

The front line in Manchukuo in April, 1940

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Zhukov’s plan was uncomplicated. He intended a massive encirclement of the IJA, a flanking maneuver in the east where there were no major cities and defenses were relatively light. The Soviet Army would drive west, eventually taking Fushun and Fengtian while a second prong would stab south to join up with the first. Had the Stoneman ignored Harbin and focused solely on isolating the eastern branch of the communist forces, he might have seriously hindered the General’s plan. Instead the Kwantung Army sent the better part of its forces north while a tidal wave came crashing down onto its flank. Most of the Japanese armor and artillery had been amassed for the drive towards Harbin, ensuring that the Soviets faced primarily infantry units without substantial support. This was considered sufficient according to Japanese military theory which held that the key to victory was not heavy weapons but rather the fighting spirit of the troops. Spirit in this case saw defenders crushed by massed armor, torn apart by concentrated airpower, and gunned down when they abandoned their defenses in poorly planned attacks. The IJA actually did manage to enter Harbin in the first week of June, before Umeza turned his forces around in a desperate attempt to keep from being entirely surrounded.



He failed.

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Soviet conscripts in Manchukuo



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The better part of the Kwantung Army and the Japanese forces in Manchukuo were cut off and completely encircled when the two prongs of the Soviet Army met near Fengtian on June 15. Umeza committed seppuku and his second-in-command, Major General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, went down fighting. Kuribayashi was an inventive tactician who abandoned the strategy of usingbanzai charges and unsupported infantry to fight the enemy. Instead he transformed the major cities of Manchukuo into fortresses that used the urban terrain to negate Soviet advantages in terms of numbers and war machines. Imperial troops removed their uniforms and integrated themselves into the civilian population, taking advantage of the fact that the Soviets had difficulty telling Japanese and Chinese apart. Large numbers of Manchukuoan citizens were conscripted to throw up bunkers and hasty defensive works to slow the enemy. The IJA fought from sewers and basements, they fought house to house and block by block. Suffering a shortage of anti-tank weapons they used improvised petrol bombs and when ammunition began to run out they fought with bayonets and swords. It took Zhukov four months to destroy the Xinjing pocket, by the time he did Xinjing, Sipingjie, and Fushun were in ruins. Over half-a-million Communist soldiers died in the campaign, so did twice their number of Japanese and some 200,000 civilians. Kuribayashi’s body was never found, but his tactics proved highly influential to Japanese operations later in the war.



By early November the Empire of Japan had been almost completely forced out of Manchuria. They held the Liaodong peninsula and the ports of Dairen and Ryojun, and a small area north of Korea that was under heavy assault. Marshall Zhukov made a symbolic visit to the port town of Qinhuangdao, celebrating the fact that the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union now controlled a stretch of territory from the Baltic to the Yellow Sea. The Soviets had split the land connection between China and Japan and were now in position to bear down on Beijing and Korea. It is impossible to understate the significance of the disaster that had been dealt to the IJA, which had lost the better part of its forces, many of its most experienced units, and virtually all of its remaining armor. The entrance of Canada into the war and the subsequent defeats of the Eastern Expeditionary Force only compounded the catastrophe. Meanwhile the Philippines were seething with unrest and the Filipino government was demanding that Japan withdraw its forces from the islands early. The behavior of the Japanese troops there had largely alienated the Filipinos, turning what had begun as a friendly alliance into general hostility.

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Russian sailors raise their Naval Ensign over the Qinhuangdao port​



