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In August, Hitler unleashed the Luftwaffe but delayed Sealion after plucky British pilots and superior aeroplanes, aided by new radar, combined with eloquent Churchillian defiance, won the battle for Britain. Churchill’s other victory was transatlantic. Kennedy, denouncing the ‘actor’ Churchill, believed (in Roosevelt’s words) that his ‘small capitalist class was safer under Hitler’, reporting to Washington that Britain was doomed and ‘democracy is finished’. But Churchill won over Roosevelt, urgently requesting help – ‘I must tell you in the long history of the world this is the thing to do now.’

HITLER AND THE YOUNG KING

FDR delivered fifty destroyers to Britain and recalled Kennedy, whom he slyly neutralized by offering to support his future presidential bid. FDR, running for an unprecedented third term, won by a landslide,^* freeing him to help Britain with a Lend-Lease plan. ‘Suppose my neighbour’s home catches fire. If he can take my garden hose,’ he artfully explained in a Fireside Chat to the Americans, ‘I may help him put out his fire.’ America would be ‘the arsenal of democracy’.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler, now widely regarded in Germany as a genius, invaded Russia in what he called Operation Barbarossa, a campaign that he had first envisioned in Mein Kampf and had planned since the fall of France. ‘The demolition of Russia’, he had explained to his generals, would force a British surrender but also enable Japan to ‘concentrate all its strength against the United States’, which would prevent America fighting Germany. He ordered the generals to prepare post-Barbarossa for an ‘invasion of Afghanistan and conflict with India’. Barbarossa was to be a war of annihilation, ‘a fight to the finish’ in which ‘Bolshevist rabble-rousers, partisans, saboteurs and Jews’ were to be instantly liquidated and Russian prisoners of war were to be deliberately starved to death. ‘Once we’ve achieved victory, no one will ask about our methods,’ he said, reflecting that ‘No one remembers the Armenians now.’

Hitler was exhilarated by the scale of this ‘mass attack on the grandest scale, the most enormous that history has ever known. The example of Napoleon won’t be repeated.’ The USSR would collapse ‘in four months’. Even for Hitler, there were moments of doubt about the ‘great risk’ he had taken: ‘The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness,’ he admitted to his secretaries. ‘Uncanny’ Russia was like the ‘ghost ship in the Flying Dutchman. Nothing at all can be known … It could be a gigantic soap bubble but it could be completely different …’ And it was.

The invasion had been delayed by the contingencies of proliferating war. Hitler’s successes attracted bottom feeders: Generalissimo Franco of Spain met Hitler to demand British Gibraltar and French colonies. ‘I’d rather have two or three teeth pulled,’ grumbled Hitler, ‘than meet him again.’ Mussolini wanted Nice and French Tunisia but overestimated Italian capabilities: he invaded Albania, ruled since the 1920s by a self-made king, Zog, who fled to London; then, without consulting Hitler, he invaded Greece, where his troops ran into trouble. The British, fielding 375,000 African troops, liberated Ethiopia, restoring Haile Selassie, then attacked Mussolini’s Libya, where the Italians collapsed. Hitler sent an Afrika Korps to halt the Italian retreat and threaten British Egypt and also had to rescue Italy in Greece.

Hitler was anxious about the Balkans, source of Romanian oil as well as the base for Barbarossa. Stalin had been pushing for Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Romania, which made Barbarossa even more urgent. The Führer admired the Romanian despot, Ion Antonescu, a splenetic martinet, nicknamed Red Dog for his ginger hair and furious temper, who had made his name fighting for the Allies in the First World War. King Mihai, last of the Hohenzollerns, haunted by his narcissistic, sexually incontinent and politically catastrophic father Carol II, endured the bullying Red Dog, who now delivered Romania to Hitler.

The eighteen-year-old Mihai, gentle and decent, brought up by his responsible mother, was powerless, forced to grant Antonescu the Führeresque title of Conducator. ‘We had a strange relationship,’ the king told this author. ‘He treated me as a child, excluded me. I hated having a dictator.’ In early 1941, Mihai lunched with Hitler, who was ‘stiff and unfriendly. He’d suddenly get on to a subject, his eyes would go glassy and he would start declaiming. I tried to speak but couldn’t interrupt.’ Hitler kept talking: ‘The last thing I remember him saying was “I guarantee America will never enter the war against us.” I didn’t believe him.’