Part 12

by Chris Oakley

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In both military and political terms the invasion of Korea and Manchuria was one of Stalin’s gravest mistakes. It not only tied up manpower and equipment needed elsewhere among the Soviet border, it also did something the Soviet dictator’s foreign policy advisors had repeatedly warned him he couldn’t afford to do-- it gave Japan and the United States a common enemy to band together against. Whatever their views about each other, the Japanese and American governments agreed Stalin was a menace to their security. So Emperor Hirohito, over the vehement and repeated objections of anti-Western elements within his own cabinet, began cautiously taking steps to form an alliance with the US against the Soviet Union similar to the anti-Hitler coalition that had existed between Britain and France prior to the collapse of the French government.

The bridge between Washington and Tokyo during these delicate negotiations was Joseph C. Grew, the US ambassador to Japan. A keen student of Japanese culture, Grew was an ideal choice to lead the US negotiating team during the alliance talks; on the other side of the bargaining table Isoroku Yamamoto, a naval officer who had once been a student at Harvard University and served as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington, acted as an advisor to the Japanese negotiating team on American customs and political views. Supporting Yamamoto in his work with the US-Japanese alliance talks was veteran diplomat Mamoru Shigemitsu, a former ambassador to Britain and the Soviet Union who handled many of the responsibilities for translating American communiqués into Japanese and Japanese dispatches to English. Modern historians have rightly given Shigemitsu a great deal of credit for smoothing over some of the communication gaps that might otherwise have disrupted Japan’s efforts to establish a unified front with the United States against the Communist bloc.

One of the biggest obstacles that had to be overcome before a US- Japanese alliance was established was the issue of Korea’s postwar political status. Japan had been occupying Korea since 1905 and wanted to retain control of the Korean Peninsula once the war was over, but the United States favored Korean independence. One prominent Imperial Army general, Hideki Tojo, vehemently insisted that the American demand for Korea’s postwar independence was a cover for a long-time secret plan by Washington to destabilize and eventually conquer the Japanese Empire; this accusation drew stern protests from the American negotiating team, not to mention many of Tojo’s peers in the Japanese military.

On the American side of the negotiating table, there was suspicion in some quarters that Japan might use the disagreement over the matter of Korean postwar independence as an excuse to break off relations with the U.S. once the Russo-Japanese war was over. It would take weeks of delicate negotiations between Washington and Tokyo before a compromise was finally reached on the Korea issue; the question of independence was to be settled by a multinational postwar conference, and in the meantime the Japanese would relax some of their more restrictive colonial policies toward the Koreans.

This compromise couldn’t have been reached a minute too soon. The Red Army may have been down in Asia, but it was certainly not out; even a minimal delay in forming a coalition, US and Japanese leaders understood, could have disastrous consequences for the non-Communist world as a whole and Japan and the United States in particular. The treaty which formally instituted an alliance between Washington and Tokyo was signed by US and Japanese diplomats in San Francisco on January 5^th, 1940.

A few weeks after the alliance treaty was signed, Japan and the United States took their first concrete steps to organize a united battle plan for fighting the Soviets. Isoroku Yamamoto, head of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet and an expert in modern naval strategy, met with US Pacific Fleet commander-in-chief Admiral Husband E. Kimmel to devise campaign plans for containing Communist bloc naval forces in the Pacific. One major component of those plans was a proposal to use carrier aircraft to mount tactical bombing raids on Communist naval bases and supply lines in Asia...

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....and it was an idea that sparked a fair amount of controversy among the battleship advocates in both navies. In 1940, the notion that aircraft carriers were the new main instrument of naval combat was still meeting a distinct if weakening measure of resistance among admirals who clung to the belief that battleships were and always would be the primary key to victory in naval warfare; this belief had long been a problem for naval aviation advocates on both the Western and the Communist sides in the war with the Hitler-Stalin alliance. It was particularly deep-rooted in Italy, where the Fascist leadership felt that building such vessels for their navy was a bit superfluous given that the Italian peninsula was at least in their view) a kind of natural aircraft carrier.

While Mussolini’s admirals were trying to persuade him to reverse this stance, Italian Communist underground cells operating under the direction of the NKVD were conspiring to assassinate the Duce. Stalin felt that the Communist bloc’s cause in Europe was in serious jeopardy as long as Mussolini remained in power in Rome; Beria shared this view, and also held that a successful hit on the Italian Fascist leader would trigger unrest in Italy that might make it possible to mount a Marxist takeover of the country. The point man for this assassination plot was one Walter Audisio, code-named "Hedgehog" by the NKVD and known to his fellow conspirators as "Colonel Valerio". Although Valerio had not been the only member of the Italian Communist underground to talk about or contemplate murdering the Duce, he would ultimately be the man who took charge of the conspiracy.

Two days after the U.S. and Japan signed the San Francisco alliance treaty, "Valerio" and his cohorts in the assassination plot met secretly in an out-of-the-way villa south of Rome. At this meeting, Valerio laid out in minute detail his ideas for how Mussolini’s liquidation should be carried out; impressed by his enthusiasm and his forceful tone, the rest of the men in attendance quickly consented to letting Valerio assume the leading role in the plot to kill the Duce. Valerio’s NKVD contacts at the Soviet embassy in Geneva also envisaged him for a leadership role, and not merely in the assassination plot either-- Beria’s master plan for the overthrow of Italy’s Fascist regime had designated Valerio as new Italian war minister in the Marxist government which the Kremlin expected to take over in Rome in the wake of Mussolini’s death.