“We will not be a colony.” President Quezon said in a speech on December 17th. “Not of America, and not of Japan.” Afraid that the Philippines were slipping away, Prime Minister Sugihara authorized the overthrow of the Filipino government three days later by Japanese forces stationed near Manila. José Paciano Laurel y García, an Associate Justice on the Filipino Supreme Court, was installed as a puppet President. This only intensified resistance against the Japanese presence, and also inspired Emilio Rizal’s Philippine Corps in Alaska to end its previous alliance with the Empire of Japan. Elsewhere the situation was little better, Hawaii had never been fully pacified and the MacArthurite defenders of Alaska kept up a dogged resistance. For a while it seemed as though Britain and Australia would join Canada in declaring war on Japan, particularly after the pro-Bordeaux French governor of Indochina invited Japan to occupy French Indochina. However the dire situation in Europe, and concerns that they couldn’t handle another theatre in the war, prevented London and Canberra from becoming involved. Chamberlain made no bones however, about informing Tokyo that any Japanese involvement in the Dutch East Indies would definitely result in a declaration of war from what remained of the Western Allies. Meanwhile, Indochina became another demand on already strained Imperial resources and manpower.

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Japanese forces on parade in Manila​



Of course the Japanese weren’t the only ones struggling to deal with setbacks.



The Chinese Communists had long drawn their strength from the fact that the better part of the Chinese people saw them as independent of foreign influence. The Nationalists relied on support from Germany and other European powers and tolerated the penetration of the Chinese economy by the west, but the Communists condemned all of that in the strongest terms- and nothing more so than the growing co-belligerence between Nanjing and Tokyo. The Soviet invasion had badly damaged public perception of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Soviet Republic which was now being characterized as just another proxy for foreign interests. The CSR and the allied Revolutionary Government in Fujian had been falling back before the invasion in the face of repeated encirclement campaigns, and Mao’s short-lived offensive when the war began was very much a last gasp. Now they survived largely by virtue of the fact that Chiang Kai-shek couldn’t spare the forces to defeat them. Despite Stalin’s avowed alliance with the CSR, and the fact that the USSR recruited local Chinese communists to administer the territories it occupied, many historians believe that the Soviet dictator wanted the destruction of the pseudo-state. Relations between Ruijin (the Red Chinese capital) and Moscow had been strained since Mao successfully usurped the authority of pro-Moscowite leader Wang Ming in 1933. The defeat of the Maoists would play right into Soviet plans for a pliant Chinese government. Stalin even had a separate Moscowite government established in the troglodyte city of Yan’an- nominally as a regional government of the CSR, but it could have become a national government if Ruijin fell.



Unfortunately for him, Mao stubbornly held on.



Meanwhile the rest of China was proving to be quite a challenge. In the field Zhukov’s commanders had no trouble beating Chiang’s National Revolutionary Army or the forces of his allied warlords. Western and northern China had fallen quickly, where the population was relatively thin and the terrain favored Soviet armor. But the deeper they pressed into China, the more the Soviets were forced to confront a single, undeniable fact;



China is very, very big.

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Soldiers of the Nationalist Chinese National Revolutionary Army​





Defeating Chinese forces in the field was one thing, actually controlling the country was another. The more territory the USSR occupied, the more of its forces were needed for police and garrison duties. After decades of conflict and civil war China was awash with arms and men who had fighting experience, many of whom turned that experience to use resisting the invaders. Disorganized guerrillas, some loyal to the Nationalist, most completely independent, launched hit and run attacks that harassed and generally made life difficult for the Soviet Army. The invasion force was large and had no qualms about responding with utter ruthlessness to any sign of resistance. However as they penetrated into the most populated parts of China these tactics became increasingly less effective and only inspired more resentment against the Soviet Union.



And it was only going to get worse.



Unalienable Rights- A 1942 Prose Interlude

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It didn’t have the homely, quaint look of Independence Hall. In fact the Atlanta City Hall looked harsh and angry to the Captain’s eyes, a modern affair of straight lines and solid angles with its tower… well, towering gloomily over downtown. Fire had gutted part of the building, leaving the right wing streaked with black soot. Many of the windows were broken, and the large front doors were completely off their hinges. Someone had bothered to hang canvass over a bank of broken windows on the upper tower and as it billowed in the wind it reminded him of nothing so much as an eye patch or a bandage. It was a white, beaten, sullen building- a very nice metaphor for Atlanta itself. The Reverend Berger had fought hard here, but now the crows were eating his corpse and the Captain was standing before this damn city hall, barely concealed triumph filling him. It was an auspicious location, whatever the state of the structure there. This was where Sherman had put his headquarters during his March to the Sea.



