Looking further ahead, Gibbs & Cox, the nation’s top naval architecture firm, had been tasked with building a new type of merchant ship to transport the materiel wherever it was needed in the world. Their answer was the Liberty ship: an ugly little 441-foot-long, 10,856-ton workhorse constructed along straight lines whenever possible in welded, prefabricated sections to save time. Instead of coal, the engines were oil-fired so the ship could be refueled at sea, and all the parts were interchangeable. Steel decks replaced wood, and there was no electricity or running water for the crew. Oil lamps were used for interior illumination, and hatch covers were designed to double as flotation devices if the ship was sunk. Once production ramped up, yards turned out three such ships every forty-eight hours. Still, by the summer of 1941, only 10 percent of America’s factories were now defense industries—there was a long way yet to go, and time was running out.
One hour past midnight on June 22, 1941, a full 299 days before Plane 8 crossed Japan, flashes ripped apart the darkness along the 1,800-mile Soviet border from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Forty-two thousand artillery pieces on the European-side border opened fire, heralding Operation Barbarossa, the largest land offensive in human history and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Nearly 4 million Germans in ninety infantry divisions with seventeen panzer divisions lunged east as 3,200 combat aircraft struck airfields, bridges, communication lines, and other carefully analyzed critical targets. Having perfected the blitzkrieg in Poland, France, and Scandinavia, the lightning war paralyzed the Red Army, the Red Air Force, and a former seminary student and self-proclaimed marshal of the Soviet Union—known to the world as Joseph Stalin.
Shocked, reeling, and without guidance from Stalin’s ineffective and overcentralized command structure, Soviet forces fell back all along the front. By the end of the second day, the Red Air Force was missing 3,922 aircraft at a cost of 78 to the Luftwaffe, and by the first week in July the Germans penetrated over three hundred miles through the Red Army toward Moscow. At the end of the month, fifty Soviet divisions, comprising five complete armies, had been annihilated and six hundred thousand Russian soldiers were taken prisoner by the advancing Germans. By July 3, Lenin’s body was removed from Moscow and taken a thousand miles east to Tumen. Without Hitler’s interference, Army Group Center, commanded by Fedor von Bock, would likely have bypassed major Russian cities and driven straight into Moscow. Hitler did meddle, however, insisting that surrounded enemy armies be destroyed rather than cut off and left to wither. After Smolensk fell on July 15, Berlin ordered Bock to split his forces and reinforce those on his flanks that were subduing Ukraine and thrusting toward Leningrad. By the end of August, Army Group North reached the Volkhov River and was dangerously close to cutting off Leningrad. Eight hundred miles to the south, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt swept through Ukraine to the shores of the Black Sea and penetrated as far east as the Dnipro River. Another seven hundred thousand Soviet soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, but Army Group Center was still over two hundred miles from the Kremlin.
Hitler’s delay was disastrous, and the drive to Moscow was not resumed in earnest until September 30, 1941. A week later, the snow was falling, and as Russian roads turned to mud, German logistical issues worsened considerably. Most infantry units were half-strength, while motorized and panzer units barely had one third of their original complement. Anticipating a short summer campaign, the Germans lacked winter boots, coats, ammunition, and food, yet Operation Typhoon, the advance to Moscow, still encircled and destroyed four additional Soviet armies at Vyazma and Bryansk. By October 13, the 3rd Panzer Group was within ninety miles of the Kremlin, with Moscow’s defenses were reduced to ninety thousand men and one hundred and fifty tanks. Two days later, Stalin ordered the government to evacuate, not the people, and pro-Nazi riots accompanied by extensive looting erupted throughout the capital. In Tokyo during the same week, a former Kempeitai officer and militant nationalist general named Hideki Tojo became Japan’s prime minister.* On October 27, the Soviet Union’s Marshal Zhukov withdrew east of the Nara River, and as the Germans attempted a pincer movement to encircle the Russian capital, reinforcements from the Soviet Far Eastern Army began appearing, largely due to information provided by a Soviet spy in Tokyo.
