Hitler held U.S. society in contempt, stating that the United States (which he consistently referred to as the "American Union") was "half Judaized, and the other half Negrified"[95] and that "in so far as there are any decent people in America, they are all of German origin".[96] As early as 1928, he had maintained that National Socialist Germany must prepare for the ultimate struggle against the U.S. for hegemony.[97] In mid-late 1941, as Hitler became overconfident of an Axis victory in Europe against the UK and the Soviet Union, he began planning an enormous extension of the Kriegsmarine, projected to include 25 battleships, 8 aircraft carriers, 50 cruisers, 400 submarines and 150 destroyers, far exceeding the naval expansion that had already been decided on in 1939's Plan Z.[98] Historian Gerhard L. Weinberg stated that this super-fleet was intended against the Western Hemisphere.[98] Hitler also considered the occupation of the Portuguese Azores, Cape Verde and Madeira and the Spanish Canary islands to deny the British a staging ground for military actions against Nazi-controlled Europe, and also to gain Atlantic naval bases and military airfields for operations against North America.[99][100] Hitler desired to use the islands to "deploy long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores", via a plan that actually arrived on Hermann Göring's RLM office desks in the spring of 1942 for the design competition concerning such an aircraft.[101] In July 1941, Hitler approached Japanese ambassador Ōshima with an offer to wage a joint struggle against the U.S.[102]—Japan's own Project Z aircraft design program was one possible manner in which such a goal could be accomplished, all during the timeframe that the USAAC had itself, on April 11, 1941, first proposed a competition for airframe designs for the same sort of missions against the Axis forces, the Northrop XB-35 and the Convair B-36, flying directly from North American soil to attack Nazi Germany.