This chapter assesses the emergent mindset and the city’s insular nature by providing an analysis of the propaganda created in Königsberg during its siege. As the idea of Volksgemeinschaft steadily lost its appeal, propagandists struggled to convey their message to the fortress’s population. By drawing attention to the efforts of local propagandists, this chapter examines the impact of the Wehrmacht ‘on the ground’, and discusses the need to forge a Kampfgemeinschaft, based on Königsberg’s ‘battle’ rather than on Germany’s ‘struggle’. Rather than encouraging the population to leave the city, the fortress command instead propagated a false sense of safety. An assessment of the themes portrayed in local media reveals how, in a fractured Germany, local authorities presented their message and how they sought to link it to the larger regional picture of events. A martial narrative came to dominate Königsberg’s propaganda while the unfolding events were consistently explained by drawing parallels to the city’s Prussian past, offering an alternative to the National Socialist rhetoric. The population’s reluctance to leave the city until the very end is a sombre testament to the propagandists’ success in downplaying the dangers to which all were exposed.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America’s strategic theorists drew from at least four paradigms of war’s nature: traditional, modern, materialist, and political. The traditional paradigm remained in vogue until the 1950s, even though the expansion of airpower during the 1920s and 1930s qualitatively changed the character of war. For that reason, the same three Jominian core principles – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – remained operative. The development of nuclear weapons in the late 1940s and 1950s, however, raised concerns over those principles and the traditional paradigm. As a result, it was strongly challenged by the political model, through the vehicle of limited war theory. By the late 1950s, the political model was in open conflict with the traditional paradigm. By this point, the principles of limited war theory had taken precedence over the core Jominian imperatives. In this case, a change in the character of war, or rather a near-change since nuclear weapons were not used after 1945, had created competing paradigms in the American way of thinking about war.

Chapter 5 analyzes the thinking of Herman Kahn, who dared to think the unthinkable. It describes his "America," which again was that of the golden age of the middle class, but which also overlapped with the sense of malaise that plagued the 1970s. Like the limited war theorists, Kahn agreed military instincts needed to be curbed, and he attempted to counter uncertainty by arguing, largely in vain, that escalation itself was also a bargaining process with systematic waystations or steps embedded along its path. This chapter discusses his model of war’s nature, which, like those of Brodie, Osgood, and Schelling, priviledged war’s political dimension, though he gave policy more agency than did they.

This chapter will further explore the consequences of the German troops’ contact with their compatriots. The failure to evacuate the local population from East Prussia meant that they found themselves in Königsberg, an area of operations under martial law where a military mindset prevailed. Soldiers perceived their environment completely differently than civilians and yet the set of military laws to which these men had long adhered became the standard of reference for what passed as ‘normality’. In this major shift in what was considered normal, almost from the very commencement of the siege of Königsberg civilians were ordered to contribute to its defence, thus having to ‘earn’ the right to be protected. In line with military custom, failure to comply was considered desertion and was punishable by death, even though commanders were fully aware that civilians could not accustom themselves to military standards overnight. Since these coercive measures ensured a compliant population, Party functionaries expressed the desire to implement similar legislation on a national level, which took place throughout February and March 1945. This led to a diverse set of perpetrators, which in turn resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of victims among the general population.

Chapter 9 analyzes the theories of John Boyd and William Lind. It describes their lives as well as their "America," which was marked by the widespread sense of malaise that followed America’s failure in Vietnam. Both theoriests contributed to a resurgence of maneuver theory as well as to an empasis on the importance of an adversary’s cultural values and social cohesion. This chapter discusses their assumptions about war’s nature, which formed the modern model.

At first glance, the Battle of the Atlantic appears to be the arena of war most likely to provide a trigger for a German declaration of war on the USA. The US Navy had been establishing a presence in the eastern half of the North Atlantic with increasing assertiveness since April 1941 and even began escorting British convoys in mid-September 1941. Historians attempting to integrate these events into Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US fall into two different camps. One see in it an unavoidable reaction to the presence of US escorts who were stymying the efforts of his U-boats to get at the convoys, while other maintain the he was longing to unleash his submersibles at the vulnerable merchant traffic in US waters.

I am now in a position to prove that neither was the case. US escorts only rarely had to prove their worth, because of the low number of convoy interceptions between July-December 1941 – a direct consequence of the rerouting of convoys thanks to the work done in Bletchley Park. Also, not a shred of evidence exists to suggest that either Raeder or Dönitz regarded patrols to the Americas as a missed opportunity.

On 3 January 1942 Ambassador Oshima paid his second house call on the German dictator in fewer than three weeks. Hitler’s fondness for the Japanese envoy notwithstanding, such a minimal gap between two visits was unheard of and could only be justified by the need to brief the new Far Eastern ally on some unforeseen event. As was to be expected, much of the time the two men spent in conference was an attempt by the dictator to cover up the near-collapse of the German frontline outside Moscow. Hitler may have held the Japanese diplomat in high regard, but he still resorted to bare-faced lying to counter any rumours about the Ostheer’s crisis that may have reached the Japanese embassy.

The subject of rubber supply to the German and American war industries is not a topic which thus far has materialised in the context of the historiography on Hitler’s declaration of war on the US. Both countries were dependent on imports of this crucial product – the Germans to a lesser extent once their newly created synthetic rubber industry began to produce the new ‘Buna’ rubber in large quantities by 1939. At the time, well over 90 % of the world’s natural rubber came from plantations in Southeast Asia, with Malaya and the Dutch East Indies providing the bulk. This was a subject Hitler was thoroughly familiar with, not the least because his Auswärtiges Amt liaison official Walther Hewel had worked as a plantation manager in SE-Asia for several years.

American attempts to develop a synthetic rubber industry were stymied by a lack of clear government policy and a persistent refusal to believe that the fall of the East Indies to a Japanese invasion would be more than transitory. Hitler tended to see this problem in a different light: any Japanese move on this region would force the Americans into prematurely moving the bulk of their half-ready armed forces to contest such a move, thus diverting US attention away from Europe for a considerable time.

Conventional wisdom has it that on the day of Hitler’s declaration of war on the US, the Ostheer was reeling under the blows of a massive Soviet counteroffensive unleashed on December 5th, 1941 and which should have put paid to any notions of demobilising just a part of the army to free up labour for shipyards and the aeronautical industry. A closer examination of the primary sources, however, reveals that the Soviet counterstrike developed in such a gradual and haphazard fashion that a sense of alarm only began to develop in the days after December 13th and did not reach crisis point until December 18th. A number of different factors – to be discussed in detail in the chapter – favoured this dynamic.

Allied lend-Lease shipments to the USSR were carefully recorded, but not regarded as a threat because it was felt that the losses of the 1941 campaign season and the loss of the Donbass had crippled the regenerative powers of the Red Army to such an extent that a comeback was no longer feasible. Belated attempts to coordinate a global strategy with Japan in late December indicates that it was around this time that this estimate was reassessed.