Richard Sorge, born in Azerbaijan to a German father and Russian mother, spent seventeen months in combat during the Great War as an imperial German infantryman. Badly wounded in 1916, he was medically discharged and spent the rest of the war attending various universities, eventually earning a doctorate in political science. Disillusioned by what he had endured, Sorge gravitated toward Marxism and became a devout communist, which led to his recruitment into the RU. Also known as the Fourth Directorate, this was the Red Army’s military intelligence service. Sorge, under cover as a journalist, traveled to the United Kingdom, China, and the Soviet Union before accepting an assignment to Tokyo. A charming sophisticate who spoke fluent Russian, Japanese, German, and English, Sorge set up an effective intelligence network in the heart of Imperial Japan that provided crucial intelligence to the Soviet Union. Through him, Moscow was informed in May 1941 that a German invasion “will commence in the latter part of June,” yet Stalin dismissed the warning.
Though Moscow and Tokyo had signed the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in April 1941, neither side trusted the other and both acknowledged that the erstwhile diplomacy was a delaying tactic that permitted each nation to deal with other issues. For the Japanese, who desperately needed the raw materials provided by its puppet state of Manchukuo, this meant the capability to wage war in China, or against the United States if the prospect of Soviet action in the Far East was somewhat lessened. Stalin, despite Germany’s military buildup on his western border, believed his most imminent threat came from the east and the Japanese Empire. If the Soviet Far East was off Japan’s menu, even temporarily, he could continue his domestic butcheries and further his territorial ambitions into Eastern Europe unabated.
Even Operation Barbarossa’s three-pronged lunge into Russia did not wholly lessen the fear of the Manchukuo-based Japanese Kwantung Army, and it was not until Sorge’s October message (which, in part, stated that “the Soviet Far East can be considered safe from Japanese attack”) that Stalin began deploying troops from Mongolia to meet the German onslaught. After Zhukov’s withdrawal, the exhausted Germans halted on the last day of October to reorganize, resupply what they could, and wait for the ground to freeze. During this halt, Stalin managed to move another thousand tanks into the cauldron around Moscow and reconstitute eleven armies from thirty divisions newly arrived from the Far East.
These fresh troops altered the balance for the Battle of Moscow. Had the Germans suffered less logistically and been better equipped, the additional Soviet forces would likely not have saved the Soviet capital, but added to the Wehrmacht’s other woes, these reinforcements were a strategic game changer. Certainly, any deployments from the Far East would not have been possible without intelligence that the Japanese were more concerned with their upcoming “Southern Operation” in the Pacific than they were with a Russian threat from Manchuria.
The situation could be, and has been, interpreted as evidence that Moscow, through Sorge, was made aware of Japanese plans to invade British, French, and Dutch colonial territories in Asia and the Pacific and also to attack the United States. It also meant the Soviets would not do anything in the near term to give cause for a Japanese revocation of the nonaggression pact or provoke a Japanese invasion in the Far East, which would force Stalin into a two-front war that he could not successfully fight in 1942.
Against the advice of his generals and with the Germans quite literally at the gates, the Soviet general secretary insisted on holding the November 7 Revolution Day parade in Moscow. Newly arrived reinforcements marched through the streets, then straight out to the front lines, but it had the effect Stalin wished. With morale boosted and the enemy temporarily halted, the Soviets had a few days of metaphoric sunlight while the world, and particularly the Japanese, watched. The respite dissolved on November 15 when the Germans lunged forward again, with the Third Panzer Army capturing Klin, fifty miles northwest of Moscow, eight days later. Taking the last bridge over the Moscow-Volga canal on November 27, Baron Hans von Funck’s 7th Panzer “Ghost Division” was now a scant twenty-two miles from the Russian capital.
Unknown to the half-frozen Germans staring through frosted field glasses at the red Kremlin walls, and certainly unknown to the muddy, desperate Soviet soldiers facing them, another event was occurring that would ultimately dictate the course of the war. Obscured by ice, fog, and predawn blackness, 4,300 miles east of Moscow, thirty-two imperial Japanese warships commanded by Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo sortied from Hitokappu Bay on Etorofu Island in the Kurile Archipelago. Clearing the sleet- and snow-covered volcanic shoreline the kidō butai, or “mobile force,” came about to the east and vanished in the mist. Its objective: the Hawaiian Islands and the home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.*
During the 1930s the Imperial Navy meticulously plotted sea lanes frequented by foreign ships around the Home Islands, and Nagumo’s carriers were following a route carefully chosen to avoid detection. Nonetheless, for over eighty years controversy has existed surrounding the supposed sighting of the Japanese fleet by a Soviet merchantman or freighter. Hiroyuki Agawa, author of The Reluctant Admiral, related that “on December 6 the Nagumo force did catch sight of one passing vessel of a third nation,” and a conspiracy that Moscow knew of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, but never warned Washington, was born. Obviously, it benefited the Soviet Union to have the United States in the war since supplies would now openly flow from West Coast ports to the Russian Maritime Territory; the Japanese would be ostensibly too occupied fighting the Americans to threaten Mongolia; and eventually the Germans would have to deal with a true second front in Europe. Sound reasons all, but hardly definitive.
