u201cAsian theater of war,\u201d but Halder does not consider Germany\u2019s declaration of war the day before worthy of note. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Warning! Our homes are in danger now!” A poster circulated by the Office of War Information beginning in early 1943. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As his master did, the army commander took for granted the Americans\u2019 inability to mount military operations serious enough to affect the German war effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, for Dec. 7 and 8 the usually voluminous OKW war diary refers to the attack at Honolulu only by summarizing official Japanese announcements and dispatches from the Reuters news agency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dec. 8 OKW entry mentions the sinking of the American battleship \u201cNew Virginia\u201d; evidently no one at German headquarters had a list of American capital ships or knew that no U.S. Navy vessel with that name existed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Dec. 9 the OKW diary summarizes official announcements from Tokyo. On Dec. 10, however, the diary merely mentions a report, and on Dec. 11 it again distills Japanese headquarters and Reuters reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dec. 11 entry, made after Hitler declared war, notes that Gen. Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of operations, called from Berlin to suggest that his deputy consider having the staff examine the question of whether the United States will concentrate its military effort first in Europe or in the Pacific. Thereafter, only minimal references to the Pacific War appear in the OKW war diary through 1945. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entries for Dec. 12 and 13 ignore the fact that Germany has gone to war with another rather large country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sailors in a motor launch rescue a survivor from the water alongside the sunken battleship West Virginia during or shortly after the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. The battleship Tennessee is inboard of the sunken battleship. Note extensive distortion of West Virginia’s lower midships superstructure, caused by torpedoes that exploded below that location. Also note 5\/25 gun, still partially covered with canvas, boat crane swung outboard and empty boat cradles near the smokestacks, and base of radar antenna atop West Virginia’s foremast. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

War with the United States had been on Hitler\u2019s wish list for two decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon becoming chancellor in 1933 he began rearming Germany for the first fights he anticipated \u2014 against Czechoslovakia, France, and Britain. He was confident those weapons would also suffice for his next war, against Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1937, with a first generation of arms in production, he turned to the special weapons he needed to take on the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A firm believer, like most of his political and military associates, that in World War I Germany had not been defeated at the front but \u201cstabbed in the back\u201d \u2014 the colloquial term, popularized by Gen. Erich Ludendorff, was Dolchstoss, \u201cdagger\u2019s thrust\u201d \u2014 Hitler held that the Americans played no real role in bringing about Germany\u2019s loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States had a tiny, weak army and minimal air force and Hitler had nothing but scorn for aircraft production quotas set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though American factories had been meeting those quotas for two years. (Told days before the war declaration that the United States expected by 1944 to be building 100,000 warplanes a year, Reichsmarshall Hermann G\u00f6ring sneered that all the Americans could make was refrigerators.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Hitler\u2019s lights, so racially mixed a collection of degenerates as the Americans could not possibly mount an effective military effort anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the United States was distant, and had a big navy at a time when Germany did not, so Hitler began developing the Me 264 Amerika Bomber, a four-engine behemoth capable of intercontinental attacks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Germany began developing super-battleships whose guns would be large and powerful enough to demolish American dreadnoughts from afar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But progress on the weapons of the future stalled and then stopped. Only prototypes of the Me 264 got off the ground, never the swarms of enormous aircraft that Hitler envisioned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

German shipwrights laid the keel for the aircraft carrier Flugzeugtr\u00e4ger A (later renamed Graf Zeppelin) in 1936, and keels for monster 56,000-ton battleships early in 1939, but the outbreak of war on Sept. 1 created demands for materiel and manpower that took precedence over these next-generation warships, which never did sail. (Not every production order was cancelled; in June 1944 the German navy took delivery of four huge battleship engines that promptly were melted down for scrap.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin (1938-1947), photographed in September 1945 at Stettin, Germany. (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Adm. Erich Raeder, who had assumed the German navy\u2019s helm in 1928, had been pleading for war with the United States since soon after the invasion of Poland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the U-boats\u2019 success, Raeder didn\u2019t have enough submarines to isolate England, and thanks to flawed designs and losses at sea the Kriegsmarine at times had few surface vessels larger than a destroyer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1940\u201341, Hitler and associates realized the foreseeable future would not include a huge German blue water navy of battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers. To compensate, they looked to the obvious alternative: enlisting an ally that already had such a force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The equally obvious candidate: Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under these circumstances, Hitler adopted two parallel policies. He ordered Raeder to avoid incidents with the United States in the Atlantic, and began chivvying Japan to take Singapore away from Great Britain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Japan openly joining the Axis side, the alliance would gain a world-class navy, not after years of building but right away, and so remove the main hurdle to Germany\u2019s making war on the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese had seen Germany\u2019s victories in the west as a signal to move south to expand their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But after joining the Axis, Tokyo authorities demurred, explaining that they were not planning to invade Malaya until 1946, when the United States had announced it would give up its bases in the