Summary: In the previous nine chapters of this series we remembered Japan’s 1916 April Revolution and the new government’s post-revolution crackdown on religious and political dissenters; the brief but intense 1932 Siberian border war with Russia; the Liberation Society-sponsored 1933 Singapore terror bombing; the 1934 succession of Yuji Kagamoto’s protégé Mitsuharu Yamagida as new chancellor of the Japanese People’s Republic; the earthshaking formation by Yamagida’s regime of alliances with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in the late 1930s; and the Japanese People’s Army’s 1939 Steel Thunder campaign against China. In this installment we’ll review the chain of events leading to a renewal of hostilities between Japan and Russia in 1941.

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Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office for his third term as President of the United States keenly aware of the Japanese People’s Republic’s intention of going to war with the U.S. sooner rather than later. What he didn’t know was when and where Japan would launch its first attack: his intelligence advisors were giving him all kinds of contradictory signals about Tokyo’s strategic intentions towards U.S. bases in the Pacific, and the Yamagida regime certainly wasn’t going to do anything to help him clear up those signals. Indeed, Yamagida was taking a malicious pride in tying the White House up in knots as far as possible.

New British prime minister Winston Churchill, who’d been voted into office shortly after the Nazi invasion of western Europe, could relate to Roosevelt’s frustration in trying to sort out the truth of Yamagida’s intention. Churchill’s own intelligence apparatus had been busy for months trying to determine whether Tokyo would strike first at India or Singapore when war finally broke out between Britain and the Japanese People’s Republic. Even while the British Expeditionary Force was being evacuated from Dunkirk Churchill spent a considerable amount of time sifting through reports warning of a major buildup by the People’s Army in Japanese-occupied sectors of China which hinted at possible plans to attack India and Singapore simultaneously-- and there were also hints the Yamagida regime might also be intending to strike at British interests in Burma.

Maxim Livitnov, then three years into his first term as Russian prime minister, was understandably concerned that in addition to its plans to declare war on America and Britain Japan might also attempt to avenge its defeat in the 1932 Siberian border war. Already in just the first week of May 1940 alone the Yamagida regime had dropped some rather ominous hints that it was ready to tear up the cease-fire pact that had ended the Siberian conflict; not the least of those hints was the deployment to Japanese-occupied Manchuria of two full JPA armored divisions stationed directly opposite the frontier dividing Manchuria from Russia’s Siberian territories. Their presence forced the Russian Federal to move some of its own armored units to Siberia in response, hindering Moscow’s efforts to push the Nazis out of Poland and stoking fears Russia was leaving herself-- and her neighbor Ukraine --exposed to the threat of a German invasion in the near future.

In July of 1940, about three weeks after the Reynaud government in France surrendered to the Germans, Roosevelt and Livitnov met with Churchill in Manchester, England to discuss formulating a joint U.S.- Anglo-Russian strategy for opposing Japanese aggression in the Pacific region. Also in attendance were representatives of the newly organized French government-in-exile headed by Charles de Gaulle; de Gaulle and his top deputies were concerned about the possibility that the largely pro-Vichy colonial administration in French Indochina(today’s Vietnam and Cambodia) would cut a deal with Tokyo to let the Japanese People’s Army station troops there, and de Gaulle wanted to avert that hideous scenario at any cost. So a plan was devised whereby the Royal Navy and the U.S. Pacific Fleet would dispatch ships to the Indochinese coast to support Free French forces in the region. It was a good strategy in theory, but the Allies were denied the chance to put it in practice; a week after the Manchester summit Vichy French colonial administrators in Hanoi officially gave Tokyo the green light to occupy Indochina.

That didn’t stop Allied intelligence services from supporting the Free French, however. Through regional field offices in New Delhi and Manila, Britain’s SOE and America’s OSS did everything possible to get arms and other materiel to the Free French troops now fighting a full- blown guerrilla war behind the lines in French Indochina; the Russian Department of External Security did its part by infiltrating teams of agents into Japanese-occupied territory to keep the JPA and its Vichy French collaborators off balance. The leader of one of those teams, a former metalworker named Nikita Khrushchev, would later go on to lead the Russian Federation into the Atomic Age as a three-term premier.

