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Comrade Hitler:

 

The Rise and Fall of an Infamous Marxist Icon

 

Part 15

 

by Chris Oakley

 

 

 

Summary:

Summary: In the previous fourteen episodes of this series we traced Adolf Hitler’s conversion to Marxism; his rise to the leadership of  the German Communist Party and then of Germany itself; his part in the  Communist victory in the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of armed  conflict between the German People’s Republic and the Anglo-French  alliance; his ruthless conquest of France; his Soviet ally Joseph  Stalin’s decision to go to war with Japan in the summer of 1938; the  Japanese army’s invasion of Siberia; Japan’s first tentative steps  toward forming a coalition with the United States; the assassination  attempt on Benito Mussolini in March of 1940; the Churchill government’s  efforts to bolster Great Britain’s frontier defenses against the threat  of Communist invasion; the German bombing campaign against Great Britain  that spanned the spring and summer of 1940; and the fall 1940 escalation  of the fighting on the Italian front. In this chapter we’ll review the  beginning of the Allied atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project, and   the Japanese “Divine Wind” campaign in Korea in the spring of 1941.

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      Since the end of World War II, one of the favorite topics for debate among alternate historians has been the question of how the war’s course might have been affected if the Manhattan Project hadn’t succeeded in its goal of producing an atomic bomb for the Allies. It has often been suggested in some quarters that such a failure would have guaranteed a Communist final victory; while that point is vehemently disputed by other historians, there can be no doubt that the bomb was a critical trump card for the Allies in their fight to vanquish the Communist bloc.

      The Manhattan Project got its name from its original headquarters, a nondescript U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office building located in the Manhattan section of New York City. For security reasons, the scientific part of the program relocated its base of operations to the New Mexico desert; the industrial aspects of the project were centered in an out-of- the way town in rural Tennessee. The goal behind these twin relocations was to minimize the risk of the program being infiltrated by Communist spies. Above all, project chief military advisor General Leslie Groves wanted to keep the Hitler-Stalin bloc from figuring out the secrets of weaponizing radioactive elements. Indeed, at least one scientist working on the project had already fallen under suspicion of being a Communist agent: German refugee Klaus Fuchs, a PhD graduate from the University of Bristol in England who had been a committed leftist for most of his life.

      Ironically, it was precisely because of his socialist views that Fuchs had been compelled to leave Germany in the first place. The Hitler regime had judged Fuchs insufficiently loyal to the German Democratic People’s Republic and had ordered him detained for what the KPD somewhat euphemistically described as “special questioning” but in reality could be more accurately described as extralegal summary execution. Fuchs fled Berlin just one step ahead of a Stasi execution squad. And even after he escaped the German capital, his survival wasn’t necessarily guaranteed; as he raced across western Europe in hopes of finding political asylum at a friendly foreign embassy, Fuchs was relentlessly hunted by Stasi agents intent on eliminating him one way or another. Only when he made it to the British embassy in Paris and convinced the embassy staff to permit him to emigrate to Britain as a political refugee was Fuchs finally able to stop looking over his shoulder.

      After graduating the University of Bristol, Fuchs was recruited for the Manhattan Project by an American diplomat stationed in London who was familiar with Fuchs’ work in the then-fairly young discipline of nuclear physics. General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s chief military director, was somewhat skeptical about the wisdom of letting a dyed-in-the-wool socialist get so closely involved with a program with military and political implications as grave as those presented by the U.S. effort to develop a working atom bomb; nonetheless, he eventually signed off on the project civilian leaders’ decision to hire Fuchs for the New Mexico section of the program.

      Fuchs was joined by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had himself been stalked by German assassins and was sent to the United States for his own safety after a sniper attack on his office; Niels Bohr, a Danish refugee who had chosen to go into exile rather than cooperate with the DDVR in its oppression of his homeland; J. Robert Oppenheimer, chief scientific advisor for the Manhattan Project and America’s top atomic physicist at the time; and Albert Einstein, whose 1939 letter to FDR had helped plant the seeds for the U.S. atomic bomb program. While their nationalities and ideologies might have differed, they all shared a common trait-- none of them wanted Germany to get the A-bomb first.