Smiling to himself, he walked up the steps past a pair of Brown irregulars guarding the entrance. Everyone else was probably waiting on him.



The Captain was a thirty-year-old African-American with a thin black mustache on his upper lip and black armband on his right arm. The later had been dyed with nothing more an ounce of Quink in a rusty washbasin somewhere in the countryside of South Carolina. His clothing was a mix of articles from civilian and military sources, all boiled in chicory-root coffee so that the colors were faded to a dull mottled brown- a kind of poor man’s camouflage. He carried a pistol at his hip, a knife in his boot, and the wear on his shirt plainly showed where the strap of a rifle had hung long enough to have worn away a patch at one shoulder. The most notable aspect of the Captain however, was his manner. There was a proud, defiant look about him that said that he had never been beaten- that he could not be beaten- and that he wasn’t afraid of anything. Once he had wanted to be a pilot, but fate had other plans.



The rest of the Executive Committee was waiting around a table in what had been Mayor Hartsfield’s office, before it was Blanding’s, before it was Berger’s. One face was a surprise.



“Harry!” The Captain greeted the other man with a firm handshake. Unlike the Captain, he was a civilian wearing a suit and tie and a solemn expression. Like the Captain, he was African-American. So was everyone else present. “So you’ve made up your mind? That’s excellent. Whatever will Chicago say?”



“Ben, you know that I agree with you on the question of political power.” Harry began with the air of a man who had planned out was he was going to say several hours ago and spent the intervening time reviewing it in his head. “The only way that the Negro can ever truly be free is if he-” “Or she.” Interjected one of the women present. “Or she, truly exercises control over the productive forces-”



“Harry we need to get started.” The Brown commander interrupted politely. “Can you be quick?”



“Fine.” The other man looked disgruntled, but did as he was told. “My point is that I am a loyal Party Member, but there are too many in Chicago who refuse to see that the oppression of the Negro requires special attention to confront and will not merely go away with the introduction of a Soviet State. I have been, and I remain opposed to any kind of true independence, but I am strongly in favor of the kind of union of sovereign nations such as exists in the USSR. This is the first step in that direction.”



“I think I speak for all of us, when I say that I have no enmity for the Reds and Premier Williamson.” The Captain addressed the committee and there were sounds of assent. “I personally may not be a communist, but I value the Party as a friend and ally of the African Nation of America. Certainly I have no intention of ending up fighting opposite General Eisenhower. And I do believe that whether or not the government that we are about to create remains independent or becomes one member of a Soviet Union here in America should be entirely up to its inhabitants. Does that help lay your concerns to rest?”



Harry nodded gravely and sat down. “Yes, it does.”



“Good.” The Captain joined him. “In that case I hereby call this meeting of the Executive Committee of the Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros to order. Ms. Taylor, you have the second draft?”



“Yes, Comrade Chairman.” Ms. Taylor was, unlike the Captain, a committed Communist and she insisted on using Red terminology. She produced a single sheet of type-written paper. “I thought it best to keep it short and straightforward.”



“Start us off, let’s hear what we’ve got.”



The female Brown commander held up the paper and began to read, her voice proud and formal.



“On this day, date to be determined, in the forty-second year of the twentieth century we the undersigned have gathered here to issue a declaration of independence for the African Nation of America, and to list the causes which have driven us to take this step. First that despite our most sincere loyalty and devotion to the United States of America, the government of the United States and of its several states has oppressed and degraded us, denying us the rights and freedoms which we as men and women deserve. Second that we have repeatedly and peacefully sought the redress of our grievances to no avail. Third…”



