Summary:

In the previous sixteen 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; the Japanese army’s “Divine Wind” campaign in Korea in the spring of 1941 and the Soviet counteroffensive against the Japanese invaders; and the German U-boat attack on Boston Harbor that finally brought about a formal U.S. declaration of war on Germany. In this chapter we’ll review the White House’s decision to send troops to Iceland to defend it against German invasion and the Japanese breakthrough on the Yalu River in the autumn of 1941.

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It didn’t take a crystal ball to predict that both the United States and the German People’s Republic would deem it a top priority to gain a strategic foothold in Iceland. Because the island happened to be situated in the vicinity of many of the major shipping lanes between North America and Britain, it was considered an ideal staging area for mounting a defense of Atlantic convoys-- or attacks on said convoys, for that matter. The United States ultimately won the race to claim a foothold on Iceland, dispatching a contingent of Marines there in late March of 1941 to relieve the British garrison which had been previously guarding the island. When the United States formally declared war on Germany less than three months later, these Marines would be at the forefront of the American war effort in Europe.

Even before the attack on Boston Harbor the Marine garrison in Iceland gave ample demonstration of its strategic value to the Allied cause. In May of 1941, about two months after taking up their duties on the island, two squads from that garrison were dispatched to the Icelandic northern coast in response to reports that a Volksmarine U- boat had landed a commando unit in the area. Sure enough, they spotted a six-man team of assassins and saboteurs clambering up the beach and opened fire on the team as soon as it was within rifle range; in the ensuring brief but vicious firefight, two of the German commandos were killed and one of the surviving four was seriously wounded. All four of the remaining members of the German team were captured and brought back to the garrison headquarters for questioning. What Allied intelligence personnel learned in the course of those interrogations was, to say the least, chilling: among other things the commando team had been assigned to assassinate the Icelandic prime minister and several key members of the prime minister’s cabinet. They had also been tasked to sabotage a number of crucial elements in the Allied defense system for Iceland in order to make it easier for Communist invasion forces to seize control of the island nation.

Transcripts of the interrogation were duly forwarded to President Roosevelt at the White House and Prime Minister Churchill at Number 10 Downing Street, and both Allied leaders were alarmed by what they read in those transcripts. This was a wakeup call not just for Washington and London but for the entire Allied cause as a whole; accordingly, Allied naval defenses in the Atlantic were further beefed up to guard against external threats to Iceland and a joint OSS-MI5 task force was created to aid Icelandic police authorities in countering Communist attempts to subvert the country from within. Air defenses in Iceland were boosted by the arrival of two RAF Beaufighter squadrons and a contingent of U.S. Army Air Corps P-38s in mid-June of 1941.

The Beau in particular would play a vital part in Allied anti-ship operations during the course of the war; equipped with bombs and rockets, Beaus were highly effective in sinking U-boats and other Communist naval vessels. At least a third of all Volksmarine U-boats sunk by the Allies after May 1941 were victims of Beaufighter attacks; Hitler so detested the Beaufighter that in August of 1941 he issued a directive to all his senior military commanders decreeing that any Beaufighter crews who fell into German hands were to be executed on sight. His hatred for the Beau only increased as the war went on; radar-equipped versions of the plane proved lethally effective against the Volksluftkorps in a night fighter capacity, and when Allied forces finally invaded France during the late stages of the war Beaus would fly thousands of anti-armor sorties against the Volksarmee.

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In September of 1941, two months after the United States officially went to war with the German People’s Republic, the Soviet front along the Yalu River finally began to crack once and for all. The Japanese army’s relentless pressure on Soviet ground forces in that region had taken a substantial toll on men, equipment, and morale there; probing operations by Japanese infantry along the eastern wing of the Yalu front had turned up several weaknesses there which if properly exploited could pave the way for a massive breakout along the entire battle line. This pressure was been supplemented by daily air strikes from carrier planes and from land-based bombers operating out of airfields on the Korean Peninsula. Off Korea’s coastline Japanese warships did their part to weaken the Red Army’s Yalu front by bombarding Soviet shore outposts in the vicinity of that front.

The Red Army’s chief of intelligence for the Far Eastern theater was at his wit’s end trying to figure out where the Japanese would hit when they were finally ready to make their big push across the Korean border into Siberia. Although the eastern flank of the Soviet line was the most vulnerable to attack, there were hints that Tokyo might just as easily try a breakthrough in the central or western sectors of the front. Some of the more imaginative members of the intelligence chief’s senior staff even hazarded a guess that the Japanese might try to land airborne troops behind the Soviet lines(although the odds on that were slim, given as many of the transport aircraft necessary to mount such an operation were already committed to operations elsewhere in the Far East theater).

On September 16th, 1941 the breakthrough which for months the Japanese had been hoping for, and the Soviets had been dreading, was finally achieved when three of the Imperial Army’s finest infantry divisions smashed a hole in the eastern wing of the Soviet lines on the banks of the Yalu. Within hours the rest of the Soviet front was beginning to collapse as well; the first light of dawn on the morning of September 17th saw Japanese troops standing north of the Yalu River and the Red Army in headlong retreat. In spite of the Kremlin’s best efforts to keep the truth about the breakthrough from getting out to Stalin’s subjects, the news of what the Japanese had accomplished on the Yalu front began to reach the masses via word of mouth-- and as these oral accounts spread, so did panic about the future course of the war. By September 21st, five days after the initial penetration of the Soviet line by Imperial Army advance units, Japanese soldiers were nearly twelve miles inside Soviet territory and roads in Siberia were packed with civilian refugees trying to escape the Japanese thrust. In Moscow, Stalin’s generals frantically looked for a way to pull their