Summary: In the first three 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 the start of hostilities between the U.S. and Japan the following year. In this installment we’ll look back at the Soviet invasion of Germany, Operation Nevsky, and the historic naval battle between the main Spanish and U.S. Atlantic fleets off Greenland in early 1942.

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To refer to Operation Nevsky as audacious would barely even begin to scratch the surface of how risky the Red Army’s battle plan for the invasion of Germany actually was. Stalin and his generals were betting heavy stakes on the invasion’s success or failure-- not the least of those stakes being the Soviet Union’s very existence. They were keenly aware that if the preemptive assault didn’t succeed in catching German forces totally by surprise Hitler would launch a fierce counterattack which might well smash the Red Army to pieces. Therefore they made it a top priority to verify that they had accurate intelligence about the numbers and deployment of Wehrmacht divisions in Germany proper and in the German-occupied western half of Poland. They also made it a point to ratchet up the number of reconnaissance flights by Soviet air force planes over German territory.

     Simultaneously the Red Army hurried to complete its buildup of troops, armored vehicles, and artillery in those sectors of eastern Poland directly facing the invasion zone. Included among the ranks of the advance units in the Soviet invasion force was a contingent of ex- Polish Army POWs who’d escaped from German concentration camps and now wanted to resume the fight to liberate their homeland from the Nazis; not surprisingly, a considerable number of these men were Communists who hoped that a successful campaign against the Germans would clear the way for the establishment of a Marxist government in Poland after the war was over. This ambition would cause no end of complications in relations between Communist and non-Communist Polish fighters once the Nevsky campaign was launched.

     The first wave of troops in the Red Army invasion force would be accompanied by special NKVD detachments whose chief assignment was to liquidate civilian VIPs and high-ranking Wehrmacht and SS officers in the German occupation zone in Poland. Their secondary mission was to serve as “blocking” units-- i.e., to discourage the Red Army’s troops from retreating should the invasion turn sour. “Not one step back” was Stalin’s famous directive; it was his intention that the Wehrmacht, if worst came to worst, should bleed themselves white while fighting his own troops so that Germany would eventually be forced to sue for peace no matter what happened with Operation Nevsky.  

     On April 29th, 1941-- Hitler’s 52nd birthday --the Red Army field commanders designated to lead the first wave of Operation Nevsky got a brief coded message from the Commissariat of Defense headquarters back in Moscow giving them the final go-ahead to launch the invasion of the German occupation zone in Poland. 48 hours later, while the annual May Day parade was marching through Red Square, Joseph Stalin announced to a cheering crowd of Muscovites that Soviet troops were, in his words, “striking a glorious blow in the defense of our Motherland against the German fascist hordes”. In Berlin, an infuriated Adolf Hitler declared the invasion “an unforgivable betrayal” and vowed the Wehrmacht would, in his words, “turn the Vistula red with the blood of Stalin’s mongrel hordes”.

      In those parts of the world not under Axis occupation the news of the Soviet preemptive attack on Germany and German-occupied western Poland was received with disbelief if not outright shock. Neither the French and British governments-in-exile nor the United States-- or for that matter the members of the Commonwealth --had had the vaguest idea the Soviets were even contemplating something like this till the first wave of Red Army tanks and infantry was crossing the demarcation line separating the German and Soviet occupation zones in Poland. Franklin Roosevelt nearly fainted from amazement when a White House aide first told him of Operation Nevsky. Winston Churchill, from the Free British government’s headquarters in Toronto, gave a statement urging all Free British resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied England to do everything they could to support the Soviet cause, an extraordinary action on his part given his longtime opposition to Communism.

      For weeks it looked as if the German occupation forces in Poland might collapse under the hammerblow of the Soviet surprise attack. And a number of Wehrmacht divisions in the East actually did collapse from the horrific losses inflicted on them by the Red Army; by June 8, just over a month after Operation Nevsky had started, Soviet advance forces were less than fifteen miles from the Polish-German border. In a rage over what he viewed as his generals’ ineptitude in the face of the Red Army’s phenomenally successful assault, Hitler sacked nearly half the Wehrmacht high command and assumed direct control of the German armed forces on the eastern front; still, the fact that German soldiers were on the defensive against an enemy the Nazis had claimed were racially inferior to them gave leaders on both the Allied and Axis sides pause for thought...

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       At first, the events in the East didn’t seem to have much of an effect on Francisco Franco’s quest to avenge Spain’s defeat in its 1898 war with the United States. He was still as determined as before to settle accounts with Washington; in fact, some historians suggest Operation Nevsky might actually have served to heighten Franco’s drive to crush the United States, since a successful Soviet penetration into Germany proper might in turn put Spain in jeopardy of Communist attack and Franco wanted to end the war before Roosevelt and Stalin were able to combine forces to smash the Hitler-Franco alliance. But as Franco’s German allies sustained more and more casualties at the hands of the Red Army, it gradually became clear that the Wehrmacht would require a measure of assistance from Spain in order to preserve Axis domination of continental Europe.