Philippines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler countered that if concern about the United States was restraining Japan, Germany would immediately join in a war against the U.S. and its allies \u2014 provided Japan struck now, not five years later, when the Americans would be stronger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One way or another, Hitler expected to fight the United States, so it made no difference to him whether an American warship went down in the Atlantic or in the Pacific. The sooner Japan attacked, the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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German Chancellor Adolf Hitler (left) on the christening platform as the battleship Scharnhorst is launched at Wilhelmshaven, Germany, 3 October 1936. Among those also on the platform, just to the right of Hitler, are Gen. Werner von Blomberg and Adm. Erich Raeder. (New York Times Paris Bureau collection in the National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Having promised to fight on Japan\u2019s side, specifically at a March 1941 meeting in Berlin with Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke, German leaders chafed as Tokyo and Washington conducted seemingly endless negotiations on into that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japan\u2019s occupation of southern French Indo-China, coming as it did within a month of Germany\u2019s June 22, 1941, invasion of Russia, clearly pointed in the direction Germany wanted, but still the talks in Washington droned on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Germans believed their attack on the Soviet Union would allay Japan\u2019s fears of any threat to its home islands from Russia\u2019s Pacific territories, encouraging the empire to strike southward into areas it had long coveted. The Germans also expected such an action to draw American attention and resources into the Pacific and away from the Atlantic, increasing Germany\u2019s advantage there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler worried that the Soviets\u2019 failure to collapse as quickly as anticipated might deter Japan from going after the United States. (From an opposite viewpoint, President Roosevelt hoped endless talk might lead Tokyo to see that a German victory was not the certainty the Japanese might be imagining.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To spur Japan on, Hitler turned to propaganda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an Oct. 3, 1941, speech trumpeting a new offensive against the Russians, he boasted, \u201cI say today, because I can now say it, that this enemy is already crushed and cannot ever recover.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the week Dietrich was claiming the Reich had crushed the Red Army and won the war in the East. On Nov. 8, Hitler insisted the offensive \u201chad succeeded beyond all measure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of it was true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels thought all three announcements were terrible mistakes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano also saw the agitprop as wrong-footed. Ciano was Fascist royalty; not only was he married to Mussolini\u2019s daughter Edda, but in 1936 he replaced Il Duce as foreign minister. He was present at the 1938 talks in Munich in that capacity. Ciano was also the recipient of phone calls at all hours from German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was trying to reinforce Italy\u2019s martial resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even so, Ciano was not privy to Hitler\u2019s larger motives. In Ciano\u2019s diary entry for Oct. 18, he wryly suggests, \u201cIsn\u2019t this a case of their having sung their victory anthem too soon?\u201d (Hitler did not keep a diary, so his private contemplations are unknown.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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German troops in Russia, 1941. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mistake or no, Hitler clearly meant the propaganda barrage to induce Japan to act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back on events in a 1950 memoir, Bernhard von Lossberg, an assistant to OKW deputy chief Warlimont, concluded, \u201cDietrich\u2019s statement was probably designed to hasten Japan\u2019s entry into the war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lossberg\u2019s suspicions are confirmed by a document from Hitler\u2019s special military historian that his secretary, Marianne Feuersenger, quoted in her 1982 memoir. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Referencing \u201cDietrich\u2019s speech on his command,\u201d the historian wrote, \u201cPropaganda fully under the control of the F\u00fchrer\u2026. It was decisive that Japan had to be held to the course. F[\u00fchrer] had a terrible fear at the beginning of the crisis [before Moscow] that they might be scared off.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Events proved Hitler\u2019s anxieties well founded. Only days before the Japanese strike force Kido Butai came within range of Pearl Harbor, Tokyo was checking with Berlin and Rome to make sure that their promise to join Japan in war against the United States still held and asking that both nations agree to a treaty not to enter into a separate peace agreement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The communication brought prompt replies in the affirmative from both Germany and Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The forward magazines of the battleship Arizona explode after being hit by a Japanese bomb, 7 December 1941. Frame clipped from a color motion picture taken on board the hospital ship Solace. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before Hitler could respond in earnest to Pearl Harbor, he had to get to Berlin, assemble the Reichstag, give its members the good news of war with the United States, and hand an American diplomat a formal declaration of hostilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he saw no need to keep Raeder and his U-boats on the leash. Late on Dec. 8, 1941, Hitler ordered Raeder to authorize the Kriegsmarine to sink on sight any ship flying the flag of the United States<\/a>, plus those of Uruguay and eight other Central American nations seen as its allies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once he reached Berlin, Hitler phoned and met with Goebbels to review the situation in detail. The propaganda minister documented the exchanges in his diary the following day, as was his custom. Goebbels\u2019s Dec. 8 entry notes that Japan has attacked the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was\u2026called by the F\u00fchrer who is extraordinarily happy about this development,\u201d Goebbels writes. \u201cHe will summon the Reichstag for Wednesday [Dec. 10] in the afternoon to clarify the German position on this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After enthusing about the Japanese action at Pearl Harbor and the likelihood that it will shrink American deliveries of weapons and transportation equipment to Britain and the Soviet Union, Goebbels adds, \u201cThe development has produced the greatest joy for the F\u00fchrer and the whole headquarters.