Hitler Gratuitously Declares War on the US
As seen in the previous entry, Japan might have made a terrible decision when it chose to go to war with the US, but it was at least a reasoned one. Poor reasoning, to be sure, but there was nonetheless some coherence in the argument linking Japanese interests and the decision to pick a fight with the US. A bad decision, but one which historians could examine and think: “I see what they were trying to do. They got it wrong, but I see where they were coming from, and where they thought they were going with this“. Such coherence and rational nexus between decision and goals were decidedly absent when Adolph Hitler declared war on the US soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed an anti-communist pact directed against the USSR, forming what came to be known as the Berlin-Rome axis – from which WW2’s Axis Powers derived their name. Japan’s militarist rulers, vehemently anticommunist in their own right, eventually signed the treaty, forming the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome axis.
The pact’s clauses included a defensive treaty, binding the signatories to aid any member that came under attack from a foreign aggressor. Notably, the treaty did not bind its signatories to aid any member waging an offensive war in which it was the aggressor. That was illustrated in the summer of 1941: after attacking the USSR, the Germans pled with Japan to join in finishing off the Soviets by attacking from the east. The Japanese refused: since Germany was the aggressor, Japan was not treaty-bound to come to its aid.
Despite that, when Hitler learned that Japan had devastated the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, he decided to join Japan by declaring war on the US. Just as Japan had refused to join Germany after it initiated war against the USSR, Germany was under no obligation to join Japan after it had initiated war against the US.
Hitler loathed the US, which he deemed a degenerate mongrel nation, controlled by Jewish capitalists. The US government was also avowedly anti-Axis, and was generously furnishing Germany’s enemies with supplies under the terms of Lend-Lease. Nonetheless, the US was not at war with Germany – and by December of 1941, the war was not looking too good for Germany. Britain, whom Hitler had expected to defeat in 1940, was still fighting. The USSR, which Hitler had expected to defeat in a few weeks, had put up a far fiercer fight than anticipated, and Germany found itself in a protracted war of attrition against an industrial and manpower giant. Only days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Soviets had launched a counteroffensive in front of Moscow, that brought German Army Group Center to the brink of collapse.
Given the preceding, Germany had nothing to gain from adding the world’s wealthiest and greatest industrial power to the ranks of its enemies. Yet, despite the opposition of his generals, Hitler, moved by emotion rather than reason, declared war against the US on December 11th, 1941. It was a rash decision that all but guaranteed Germany’s doom. At a stroke, Hitler added to his enemies a country whose GDP was nearly four times that of Germany’s, and whose factories and homeland were thousands of miles beyond the reach of German arms.