      With that in mind, on May 26th Franco ordered the creation of a special Spanish army detachment known as the “el Division Azul”(“the Blue Division”) whose specific purpose would be to fight on the German side on the Eastern Front and thus minimize the need for the Wehrmacht to transfer any of its own troops from the west. Accompanying the Blue Division to the Russian front would be a squadron of Spanish air force fighters flown by Falangist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. One of the major consequences of Franco’s decision was that the Spanish army would have fewer men available to take on the United States if or when Madrid decided to make another attempt to land troops on U.S. soil; a second major result was that Spanish Communists, outraged by Franco’s decision to co-operate with Hitler on the Russian front, would set up a guerrilla movement in the hinterlands of Spain with the primary goal of toppling the Falangist regime.

       But if the Spanish army’s capacity for waging war on America had been diminished, the Spanish navy still remained a major threat to American security interests. In fact, during the two years since the Virginia fiasco the Spanish Atlantic fleet had made good many of its losses from that engagement(with a bit of assistance from German shipyards) and was getting ready to confront the U.S. Atlantic fleet once again. Operation Tiburon(“Shark”) would mark the second time since the Axis conquest of Britain that Franco sought to take the fight to the American homefront; originally conceived as a direct naval assault aimed at the New York-New Jersey shoreline, Tiburon was subsequently modified to start with bombardments of Allied bases in Greenland, the Canadian maritime provinces, and the New England states and then move on to smash the U.S. Atlantic fleet in a set-piece battle that the Spanish admiralty envisioned as taking place off the mouth of New York Harbor.

      At first Franco expected to launch Operation Tiburon no later than October of 1941. But as the Axis campaign in Russia bogged down and anti- Nazi guerrilla activity in Britain escalated, the Spanish dictator found it necessary to postpone Tiburon twice during the second half of 1941 and again in January of 1942. When word reached the German embassy in Madrid that Franco might delay the operation a fourth time, an impatient Hitler phoned the Spanish dictator to demand he commence Tiburon without further delay. In the end that impatience, combined with the determination of the White House not to let the Axis powers gain a foothold anywhere near the North American continent, would cost Franco dearly when the Spanish navy and marines finally launched their second attempt to breach the American eastern seaboard.

      While Hitler and Franco bickered over when and where Tiburon should start, the U.S. Atlantic fleet and the Royal Canadian Navy quietly set up a trap for the Axis off the coast of Greenland. Appropriately codenamed as Operation Mousetrap, the battle plan for repulsing the invasion forces was to lie in wait for them until they came within sight of Greenland’s coast and then set upon in a massive air and naval bombardment that would break the armada in two. With most of the U.S. Navy’s carrier strength committed to guarding American bases in the Pacific against the Japanese, the chief responsibility for providing air support in Operation Mousetrap would fall to land-based Allied squads in Greenland and the Canadian Maritimes; three Army Air Corps squadrons stationed in eastern Maine would act as a reserve force if necessary.

     On March 22nd, 1942 the main body of the Axis invasion force was sighted off the Greenland coast; within minutes after the sighting was first reported Allied forces sprang into action to carry out the first phase of Operation Mousetrap. The German and Spanish forces involved in the attempt to invade Greenland didn’t even realize they were in trouble until the lead Kriegsmarine U-boat in the Axis naval contingent was sunk by U.S. Army Air Corps dive bombers. By then, the would-be invaders were trapped in an inexorably and quickly shrinking pocket as U.S. naval and air forces, supported by Canadian and Free British units, harassed the German and Spanish flotillas like hounds driving a wounded stag into the hunter’s crosshairs.

     In one of the shortest and most intense naval battles of the war, perhaps in all of human history, the Allied naval forces wiped out most of the invasion fleet in the space of less than two hours; the remnants of the German-Spanish landing contingent beached on Greenland’s eastern coast, where battalions of U.S. Marines crushed Franco and Hitler’s last hope of establishing a foothold on the American east coast. Just a few nautical miles off this improvised beachhead, Spanish and German troops watched in horror as the battleship 18. de Julio, then the flagship of Franco’s Atlantic fleet, sank from multiple direct hits by Allied bombs. With 18. de Julio out of action the Axis fleet was effectively vanquished; not wanting to risk seeing their remaining vessels meet a similar deadly fate, the highest-ranking surviving captains in the Axis task force gave the order for the remnants of the invasion force to withdraw and head back to Spain at the fastest speed possible.

     Hitler was beside himself with fury when news of the invasion force’s defeat reached Berlin that evening. In a rage, he telephoned the Spanish ambassador to Germany and berated him in a four-hour tirade which blamed the Franco government for just about everything that had gone wrong with Operation Tiburon. The small but important detail that Hitler himself had pressured Franco to mount the invasion attempt before his Atlantic fleet was fully prepared to do so got conveniently ignored. In fact, in what was to prove to be Hitler’s final wartime summit with Franco the Führer gave his Spanish counterpart a tongue-lashing that was incredibly vicious even by Hitler’s own notorious standards; he all but accused the Caudillo of deliberately sabotaging Axis plans for the invasion and conquest of North America.

