Ancient history

Hitler's biggest blunder… Challenging and underestimating the giant

It is often said that Hitler's most serious blunder was the declaration of war against the USA. This is not entirely accurate because due to President Roosevelt's hostile policy against Germany the conflict was largely inevitable. However, he could buy time without pushing the situation to extremes.

Nevertheless Hitler's biggest mistake was his reasoning that led him to declare war on the USA , reasoning that proves the complete lack of knowledge about the other side of the Atlantic giant, the USA, and its limited perceptive capacity.

Hitler was an amateur in everything from painting, to strategy, and most likely geopolitics.
“This country is rotten... They have a racial issue, social inequalities. These problems caused the fall of Rome... The Reich has 270 operas and a cultural level that they (Americans) can't even fathom. They have clothing, food, cars, badly built houses with refrigerators", Hitler said of the US, failing to understand that even without operas, it was easy for Americans to jump from making cars to making tanks.

Underestimating, based on some of his own, stupid, mental misdeeds, the strongest industrial power on the planet, he took the step of no return. He saw the USA as a country of "negro music", Jewish influence, decadent with low cultured inhabitants who only cared about the easy life. Whether Americans were fans of the opera or not, at the height of its production, Boeing factories were assembling 16 'flying fortresses' a day than 40,000 workers, with factories working 24 hours a day.

Ignorance and political myopia led Hitler to declare war on a country that built a Liberty ship every 80 hours, building a total of 2,700 of them during the war years and ensuring transport across the Atlantic.

The Ford company alone produced more military hardware than Hitler's ally Italy and Mussolini's partner. In fact, a vehicle was assembled every 69 seconds. In addition to the same production, the Americans also supplied their British and Soviet allies with huge quantities of war material, fuel and supplies.

As one German officer rightly put it in the final phase of the war, the Soviets were "moving rapidly into the heart of Germany riding in American vehicles, feeding on American canned goods." It is worth noting that 58% of the aviation fuel used by the Soviet Air Force in World War II came from the USA.

In total the Americans gave the Soviets:7,000 tanks, 6,303 other armored vehicles, 427,284 trucks and jeeps, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 other general purpose vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products.

11,400 aircraft were also given 4,478,116 tons of food, 1,191 locomotives, 66 diesel engines, 10,920 railway, wagons and 120 armored and equipped wagons. Also, the ammunition that was delivered corresponds to 53% of the stocks.

No matter how degraded the Americans were their industrial strength was terrifyingly superior to all the Axis countries combined. Hitler had provoked a country that during its involvement in WWII built over 88,000 armored vehicles, approximately 300,000 aircraft and thousands of ships, including dozens of aircraft carriers.

B-17 bomber production line.

Liberty Shipbuilding.

Sherman tank production line.

B-24 bomber production line.