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My candidate would be Germany declaring war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor.
[/ QUOTE ]Interesting. I am curious as to why the Germans would declare war at that point. There must have been a strategic reason, even if greatly flawed.
[/ QUOTE ]"In the spring of 1940, Germany overran Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France with ridiculous ease. ... Only Britain was left at war with Germany, under a coalition of all national forces, headed by Winston Churchill, based on a total refusal to come to any kind of terms with Hitler. ... For practical purposes, the war in Europe was over. Even if Germany could not invade Britain because of the dual obstacle of the sea and the Royal Air Force, there was no foreseeable war in which Britian could return to the Continent, let alone defeat Germany" pp.38-39
"The war was revived by Hitler's invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the decisive date in Second World War; an invasion so senseless -for it committed Germany to a war in two fronts- that Stalin would simply not believe that Hitler would contemplate it." p.39
"Once the Russian war had not been dcided within three months, as Hitler had expected, Germany was lost, since it was neither equipped for now could sustain a long war. In spite of its triumphs, it had, and produced, far fewer aircraft and tanks than even Britain and Russia
without the USA." [emphasis added] p.40
"But for Pearl Harbour, and Hitler's declaration of war, the USA would almost certainly have continued to stay out of theSecond World War. It is not clear under what circumstances it could have come in." p. 151
"Winston Churchill was right when he confidently claimed after Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941] that victory by 'the proper application of overwhelming force' was certain". p.42
"The decisions to invade Russia and to declare war against the USA decided the result of the Second World War." p.41
All the above are from Eric Hobsbawm's marvelous
"Age Of Extremes", Abacus, 1995.
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So, it looks to me rather like a tie, whereby each mistake alone would have probably decided the course of war (adversely) for Germany. Still, I'd pick Hitler's Russian folly over his American folly, if only by a bit.
That's because I believe that a one-front, western-front war for Germany and its allies in Europe (and they had a lot at the time!) would be an extremely hard bargain for the British-American alliance to overcome. If Hitler had kept his cool in 1941 and leave the "ideological" settling of accounts with the bolsheviks for after his final victory in the West, he could have possibly faced off the British-American alliance. An alliance which crucially, to repeat Hobsbawm, had absolutely no military foothold on the Continent. (Only the Russians were in Europe.)
--Cyrus