Agawa never identified the vessel’s flag, and the likelihood that it was Soviet is virtually nonexistent. On December 6, Nagumo’s task force was approximately one thousand miles northwest of Oahu, which was at least fifteen hundred miles south of the standard route used by Russian ships outbound from Los Angeles or San Francisco. This track proceeded north of the Aleutians into the Bering Sea and past the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula, thus skirting Japan via the Sea of Okhotsk to Vladivostok. Japanese agents in port cities along the American West Coast were well aware of “emergency” aid, especially gasoline, supplied to the Soviet Union by the United States in circumvention of the Lend-Lease program, which would not be formally extended to Moscow until October.
There were thirty-two Soviet tankers and freighters operating in the North Pacific, but only four departed California ports after November 7 that could conceivably have steamed far enough to encounter Nagumo’s fleet. In fact, Clara Zetkin and Uritskii laid over in Portland and did not depart again until December 6 and therefore could not have encountered the Japanese warships. The other pair, Uzbekistan and Azerbaidzhan, cleared San Francisco on November 12 and 14, respectively, heading for Vladivostok. Based on a twelve-knot average speed following the prescribed northern route, Uzbekistan would have the closest point of approach—four hundred miles north of Nagumo by November 26, on the other side of the Kurile Islands, heading the opposite direction. A visual sighting would be impossible and, in the event, Agawa claims the “third nation vessel” was spotted on December 6, a thousand miles north of Hawaii.
Even if a Soviet ship had deviated so far south as to encounter the Japanese fleet, there was no way to relay the information had such a sighting been understood. There was also no way to confirm the report, as Richard Sorge was arrested in Tokyo by the Kempeitai on October 18 and was sitting in a cell in Sugamo Prison as Nagumo approached Hawaii.* More plausible, if such a ship was truly encountered, was that the vessel belonged to a neutral country and had no interest in a fleet of warships, which would be difficult to positively identify so close to the largest U.S. naval base in the Pacific.
In the end, even if Nagumo’s ships were sighted, Tokyo was committed to war with America, and Moscow was equally committed to avoiding war with the Empire. By the time Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox acknowledged that “we are very close to war … war may begin in the Pacific at any moment,” the die had already been cast. During his speech on a cold Thursday evening in Chicago, Knox also stated, “no matter what happens, the United States Navy is ready! Whatever happens, the Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
Knox uttered these fateful words on December 4, 1941.
At the same time Knox was speaking, Nagumo’s Carrier Strike Force was approximately sixteen hundred miles north of the Hawaiian Islands and turning southeast toward Pearl Harbor. Dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, saw the six imperial carriers swing into the wind, and Lieutenant Commander Shigeru Itaya gunned his Zero fighter down Akagi’s wooden deck two hundred miles north of Oahu. Within hours 2,403 Americans were killed, and the United States would shortly be at war once again. Stalin, and also Winston Churchill, rejoiced at the news. Oddly enough, so did Hitler. “We can’t lose the war at all,” he proudly proclaimed, already envisioning full Japanese participation with the Axis in keeping with its 1940 Tripartite Act obligations.
In point of fact, the Tripartite Act stipulated military action only “if one of the Contracting Powers [Germany, Italy, and Japan] is attacked by a Power at present not involved in the European War, or the Japanese-Chinese conflict.” Under these terms, Japan avoided intervention in Russia since it was Germany who attacked the Soviet Union, just as Hitler was under no obligation to now go to war with the United States, as Japan was the aggressor. Nonetheless, four days later Hitler did exactly that, to the dismay of his generals and admirals. Cloaked in a euphoric haze at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, at the end of a rambling, ninety-minute harangue to the Reichstag, the führer declared: “Faithful to the provisions of the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, Germany and Italy accordingly now regard themselves as finally forced to join together on the side of Japan in the struggle for the defense and preservation of the freedom and independence of our nations and realms against the United States of America and Britain.”
