7 Days in December
It was December 5–11, not just the 7th, 1941 that changed the course of WW II and the world forever.
On December 5th, 1941 the Japanese Imperial fleet under strict radio silence made its way across the Pacific towards its fateful destination in the Hawaiian Island chain. That same day the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had reached its ultimate goal: Moscow. They were just within 20 miles of the Kremlin. They were also exhausted, bleeding, and very, very frozen. The winter of 1941–42 was the coldest of the century. The Russian General Winter left dead soldiers as solid cold bricks all around the Russian capital. Despite these hardships the Germans still thought they were fine. All reports informed the field marshals the Red Army was in a severely weakened state. However, the Germans were in a weakened state as well having conquered a substantial part of the western Soviet Union and sustained almost a million casualties. The Germans could no longer drive the assault, just hold steady, wait out the winter until spring thaws the gasoline ice cubes in their panzers. Heinz Guderian admitted as much in his war diary but he didn’t anticipate an assault coming from the other side. On the 5th the Soviets launched their counterattack that flung the nazis back away from Moscow. Yes the Red Army was relentlessly pummeled and ground down into a weakened state. That held true until Stalin received word from a spy with certainty that Japan had no intentions of attacking the Soviet Union. That freed up a million troops and armor to move West across the Urals straight into Zhukov’s hands to deliver the blow that won the Battle of Moscow.
Those Japanese intentions were in full view of US servicemen and women on December 7th as they looked up at the morning sky to see the red dots on imperial zero warplanes raining bombs and torpedoes into the shipyards of Pearl Harbor. This surprise act of war, without a declaration of war, brought the United States into WW II. No longer could they sit comfortably between the oceans and bicker over isolationist politics. FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war against the infamy of Japan. The USA was in it now, determined to fight it out. However, they were not technically at war with Germany yet. Nevermind the US was practically already at war with the German U-boat Wolfpacks scouring the Atlantic. The first American blood to be shed in the ocean was at the hands of Germans, not Japanese. The Germans were attacking US shipping all summer and had sunk a destroyer in October, killing over 100 Americans, a month before the attack at Pearl Harbor.
The Nazi warlord would soon address this technicality. The news of the Pearl Harbor attack registered the same joy in London as it did in Berlin. Churchill and Hitler each thought they gained a powerful ally. Der Fuhrer had no problem declaring war on December 11, 1941, believing the conflict was still confidently in hand as it ever had been. He must have known something was amiss on the eastern front because he sacked his overall commander, Brauchitsch, among other field marshals, with news of the backtracking from Moscow, which he thought 7 days before was firmly in his grasp. “In Moscow by Christmas” was a daily mantra in the Nazi lair. He was furious. Little did he know that the extremely rash actions on his part and on the part of his new ally, would bring their complete and total destruction within 4 years.
This was only the beginning. There was still much fighting left. There were still Stalingrads, Kursks, Midways, Guadalcanals, and Normandys to come and turn the tide. Only in hindsight, after seeing what behemoths the United States and Soviet Union became in the 20th century, do we now know that World War II was decided over the course of those December days.
