Summary:

In the previous fifteen 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; the fall 1940 escalation of  the fighting on the Italian front; the beginning of the Allied atomic  bomb program, the Manhattan Project, and the Japanese “Divine Wind”  campaign in Korea in the spring of 1941. In this chapter we’ll review  the desperate Soviet counterattack against the Japanese invaders and  the German attack on Boston Harbor that finally brought about formal U.S. entry on the Allied side in the Second World War.

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The Japanese army swarmed over the Soviet front lines in Korea like a swarm of locusts, devouring everything in its path. In spite of their best efforts to contain the assault the Red Army troops charged with defending Soviet-held territory in Korea were utterly overwhelmed; some Red Army conscripts simply threw down their rifles and ran for the hills rather than face the wrath of this relentless juggernaut. It was only on July 1st, nine full days after the initial Japanese attack, when the Soviets were able to mount their first attempt at a counteroffensive. And even then the Red Army had little success in holding back the IJA’s advance-- morale in the Soviet ranks was too low, the Japanese invasion force too well-equipped, and air cover too scarce.

Back in the Kremlin, Stalin alternately raged and fretted over each new report of defeat that reached his desk from his field generals in the Siberian theater. On its own the Japanese invasion would have been a thorn in his side; combined with the Polish anti-Communist insurgency and the continuing resistance of British forces to the Communist bloc’s bid for domination of western Europe, it constituted a potential turning of the tide against the U.S.S.R. for keeps in the Second World War. The further the Japanese advanced, the greater the chances were that they would eventually succeed in penetrating Stalin’s Siberian frontiers.... and once that happened it was anybody’s guess as to how long the Soviet Union would survive.

And it wasn’t only the Japanese offensive that concerned Stalin; America, the nation he called “the main enemy”, was showing increasingly clear signs of officially entering the war on the Allied side. On the day the Divine Wind campaign began, the Chicago Tribune published a poll in which 78 percent of those surveyed favored direct military action to halt Soviet expansionism in Europe and the Far East. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his three most recent speeches before Congress, had warned the Kremlin the U.S. armed forces would not stay out of the fighting in Europe indefinitely. And Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, was doing everything humanly possible to expand U.S. troop strength in Hawaii, Alaska, and the Philippines and on the west coast of the United States mainland in order to be ready to face whatever the Red Army threw at Uncle Sam in the Pacific.

In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the undeclared naval war that had been raging between the U.S. Navy’s convoy escorts and the Volksmarine’s U- boat arm since late 1940 was steadily escalating. Only two weeks after Divine Wind was launched another American destroyer, the Reuben James, was attacked by German submarines in the same way her sister ship the Robin Moor had been the previous fall. Unlike the Moor attack, however, the Reuben James engagement ended in a victory for the U-boats; James was sunk with most of her 144-man crew still on board. The captain of the lead U-boat in the James attack was awarded the Iron Cross and the People’s Maritime Valor Medallion for his actions. The James’ demise drove home to Roosevelt’s top naval advisors the urgency of neutralizing Hitler’s U-boat arsenal before the Communists succeeded in strangling the West’s economic lifelines with it.

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America’s last peacetime 4th of July under the Roosevelt Administration saw the Red Army locked in heavy combat with Japanese ground forces along the banks of the Yalu River. As President Roosevelt was celebrating the 165th anniversary of American independence with his fellow countrymen, an earth-shattering Japanese artillery barrage was slamming into Red Army defensive positions just south of the Korean village of Ryanggang; by the time the last Independence Day parade of that afternoon had finished its march, Soviet ground troops were engaging their Japanese counterparts southwest of the Chinese border town of Changbai. While American citizens were enjoying evening fireworks displays, Soviet and Japanese air force pilots were confronting each other in vicious dogfights that took a heavy toll on both sides’ airpower inventories.

For both sides control of the Yalu was a critical strategic priority. The Soviets viewed a successful defense of the Yalu’s banks as vital to preventing a Japanese thrust into the USSR’s Siberian territories; on the other side of the coin the Japanese considered getting across the Yalu a key step in achieving Divine Wind’s primary objective of neutralizing the Red Army threat to Japan’s interests in Korea and Manchuria. If or when the Emperor’s soldiers succeeded in getting across the Yalu, there was no telling how far they might get before they ran out of steam. In diaries uncovered at the end of the Second World War and released to the public by the Russian government after the collapse of Communism, a number of Red Army senior officers confided their fears that should the Japanese succeed in crossing the Yalu’s banks they might not stop advancing until they were marching through the streets of Vladivostok. Red Army political commissars had their hands full trying to maintain morale and discipline among their troops; one particularly harried commissar, a certain Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, actually sustained a nervous breakdown under the pressure and had to be institutionalized before the Korean campaign was over. He ended up spending most of the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital and at one point actually had to be put in a padded cell after he grabbed a doctor’s shoe one day and pounded it on a desk in a fit of temper.       Thousands of miles away from the fighting in the Korean theater, Hitler’s Volksmarine in the midst of final preparations for a special operation that he meant to constitute a crippling blow to American hopes for getting directly involved in the war in Europe on the Allied side. Code-named Fall Vorschlaghammer(“Case Sledgehammer”), its primary objective was to render Boston Harbor, one of the U.S. East Coast’s most important commercial and military seaports, so badly damaged that its facilities would essentially be unusable. The attack would involve a combined task force of mini-subs and conventional U-boats and be timed to catch the harbor’s defenders at exactly the moment when they would be least alert-- a Sunday morning, to be more precise.

The first challenge the Volksmarine admiralty faced in executing Case Sledgehammer was getting the strike force across the North Atlantic undetected. In order to accomplish that goal, the flotilla would use a route that took them well north of the coast of Iceland and nearly into the icy waters of the Arctic Circle. While it put some of the officers and crews at risk of getting frostbite at certain points, it certainly worked in terms of keeping the attack force out of detection range of any U.S. naval patrols before it reached its designated target. It also gave the crews of the subs involved in the operation an invaluable opportunity to further test new navigational equipment the Volksmarine’s U-boat corps had first installed on its vessels the previous autumn.

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It was just past 2:00 AM on the morning of July 13th, 1941 when the Case Sledgehammer task force reached the edge of Boston Harbor. Acting on a pre-arranged code signal, the mini-subs began slipping into the harbor entrance while the conventional U-boats prepared to fire their torpedoes and deck guns. Barely five minutes after the code signal was transmitted, the first explosions of detonating torpedo warheads were rumbling through the pre-dawn air and ships were beginning to sink in the harbor’s chilly waters. For the next forty-five minutes the U-boats treated the harbor as if it were their personal shooting gallery; by the time the Sledgehammer task force began leaving Boston Harbor to commence the voyage back home, at least 66 merchant vessels had been sunk along with 18 naval and Coast Guard ships and fifty percent of the harbor’s shore installations were in flames. Total Volksmarine casualties amounted to two mini-subs sunk and a U-boat damaged by friendly fire when one of her sister submarines mistook her for an American warship and let loose two deck gun salvos at her port side.

Yet if the Hitler-Stalin alliance thought the pre-emptive strike on Boston Harbor would frighten the Americans into staying on the sidelines in the war between the Western Allies and the Communist block, they would quickly be disabused of that notion. At 12:30 PM on the afternoon of July 13th, barely ten and a half hours after the Case Sledgehammer strike force had commenced its attack, President Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against the German People’s Republic. Far from being intimidated by the brutal surprise raid against one of the East Coast’s busiest seaports, the American people and their leaders were itching to retaliate against Berlin at the first opportunity they got....