During the late summer and early fall of 1940, Swiss and Swedish diplomats tried endlessly to arrange conferences between Japan and its Western adversaries in hopes of averting what in most quarters was by now considered an almost inevitable Pacific war. Not surprisingly the expansionist Yamagida regime rejected all attempts by the neutrals to start even a half-hearted dialogue with Washington, Moscow, or London. For that matter, public sentiment in most quarters of the West seemed to be increasingly in favor of a winner-take-all showdown with Tokyo. A rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in August of 1940 drew crowds of at least 150,000 to hear some of Great Britain’s most prominent social and political leaders demand that the Churchill government take swift and decisive military action against the Yamagida regime; a week later protesters at Times Square in New York hung Yamagida and war minister Hideki Tojo in effigy. In Moscow Alexander Kerensky, making one of his last public appearances before his untimely death from heart failure, addressed a massive crowd in Red Square urging the Livitnov government to-- in his words --“not forget the victims of tyranny in Asia”.

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For Livitnov, the Kerensky Red Square speech was an instance of preaching to the choir. From his first days as prime minister of the Russian Federation Livitnov had earned a reputation for being a stern opponent of the Liberation Society regime in Japan, and his actions since the Nazi conquest of western Europe had only served to enhance that reputation. The Liberation Society propaganda machine in Tokyo seldom if ever passed up a chances to issue vehement denunciations of the Russian leader as at the very least a junior deputy of Satan; the Russian Federal Army’s listening posts along the Siberian border and on Russia’s Pacific coast regularly picked up shortwave broadcasts out of Japan claiming Livitnov was guilty of all kinds of heinous crimes from eating the corpses of political prisoners to raping young girls in the Kremlin basement. The accusations were so patently far-fetched and easily disprovable that the Federal Army personnel monitoring the broadcasts sometimes burst out laughing.

To Livitnov, however, the bellicose tone of these accusations was no joke. However far-fetched and bogus the charges Tokyo leveled against him might be, the menace behind them was all too real. There was an undercurrent to them which suggested to Livitnov the Japanese People’s Army was psyching itself up either to launch an attack across Russia’s Siberian border or stage amphibious assaults on the Sakhalin Islands-- possibly both. For that matter, the Korean Democratic Union was showing ominous signs it might be gearing up for its own military showdown with the Russians; on September 1st routine Russian air force reconnaissance flights over the northern half of the Korean Peninsula revealed the Korean National Popular Navy(KNPN) had massively expanded its base at the port of Wonsan and was in the process of building its largest-ever surface warship.

When the British and American governments were alerted to what the Russian recon planes had found, it heightened fears in London and Washington that Yamagida was about to start a war in the Pacific, and by the time Roosevelt was officially inaugurated for his third term as President of the United States in January of 1941, the question was no longer if Japan would go to war with the Western Allies and Russia but where and when the first shots would be fired. Prospects for continued peace in the Pacific, already bleak to begin with, would nearly vanish altogether six months after Roosevelt’s inauguration; in a bold gambit aimed at breaking the seemingly interminable standoff between Hitler’s occupation troops in western Poland and the Russian Federal Army units defending the eastern half of Poland, the Germans started an offensive they dubbed Operation Barbarossa on June 22nd. Involving at least three million soldiers, Barbarossa had as its two principal objectives 1)the expulsion of all Russian forces from eastern Poland and 2)the eventual creation of a toehold on Russian soil in anticipation of the chance to make a drive for Moscow in the near future.

 To Livitnov’s and Roosevelt’s dismay the invaders achieved a number of stunning tactical successes against the Russian Federal Army in Poland. Within less than three weeks after Barbarossa was first launched, the Wehrmacht had overrun Warsaw and were pushing Russian troops back towards Poland’s eastern border; the Wehrmacht’s armored divisions in particular proved devastatingly effective when used in conjunction with Stuka dive bombers. Although Livitnov was determined to avoid causing a panic among his fellow countrymen or seeming unduly pessimistic, he nevertheless felt some kind of action had to be taken to ensure that the Russian government could continue to function even if worst came to worst and the Nazis succeeded in reaching Moscow. Accordingly, on July 15th he authorized his defense and interior ministries to draft preliminary plans for evacuating the government’s top officials and their staffs along with the official government archives to an emergency bunker complex safely tucked away in the Ural Mountains; he also directed the Russian foreign ministry to do everything it could to help foreign diplomats in Moscow to get to safety in the event the Germans made a serious attempt to capture the Russian capital.

Intelligence analysts in every major Allied capital feared the Japanese People’s Republic would capitalize on Russia’s troubles in Europe to strike at her Siberian border-- and sure enough on July 23rd, just over a month after Operation Barbarossa began, the JPA started a four-pronged attack across the Russian-Manchurian frontier, catching the Russian Federal Army’s Far Eastern border defenses at one of their weaker moments. Roosevelt and Churchill were aghast at this latest act of aggression by Tokyo; to them it seemed like just a question of time before the Japanese People’s Army turned its guns on Singapore and the Philippines...

To Be Continued