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‘The war is fundamentally won,’ the Führer told Goebbels a week later. ‘The Kremlin will fall.’ He assured the Japanese ambassador that ‘Resistance won’t last longer than six weeks.’ Stalin’s interference in the war was disastrous: he lost 3.5 million men and most of European Russia in just over a year. Occupied territories were divided into Ukraine and Ostland. Hitler’s plan was that ‘Moscow will be wiped off the face of the earth.’ The Russian population of 194 million would be starved until there were just thirty million left; his German empire would extend to the Urals; German governors would live in palaces, German farmers would live in beautiful villages in Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltics while enslaved Slavs toiled, with the rest driven into Siberia. Nazi invaders instantly started to murder large numbers: out of 5.7 million PoWs, 3 million were starved, the greatest crime of the war after the killing of European Jews. ‘I’m approaching this matter ice-coldly,’ Hitler said. ‘I feel myself to be but the executioner of the will of history. Once we are the lords of Europe, we will hold the dominant position in the world.’

Roosevelt, surveying a broiling world from the serenity of the White House, concentrated first on London, sending his devoted aide Harry Hopkins, cadaverous yet buoyant, who promised a tearful Churchill, ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ Hopkins flew on to Moscow to meet Stalin and promise aid, then back (exhausted) to join FDR for his summit with Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland.

‘At last we’ve gotten together,’ said FDR to Churchill, later writing to Daisy Suckley, ‘He’s a tremendously vital person. I like him.’ After agreeing a Wilsonian programme of democracy later (the Atlantic Charter), both were moved when at a Sunday morning service on the great battleship, the Protestant aristocrats sang the rousing hymns of their boarding schools with the (doomed) crew. It was the first of many meetings.

In September, Hitler’s Army Group Centre was approaching Moscow, but Soviet resistance was intensifying, winter stirring, and Russia had still not collapsed ‘like a house of cards’. When it dawned on him that his Blitzkrieg could fail, Hitler became quieter, more short-tempered, as he forced his generals to seize the rich resources of the south and Leningrad in the north, delaying the storming of Moscow. In the south, Kyiv fell, trapping 665,000 Soviet troops, while in the north he besieged Leningrad, where a million civilians starved to death, planning to raze it:^* ‘The nemesis of history,’ he ranted.

‘This,’ crowed Goebbels, ‘will be the biggest drama of a city in history.’ Keen to avoid ‘the second Mongolian storm from a second Genghis Khan’, Hitler ordered ‘the greatest battle in world history’, the storming of Moscow. But the temperature plummeted; Soviet fighting stiffened; then came a thaw; vehicles languished in mud. Hitler told Count Ciano that winter heralded ‘a repetition of Napoleon’s fate but for Russia not Germany’. In Moscow, on 16 October, Stalin evacuated the main commissariats to the rear; disorder broke out; his train was packed with his library – but on the 18th he stayed to fight. On the 30th the Germans halted. On 7 November, Stalin presided over the October Revolution parade and summoned Zhukov to take command. Stalin had a reserve that Hitler had not registered: his Far Eastern army of a million men, 17,000 tanks, to cover against Japanese attack.

Hirohito too was agonizing over strategy. In July 1940, with Hitler’s acquiescence, the Japanese, overstretched by their war in China, occupied French Indo-China. President Roosevelt punished Tokyo, banning iron and steel supplies and some fuel. Just after Barbarossa, the Japanese Imperial Conference had leaned against any more fighting with Russia, signing a neutrality treaty with Stalin. If America threatened oil supplies, Japan would have to fight the USA as well as attack Dutch and British colonies. ‘Our empire won’t be deterred by war with Great Britain and USA,’ said Prince Konoe, though ‘If the German–Soviet war should develop to the advantage of our empire, we will settle the northern question.’

The hawkish war minister, General Tojo, had a clear plan – and simplicity is often mistaken for lucidity. This general’s son, nicknamed the Razor, a veteran of the Russian civil war, then commander in Manchuria, was a humourless disciplinarian who routinely slapped the faces of his officers as a means of instilling bushido. He proposed attacks on the USA and Britain.