The Honor of Spies

The backstabbing--"Operation Barbarossa," named in honor of Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor--was the largest attack of the Second World War, and initially the most successful. It began on 22 June 1941.

It was brilliantly planned, brilliantly executed, and took the Russians entirely by surprise.

On 15 September, German forces began the siege of Leningrad. They--and almost everyone else--thought it would be over in about a month. With that in mind, the Germans on 2 October 1941 began their march on Moscow and soon the gilded tops of the Soviet capital's churches could be seen through German binoculars.

Before things (including the weather and Soviet tenacity) turned against them, the Germans held 750,000 square miles and had nearly 100 million people under their boot.

On 5 December, the attack on Moscow was called off. Winter had set in, and the Germans were simply unprepared to fight in the terrible cold. The troops were freezing and could not be properly supplied. Moscow could wait until spring.

Two days later--7 December 1941, a date President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared "would live in infamy"--the Japanese attacked the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. That, too, was a brilliant operation, one meticulously planned, effectively carried out, and which took the Americans by complete surprise. When it was over, most American battleships in the Pacific were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

And things promptly got worse.

On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. On Christmas Day 1941, Japan took Hong Kong, and on 2 January 1942, Manila was declared an open city and fell to the Japanese.

With the fall of all the Philippines to the Japanese only a matter of time, and aware that the morale of the American people was as low as it had ever been--and sinking--President Roosevelt authorized a near-suicidal bombing attack on Japan.

On 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led a small flight of B-25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of an aircraft carrier to Tokyo. The physical damage they caused was minimal, but the damage to Japanese pride was enormous. And the United States could finally claim to be fighting back.

Eighteen days later, on 6 May 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wain-wright surrendered the Philippines to the Japanese. It was the largest surrender in U.S. history.