Race and Racism- 1941-1942



The Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros had never possessed a clear chain of command. Created by the merger of several groups that been founded independently by surviving members of the Free Action Movement, it operated as a series of cells under local leadership which co-operated whenever possible. This configuration made the organization particularly difficult to suppress, but also meant that establishing any kind of coordinated strategy for the Browns was impossible. Relations between Brown and Blue partisans were handled independently, and when several of the organization’s commanders gathered together in early 1939 to dispatch a representative to Chicago it was an unusual display of unity. By 1940 however the need for centralization had become apparent to most of what was colloquially referred to as the Brown Army, and serious efforts were launched to organize a real leadership. Eisenhower’s reveal of the brutality of the camps lit a fire under the African-American resistance (who had been aware of the existence but unsure of the extent of the concentration camp program) as did the sudden weakness of the Whites, and on September 12, 1940 the Executive Committee of the BROWN met for the first time in the small town of Estill, South Carolina. For their chairman they elected a man who had gained the respect of his comrades and already wielded influence outside of his personal command;



Captain Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., United States Army.

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Brown fighters in Mississippi in 1941​



When the Second American Civil War broke out there were only two African-American officers in the entire United States Army; Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and his father Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Both remained loyal to the chief of staff and reported for duty under the military government. Unfortunately for the father and son they immediately fell victim to the wave of suspicion that swept MacArthur’s regime. Oscar Stanton De Priest, the Congressional Representative who had appointed Benjamin Jr. to West Point, had joined the Constituent Assembly and J. Edgar Hoover believed that both men were potential agents for the Blues. On September 11, 1937 they were arrested under suspicion of subversive activities by members of the FBI. According to a report filed by the agents sent to arrest the elder Davis, he resisted violently and they had to use force to bring him in. It seems unlikely that the sixty-year-old lieutenant colonel actually fought the agents, judging by all accounts of the man such an act would have been completely out of character. Regardless he sustained a head injury during the arrest which probably was the cause of his death two weeks later in prison. Upon being told of his father’s death, the younger Davis expressed his outrage; “There was never more loyal or zealous man in the service of the United States government. He would have carried a rifle in the infantry if MacArthur had ordered him to, he would have laid down his life for his country gladly… in the end it was not my father who betrayed America, it was America who betrayed my father.” Benjamin Davis Jr. remained imprisoned for the next year, until Washington fell to the Whites who first interned him along with a number of other Khaki officers and later sent him to a concentration camp for middle class African Americans at Sangaree, South Carolina.

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Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr. on the right, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr. on the left​



While in Sangaree Davis was for the first time exposed to radical ideologies, notably African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Among the intellectuals imprisoned with him were such people as Cyril Briggs, Gabriel Johnson, Henrietta Vinton Davis (no relation), Clifford Bourne, and James Robert Stewart whose ideas strongly influenced the young man. Many of them argued that the African people were in fact a single nation spread out among multiple countries and that rather than striving to become Americans, Cubans, or Englishmen, they should embrace their own independent culture and return to Africa which they hoped would become independent of the colonial powers. To the disillusioned former US Army captain who had struggled all his life to overcome discrimination and serve his country in uniform, only to have his father killed and himself imprisoned by that same country, these ideas were attractive. Where Davis different from most of the intellectuals around him, was his refutation of the return to Africa. He was familiar with the authoritarian nature of the Liberian and Haitian governments and considered them failures as free black countries. Rather than seek returning to Africa and creating a free African Nation there, he posited one in the United States of America.

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The concentration camp outside of Sangaree, South Carolina

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“I was born in Washington D.C,” the Captain wrote in the makeshift diary he kept whilst imprisoned. “a city whose people were as black as they were white, yet which served as the seat of white dominion over Negros. What makes Monrovia superior to this other African city on this other side of the Atlantic? What makes the “White House”, built by black hands, unsuitable as the seat of a Negro government?… Why should the African Nation of America be required to abandon its home in order to be free on a distant shore?” One thing Benjamin Davis was sure about; “To truly be the masters of our own destiny the African Nation of America must be sovereign in its own country… a country loyal to the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln.” He had difficulty convincing his fellow inmates of his ideas until January 8, 1939 when he took part in a successful breakout from Sangaree camp that saw him and some twenty or thirty others escape from their lackadaisical Klan guards via tunnel dug under one of the barracks.



