To say relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers were somewhat tense in the summer of 1941 is like saying the Titanic encountered a slight navigational problem on its maiden voyage. With British and French military forces still occupying Germany and a massive Red Army garrison holding Poland under its boot-heel, the German-Polish border was a veritable armed camp as the rival blocs engaged in what modern historians now describe as a“cold war” for possession of Europe’s collective soul. Stalin was trying to convert the European masses to the gospel of Communism while Churchill was simultaneously exhorting the people of Europe to reject it as an evil and corrupt philosophy which could only end in disaster for any nation foolish enough to adopt it as a system of government.

On the same day that the United States officially declared war against Japan, Joseph Stalin went before the Politburo to give a speech denouncing the British presence in Germany as “militant imperialism at its worst”. It mattered little to him that those British troops were on German soil in keeping with the surrender pact Germany had signed with the Allied powers a year earlier, or or that their mission in Germany was largely a defensive one meant to keep Germany’s borders secure while the Allies supervised the country’s postwar reconstruction. And it certainly didn’t matter to him in the least that to the rest of the world he might come off as a hypocrite denouncing the supposed aggressive intentions of other countries while he himself was engaging in very real and vicious aggression against Polish citizens-- the opportunity to fire up the Communist masses with a condemnation of the capitalist West was just too good to pass up.

In London and Paris(and Washington for that matter), Stalin’s speech was greeted mainly with a mix of cynical laughter and head- shaking disgust. On his watch the Soviet Union had earned itself a reputation as one of the worst aggressors on the face of the earth, and for its head of state to lecture another country about harboring imperialist ambitions struck the majority of Western diplomats and heads of state as hypocritical at best. At least one French diplomat familiar with the Soviet dictator’s expansionist mindset actually had to bite his lip to keep from bursting into laughter at Stalin’s revisionist version of Anglo-European history since 1938.

His reaction was mild compared to that of Winston Churchill, who blasted Stalin first in private conversations with his cabinet and then in a speech before the House of Commons five days after Stalin’s “militant imperialism” tirade. His House of Commons address was particularly blunt, accusing Stalin of trying to impose what he called “an iron curtain” of Marxist tyranny on central Europe. Those sentiments were shared by a majority of the British Parliament, and not every MP who felt that way was a right-winger: a substantial number of Socialist lawmakers also detested Stalin for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that they feared their cause would be tainted by association(however tenuous) with the Soviet ruler.

At the White House the reaction among Roosevelt’s foreign policy and defense advisors was mainly one of appalled disbelief. Secretary of State Cordell Hull in particular denounced the Stalin speech as “an exercise in dishonesty the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the snake offered Eve that apple”. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was of the opinion the speech was in effect an attempt by Stalin to incite further anti-Western sentiment among the Soviet people in advance of a future military showdown with the Western powers. And he wasn’t alone in thinking so; in an editorial printed in its June 27th edition, the Wall Street Journal denounced the Soviet dictator as “a vicious warmonger” and “an arsonist trying to burn down the house of human civilization” .

Suffice it to say that if any isolationists were still walking the corridors of power in Washington, they were keeping very quiet. Republicans and Democrats alike were calling on FDR to take on the Soviet bear in his own backyard at the first opportunity. However, such a confrontation was a still a long way off, as the newly begun conflict with Japan had top priority in American strategic planning at the time. The Soviet Union was a distant second on FDR’s list of most dangerous foreign adversaries-- and an extremely distant second at that. In Roosevelt’s eyes Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder, who at the time had been head of the party of almost twelve years, was more of a “red menace” to the American way of life than Stalin; Stalin was still ensconced behind Kremlin walls thousands of miles away, whereas Browder was operating practically on Roosevelt’s own doorstep.

It wasn’t until November of 1941, when U.S. troops in the Philippines were fighting the Japanese tooth and nail to keep the city of Manila from falling into enemy hands, that the War and Navy Departments started to draft contingency plans for fighting the Soviets. And even then those plans called largely for waging a defensive war in the Bering Straits to block any attempts by the Red Army to invade Alaska or Canada. The idea of going over to the attack against the Soviets was barely even a gleam in anybody’s eye at that point. General George C. Marshall, then U.S. Army Chief of Staff, had told Roosevelt as recently as the eve of the outbreak of the war with Japan that any attempt to wage war on the Soviet Union while the Japanese still posed a threat to the United States would be, in Marshall’s words, “committing national suicide”.

That same month, then-Soviet ambassador to Britain Ivan Maisky outraged the British public by accusing the Churchill government of plotting to launch a sneak attack on Soviet Arctic territories via Norway. As if that wasn’t enough to further inflame already red-hot anti-Soviet feeling in Britain, Maisky also alleged that Scotland Yard was routinely engaging in torture against British Marxists who had recently been arrested on charges of spying for Moscow. In view of the all-too-real atrocities the NKVD was engaging in against POWs and dissidents behind the walls of Dzhersinsky Square and the barbed wire of the Siberian gulags, one might have thought Maisky would be just a tad more cautious about accusing other nations’ police forces of torture, but the Kremlin’s hate for the anti-Communist Churchill administration was too intense.

By mid-January of 1942 the war of words between Moscow and London had grown every bit as intense as the shooting war between the Anglo-American coalition and Japan. British diplomats in Moscow were relentlessly harassed by the NKVD, while the Soviet embassy in London was the target of frequent protest by British anti-Communists who hurled everything from insults to bricks at the embassy windows; newspapers on both sides of Churchill’s “iron curtain” were chock full of editorials in which each side trashed the other as the very embodiment of pure evil; and university students were abandoning the classroom in favor of the parade ground as those young Englishmen or young Russians not already wearing a military uniform flocked to the nearest recruiting office to volunteer for their nation’s armies.