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goebbels\u2019 Dec. 9 entry summarizes developments in East Asia and the Pacific, mentions the coming Reichstag session, and repeats his assessment that the United States no longer will be able to aid England and the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can be extraordinarily satisfied with the way things have developed,\u201d the Nazi propagandist says in conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Dec. 10 Goebbels again predicts the demise of American deliveries of weapons and airplanes, refers to worldwide puzzlement over German policy in the new situation, and reports at length on a Dec. 9 meeting in Berlin and Hitler\u2019s demeanor during it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe is filled with joy over the very fortunate development of the negotiations between the USA and Japan and also over the outbreak of war,\u201d Goebbels writes. \u201cHe correctly pointed out that he had always expected this development.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goebbels then summarizes comments by Hitler to the effect that the Japanese initiated war in the Pacific in a manner and at a moment that caught him unaware but which he found entirely correct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler told Goebbels about his sink-on-sight order to the Kriegsmarine \u2014 which both men celebrated \u2014 and said that in his Reichstag speech he would declare war on the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler added that he would urge all Axis partners to do the same. (Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria proceeded to do so, although Roosevelt had the State Department attempt for half a year to get the latter three to withdraw their declarations of war.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his conversation with Goebbels, Hitler claimed to be blas\u00e9 about setbacks on the Eastern Front and predicted an end to American provisioning of England and the Soviet Union. Hitler summarized what he expected to say to the Reichstag, telling Goebbels that to give himself time to draft and polish the speech he was postponing it to Dec. 11. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe F\u00fchrer again projects a wave of optimism and confidence in victory,\u201d Goebbels writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The loss of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, 10 December 1941, as photographed by a Japanese aircraft during the initial high-level bombing attack. Repulse, near the bottom of the view, has just been hit by one bomb and near-missed by several more. Prince of Wales is near the top of the image, generating a considerable amount of smoke. Japanese writing in the lower right states that the photograph was reproduced by authorization of the Navy Ministry. (Donation of Mr. Theodore Hutton, 1942, now in the collections of U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On Dec. 11, diarist Goebbels says how good it is to have Japan\u2019s aggressive and successful advances diverting attention at home and abroad from Axis setbacks on the Eastern Front and in North Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japanese pilots have sunk the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya, the propaganda minister notes. He restates his conviction that America will stop being England\u2019s quartermaster. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing of a noon meeting the day before with Hitler, Goebbels says the F\u00fchrer is especially pleased about Prince of Wales and Repulse and about the timing of the Japanese successes, given the situation on the Eastern Front. Goebbels notes that although the Japanese wanted the Reichstag to convene earlier, Hitler is to speak at 3 p.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After offering considerable detail on matters in the Pacific, Goebbels\u2019s Dec. 12 entry reports on Hitler\u2019s speech the day before. In his address, the dictator told the Reichstag that Germany was at war with the United States and had signed a treaty with Italy and Japan eschewing a separate peace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goebbels raves about Hitler\u2019s presentation, and about Mussolini\u2019s own Dec. 11 proclamation and speech about war against the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two days later Goebbels notes that he and Hitler met once again. He describes their shared excitement and pleasure at Japan\u2019s coups in East Asia. He notes that in the afternoon Hitler spoke to the Gauleiter, the district chiefs of the Nazi Party, telling his tribunes all will be well, with no chance that the entry of the United States will prolong the conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, Goebbels reports, Ribbentrop has handed Germany\u2019s declaration of war to the American charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires; the German charg\u00e9 in Washington presented the document to Secretary of State Hull. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ribbentrop and Hitler had worried that the United States might declare war before Germany was able to do so. (\u201cA great power does not allow itself to be declared war on; it declares it on others,\u201d Ribbentrop once told a deputy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A soldier looks at a huge portrait of Mussolini that had been taken from an Anzio Political Hall and damaged by passing troops, 30 January 1944. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At every previous juncture expanding the war, Hitler heard warnings and even argument from his circle of political and military advisors. But prior to the German declaration of war on the United States, the only discouraging words came from Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, the former German ambassador to Washington. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For once on a dangerous gambit, the Reichstag exhibited unanimity as enthusiastic as the leadership\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler and coterie may have had no second thoughts, but in Rome, Galeazzo Ciano\u2019s experienced eyes suddenly came into sharper focus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He connected the dots backward from Germany and Italy\u2019s twin declarations of war \u2014 the latter of which he personally handed the American charg\u00e9 the afternoon of Dec. 11 \u2014 to Pearl Harbor, to Japan\u2019s demand for a treaty abjuring any separate peace, to autumn\u2019s bluster about the Eastern Front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Ciano notes in his diary that Ribbentrop was \u201cjumping with joy about the Japanese attack on the United States,\u201d he records a very different personal perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following a meeting on Dec. 13 with the Cuban minister, who had come to declare war on Italy, Ciano mused on the private page about \u201chaving had the good fortune, or is it the misfortune, to declare war on France, on Great Britain, on Russia and on the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t