Unlikely Comrades in Arms

It is important to realize that in developing their blitzkrieg doctrine (“Blueprint for Blitzkrieg,” June 2007), the Germans had learned a good deal from the Soviets by testing tactics and weapons in the USSR in the 1920s up to 1933. The Soviet government secretly invited members of the German General Staff (including officers who, ironically, were to become Wehrmacht commanders in the German attack on the USSR in June 1941), field and staff officers, weapons designers, and industrialists to the Soviet Union. There, by order of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo, the Russians and Germans manufactured and test flew, for instance, the first Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber. Besides testing mechanized warfare tactics, they also developed chemical weapons.

As Lennart Samuelson writes in his Plans for Stalin’s War Machine:

“In theory and in practice, the Soviet Union [in the 1920s] seems to have had the lead in modern mobile warfare over the Germans. After a visit to Germany in autumn of 1932, [Marshal Mikhail] Tukhachevskii reported on maneuvers in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder….In Tukhachevskii’s opinion, the German army lacked understanding of modern warfare: ‘The Reichswehr leadership cannot imagine the new form of combat which arises from the new weapons: aviation, tanks, automatic rifles.’ As the German army adopted principles close to the ones already developed in the Soviet doctrine, the Wehrmacht would become a formidable enemy that would change all earlier war scenarios.”

Albert L. Weeks
Sarasota, Fla.
Author, Stalin’s Other War:
Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941

Doolittle, Tokyo, and Kobe

In “Darkness over Kobe” (June 2007) there is a mistake concerning the Doolittle raid. None of the sixteen B-25s were shot down. All the planes but one ran out of gas, and either the crews bailed out over China or the planes crash-landed on the coast. One plane landed in Russia. The captured crewmen were held in prison in China.

Stan Cohen
Missoula, Mont.
Author, Destination Tokyo

As one who spent the war years in Kobe as a foreign national, I vividly remember the bombings, in particular the one on June 5, 1945, when what was left from the previous two major raids was obliterated.

That included the house where my family lived. We escaped with just the clothes on our backs and two suitcases that we had placed by the door for just such emergencies. But we were lucky, having escaped unscathed from the burning house. Many did not.

George Sidline
Portland, Ore.
Author, We’ll Survive

The Shot Heard ’Round Shanghai

Three months after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, my family was visiting my grandparents’ house on a sunny Sunday, October 24. On the way there, I noticed several British soldiers manning a machine gun, for we were inside the British concession of Shanghai. Things were very tense with all-out war looming. As always I brought my trusty Red Ryder BB gun my Uncle Kim gave me for Christmas. While playing in the garden, I heard the sound of a low-flying plane. Looking up, I saw a biwing Japanese plane flying about 100 feet above ground, heading straight for me. I could clearly see the red meatballs on the wings and the pilot’s goggles. Instinctively I raised my rifle and fired a shot at the plane. Then I heard the loudest machine gun fire in my life. Before I could reload, my grandfather grabbed me from behind and dragged me into the house.

The plane was actually shooting at the machine gun nest behind me. Later we visited the gun crew, who were all shot up, with one dead. This incident was well publicized. Unfortunately, my name was never mentioned, even though I fired the first shot. Instead I got the biggest chewing out for a nine-year-old boy.

That plane was later identified as Aichi D1A2 96, the same type that later attacked the USS Panay gunboat on December 12, 1937.

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