It was, if memory serves, a defensive treaty. It no more obligated him to declare war against the US than it obligated Japan to declare war against the USSR.
ETA:
So it really was an unforced error by Hitler. Kind of like invading the USSR and the whole starting WWII to begin with thing. Like I said, he was a fucking moron.
In fact Carl Grimberg’s World History (the first book I read about the subject) advanced the theory that he expected the Japanese to declare war against the USSR in return, the Japanese fascists in a rare display of intelligence declined to do so until August 6, 1945 when the Soviets invaded Manchuria (among other things that happened on that date).
Ah. That makes some sense.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
It actually made some strategic sense for Hitler to declare war on the United States in 1941, after Japan had done so.
The United States had been out of the war. So Germany could afford to maintain that status quo. Germany was going to fight the United States as some point but it wasn’t a priority.
But the Pearl Harbor attack brought the United States into the war. Regardless of what Germany did, America was going to build up its armed forces to fight Japan.
So Germany was looking at two scenarios:
They stay out of the war between America and Japan. They stay focused on their existing war with Britain and the Soviet Union. America builds up its military and focuses all of its efforts against defeating Japan. It’s pretty certain Japan would lose this war and do so even earlier than they did historically when defeating Germany was seen as the main priority. So Japan surrenders around 1944. Germany now has the prospect of having to fight a fully militarized America, which won’t be fighting a second front in the Pacific.
Germany joins with Japan in 1941. The United States is still weak because there hasn’t been a wartime buildup. Plus American military strength will be divided between fighting against two enemies.
So Hitler knew he was going to fight the United States at some point. And he could see he had a better chance fighting that war in 1942 than he would have fighting it in 1945.
I think it’s easy to understand, when it comes to anything connected with the military, especially the military in World War II, and most especially the military in the Philippines during World War II.
His father abusively inculcated hero worship in him. The hero, of course, is dear old dad. I’m not saying the abuse was physical, but the mental abuse seems rather obvious. Daddy Dearest’s war stories as DrDeth recites them are patently false and quite easy to prove contradict known facts about the people, places, and times mentioned in said war stories. When a poster here provides such proof, thinking on the part of the doctor is defenstrated immediately. And Deth has to come to the defense of his idol. He lashes out at the “offending” poster and takes it quite personally, even going so far as to accuse the poster of calling DrD a liar or otherwise insulting him. His patriolatry requires it.
I am not a doctor of any sort. I’m certainly not a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
I’m not into the history enough to comment but is this necessarily so? Was there no prospect of the European theatre resolving one way or the other and Germany not attacking the US, and the US staying out of it?
I still don’t buy it. It’s not like he was ready for war against the US. Plus—and this is key—your description of Hitler’s conception of starting war with the US sooner rather than later presumes the sort of divided effort that actually occurred. Hitler might just as easily have imagined the US sticking to a “Japan first” strategy, as indeed it did (nominally) adopt a Europe first strategy to Hitler’s detriment (although I do continue to marvel at how the allies so effectively waged war against Germany and Japan concurrently).
In theory, Hitler might thus have imagined the US could prosecute WWII the same with a German declaration of war as without (by focusing on the Japanese and leaving Europe to the europeans). Although this is not actually how history played out—the US made a different choice—the point is that Hitler gave the US that choice, which is the unforced error in a nutshell. He surrendered strategic initiative and the ability to more fully direct the course of the war to not just the US generally, but to the then-current Roosevelt administration. He took an unfriendly government that really wanted war with Germany but was momentarily saddled with a casus belli for war with Japan only (thus being placed somewhat on the back foot, absent Hitler’s unforced error) and gave them their casus belli for Germany as well. On a silver platter!
Hitler made it easier for his enemies to destroy him if they wanted to, and they (or at least Roosevelt—to his credit) chose to pursue precisely that. He was a fucking moron.
Huh. I thought that thread was closed.
There’s the Hitler factor. Hitler was not the kind of guy who could accept the idea that there was a rival power out there that could potentially defeat Germany. (Especially one which had helped defeat Germany in 1918.) In his world view, Germany would not be safe until all potential threats, including the United States, had been suppressed.
Hitler, like militarists in Japan, was imbued with the idea that the U.S. was fatally handicapped by pursuit of material things, riddled with people of inferior blood and divided by strife between labor unions and corporations. In their view, superior race and ideological fervor would inevitably overcome industrial superiority. So why not challenge the paper tiger, which would sue for peace at the first opportunity?
It was just one of many fatal miscalculations by Axis powers.
*I suspect that if you polled Germans, including what’s left of the population that experienced WWII, a surprising percentage would be unaware that America joined the war against the Nazis only after Hitler declared war on the U.S. first.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that a reasonable discussion/debate about this particular topic can only be held in the Pit thread for the poster most likely to derail it
It was a sort-of-sequel to Mein Kampf, In it, he extended his “staged plan” for domination of Europe to the entire world, and he considered the U.S. to be his most dangerous potential opponent, even more so than the Soviet Union (which, by proximity, he would have to deal with first).
So Hitler figured a showdown with the U.S. would have to happen eventually, and would have probably taken efforts to stay out of the European war as indicative of weakness on the part of the U.S. He also didn’t think much about the logistics of war and the need for industry to pursue a modern war, so the U.S. with an army smaller than Portugal in 1939 was not something that registered to him as a threat.
If the USSR and the UK had managed to subdue Germany by themselves, the U.S. could have stayed out of it; but if Germany ended up with dominion over Europe, Hitler’s ambition was to take on the U.S. in time.
There’s the saying about Hitler that he could make plans for the next six months and he could make plans for six decades in the future - but he couldn’t make plans for any period in between.
Probably just as well it stays closed. Because otherwise we get Zombie Hitler and that’s the worst kind of Hitler.
Add “I do not think Gaza will be such a big issue in two years” to the list of Dumb Things DrDeth Keeps Repeating.
Quoted for truth.
Anyway, as has been mentioned, the US was already in an undeclared naval war with Germany, escorting British convoys with orders to shoot on sight any German ship they encountered. And the US was already supplying all of Germany’s enemies via lend-lease. So, there’s a case to be made that Germany had nothing to actually lose by declaring war first. There were no real immediate military consequences for Germany, the US aid to the Commonwealth and the USSR was going to happen regardless and the US wasn’t going to be in a position to make any direct military impact for most of a year.
What it did allow was Germany to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare against the US. Which was extremely successful, as the US was entirely unprepared for it.
The Second Happy Time lasted from January 1942 to about August of that year and involved several German naval operations, including Operation Neuland. German submariners named it the “Happy Time” or the “Golden Time”, as defense measures were weak and disorganized,[3] and the U-boats were able to inflict massive damage with little risk. During this period, Axis submarines sank 609 ships totaling 3.1 million tons[vague], against a loss of only 22 U-boats. This led to the loss of thousands of lives, mainly those of merchant mariners. Although fewer than the losses during the 1917 campaign of the First World War,[4] those of this period equaled roughly one quarter of all ships sunk by U-boats during the entire Second World War.
Bolding mine. It’s actually closer to one-fifth than one-quarter; 14.5 million tons of shipping was sunk by U-boats during the entirety of the war; 3.1 million is 21.4% of that. Regardless, it was a huge amount of shipping sunk at virtually no cost to Germany, both as an absolute figure and as a percentage of the total sunk during the entire war.
I still say that the guy who killed Hitler was a real asshole.
There has been conflict in Gaza since 1948, so you got to figure it has to run out of steam at some point, right?
Killing Hitler’s dog was a real dick move.