Summary: In the first chapter of this series we analyzed the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war between the United States and Franco’s Spain in 1940. In this installment we’ll start to look at the ripple effects that Spain’s entry into the Second World War had on two of the war’s other combatants, Japan and the Soviet Union.

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The initial reaction of the Japanese military high command to the news of the naval clash between Spain and the United States off the Virginia coastline was somewhat mixed. While they welcomed the idea of Washington being distracted from Japan’s expansion agenda in the Far East by the outbreak of war in the Atlantic, at the same time they fretted that every ounce of material and manpower the European Axis powers committed to this new conflict might mean less available logistical support for their own efforts to tighten their grip on the colonial holdings they’d seized from Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands after those countries were overrun by the Nazis. To minimize the risk of war breaking out between Japan and the Soviet Union before the United States had been completely neutralized, then- foreign minister Daisuke Matsuoka traveled to Moscow in November of 1940 to meet with Soviet foreign minister Vycheslav Molotov and open negotiations for a non-aggression pact between the two countries.

Back in the U.S., the Spanish attempt to invade Virginia had effectively destroyed the presidential hopes of Franklin Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the 1940 elections, former Wall Street attorney Wendell Wilkie. Before the invasion attempt Wilkie’s antiwar platform had enjoyed the support of a substantial part of the American public; after the invasion try, however, even many of those who had once been ardent isolationists were clamoring for President Roosevelt to strike back at the Axis by any means possible. No less a figure than Charles Lindbergh, who just a few months earlier had been strenuously arguing against any U.S. involvement whatsoever in any European conflict, now demanded an all-out bombing campaign to wipe out the German military and industrial infrastructure in occupied Europe. Conducting such an operation was easier said than done considering that there weren’t any bombers in the U.S. armed forces’ inventory in those days capable of trans-continental flight, but Lindbergh’s statement reflected the sea change in attitudes the Spanish attempt to invade Virginia had brought about.

No sooner had the last of the surviving ships from what was left of the invasion force turned around and started retiring home to the Spanish coast than people started flocking to recruiting stations all over the United States. The lines at some of these stations stretched out so long down the street recruiters actually had to tell would-be soldiers and sailors to go home and come back the next day. The Red Cross reported a major spike in civilian blood donations within the first 48 hours after Spain went to war with America; women’s groups began organizing rallies to encourage housewives to do whatever they could on the home front to help the U.S. win this new conflict with the Falangists in Madrid. Even the colorful characters of the Sunday funnies got drafted into the budding war effort; the week after the U.S. and Spanish fleets did battle off the Virginia coast a special edition of Terry And The Pirates encouraged readers to report to the nearest recruiting station to sign up for the armed forces.

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Roosevelt won re-election to the presidency by a convincing margin, taking 40 of 48 states from Wendell Wilkie. Part of this was a reluctance to change horses in mid-stream, but there was also a genuine and deep conviction among much of the electorate that FDR was the only man who could lead the United States through its burgeoning war with the Axis powers. The defeat of the Spanish attempt to land troops in Virginia had done nothing to calm fears of an impending Axis assault on the continental U.S.; if anything, much of the public was convinced the Spanish attack was simply a warm-up for a much larger Axis landing operation-- this time led by the Germans. Roosevelt’s first official presidential act following his election victory was to sign an executive order establishing a so-called Enemy Alien Registry Committee which would collect information on U.S. citizens of Spanish, German, Italian, or Japanese descent and use it to determine whether or not those people posed a risk to American national security. Civil libertarians at the time warned that the Registry Committee was just the first step in a Roosevelt power grab that, unless it were checked, would culminate in the transformation of America into the very kind of fascist dictatorship American soldiers were taking up arms to fight.

But such complaints found little sympathy with most Americans; all that mattered to them was the hard truth that their country was under attack by a fascist empire determined to bring the world under its heel. From their perspective the Registry Committee was nothing more or less than an unfortunate necessity for protecting the country against terrorism or sabotage. Indeed, some Americans felt that the committee’s powers should be expanded even further to enable it to go after potential Communist fifth columnists as well as the fascist ones the committee had originally been established to weed out. (A decade after the Spanish attempt to invade Virginia was thwarted, the idea of a special government body to investigate suspected Marxist subversion would give rise to Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Un-American Activities Committee.)

Two weeks after Roosevelt was re-elected, U.S. intelligence agents inside occupied Europe cabled Washington with the grim news that the Axis powers were beginning preparations for another attempt at establishing a toehold in the New World. Their target this time: Greenland, a former Danish territory now the joint protection of the United States and Canada. In a meeting with Franco on November 3rd in Munich Hitler told the Spanish dictator: “The key to gaining control of North America lies in Greenland. Once we have subjugated her, the rest of the North American continent will fall into our hands like a ripe plum.” And it wasn’t just the Führer who believed a successful occupation of Greenland could pave the way for the final defeat of the United States and Canada-- in Tokyo the Imperial Japanese Army general staff was keeping a close eye on developments in the Atlantic with the expectation that a protracted war between the United States and the Hitler-Franco alliance would leave America so debilitated Japan could simply swoop in and help itself to American bases in the Pacific.

With that in mind, Imperial Japanese Navy admiral and carrier aviation strategist Isoroku Yamamoto convened a special meeting of his senior staff on November 13th to draft a preliminary battle plan for attacking U.S. military bases in Hawaii and the Philippines, with special attention to the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was known to house most of the U.S, Navy’s Pacific battleship force, and IJN intelligence experts had picked up signs that the Pacific fleet’s major aircraft carriers might also be docket there; Yamamoto’s hope was to catch all these vessels there at the same time and neutralize American naval striking power in one fell swoop with a massive air strike.

There were a host of challenges that had to be tackled in order for Yamamoto’s proposed air strike to work, not the least of which was the daunting task of somehow managing to shepherd a massive naval task force 5000 nautical miles across the northern Pacific without either being detected by the Americans or running into heavy storms en route to their intended target. And then once the task force did reach its target, Nagumo’s carrier pilots had to be absolutely sure the vessels docked at Pearl were caught totally by surprise when the torpedoes and bombs started dropping. But perhaps the biggest problem to solve-- and one his staff would turn out to be unable to lick-- was ascertaining whether the U.S. Pacific fleet’s main aircraft carriers would in fact be at the harbor at the time of the attack.

And even putting aside all of those obstacles, Yamamoto’s staff still had to figure out a way to make a torpedo capable of operating in Pearl’s shallow waters. In late 1940 most torpedo classes had been designed to operate in depths of seventy-five feet or more, and Pearl Harbor is just forty feet deep. The engineers on Yamamoto’s staff went through many a sleepless night trying to untangle that particular knot before finally coming up with a design which might work in forty feet of water or less. Once they had the right model for the task at hand, the engineers proceeded to put it through a rigorous series of tests in order to make certain the new torpedo-- dubbed “the Long Lance” by its inventors --would actually work as promised.

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In Moscow Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin saw in the Spanish attempt to invade Virginia both a warning and an opportunity-- a warning of possible Axis aggression against Mother Russia in the near future, and an opportunity to strike at the Nazis while Hitler’s concentration was focused on the United States. Two weeks after Spain went to war with the United States, Stalin ordered the Red Army general staff to draft the preliminary outlines of a battle plan for a pre-emptive attack on German military forces in occupied Poland and eastern Germany....

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