Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945) opposing Germany in the west, Britain threatened to coalesce a future “grand alliance” against him What Hitler did not understand was that rising opposition to his ambition and aggression was fundamentally stimulated into existence by his strategic overreach and compounding errors The British Empire and Commonwealth was arming and training not inconsiderable field armies The United States was rearming and beginning limited but active participation in the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945) Nor was Hitler wrong that Britain’s civilian and military leaders clung to the hope that, if they held on long enough, other Great Powers with larger armies would enter the fight It is probably true that Hitler and the OKW were also more comfortable planning a land campaign into Russia than a cross-Channel invasion of Britain The German Führer and his generals shared a view that the Red Army was ineptly led and ill-prepared for defense That was not entirely inaccurate But a larger point is that perception of Soviet weakness persuaded Hitler that an eastern campaign conducted by the Heer would be easier than trying an amphibious operation for which the Kriegsmarine was unprepared and unenthusiastic And there were underlying and long-term ideological and depraved racial motives for an attack in the east In the short-run, however, Hitler believed that eliminating the Soviet Union was the only way to extricate Germany from the strategic cul-de-sac it had entered in 1939 A bonus of quickly eliminating the Soviet Union from any potential enemy coalition and order of battle was that a second severe blow would be struck against Britain’s other great hope for a war-winning alliance: the United States With the Soviet threat removed, Hitler’s reasoning proceeded, Japan would be freed to turn its full military power against the Americans Hitler admired the Imperial Japanese Navy and coveted its entry into the war That is why he still believed as late as his invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941 that it was far preferable that Japan attack Great Britain and the United States in Southeast Asia, rather than the Soviet Union in Siberia His misreading of strategic realities and possibilities was reinforced by a belief that the Soviet Union must collapse militarily in short order, once he kicked in Stalin’s front door with Operation BARBAROSSA In his final “Testament” dictated in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945, Hitler openly regretted that Japan did not attack into Siberia in 1941 But such regret still lay a world of death and destruction away Finally, in the calculus of decision to launch BARBAROSSA and in its operational planning, Hitler and the OKW alike cleaved to a faulty operational doctrine of a “war of annihilation” that foresaw the Wehrmacht easily crushing the Soviet colossus in a matter of weeks, or a few months at most At first all went spectacularly well in the western Soviet Union, even better than the campaigns in Poland and France But as logistics and Soviet resistance hardened over the autumn of 1941, the task looked more daunting As always, Hitler’s answer to shortfalls of men and war matériel was more “iron will.” He therefore took personal control of operations It was his decision to shift two Panzerkorps away from Army Group Center barely a month into BARBAROSSA Now he shifted them back, ordering a recommencement of the central drive on Moscow in Operation TAIFUN (September 30–December 4, 1941) Why did he make the original shift to the south? One of his generals said after the war that Hitler 518