On February 3rd the already cold relationship between London and Moscow became downright frosty when the chief trade attaché for the British embassy in the Soviet Union was deported for reasons that in Churchill’s opinion were, at best, dubious. He viewed the attaché’s deportation as a blatant and calculated insult to the United Kingdom committed solely for the purpose of getting back at him for a speech he had given two weeks earlier in which he’d roundly condemned the Soviet government’s long-standing practice of sending dissidents to psychiatric hospitals as a form of punishment; neither he nor any of his top cabinet ministers believed for a moment the official Kremlin pretext for expelling the attaché(in a statement published by the state-run news agency TASS the attaché was falsely accused of having had improper relations with a charwoman working in his office).

If forcing Churchill to soften his attitude towards the U.S.S.R. was the main goal of the trade attaché’s expulsion, it backfired in the most predictable way anybody could imagine: the prime minister further stiffened his already bitter condemnations of Communism as a whole and the Soviet Union in particular. In some of his speeches to the House of Commons during the spring of 1942, one Daily Mail war correspondent wrote at the time, Churchill sounded as though he were ready to take on the Red Army single-handed. Even British leftists who before the war had sharply opposed him on most other issues were were coming to agree with his tough anti-Stalin attitudes: no less a literary light than science fiction author and longtime advocate of socialism H.G. Wells submitted an opinion article to the Guardian in April of 1942 denouncing Stalin in harsh terms even Churchill hadn’t thought of using. For his trouble, Wells was subsequently blasted by the official Kremlin newspaper Pravda as “a craven traitor to and an enemy of the working class”.

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The incident that finally put the Soviet Union and Great Britain irrevocably on the road to war happened in August of 1942, just over three months after the U.S. Pacific Fleet wiped out the cream of Japan’s aircraft carrier force in the Battle of Midway. It happened at a Soviet guard post on the German-Polish border just a short drive from the German town of Neustadt. A British patrol on the German side of the border line noticed some suspicious activity going on in the vicinity of the Soviet outpost and immediately took up defensive positions; just minutes later the patrol leader heard gunshots coming from the direction of the Soviet guard post and gave his own men the order to return fire. The official Soviet account of the incident would later claim their border guards had been trying to stop a spy from illegally crossing the frontier and the British had shot at the guards without provocation; the British responded by asserting the Soviets had been trying to mount a ‘black ops’ raid on German territory and the British frontier patrol had caught them in the act.

In truth it’s uncertain even now who fired the first shot in what would later became popularly known in the Western press as “the Neustadt incident”. But that hardly made much difference to Stalin; to him the British soldiers’ actions in the border skirmish were a blatant act of imperialist aggression against the Soviet Union, and he was determined to avenge it at any cost. On August 8th, 1942, two days after the incident, the Marxist dictator ordered Soviet bomber squadrons in occupied Poland to bomb British military outposts near the city of Frankfurt-an-den-Oder in order to-- as he saw it --teach Whitehall a lesson. The smoldering embers of Anglo-Soviet hostility were about to turn into a blazing inferno....

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It has been recorded as one of the profound ironies of modern history that while the Soviet Union was celebrating May Day 1942, its primary ideological and economic nemesis was preparing for a showdown with the Imperial Japanese Navy on which would hinge the ultimate success or failure of America’s war effort in the Pacific theater. Although the IJN had been dealt some serious blows at Pearl Harbor and in the failed Japanese campaign to conquer the Philippine Islands, it still posed a major threat to U.S. security in the Far East. So in January of 1942 the U.S. Pacific Fleet senior command staff devised a top secret plan to neutralize the IJN’s most potent weapon: its carrier fleet.

Taking advantage of their vast collection of intelligence data on the supposedly secret Japanese naval codes, U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters put out a bogus radio message suggesting that the fresh water condensers at the American naval base on the island of Midway were malfunction. They suspected that Midway Island was the“AF” referred to in dispatches between IJN headquarters in Tokyo and the captains attached to the IJN’s main carrier force, and soon they were proven right in their suspicions. Three days after the dispatch about the nonexistent condenser breakdown was transmitted, the IJN admiralty sent a cable to its carrier commanders advising them that AF was having difficulty with its fresh water condenser systems.

With the IJN having taken the bait, it now fell to the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carrier flotilla to spring the trap. On May 2nd, 1942 a contingent of dive bombers and torpedo planes operating from the Yorktown, the Lexington, the Hornet, and the Enterprise hit the Japanese Midway invasion fleet just as that fleet’s own carriers were getting ready to launch their strike aircraft against Midway’s shore batteries. While the torpedo planes sustained horrific losses in the first wave of the American air strike, the dive bombers were able to penetrate the Japanese air cover and score critical hits on the enemy carrier force. By noon two carriers had been sunk, a third turned into a blazing inferno, and a fourth severely crippled. Just after 2:30 PM the last remaining carrier, damaged beyond repair and shorn of virtually her entire combat plane inventory, was scuttled by her own crew.

The destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s elite carrier group at Midway marked the beginning of the end for Tokyo’s expansionist ambitions in the Pacific. With their campaign in the Philippines having stalled as a result of fierce American opposition on those islands, and their occupation of French Indochina being challenged by increasingly assertive Vietnamese nationalist rebels, the loss of hundreds of the IJN’s best naval aviators and four of their most effective carriers, Japan was thrust irrevocably on the defensive. Though it would take the better part of a year and a half for the Americans and their British allies to finish the task of crushing the militaristic Tojo regime, there was no longer any doubt
the initiative had passed to the Allies for good....