Had Germany and Japan ever coordinated they could have linked up in Afghanistan via Burma and Northern India (Japanese) and southern Russia or the Middle East (Germany). But they didn't, which made Hitler's declaration of war on the US after Pearl Harbour an even sillier move in retrospect. As I read it, Hitler would have been reasonably comfortable with Japan controlling the Pacific and Asia, Britain controlling its Empire and the US controlling all of the Americas, so long as Hitler had Europe/Russia to himself. At least, to begin with...
Brett This is a really interesting question. There's certainly a lot of evidence to support that - including Hitler's own statements (to the extent that those are evidence one way or the other, of course). OTOH, there's also some evidence that one of the reasons for the invasion of Normandy was that Hitler viewed it as a jumping-off point for an eventual invasion of the US, so it could go the other way, of course. But I don't think they could have linked up in Afghanistan via Burma and India, because the Japanese were stopped cold at Imphal-Kohima. Nor, in fact, was such a linkage really necessary. Of course in the larger frame there's the serious question of what the Japanese could possibly have been thinking in fighting a war with the United States anyways. It was fundamentally a misreading of the American character. One of my profs argues that they _knew_ that they would lose the war, but thought that the US would limit itself to a small campaign and then concede dominance in Asia to Japan. This was, of course, a rather catastrophic misinterpretation of the American character. Of course, they weren't the last people to make that same mistake... Gautam