The would-be assassins finally got their opportunity to strike in early March of 1940, when Mussolini was set to visit a military hospital near Milan to speak with wounded soldiers and airmen. Valerio and his team, posing as a newsreel camera crew, positioned themselves to attack Mussolini’s motorcade as soon as it pulled up to the hospital entrance. But just when the hit squad thought they had the Duce in their sights, their cover was abruptly blown when a Swiss tourist standing just a few feet from Valerio’s position recognized his face from a ‘Wanted’ poster prominently displayed at all Milanese government and police offices; the tourist alerted a Milan carabineri commander to the Communists’ presence, and the policemen quickly sprang into action. One detail rushed Mussolini and his entourage to safety while another evacuated the sidewalks lining the motorcade route and a third moved in to arrest Valerio’s hit squad.

Most of Valerio’s team, including Valerio himself, were successfully captured without incident, but four of the Communist hitmen engaged the Milanese carabineri in a brief but intense gunfight in a back alley down the block from the hospital. Two policemen, one civilian, and three of the four fugitive Communists were killed in the skirmish; the fourth man fled down another back alley and disappeared.

The fate of the fourth gunman, known to his cohorts as "il Sparviero" (the Sparrow), remains a mystery even today. One popular legend claims he was hunted down and murdered by the Mafia with Mussolini’s acquiescence; another asserts that OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police, executed him after a quick trial in the basement of their Milan local branch office. Still other theories have him defecting to the Fascists and being trained as a counter-assassin to liquidate his former colleagues, fleeing to Rome and becoming a priest, or secretly emigrating to the United States and going to work as an enforcer for New York City gangster Albert Anastasia. One story even claims "il Sparviero" was granted a pardon by the Mussolini government in exchange for taking part in a suicide mission against the Volksarmee.

There were certainly no pardons forthcoming for Colonel Valerio or his surviving co-conspirators in the assassination plot. Within a week of their capture they had all been indicted on a host of criminal charges including terrorism, treason, and conspiracy to commit murder. On March 16^th, 1940 an Italian military tribunal found them guilty on all counts; they were executed by firing squad three days later.

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As the Mussolini regime’s security forces and the regular Italian army set to work smashing the rest of the Italian Communist underground, Britain was busy girding its coastal and air defenses for what most of the British people were convinced was an imminent Communist bloc invasion of their country. Despite serious disagreements between Hitler and his generals, preparations for Fall Rote Lowe¹ were going fairly well and the main question in the minds of most Englishmen seemed to be not if or even when the Hitler-Stalin alliance would invade but rather where the first wave of the invasion would come ashore.

The prevailing consensus among military intelligence officers at Whitehall was that the most likely spot for the invasion forces to launch their assault was the port of Dover. In addition to being one of Great Britain’s most vital seaports, Dover was seen as a potential staging area for a Communist push towards London-- a city whose capture Hitler viewed as the crowning triumph in the Volksarmee’s conquest of western Europe. "He who wins Dover, wins London." the DDVR chancellor told his generals at a late night tea party three days after Colonel Valerio’s execution. "And he who wins London, wins England." Like King Philip II of Spain and Napoleon Bonaparte of France had before him, Hitler found the prospect of invading and conquering the island nation an irresistible lure as well as the logical next step in fulfilling his geopolitical agenda.

The basic battle plan for Case Red Lion called for Volksarmee armor and infantry units to establish their main beachhead on the southeastern coast of England, with diversionary attacks coming at Lyme Bay and the Isle of Wight and a deployment of airborne troops to Brighton. The role of the Volksluftkorps would be to provide air support for the invaders by bombing British troop concentrations, airfields, and supply bases on the front lines along with industrial and command/control centers behind the lines. The Volksmarine, besides furnishing landing craft for the invasion forces, would carry out interdiction of British maritime supply routes with its submarines and bombardment of British coastal defense batteries with its surface warships.

As Winston Churchill’s senior military and intelligence advisors had suspected, Dover was one of the major landing sites under consideration for the main German amphibious assault on Great Britain. Other possible landing spots included Ramsgate, Folkestone, Eastbourne and the historic village of Hastings-- the very spot where William the Conqueror had won his world-changing victory over Harold Godwinson back in 1066. There was even a provision in one of the early drafts of the invasion plans for a detachment of German marines to be disembarked right at the mouth of the Thames River as a diversionary maneuver  to keep British attention off of the main assault in the southeast.

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Meanwhile, the RAF’s fighter squadrons were racing against time to prepare for the Volksluftkorps bomber offensive which was expected to precede(and then support) Operation Red Lion. Both sides realized that air superiority would be one of the deciding factors in whether the invasion plan succeeded or failed...and Churchill was determined to see it would fail. Therefore he gave Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Dowding free reign to take whatever steps Dowding deemed necessary to bolster British air defenses in the projected invasion area.

On April 26^th, 1940 Hitler issued what he called "a last appeal to reason" to the British people, calling on them to make peace with the Communist bloc and accept German-Soviet rule over continental Europe. Within less than an hour after Hitler’s speech, the foreign ministry in Berlin got London’s reply-- Hitler’s "last appeal to reason" had been unanimously and bluntly rejected by Churchill and his cabinet. Britain, they said, would fight to the last man rather than submit to Communist rule. Enraged, Hitler immediately gave Volksluftkorps commander-in-chief Heinrich Stuckart the green light to begin bombing raids on England...