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But the U.S. remained stoutly neutral, isolationist. Though most Americans favored the British, polls consistently showed that 75% to 80% strongly opposed U.S. involvement in the war. The U.S. did appropriate $13 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941, but when Churchill asked for 50 obsolete World War I destroyers to replace those lost in the Battle of Britain, he had to sign over Western Hemisphere bases in exchange. Besides, the U.S. was embarrassingly weak, boasting an Army of barely three divisions and an Air Force with just over 300 fighters.
In Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here . . ."
In part, too, it was a matter of paranoia. Hitler suspected that Churchill fought on largely because he hoped to inveigle Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being he was too preoccupied to counterattack. And then Hitler finally became a victim of his own successes. He could not believe that backward Russia, which had had trouble subduing Finland, could resist the invincible Wehrmacht.
Even before the Battle of Britain, Hitler wanted his generals to start planning an invasion of Russia in the fall of 1940. They managed to talk him into delaying until the following May. Germany signed a trade agreement with the U.S.S.R. as late as January 1941, but a month earlier Hitler had told his commanders, "The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign." The battle plan called for some 148 divisions -- more than 3 million men -- to attack in three main drives along a 1,000-mile front. One army group would strike northward, toward Leningrad; another army group from the Warsaw area would move north of the Pripet Marshes toward Moscow, which Hitler planned to level and leave forever uninhabitable; the southernmost group, from Rumania, would storm across the Ukraine toward Kiev and Stalingrad. "Operation Barbarossa" would smash Russia within six months.