Hitler's American Gamble by Brendan Simms

Author:Brendan Simms [Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Across Europe, even those who knew little of the diplomatic machinations sensed that the world was in flux, though there was not much consensus on what to make of it. The German writer Ernst Jünger, stationed in Paris, was confused. He wrote that day that he caught himself “mixing up the alliances.” Sometimes Jünger thought that Japan had declared war on Germany rather than the United States. Everything, he felt, was “inextricably snarled up like snakes in a sack.”184 In Romania, Mihail Sebastian spoke of “a new type of war” in the Pacific “unlike anything we have seen since August 1939.” He was stunned by the Japanese “Blitz technique” and found it “most disturbing to see America taken by surprise like any old Belgium or Yugoslavia.”185 Word of Pearl Harbor had finally penetrated to the heart of the Polish region of Zamosc, deep in Nazi-occupied territory. “News of the outbreak of the Japanese-American War arrived,” Zygmunt Klukowski wrote, which “provoked great excitement—everybody is speaking only about this.”186 In the village of Rhöndorf by the Rhine, where he was living in internal exile, the former mayor of Cologne Konrad Adenauer reflected to an old friend how the world had changed. Referring obliquely to the despised Third Reich, he added that he thought “this period will also come to an end one day, perhaps earlier than we now think.”187

Opinion was divided on what the Pacific War would mean for the European theater. Even the expectation that the Soviet Union would no longer receive Lend-Lease equipment did not cheer up Hellmuth Stieff on the eastern front. “On the contrary,” he wrote to his wife, “I now have the feeling that the Russians will stake everything on one last throw because they will not be getting any more aid in future.” This would cause the Red Army to throw everything at the Wehrmacht while they still could. “And their prospects are good,” Stieff concluded bleakly, “because we are exhausted and the winter is against us.”188

In Lvov, Professor Tadeusz Tomaszewski and his friends made the same calculation but came to a radically different conclusion. Having thought over the implications of Pearl Harbor, they were no longer so optimistic. The “preponderant” view now was, he recorded in his diary, that the Japanese attack was “bad” and could “prolong” the hostilities by distracting the United States from Europe and reducing the flow of equipment across the Atlantic to Britain.189 Lend-Lease clearly loomed as large in his mind as it did in the minds of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Goebbels.

In England, too, the Mass Observation diarists worried over the fate of American aid. The Maida Vale housewife noted that “opinion has now become general that the reason for Japan’s entry into the war was primarily at Hitler’s instigation to prevent the operation of Lend-Lease.”190 The Newport insurance clerk concurred, fearing the worst: “Just when we were getting the measure of the war and were relaxing in the luxury of unlimited lease-lend from America, anarchy and confusion breaks loose again.

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