It had been alleged by Canadian historian Holger Herwig that both in November 1940 and May 1941, leading into and through to the period in which Japan began planning the naval attack that would bring the United States into the war,[92] that Hitler had stated that he had a desire to "deploy long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores." Due to their location, Hitler seemed to think that a Luftwaffe airbase located on the Portuguese Azores islands were Germany's "only possibility of carrying out aerial attacks from a land base against the United States", in a period about a year before the May 1942 emergence of the Amerika Bomber trans-oceanic range strategic bomber design competition.[93]