Okay, here's the thing. I'm about to leave for a camping trip, during which time I will be unable to work on DWS. However, I think I should probably update before I head out.
So here's what I'm going to do - I'm going to post the writeup sans wikibox now, and add the wikiboxes when I get back to Houston on Wednesday.
EDIT: Well, that didn't happen at all. Going to cut my losses and get to work on the next update.
Despite the capture of U-552 off New Jersey in early August, neither the United States nor Nazi Germany officially declared war until significantly later in the year. Both sides had similar reasons - neither wanted to divert resources to another front, and both had political considerations. Hitler's belief that the Americans could be persuaded to remain neutral was obviously erroneous, but it still prevented the upper echelons of the German government from immediately going to war. And isolationism was, while not as strong in America as it had been before the war, still had its advocates, such as William Borah, who - shortly before his death - traveled to Berlin to converse with Hitler himself.
Even when Germany formally declared war on the United States in November, citing the Lend-Lease Agreement and the Occupation of Iceland as casus belli, isolationism was still a going concern. Part of that was fueled by bad news coming from the Pacific. While the American mainland was never under serious threat, the attack on Pearl Harbor took out two aircraft carriers and much of the shore facilities, a massive blow. It was followed by the invasion of Hawaii, which was short-lived but nevertheless saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. (On a happier note, the valor with which many Japanese-Hawaiians fought to defend their homeland likely helped to remove some of the prejudices against them. Certainly they put to rest any thoughts of internment, as "Hawai'i Pono'i" like Dan Inouye, a seventeen-year-old nisei volunteer who led his squad to beat back a Japanese force three times as big at the cost of his right arm and eye, became household names.)
But while the American war machine had been caught flat-footed, once it got going it really got going. Millions of tons of material made its way across the Atlantic to Britain and Russia. American troops came over, too - entering the war with a splash in North Africa, where they turned the tide in Tunisia, and then invading Sicily as a precursor to a planned invasion of the Italian peninsula.
Nobody alive knows for certain what happened on January 18, 1942. It was several days after Axis forces broke off the siege of Moscow, a major strategic defeat which imperiled the whole Eastern Front. Some have said that it was brought on by the stress he was under, made worse by his copious use of amphetamines and probable Parkinson's. Others say that it was a coup, conducted by generals afraid of a planned purge or a Soviet wave overrunning Germany. But one way or another, it was announced that day that Adolf Hitler had died.
Several hours later, it became clear that a military coup had taken place in Germany. A brief fight between "true believers" and military figures saw the latter faction win control. This meant pulling out of the losing front in North Africa, which was always a sideshow. It meant putting the full strength of the German military into destroying the will to fight of Western powers and consolidating gains in the east. (It did not mean ending the death camps. That would have been a bridge too far.)
It also meant trying to take out other nations through diplomacy. In March of 1942, the Nazi government sent a message to the United States that they were willing to discuss terms for an armistice. While there was some hope that the overtures would be received well, the main aim of the gesture was to create political chaos in America.
After all, the Longite parties may have quieted down about war when Japan attacked, but they were still there. And they were certain to call for any end to the increasingly bloody war in Europe that seemed possible. William Borah had planned to visit Germany to call for peace before his health ended him - and Der Angriff, Goebbel's newspaper, had eulogized him. (Borah also had, by the time of his death, $200,000 in a safety deposit box. Many thought it came from Berlin.) And Borah's successors - Gerald Nye, Burton K. Wheeler, Bennett Champ Clark, Charles Lindbergh - were still very much alive.
The message was discussed across America. But there was never any chance that it would be replied to favorably - America had committed to aiding her allies. Ultimately, only one thing came of the message.
Alfred Williams was a teenager from Arkansas. Sent to the Pacific front, Williams had seen his unit destroyed at Pearl Harbor before being sent home. Believing that the civilian government had betrayed its men in uniform by failing to end the war as soon as it could, Williams sought to take his revenge any way he could.
Cordell Hull had had little influence over foreign policy for years. A former Tennessee Senator, the Secretary of State's influence had long been usurped by Undersecretary Sumner Welles. So it was that, only a month after some of the most important negotiations in American history, Hull found himself campaigning for his successor, Tom Stewart.
He would never return north.
Rafael Trujillo was, as of 1942, one of the most brutal dictators in the world. Since 1930, he had ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist. Though he had held no official office since 1938 - ironically, showing more concern for a foreign country's two-term tradition than its own President - Trujillo's cult of personality continued, his ironclad control over the government continued, his million-dollar salary continued, and the rapes he committed on a daily basis continued. The electric sign in what was formerly Santo Domingo and was now Ciudad Trujillo bore witness to the fact that, when El Jefe said "Jump!", the Dominican Republic replied "How high?"
During his rule, his foreign policy had been, from an American perspective, scattershot. His keen awareness of just how much the United States could do to the Dominican Republic ensured that he never did too much to alienate the Americans. But he also admired Hitler's style and wanted to emulate his total control. The late Cordell Hull and him had attempted to renegotiate America's financial ties to the Dominican Republic, but both sides felt shafted by the resulting treaty, and the negotiations ultimately did not bear fruit.
The Kriegsmarine saw an opening. A base as close to American ports as the Dominican Republic was could do wonders to harass Allied shipping. Airfields that close could help take the fight to the United States. And the United States was - to German eyes, at least - less committed to the war and less unified than the United Kingdom. Bombarding London was not enough to take Britain out of the war. Bombarding Savannah might be enough to take America out of it.
There were some in the Nazi top brass who opposed the plan. It had echoes of the Zimmermann Telegram, for sure. But the potential reward, it was decided, outweighed the risk. In May 1942, Rafael Trujillo - by then elected to his third term - announced that, in return for basing rights, the Germans would be sending obsolete military equipment to the Dominican Republic. Soon, he thought, the entire Caribbean would take orders from Ciudad Trujillo.
It didn't happen like that.