On December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was not self-evident that the US would enter the war in Europe being fought between Britain and Nazi Germany.
British prime minister Winston Churchill was praying and
lobbying for America to enter the European war because Britain was barely
holding on against the Hitlerian onslaught. Recall the war began in September
1939. London and the British islands were mercilessly bombed by the Luftwaffe between
July 10, 1940 – and October 31, 1940.
Despite strong isolationist opposition, since March 11, 1941, the US had been formally providing a near-bankrupt Britain with weapons. Some of which were channeled to the USSR, which since June 22, 1941, was also fighting Hitler. None of this would have been enough to turn the tide in Europe, and all sides knew this. The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan put Lend-Lease into doubt, at least temporarily, because the US would need to focus its energies on Japan. London and Moscow would have to tread water.
As Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman remind us in their riveting
Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War,
it was Hitler who declared war on the US, not the other way around.
Therefore, the day that arguably deserves to go down in
history is December 11, 1941, when the Nazi dictator – seeing a brief window of
opportunity – made his fateful miscalculation. Only the American economic
engine and the manpower of the American armed forces ensured Hitler's (and
Japan's) defeat.
"The Fuhrer was convinced that 'the Jews' had suborned Roosevelt,
who had manipulated the United States into such a hostile attitude toward the
Reich that Germany had no choice but to declare a preemptive war," the authors argue.
By December 7, 1941, the Nazis had been waging frenzied war
against the Jewish population of occupied Russia. With Hitler's declaration of
war against the US, the Holocaust would now go into high gear to annihilate the
Jews of western and central Europe as well. The authors remind us that on Pearl Harbor Day most European Jews were still alive. "The world war is here, and the
extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence," Hitler told
his subordinates after his December 11, 1941, declaration of war on the US.
That is the context in which the Wannsee Conference of January
20, 1942, is best understood. This was the crucial bureaucratic planning meeting
addressing the nuts and bolts details of the systematic industrial destruction
of Europe's Jewish people
This book is not primarily about the Shoah, but the authors
so effectively weave Hitler's twisted motivations showing how central his
obsessive hatred of the Jews was to his reason for going to war and how he
waged it. All his economic and diplomatic grievances against Britain and the US
interlocked with his warped belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
History is not linear, and nothing is foretold – it only
appears orderly or sensible after the fact. Had Hitler not declared war on the
US, the Roosevelt administration might not have found the political nerve to come
to Britain's aid in WWII with boots on the ground.
Hitler's American Gamble focuses on five crucial days
in the history of WWII – practically hour by hour. The book's pace is gripping,
and the angle the authors take is distinctive. Highly recommended.
Thanks for this review - I gotta read it now - I'm going to have to give up the day job. Mind you I already knew that little dictator was a complete lunatic. With just a little English/French backbone in 1938 he'd be a footnote of history. Like you wrote above - history isn't linear and nothing had to happen the way it did. Any change and everything after that - from Israel to the Ukraine - it all happens differently. But whether for better for worse who knows.
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