Why Did the Axis Fight the US? June 7, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
One of the neatest sentences about the Second World War is that the Allies won their victory because of ‘Soviet blood, British time and American resources’. This is an approximation, of course, to truth but a pretty effective one. The Soviets lost perhaps 26 million, enough dead to damn the river of German invasion. The British (and above all the Royal Navy and Royal Airforce) kept the clock ticking through 1940 and 1941 before others climbed onto their life-raft, (so many mixed metaphors today). America, meanwhile, simply outproduced not only the Axis but their friends and, indeed, the rest of the world: an extreme (and unfair caricature) is that the war in the Pacific was won not by marines but by Rosy and other American factory workers. What is certain is that the Axis soon came to regret treading on the US’s long and sensitive tail. The Japanese did not have to bomb Pearl Harbor, they could have sat tight or better still they could have revenged themselves on the USSR and Roosevelt be damned: British, French and Dutch possessions were out as the US had guaranteed these territories. Germany was effectively at war with the United States in the western Atlantic long before December of 1941, but there was no need for Hitler and Mussolini to invite hundreds of thousands American infantry into their continental Empire: Germany should have swallowed hard and pretended not to notice its missing uboats. (Swallowing hard had been the UK’s strategy with the US since the 1880s and it had worked admirably).
Of course, after Pearl Harbor (and the declarations that followed) it was too late, but for the rest of the war and for the years that followed Axis fighters and Axis survivors reflected on what could have possessed their leaders to have done something so foolish as to take the fight to America: the equivalent of a couple of wiry teenage toughs throwing a beer bottle at the bouncer. One common expression of despair in Italy is that Mussolini simply did not understand the extent of the United States: you often hear from those with fascist sympathies (who though have no illusions about the limits of the Duce’s wisdom) ‘if only someone had shown him a telephone book for New York’, i.e. Mussolini just didn’t realize how many millions of people Roosevelt represented. Hitler knew the United States about as well as anyone who had never visited the country could have: that is assuming that he wasn’t on the back of Rommel’s motorbike in Virginia. He had adored cowboy novels when younger (!) and knew a great deal about America’s modest military capacity in 1941. Listening to his long justification to the Reichstag for war in Dec 1941, there is the sense that he knew that he was getting in over his head, but decided to do it anway: honour among Axis thieves? The best explanation I’ve ever heard for an Axis attack arrived, though, in an email from Invisible (thanks!) just the other day and involves Japan: ‘in 1983 [John] Fleming [a veteran] said he met a group of Japanese high school exchange students who had traveled to study for a semester at Minneapolis High School. The Japanese supervisor told Fleming that before World War II, his country’s leaders had a misconception of the U.S. They assumed it was just a collection of ‘little countries,’ and not united at all.’ Brilliant: the United State are, not the United States is. Imagine the Japanese high command sitting around on 8 December 1941. ‘Listen, Tojo, Virginia and New Hampshire might struggle on, but as long as California and Texas are out we can concentrate on the Brits in Burma….’
Any thoughts on why the Axis were foolish enough to attack the US? drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
27 June 2014: Louis writes in: Two things about the post: First, A.H. did not read cowboy novels, he read Karl May novels, that do take place in the American West, but are a very different kettle of fish. Basically it is about the “Noble Savages” beeing beaten up, (but occaisionally winning) against the brute and uncouth Americans, where this noble (of spirit, definitly not by birth!) German in exile, comes to safe the day. There is not a cowboy in sight, and it is all romantic nature and trappers, nothing about beef and greed. Second: there is a book about how the Japanese more or less blundered into the war:Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta. It came down to the fact that everybody played the role they thought they should play, and expected somebody else to say: This is far enough, and all we do is folly. Unfortunately nobody had the courage, or saw the need, to say that. For instance Yamamoto, who had been a naval Attache in the US, knew that the Japanese could not win, asthe realised the industrial might, and potential, of the US. However, he misjudged the psychology, when he proposed the Pearl Harbor attack, by stating that an early knock-out blow might induce the US to negotiate…. Norm, meanwhile, writes: On WW2 and “Why on earth would the Axis take on the US”? Nations are run by human beings and they fall into the same misconceptions that individual humans do. I am your classic heavyweight, 5’10” 220 lbs, there have been any number of men along the way that were under the impression that if they hit me hard enough, right off, they would put me down. In every case they were on their way to the hospitable for a few days to a fortnight, those poor men had bought into a myth. The Germans and even more so the Japanese had bought into the myth that if you hit the bruiser hard enough, fast enough, you’ll win and the results were similar to what goes on with men, they both ended up in the hospital. Thanks Norm and Louis!