His declaration, Hitler believed, would result in a similar declaration of war on the Soviet Union by Japan, which would certainly lead to an imperial offensive in Mongolia that siphoned men and materiel away from Moscow. The Japanese, he believed, would so fully occupy Washington that aid to Britain and Russia would suffer since the United States could not possibly fight a multifront, global war and supply its allies effectively at the same time.
In fact, it could.
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” the president said. He and his son, Marine Major James Roosevelt, had traveled together to Capitol Hill for the president’s short speech to the Seventy-Seventh U.S. Congress. “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph … so help us God.”
Within an hour of his speech, a declaration of war unanimously passed in the Senate and subsequently passed the House by a vote of 388:1; the dissenting vote was cast by Jeannette Rankin, a Republican pacifist from Montana.* “If you’re against war, you’re against war regardless of what happens,” she later stated. “It’s a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.” She was correct, though like many pacifists, dangerously naive. Such sentiments, admirable in other circumstances, played directly into the hands of those who continue to take by force, indifferent to the misery inflicted, until they are stopped. Force, when used, must be met by force as the time for diplomacy and compromise has plainly passed. Rankin never understood this, but Charles Lindbergh certainly did.
“Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitude in the past,” Lindbergh publicly stated the day following Pearl Harbor. “I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight.”
America had neither desired nor chosen to be the guardian of freedom, yet no other nation could now do it, and if good was to triumph over evil, then the United States had no choice but to wholeheartedly enter the conflict. Japan, without intending to do so, had sounded the death knell for the Axis. But this was not obvious to anyone at the time; in fact, the global situation appeared to dictate the opposite. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Operation Z had succeeded, temporarily, with its primary objective, which was to prevent the U.S. Pacific Fleet from intervening against the Japanese invasion of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. On the same morning Oahu was attacked, across the International Date Line the Japanese 14th Army commenced its assault on American bases in the Philippines. Six hundred Marines on Guam were overwhelmed on December 10 by nearly six thousand men of the South Seas Detachment and elements of the 2nd Maizuru Special Naval Landing Force. During the next ten dark days, Hong Kong, Borneo, and Wake Island were invaded. The Japanese caught the Royal Navy battle cruiser Repulse and the battleship Prince of Wales off Malaysia, sinking them both, and on Christmas Day, the British surrendered Hong Kong. Then Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies and captured Singapore. On February 19 the Imperial Navy bombed mainland Australia and then, four days later and 7,500 miles to the west, the submarine I-17 attacked the Barnsdall–Rio Grande Oil Field near Santa Barbara, California.* Yamamoto’s prediction that he would “run wild” in the Pacific for six months seemed to be accurate. British, Dutch, and colonial troops collapsed under the assault as American and Filipino troops fell back to the Bataan Peninsula. Under the spell of what Yamamoto and others called “Victory Disease,” imperial forces became somewhat complacent and arrogant from their “easy” conquests, and in so doing left themselves vulnerable to thoroughly enraged Americans, who viewed the attack on Pearl Harbor as unforgivable duplicity. Roosevelt requested a $56 billion defense budget increase from Congress and got it, while fighting-age men flocking to recruiting stations would swell military ranks to the 2 million mark within a year. Patriotism became a faith, and those disinclined to join the war effort were scorned and vilified. Congress, in its continuous quest to look after itself, discreetly passed Public Law 77–411, providing themselves with lucrative pensions above their current list of benefits. Public indignation and outrage forced a hasty repeal.
New songs rolled out over the airways like “Taps for Japs” and “We Did It Before We Can Do It Again.” Barbershops offered “Free Shaves for Japs—Not Responsible for Accidents!” Anything remotely connected with Japan, such as performances of Madame Butterfly and The Mikado, were summarily canceled, and the fleet carriers Yorktown and Enterprise surprised the Japanese by raiding the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. While Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright stubbornly delayed the Japanese on Bataan, Frog Low stepped through Admiral King’s door to articulate his plan to raid Japan with land-based bombers flown from an aircraft carrier.
Low did not know, as King and Arnold did, that the president yearned to strike at Japan, to send a message to Tokyo, to our allies, and to the American people, who were dazed by the suddenness and effectiveness of the Japanese offensives. Now that America had been attacked, Roosevelt meant to pit the entire might of the United States against the Axis.
