Betting Against America: The Axis Powers’ Views of the United States

Betting Against America: The Axis Powers’ Views of the United States by Harry Yeide. Casemate, 2024, 496 pp.

In the meticulously researched Betting Against America: The Axis Powers’ Views of the United States, national security affairs analyst and military history author Harry Yeide uses a mixture of primary and secondary sources to examine the Axis powers—the original signatories of the Tripartite Pact—and their strategic and operational decisions regarding the United States from 1937 through their surrenders of 1945.

In this “red team” analysis, the thesis is straightforward: Japan made the decision for war against the United States by late 1940 after a “sophisticated process of open internal debate and a strategic assessment” (2) and as an “auxiliary operation” to its war in China (384). Germany made the decision in April 1941 with “little thought” as an incentive for Japan to go to war first with America (24). Both countries concluded that the recipe for victory was striking America before it could mobilize its industry into a military juggernaut.

Betting Against America is organized into chronological order and focuses on individuals in leadership positions and their influence and impact on decisions. Yeide uses a process-tracing method to analyze German, Italian, and Japanese decision-making. For Japan, Yeide details the factions within state and the friction between civil and military authorities. For example, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army advocated for continuing the war and kept conducting operations, even after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.

For Germany, Yeide adds clarity to a habitually chaotic process, which includes telling the wayward story of Germany’s apprehensive but subservient ally, Italy. Chancellor Adolf Hitler engaged in a capricious, nonlinear approach to his decisions, often leaving the bureaucracy in the dark. For example, in February 1945, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop cabled the German missions to engage with American and British diplomats to inquire about cessation of hostilities negotiations. A month later, Ribbentrop informed Japanese Ambassador to Germany Baron Hiroshi Oshima that Hitler was opposed to peace negotiations entirely—whether it was with the Russians, Americans, or British.

With 58 pages of endnotes, Yeide relies extensively, but not exclusively, on German, Italian, and Japanese primary sources. The abundance of endnotes contributes to a fact-centric—even sterile, at times—flow to Betting Against America. Yet Yeide punctuates this formal approach with colorful anecdotes. For example, in describing Hitler’s decision for war in April 1941, Yeide writes, “[Hitler] and his henchmen made a bet like drunks at the racetrack” (2).

No detail seems left out—even the bizarre ones exemplifying the fallibility and sometimes nonsensical nature of human decision-making. For instance, in April 1945, about three weeks before the world would celebrate Victory in Europe Day, the Japanese proposed a combined naval operation with the Germans, to which the latter responded positively. Hitler would assist Japan and send submarines to the Pacific if the current situation of the German army being crushed between Anglo-American and Russian forces improved.

Yeide takes issues with other historians’ views of the German and Japanese decisions to go to war against America. Most pointedly concerning Germany, Yeide criticizes Klaus H. Schmider’s Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), arguing Hitler made the decision to go to war in April 1941, not November 1941 as Schmider argues.

In a 4 April 1941 meeting, Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka and Hitler discussed a hypothetical American response to a Japanese attack on Singapore with a southerly advance. Schmider references Hitler’s “in case of conflict” comment and states the minutes of the meeting do not reflect an unequivocal German commitment to join Japan in a war.¹ Yeide argues this meeting marks the “date [of] Hitler’s decision to go to war against America” (123). A parsing of the meeting minutes seems to support Yeide’s thesis: “Germany would strike, as already mentioned, without delay in case of conflict between Japan and America, because the strength of the tripartite powers lies in their joined action, their weakness would be if they would let themselves be beaten individually.”² The key phrase is the raising of the 1940 Tripartite Pact, a military alliance of mutual support.

To further complicate understanding Hitler’s intent, there is no evidence that Hitler informed anyone after the meeting to begin considering America as a military opponent. In fact, by the time of Hitler’s declaration of war on 11 December 1941, the German High Command had not assessed US military strategy, operations, and capabilities.

Yeide fails to deliver much evidence on his April 1941 claim. He argues that Ribbentrop echoed Hitler’s “exact same words” in a 28 November 1941 meeting with Oshima (123). But, when writing about Ribbentrop’s meeting with Oshima after Germany learned of Japan’s imminent southward movement, Yeide offers one sentence of analysis, “On [November] 28th, Ribbentrop told Oshima that Hitler was determined that if Japan went to war against America, Germany would join the war immediately” (171).

Yeide criticizes more generally the historical literature and its focus on the year 1941 for Japan’s war decision. For him, Japan “marked the turning point toward inevitable war with the United States” with the Imperial General Headquarters-Government Liaison conference on 27 July 1940 (88). The conference adopted a policy to move forces southward to cut off support in French Indochina, Burma, and Hong Kong for Chinese President Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist forces. The movement south, as Yeide points out and as predicted in a Naval general staff report, would trigger an American oil embargo, which in turn would compel Japan’s seizure of the Dutch East Indies and a resulting war with the United States. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto concluded that Japan needed to destroy the US fleet in Pearl Harbor as a necessary condition for a successful operation, ordering the attack plan in the latter part of 1940. Contrary to the German decision, Yeide offers nine pages of analysis and more than 50 reference sources, highlighting the service rivalry between Japan’s Imperial Navy and Army.

The concluding chapter has potential but is eventually disappointing. The two pages of summary are concise but pithy. Yeide provides an excellent “bottom line” assessment: Japan and Germany decision-making had “little do with prewar relations” with America (384). Germany had initial success against America in North Africa, and Japan achieved its goal of establishing a defensive perimeter. Could Japan and Germany have done anything differently to win? Probably not, Yeide informs the reader, while providing three paragraphs of analysis (384). These three paragraphs along with two more paragraphs of analysis deserve more white space, considering that Yeide is offering thoughts on his 383 pages of objectively written text.

The remaining two pages of the conclusion are dedicated to making a connection to contemporary American and Chinese competition. But its reliance primarily on two sources and commentary on a “Make America Great Again (MAGA) politician” is underwhelming and a distraction from what is otherwise a studiously delivered thought piece on World War II (387).

Yeide’s Betting Against America is an engaging, punctilious, and revealing analysis of German and Japanese war decision-making. Students of professional military education can use it not only as a learning tool for red team analysis—by placing oneself into an enemy’s views, for example—but also as a historical lesson on the reality of individual, organizational, and governmental decision-making. Regarding the latter, Betting Against America indirectly provides empirical evidence for two schools of decision-making: Japan’s rational choice approach, which is methodic, holistic, and compensatory; and German’s cognitive approach, which is biased, uncalculated, and satisficing-based. The result is a monograph, both theoretical and historical in its findings and multidisciplinary in its social science contribution.

Bradley F. Podliska, PhD