Now free Davis successfully joined the BROWN, quickly becoming one of its most capable commanders. The Brown fighters found his arguments about an “African Nation of America” to be exciting and convincing in a way they didn’t see Pan-Africanism. Many worried that even if the progressive factions won the war, whatever new government entered existence would be white dominated and any rights African-Americans gained would have been given to them by the progressives instead of earned by they themselves. Many agreed that having their own state in America would be the only way that they could really protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. And unlike the Pan-Africanists, Davis didn’t propose anyone having to abandon their homes where they had lived their entire lives. The “Nationalists” who subscribed to his branch of African Nationalism, soon became one of the major political factions among the Browns, alongside the Communists who supported the ASR and the Loyalists who supported either the Blues or the Khakis. It was thanks to an alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists that he managed to win election as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros, and found himself in a position to make his plans a reality.

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The house at Estill, South Carolina where the Executive Committee of the BROWN first met. It did not survive the war.​



As the Browns planned their uprising and the Red Guard advanced quickly into the American South, the White government was in turmoil. The Klan, the Social Justice Platoons, and the Silver Legion were more interested in blaming each other for their military failures than actually correcting said failures, and the White army remained paralyzed and demoralization. A canny politician, Huey Long had been able to weld together the disparate political factions that made up the Whites, but with him isolated and powerless the movement was cracking apart. A new wave of conscription was ordered, but the new recruits were untrained and there were few weapons to spare to arm them. One unit about to go into battle in northern Tennessee had only half its members armed, the unarmed conscripts were told to “wait until someone else dies and take his rifle”. Undisciplined paramilitary troops that were sufficient to fight guerrillas and keep civil order proved a poor counter to the Reds’ Lincoln tanks. White resources were further drained by the expansion of the General Anti-Partisan Plan, it had previously focused on African-Americans but now Americans of “degenerate racial character” including Jews, those of mixed race, and individuals with East Asian or Southern European descent were being arrested and interred.



But the Whites weren’t the only ones interning people on racial grounds.



In early 1941 the Canadian and their Pactist allies moved in to deal the death blow to the beleaguered Japanese invaders. General Arnold cracked the San Bernardino Mountains Line and moved in to liberate Los Angeles and San Diego. Inspired by Kuribayashi’s tactics in Manchuria, Major General Cho fought to the death in both cities despite explicit orders from Masaharu Homma not to. The Japanese forces that had been stopped short of Sacramento were forced back to San Francisco Bay by the West Coast Division, which had the numbers in men, artillery, armor, and aircraft. Faced with an unwinnable battle, the Poet General ordered delaying actions to be carried out with hope of slowing down the Americans for as long as possible so his surviving forces could evacuate to Alaska and Hawaii. He himself remained behind, when Blue soldiers burst into the mayor’s office in the San Francisco City Hall Homma set off two tons of ammunition and explosives that his men had been forced to leave behind, killing himself and about a dozen American soldiers. Although San Francisco fell with minimal bloodshed- Homma had preferred to evacuate his forces rather than afflict the civilian population in a useless last stand- Colonel Tsuji Masanobu convinced about 5,000 soldiers and sailors to stay behind at San Jose where they deliberately destroyed as much of the city as possible before being annihilated by the Blues.

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The ruins of San Jose after being liberated by the West Coast Division​



The last pocket of Imperial forces in the United States proper were the remaining men of the Imperial Guard Division with Tomoyuki Yamashita in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Upon hearing of Homma’s orders to evacuate, Yamashita asked his ten thousand survivors for volunteers to stay behind with him. Almost universally they opted to remain and fight, motivated by the old Yamato Damashii. The Canadians flooded the dense rainforest of the central peninsula with troops, still armed bands continued to resist guerilla style for another six months until the last of them were finally flushed out. Of the approximately 10,000 diehards exactly 218 surrendered or were taken prisoner. It was not true as Japanese propaganda claimed that the last words of most Japanese soldiers were “Ten Thousand Years for His Majesty the Emperor!” (one Japanese journalist noted that in fact most dying men called out for their mothers, regardless of nationality) but there was at least one case of it happening. On July 1, 1941, when Yamashita himself was finally surrounded, starving, ragged, and completely out of ammunition, the Tiger drew his sword and shouted one last “Tennouheika Banzai!” before attacking the Canadians and forcing then to gun him down.

