Chapter 22

NOV 1940 HUNGARY AND ROMANIA JOINS THE AXIS

“When Švejk subsequently described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in exceptionally eulogistic terms: ‘I really don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite. If anyone did this anywhere on the promenade people would be astonished, but there it’s the most common or garden thing to do. There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of.”

― Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

(Author’s Note: Not wanting to be presumptuous in claiming to be an author or even an Historian for that matter, I wanted to add this little reminder for reader’s interest. The following few chapters deal with “cleaning up operations” for Hitler prior to Operation Barbarossa and highlight his obsession with North Africa and the ever mounting pressure to find adequate oil supplies to grease his tentacles of power across the civilized world. I hasten to point out that the crux of the “Turning Point” of the war in Europe will be found in Chapters 27 and 28 that deal with the starting point of Operation Barbarossa and the Entry into World War Two by the United States right after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy. I suspect that even Hitler understood the muddle he had stepped into by these two events and his only hope was to develop new and more dangerous weapons of warfare and have some luck on the battlefields to the East. His weapons development came a bit too late to help him reverse his course of failure and the luck was all on the side of the Soviet Union.)

It is important to place Hungary and Romania in their proper place in the timeframe of the 1940s. Although Hitler was pretending to function under the guidelines of his non-aggression pact with Stalin, he knew that he had to establish some sort of a demarcation line between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that would protect his designs on the Balkans and Greece. It was the only way that he could possibly protect his vulnerable southern flank along the shores of the Mediterranean. The German High Command war planners had gamed that the Allies would start their assault on Europe not directly across the English Channel but the long roundabout route up though North Africa to drive the German Army from North Africa and then attack the soft underbelly of Hitler’s weakest partner, the Italian forces under command of Benito Mussolini. The Nazi’s understood that their surface fleet would soon deteriorate and the likelihood of replacing them was slim to none. There would come a day when their power at sea would depend entirely on their U-Boat contingent. Meanwhile the probability of the United States entering the war was almost a certainty even though it took a sneak attack by an Axis ally to draw them into the war. Hitler had hopes that the spirit of revenge would drive the upstart Americans to focus their attentions on defeating the Imperial Japanese Navy first but he was sorely disappointed because the Pentagon decided that starting in Europe was the best route as they would need a couple of years to build up their surface fleets to take on the Japanese in their own territory.

The addition of Hungary and Romania to the Axis alinement would establish a buffer against the Soviet Union. It could be done without starting a war with the Russians prematurely. The Third Reich also saw the benefits of adding two more anti-Semitic countries to his buffer line against the eventual expansion of the Soviet Union. Hitler was a realist and he knew that Stalin was plotting against him even as he gathered his forces for the initiation of the Invasion into the Soviet Union. The Generals all basically agreed that it would be possible in late spring or early summer of 1941 barring any disaster that might take place in the interim. Of course, they were all in agreement that if the United States had moved from a neutral status to an active ally of the forces still fighting against the Nazi regime, they would have to call everything off and figure out a different way to confront the danger from the east.

Churchill in Whitehall must have danced a jig and smoked a cigar at the news of the Japanese sneak attack because it meant that the United States at war with Japan automatically meant that they would be at war against Germany and Italy as Japan’s Axis allies.