“We must raise our sights all along the production line,” the president said in strong, measured tones during his January 6, 1942, State of the Union address. “Let no man say it cannot be done. It must be done—and we have undertaken to do it.”
He increased his 1942 production demands to sixty thousand planes, forty-five thousand tanks, twenty thousand anti-aircraft guns, and fully six million tons of shipping. But this would take time, and Roosevelt wanted to strike now; Frog Low’s bomber idea neatly dovetailed with the president’s wishes and with the conundrum facing Hap Arnold: how to hit Japan from bases in the Soviet Union.
“As our power and our resources are fully mobilized, we shall carry the attack against the enemy,” Roosevelt intoned, adding:
We shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him. We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image—a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom. That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives. No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil.
Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.
Roosevelt was calm, decisive, and adamant: “We cannot wage this war in a defensive spirit.”
With America now in the war, would the Soviets join the Allies? If so, would they abrogate their nonaggression pact with the Empire? No one knew the answer, but Washington was certain that Moscow would act solely in its best interests. Allied distrust of the Soviet Union was well founded, and pragmatists were well aware that any alliance with Moscow was an alliance of convenience that would end as soon as the fighting was over.
Japan had never acted in concert with its Axis partners, so perhaps Moscow would not participate in the Allied war against the Empire. But even with no active role, the Russians could permit the Americans to establish bases in their Maritime Territory, bases from which the Home Islands could be attacked now, in 1942. Moscow could also permit a Siberian resupply line through Russia into China as well, creating a true second front that would clamp Japan in a Russia-China-American vise.
The Americans were pressing for exactly that. The Tenth Air Force had been created in anticipation of opening such a front against the Japanese with bombers, primarily B-17s, operating from bases in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. Aircraft from the 19th and 7th Bombardment Groups were transferred to Australia following the disasters in the Philippines and Java, with the Tenth headquartered in New Delhi, India. Another big part of this planned buildup was the addition of Doolittle’s B-25s, which would join the Tenth after bombing Tokyo. The Japanese, who had never been able to subdue China, were very aware of their vulnerability to American air attacks against the Home Islands from bases across the East China Sea in the Soviet Union. The Imperial Army feared and distrusted the Russians, so much so that of the fifty-one divisions available in 1941, thirty-eight of them—some 750,000 men—would remain in China for most of the war due to the unpredictability of the Soviet Union and wariness of an Allied second front.
As for Stalin, he could do all that Tokyo feared—but would he? The Americans were hampered by a lack of knowledge concerning Soviet intentions, very probably because Moscow did not know itself what it would do and was not cooperating with Washington. The U.S. Army Air Corps, renamed the U.S. Army Air Force two days before Hitler invaded Russia, was particularly in the dark regarding Soviet infrastructure, attitudes, and capabilities. Before Washington made any type of real demands in return for the extensive Lend-Lease aid Stalin desired, American leaders had to know what sort of hand the Russians were holding in the Far East.
There was no time to build ports, railways, and bases—not if operations were to commence early enough in 1942 to blunt Japanese advances in the Pacific. Therefore, it was imperative to know what the Russians possessed along the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula, and the only way to do it was to somehow get to the area and conduct a professional on-scene assessment. Even if this could be done through official channels, the Russians would simply stage-manage the entire affair and reveal only what they wished. The key to the Maritime Territory, both for logistics and combat operations, were the coastal ports and any bases close to them. If experienced combat-trained pilots could make a survey, then Washington would have more information than it presently did, which meant valuable leverage in dealing with Stalin.
However, until a possibility was suggested by Hap Arnold during that critical and dangerous winter of 1942, no one, not even Arnold’s close friend William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had figured out how to make this happen. This possibility existed only because sixteen American B-25s would be less than seven hundred miles from Vladivostok while they bombed Japan. What, Arnold, mused, if one bomber was to avoid Tokyo, slip across Honshu, and fly to the east coast of the Soviet Union instead of China? It could conduct an aerial survey followed by one on the ground that would include an assessment of Russian air defenses, and one particularly attractive port and airfield on the far eastern coast closest to Japan.
Roosevelt’s desire to hit Japan and Arnold’s idea about gaining information supporting that desire were precisely how Ed York, Bob Emmens, and the crew of Plane 8 found themselves a few miles south of Sado Island heading for Russia during the early afternoon of April 18, 1942.