      Oak Ridge, the Tennessee town which was the headquarters of the industrial element of the Manhattan Project, was unique among American municipal areas in that it had been created specifically to fulfill the purpose of housing part of the U.S. A-bomb effort. Existing factories had been deemed by General Groves and his staff as inadequate for the task of producing the plutonium and refined uranium needed to make a functioning atomic weapon; furthermore, in private factories the risk of espionage was too great for Groves’ liking. It was much easier to preserve operational security in a government-run installation...or at least the general thought so.

      That didn’t stop the Stasi and the NKVD from trying their level  best to infiltrate covert personnel into the Allied atom bomb effort. The FBI’s anti-espionage services were kept busy around the clock with barring Communist agents from sneaking onto American soil and detaining those operatives who’d made it into the States already. No less hectic were the efforts of British security forces to collar would-be moles in England and Scotland. Indeed, by the time Fuchs arrived in New Mexico MI-5, Great Britain’s primary counterintelligence service, had a full division in place specifically tasked to hunt down and detain those trying to uncover Great Britain’s atomic secrets. Euphemistically known as “the Special Duties Branch”, this division had broad power to arrest any individual suspected of trying to conduct espionage regarding the British elements of the Allied atomic weapons program; in some extreme cases its agents had clearance to shoot would-be atomic spies on sight without waiting for orders from their superiors. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the SDB and its operations, no information about its missions was released for decades-- Churchill was reluctant to even acknowledge the division’s existence until the war was nearly over.

      The quest to safeguard the Manhattan Project’s secrets even extended to Cuba, where intelligence agents working under the direction of the military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Havana kept a wary eye on the city’s port district for any suspicious foreign nations trying to sneak into the United States to steal information on the American atom bomb program. Fidel Castro, later to become head of Cuba’s socialist regime in the early 1960s, was in his teens at the time the U.S. War Department began its surveillance of Havana’s docks; as he would later recall in his autobiography, dodging the feet of U.S. agents and the Marxist spies trying to elude them turned out to be first-rate training for evading the army patrols which Fulgencio Batista sent to arrest him during his long-running rebellion against the Batista regime in the late ‘50s.

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       In Japan the primary focus among the men of Emperor Hirohito’s general staff was not on atomic weapons but on making sure everything was ready for the Imperial Army to execute Operation Divine Wind, the massive Korean theater offensive that was set to be launched during the spring of 1941. Taking its code name from the legendary “divine wind” (kamikaze in Japanese) that was said to have saved the Japanese home islands from a Mongol invasion in 1281, the campaign’s chief objective was to drive a wedge between the left and right wings of the Soviets’ main battlefront in Korea. Once that wedge was formed, the conventional wisdom went, the Imperial Army could push the Soviets back into Siberia and hammer away at them until the exhausted Red Army was at last willing to sue for peace. With Stalin’s ground forces either still tied up with combating the anti-Communist rebellion in Poland or aiding their German allies in guarding occupied western Europe against the British, there was little fear in Tokyo of the Soviets mounting a serious counterattack to stop Divine Wind.

      Carrier aviation units were also expected to play a critical role in Divine Wind; the Imperial General Staff had no illusions about being able to fulfill any of the campaign’s objectives without first securing air superiority in the target zone. Minoru Genda, an Imperial Japanese Navy aviation expert who’d been studying the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet air force capabilities in the Korean theater since the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Japan, was the primary architect of the air component of Divine Wind. Aiding Genda in his strategizing for the air phase of the Divine Wind campaign was Mitsuo Fuchida, a former Imperial Naval Academy classmate of Genda’s who some of his comrades-in-arms nicknamed “Gandhi” because of his placid demeanor; a veteran pilot with more than three thousand hours worth of flying time to his credit, Fuchida understood better than any other IJN officer(with the possible exception of Genda) the problems entailed in neutralizing the Soviet air threat.

