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‘Do you have any plans for a protracted war?’ retorted Hirohito. Tojo had to win at once – or not at all. His Southern Plan would send 185,000 men to seize oil and resources in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. But first the Japanese had to knock out America, so they were planning an attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in the tradition of the 1904 raid on Port Arthur. To cover themselves they would also have to take the American Philippines and Guam, an expansive offensive across the Pacific, with a second operation advancing to Australia. But their best admiral, Yamamoto Isoruku, a veteran of Tsushima, warned it ‘wouldn’t be enough if we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco’, and wondered if Tojo and the hawks had ‘confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices’.

‘The Japs are having a real drag-down,’ said FDR, who hoped to avoid provoking Tokyo, ‘trying to decide which way they’re going to jump. No one knows what the decision will be.’ Prince Konoe suggested negotiations; FDR agreed, but by September 1941 the shortage of oil threatened to incapacitate Japan altogether. Konoe proposed ‘to start a war if by early October we can’t achieve our demands through negotiations’. He asked Hirohito to make a decision: he could have refused to go to war, negotiated with America and made temporary concessions, while awaiting developments in the European war. Prince Konoe consulted Admiral Yamamoto.

‘I’ll run wild considerably for the first six months or a year,’ replied the admiral, ‘but I’ve utterly no confidence for the second and third years.’ Konoe preferred negotiation but, as he recalled, ‘His Majesty … leaned towards war.’ In an astonishing conversation, Hirohito, now forty-four, and his commanders decided to risk everything rather than give up any of their expansionist ambitions.

‘If we open hostilities,’ asked Hirohito, ‘will our operations have a probability of success?’

‘Yes,’ answered General Hajime Sugiyama, his chief of staff.

‘At the time of the China Incident [invasion] the army told me we’d achieve peace after one blow. Sugiyama, you were army minister then.’

‘We met unexpected difficulties …’

‘Didn’t I caution you?’ asked Hirohito. ‘Are you lying to me, Sugiyama?’

‘Your Majesty?’ asked naval chief Admiral Nagano.

‘Proceed.’

‘There’s no 100 per cent probability of victory … Assume there’s a sick person and we leave him; he’ll die. But if the doctor’s diagnosis offers 70 per cent survival if we operate, then don’t you think we must try surgery? And if after surgery the patient dies, one must say it was meant to be.’

‘All right.’

Stalin, desperately holding out in Moscow, was waiting to see what Hirohito would do. ‘The possibility of a Japanese attack, existing until recently,’ the spy Sorge reported to Stalin on 14 September, ‘has disappeared.’ It was the most decisive jewel of intelligence in the Second World War.^* Stalin took notice, secretly bringing his fresh Siberian army to Moscow.

Konoe opened negotiations with America, but Roosevelt still demanded withdrawal from China and Indo-China. ‘If we yield to America’s demands,’ warned Razor Tojo, ‘it will destroy the fruits of the China Incident’ – the Chinese empire. On 17 October, Konoe resigned and Hirohito appointed an ‘absolutely dumbfounded’ Tojo. ‘I’m just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents,’ said the Razor. ‘Anything I’ve achieved I owe to hard work and never giving up.’ But he accepted. It was war. ‘If the Emperor said it should be so,’ said the Razor, ‘then that’s it for me.’

‘Now next,’ said Hirohito, ‘when does the navy plan to open hostilities?’

‘On 8 December,’ said Admiral Nagano.

Razor compared the risk to jumping off a cliff with his eyes closed: ‘There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things.’

Razor checked with Hitler whether he would join the war against the USA. Hitler had no obligation but America was ‘a mongrel society’ of Jews, black people and Slavs that ‘couldn’t possibly create an indigenous culture or operate a successful political system’. He believed he was already at war with Roosevelt. Besides, ‘the Soviet Union was finished’, his spokesman announced.

‘Never before,’ Hitler told his veteran comrades, ‘has a gigantic empire been so quickly smashed.’ But the frosts came again; the Germans halted again, just outside Moscow. On 6 December, Zhukov counter-attacked. Moscow was indeed ‘the greatest battle in world history’ – the decisive battle of the war that marked the end of Hitler’s winning streak.