Hitler also drew another devastating conclusion from the entry of America into the war. Moreover, he thought the Japanese would now tie down the American fleet in the Pacific and threaten British interests in the Far East. Hitler further reasoned that the immediate entry of the US into the war would do nothing substantively for at least a year to alter the course of the struggle in the Soviet Union – and it was this fight against Stalin that he believed would decide the entire conflict one way or the other. So, by December 1941, Hitler must have felt that by declaring war on America he was doing little more than accepting the inevitable – with the added benefit of retaining apparent control of events.
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Inevitably, following Roosevelt’s decision to order American warships to patrol the western Atlantic in support of convoys, a series of incidents followed – notably a U-boat attack on the USS Greer in September and the sinking of the USS Reuben James, causing the deaths of more than 100 American sailors, on 31 October 1941. Read more | The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War.This was also the conclusion the German Grand Admiral Raeder had reached, and he had told Hitler months prior to Pearl Harbor that unless U-boats were allowed to sink American ships, the battle of the Atlantic could not be won. As Winston Churchill noted, by the time of the Atlantic Conference in August 1941, Roosevelt was determined “to wage war, but not declare it”. The key moment on that road to war had occurred not at Pearl Harbor but several months before, when President Franklin D Roosevelt had ordered American warships to accompany British convoys to the middle of the Atlantic. And to Hitler it had been obvious that war with the United States was inevitable. Hitler, like Stalin, was a political leader who had an eye for reality, not just rhetoric. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images) Why did Hitler declare war on America on 11 December 1941? Hitler declares war on America, 11 December 1941.
Why, as German forces faced the immensity of the challenge of the war on the eastern front, did Hitler voluntarily add such a powerful additional enemy to his list of adversaries? Hitler’s decision to declare war on America, announced on 11 December 1941, has often puzzled people who are not aware of the details of the history. The second reason that Pearl Harbor had an instant effect on Stalin, and increased the chances of the Red Army winning against the German Wehrmacht, was because it led almost immediately to Germany declaring war on America, and so brought Stalin an unexpected ally of colossal potential power. Vasily Borisov believed that he and his comrades held firm during the battle for Moscow because of this “Siberian stubbornness… The commanders used to say that the Siberian divisions saved Moscow…” Everyone knows that Siberians are very tough… I am a true Siberian, everyone knows that we are tough”. This is how people are raised from childhood. “We are very strong and very fit,” said Vasily Borisov. And once Red Army soldiers began to counterattack against the Germans outside Moscow on 5 December, they became more and more confident. This was a more straightforward struggle – one in which the Red Army could compete on equal terms. It was very hard… we felt fear”.īut in the freezing Soviet winter, all the Germans’ technological advances counted for nothing. We knew that the war would be hard, and that’s what it turned out to be. As they travelled towards the west, Borisov and his comrades thought “that a lot of us would be killed. But on 18 October his unit received orders to board trains immediately and head west to face a different foe: “In the summer we knew the Germans were advancing very fast and were capturing Soviet territory and we knew they were technically more advanced than us… we knew that the situation was bad”.
In early October 1941, Vasily Borisov was a soldier in a Siberian division in the remote east of the Soviet Union where, he says, “we were expecting Japan to attack”.
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