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     The defeat of Operation Tiburon did more than just crush Axis hopes for gaining a foothold in North America and sour German-Spanish relations; it also drained away personnel and material resources that would prove to be desperately needed in the Axis struggle to maintain the fascist grip on continental Europe. Both the Free British partisan forces within occupied Britain and the Red Army on the Eastern Front sensed Hitler and his allies had been weakened by the Greenland disaster-- a weakness they didn't waste much time exploiting.

     Shortly after the demise of the Tiburon invasion force the Red Army, whose offensive operations on the Eastern Front had been badly stalled for several months, regained the initiative by launching a massive tank strike against German occupation troops at the Polish city of Krakow. Krakow fell to the Soviets within forty-eight hours. Three days after Krakow’s capture Free British partisans raided the SS garrison in Manchester, catching the Waffen-SS personnel stationed there utterly off-guard. The raid also led to the death of one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen; SS deputy chief and Bohemia-Moravia overlord Reinhard Heydrich, who was in Manchester for an inspection tour of the local garrison, was fatally wounded by partisan snipers and died en route to the hospital.

     Hitler was beside himself with rage when he heard of Heydrich’s death and ordered the entire city of Manchester wiped off the face of the earth. That proved easier said than done, however, as the Free British partisans fought like demons against the Waffen-SS detachments sent to carry out the Führer’s directive. After more than three days of bitter resistance which rivaled anything seen during the Nazi invasion of Britain in 1940 and also surpassed any battle fought on British soil other than the Norman conquest of 1066, the battered remnants of the Waffen-SS assault force departed the city in one of the most disorganized retreats ever carried out by a German military unit. Seeing an opportunity to improve his status within the Nazi hierarchy, Luftwaffe C-in-C Reichmarschall Hermann Goering offered to take over the task of reprisal against Manchester; Hitler immediately took him up on the offer, and within twelve hours after the Waffen-SS pulled out of the city a squadron of Heinkel bombers took off from an airfield just east of Liverpool to bomb Manchester into oblivion.

     But if the Nazis thought that obliterating one of Britain’s oldest cities would be sufficient to cow the Free British resistance forces into capitulation, they learned within a mere thirty-six hours how wrong they were. The last Heinkel bomber crew had barely finished their debriefings with Luftwaffe intelligence officials before the partisan units struck in a series of savage attacks of their own against German military outposts and civil occupation facilities throughout the UK. These raids, which one American newspaper correspondent would later dub “the second Night of the Long Knives”, shook the Nazi occupation authorities to the core and cast a grave doubt on Hitler’s dreams of a thousand-year Reich. They also had an unexpected effect on the fortunes of one of the Reich’s most senior naval commanders: Kriegsmarine commander-in-chief Admiral Erich Raeder, who as Hitler’s top naval leader bore responsibility for guarding the waters off occupied Britain against attempts to smuggle weapons to the Free British resistance, was cashiered from his post shortly after the guerrilla raids and would spend the rest of the war as an instructor at Germany’s naval academy. In Hitler’s twisted logic, Raeder was to blame for the failure to more properly invest in and deploy U-boats to interdict the smugglers; Hitler’s own decision to emphasize the construction of huge and clumsy battleships and battlecruisers at the expense of the lighter and swifter U-boats had nothing to do with it. Raeder didn’t suffer alone, however-- his top submarine officer, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, was unceremoniously court-martialed on trumped-up insubordination charges and stripped of his rank. Doenitz would spend the rest of the war as a lowly junior lieutenant at the cadet academy in Flensburg.

   Indeed, the entire German U-boat arm, only two years earlier the pride of the Kriegsmarine, began falling into disgrace in the eyes of the German people as the tide of the war continued to turn against the Axis. A tidal wave of resignation letters flooded the desks of Kriegsmarine clerks back in Berlin during the late spring and early summer of 1942; veteran naval personnel fled the U-boat service in droves and younger seaman were loath to enter it. Some NCOs already in the U-boat fleet scrambled desperately to obtain transfers to other branches of the Kriegsmarine, or else drank themselves into an early grave. Raeder’s successors as commander-in-chief of the German navy quickly confronted with a spike in suicide rates among U-boat crews, and when they were unable to remedy this problem they wound up being sacked almost as quickly as Raeder himself had been.

   Nor were the other branches of the German armed forces immune against morale problems. The combined strain of the continuing guerrilla conflict in occupied Britain and the war with the Soviets in the East was draining the fighting spirit of the Wehrmacht; the inability to strike directly at the United States was hurting the collective spirits of the Luftwaffe; and even in certain elements of the elite Waffen-SS there was a nagging sense (though no SS man dared to say it openly) that the Reich’s best days might be behind it. As bad as things were for the Axis, however, they were about to get noticeably worse...

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