       To prepare the Japanese carrier pilots for their hazardous mission, Commander Genda had them execute mock air strikes against  a simulated Soviet air base on the southern end of Honshu. It was a long and grueling training regimen, but the pilots hardly seemed to mind it much-- they were young(mostly) and eager to take the fight directly into the heart of the beast. Some of those scheduled to take part in the Divine Wind air strikes put in at least double the amount of practice time their officers required of them.

       The primary weapon that would be used in Divine Wind was the Mitsubishi A6M2 Type 00-- more popularly known in the Western press as the Zero . A light, nimble tactical fighter designed precisely for the kind of carrier operations Genda and Fuchida had in mind, it was considerably faster than most of its Soviet adversaries, not to mention more maneuverable. Typical Russian fighter designs emphasized firepower rather than speed, and as a result more often that not Soviet air force fighter pilots, regardless of how well-trained they were, came out on the losing end of encounters with Japanese aviators flying the Zero. Indeed, at the time Divine Wind commenced it was very common for Soviet fighter jockeys to get shot down on their first mission if they had the misfortune to confront a Zero head-on.

                              ******

       Preparations for the Divine Wind campaign were completed in late April of 1941; the start of the offensive was originally scheduled for May 15th, but weather problems compelled the Imperial General Staff to postpone it until June 22nd. One might have thought such a delay would have worked to the Soviets’ advantage, but the Red Army had some major weather-related problems of its own to contend with, and in any event the Red Army’s Far East command staff was infected with a serious case of overconfidence where the course of the war with Japan was concerned. Most of Stalin’s generals in that theater regarded recent setbacks in Korea and Manchuria as a fluke and still held on to the belief that the Soviet Union would prevail in the end.

       This complacency would be dramatically jolted at 4:00 AM on the morning of June 22nd, when the largest assault force the Japanese army had yet assembled up to that time unleashed its full fury on a startled Red Army; backed up by ferocious naval bombardment and air strikes from carrier planes as well as land-based attack aircraft, the ground troops tore into the Soviet battlefront in Korea in a two-pronged assault which eerily reminded some Western military analysts of the “lightning war” tactics the Volksarmee had used in France and Italy in the early months of the Second World War. The commanding general for Soviet expeditionary ground forces in Korea barely had time to react to the first reports of the Japanese attack before he was forced to take shelter in an air raid cellar to escape the carrier planes that had been sent to strike at his headquarters.

       To the dismay of the STAVKA high command back in Moscow, the Japanese invaders achieved almost total surprise; three-quarters of the warships at anchor in the Soviet Pacific port of Vladivostok were sunk by Japanese torpedoes in the first hours of Divine Wind, while in the land fighting at least four Red Army infantry divisions were literally wiped out to the last man before the campaign had finished its first day. The Red Air Force’s Far East wings took staggering blows at the hands of Japanese combat aviators; according to modern Russian defense ministry archivists, nearly 30 percent of operational Red Air Forces squadrons stationed in Siberia and Korea at the time Divine Wind began were either wiped out on the ground or shot to pieces by Japanese fighters in the first twelve hours of the invasion.

       While Stalin’s fellow Soviet leaders might have espoused atheism publicly, behind closed doors some of them must have wondered if maybe this latest turn of events in Asia might be some form of divine revenge for the sins Communism had committed against its subjects.

To Be Continued

Its formal designation, and popular nickname, both stemmed for the use of the Imperial calendar; in those days it was standard practice to base aircraft designations on the last digit of the year in which the Emperor was serving at the time the aircraft type entered service-- which in the case happened to be the year 2600(or 1940 by the Gregorian calendar).