Summary: In the first two chapters of this series we analyzed the events leading to the outbreak of war between the United States and Franco’s Spain in 1940 and some of the ripple effects which Spain’s entry into World War II had on Japan and the Soviet Union. In this installment we’ll look back at Japan’s first naval battle with the U.S. Pacific fleet and Stalin’s decision to initiate a pre-emptive attack on Germany in the spring of 1941..

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Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his third term as chief executive facing the greatest threat to American security any U.S. president had been confronted with since the War of 1812. Not only was the Hitler-Franco alliance still intent on invading America’s east coast in spite of the Virginia fiasco, but the Empire of Japan was gearing up to strike at American military bases in the Pacific region. What alarmed the White House than the threat of a Japanese attack in the Pacific was the unfortunate fact that U.S. intelligence analysts had little clue as to where the blow would fall when it came. The Imperial naval command staff in Tokyo seemed to be aiming at a thousand different targets at once-- and doing their level best to try and dupe Washington about which target they were going to fire at first.

One area that was of vital importance to both sides was the Hawaiian Islands; Washington viewed Hawaii as a critical linchpin in its Pacific defenses, while Tokyo saw the islands as both a danger to their fleet’s operations and a potential launch pad for an invasion of the west coast of the American mainland. Perhaps the most critical military installation on the islands was the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, home to what was then the largest assemblage of battleships in the possession of any Pacific naval power. A respected Imperial Navy admiral named Isoroku Yamamoto had been analyzing U.S. naval strategy and used his expertise in naval aviation to formulate an audacious plan for taking out the American battleships in one fell swoop. His proposal was to organize a carrier task force and send it across the Pacific using a route that would enable them to bypass any heavily traveled shipping lanes in the region; once the carriers got within striking distance of Hawaii, they would launch dive bombers and torpedo planes to smash the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s surface warships in one fell swoop.

As an offshoot of this ambitious plan, Yamamoto commissioned the Imperial Navy’s top technical experts to develop and build a torpedo specifically configured to operate inside the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Such a torpedo, Yamamoto suggested, would make it much easier for the carriers to fulfill their task. Many of Yamamoto’s critics had their doubts about the wisdom of his idea, but his supporters viewed the attack plan as Japan’s best hope for ensuring she could pursue her territorial ambitions in the Far East undisturbed by American naval or air power. It took weeks of persuasion and intense, sometimes vehement arguments to bring the doubters around, but eventually even Yamamoto’s toughest critics were persuaded of the wisdom of his strategy.

It’s hard to say whether Yamamoto would have succeeded in raiding Pearl Harbor had Britain not collapsed in 1940 and triggered an early declaration of war by the United States against the Axis, but with the U.S. fully alerted to the danger she faced from both east and west-- and Washington having broken Japan’s naval and diplomatic ciphers long before she entered the war --Yamamoto’s gambit was doomed to fail from the outset. Modern Japanese naval history scholars have said that the operational plans for the Pearl Harbor attack were so seriously flawed it was a surprise Yamamoto’s Hawaii task force wasn’t wiped out to the last supply tender.

As it was, Japan would start her war with the United States with the very weapon she prized the most-- her navy --sharply diminished in offensive capacity. During the eleven days it took for Yamamoto’s task force to make the journey from its home port at Nagasaki to its chosen targets in the Hawaiian Islands, the U.S. military in Hawaii had been quietly laying an ambush for the Japanese flotilla. While Roosevelt’s military intelligence advisors hadn’t yet fit together all the pieces of the puzzle, they had a clear enough picture of Yamamoto’s intention to suspect he intended to launch at least two waves of air strikes at Pearl Harbor-- possibly three.

On March 16th, 1941, just under two months to the day after FDR was inaugurated for an unprecedented third term as President of the United States, the Japanese carrier force arrived to its designated launch point for the first wave of air attacks against Pearl Harbor. Just as that first wave was about to be launched, a lookout on one of the lead carriers spotted a sizable formation of U.S. aircraft coming directly towards the lead Japanese carrier, the Hiryu. The commander of the Japanese task force, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, ordered the strike planes off Hiryu’s deck immediately, but before her crew could fulfill the admiral’s directive squadrons of F4F Wildcats were pouncing on the unlucky carrier’s air combat patrols and attack planes were deploying bombs and torpedoes against Hiryu and her sister ships Akagi, Soryu, and Kaga. In the space of less than two hours the American planes took out Hiryu, Soryu, and Kaga and left Akagi so severely damaged that her own captain chose to scuttle her rather than risk it falling into U.S. hands.

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Around the same time that the Japanese carrier task force was being annihilated, Joseph Stalin was reviewing his top generals’ final draft of a proposed battle plan for a pre-emptive invasion of German- occupied western Poland. The proposed assault, an ambitious four-front campaign code-named Operation Nevsky in honor of 13th-century Russian military hero Alexander Nevsky, would start with a blitzkrieg thrust over the demarcation line separating the Soviet and German occupation zones in Poland; after the German armies in western Poland had been neutralized, the Soviet invasion forces would enter Germany proper and whittle away at the rest of the Wehrmacht until it collapsed and the Nazi regime either surrendered or was wiped out. The two most critical objectives of Operation Nevsky were Berlin, the Reich’s capital, and Warsaw, headquarters of the so-called General Government through which the Nazis ruled their occupation zones in Poland. Once the Reich had been beaten into submission, Stalin intended to have its top military and political leaders liquidated following a public trial in Moscow.

On March 21st, three days after the Japanese debacle at Pearl Harbor, Stalin officially approved the battle plan for Operation Nevsky; the attack was, fittingly, scheduled to commence on May Day with the goal of defeating Germany by June 15th. Although it would take somewhat longer than Stalin expected to vanquish the Wehrmacht legions in the East, Operation Nevsky can certainly be credited with playing a substantial role in bringing about the ultimate collapse of the Third Reich. In turn the eventual success of Operation Nevsky can be attributed to the diligence and zeal of the man who was mainly responsible for executing it, a former Czarist cavalry officer-turned- Red Army marshal named Georgi Zhukov. Zhukov, who had previously led a successful border war against the Japanese in 1939, was mindful of the value of tanks in modern warfare, and accordingly he deployed his best armored regiments in the vanguard of the invasion force which he was amassing along the demarcation line between the Soviet and German occupation zones in Poland.

Zhukov also built up a sizable contingent of airborne troops to strike behind the German lines once the invasion was underway. He had seen the effectiveness of the German Fallschirmjager in securing the Nazi conquest of continental western Europe and Great Britain; he was sure the Red Army’s own paratroop regiments could achieve similar if not better results against German troops in Poland. To improve the Red Army paratroopers’ chances of accomplishing their mission, Zhukov had decided to schedule most of their drops to happen in the early morning hours, when German alertness was likely to be at its lowest. This was just one of many decisions by Zhukov that would spell disaster for the Wehrmacht when the Soviet invasion forces finally breached the German occupation zone in Poland...

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