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A member of the Imperial Guard Division surrendering to Canadian soldiers​



With the threat from the Japanese military abated, the Allies began an immediate program of arresting and interning all Japanese-Americans in California, Oregon, and Washington, and all Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia. Together the internees numbered approximately 132,000 people who were relocated to camps in the Rockies or further west. In America the camps were largely administered by the 104th Infantry Division which was operating in a supportive capacity towards the Pact, there Japanese men were conscripted for labor repairing war damage and maintaining infrastructure. In Canada the Department of National Defense handled the internees, many of whom were used for agricultural labor in Alberta. North and south of the border the internment camps were “self-supporting” in that their inhabitants were expected to work and provide a contribution to the war effort equal to that which was required to maintain the camps. The cost of the relocation was paid for by confiscating the property of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians- this ranged from the contents of bank accounts to automobiles and jewelry. Land ownership was revoked for most of the internees, in America their houses were turned over to European-Americans who had been displaced by the invasion or the war. The intention by the Provisional Government was nothing less than the complete dismantling of the Japanese-American community as evidenced by Sections 4 and 5 of the Anti-Espionage and Sabotage Act which authorized internment in the USA;



“4. All Japanese language publications and publishers are hereby banned, and all Japanese language material is to be destroyed.



5. All facilities for the encouragement of Emperor-worship and pro-Imperial propaganda are to be closed and their ownership transferred to the War Department.”



Section 4 resulted in book burnings whose size was only surpassed by book burnings in White America, Section 5 proved the justification for the destruction or re-purposing of virtually all Buddhist and Shinto places of worship in the western United States.

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Japanese-Americans in San Francisco being loaded onto train-cars en-route to a camp in Nevada​



“I remember when the soldiers came to our neighborhood.” Hisaye Yamamoto, only a child at the time of the internment, later recalled in her memoirs. “They shouted and banged on all the doors until everyone came out… we were forced to stand at attention for an hour while they shouted abuse. They called us animals and accused us of not being human… Eric Hayashi came out of his house wearing the blue uniform of a police officer, which he’d been in Hawaii before moving to California… the soldiers tore off his jacket. I remember watching the bright brass buttons bouncing on the pavement as they came off… he was beaten with rifle butts until he collapsed.”



Even respected people who were otherwise great enemies of racism were giving into expressions of hatred. Haim Kantorovich questioned whether or not a person could Japanese descent could ever truly “have loyalties other than to their emperor.” Walter Lippman wrote a harsh condemnation of Japanese culture and “it’s valuation of cruelty, imperialism, and inhuman violence.” It was proposed by a respect university professor that the long period of isolation on the Japanese islands had “led to systematic inbreeding… and an evolutionary trend towards island dwarfism, like that seen in the Canis lupus hodophilax- the Honshu Wolf.” He was an exception, most in Blue America cast their racism in cultural terms, arguing that Japanese social mores encouraged “inherently vicious tendencies” that made them as a people dangerous to the war effort and the American public.

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Anti-Japanese poster in Blue America​



Not all of the camps were so terrible, when Emilio Rizal and the Philippine Corps chose to abandon their alliance with Japan, they were permitted to withdraw east into Canada where the Canadian government established a camp for them near Calgary. There they were free to come and go and many found employment in the nearby city and interacted amicably with the locals. Conditions there were adequate, and a number of the internees choose to stay when the war ended, forming the basis of the present day Filipino community in Alberta.



Into late 1941 the war continued to go better and better for the Red Oak Pact and its allies. The Whites were demoralized, divided, and preoccupied with diverting resources to their expanded system of concentration camps. With power no longer centralized under Long, their military strategy was uncoordinated as different factions squabbled about what to do. The cracks were not yet showing among the anti-White cobelligerents who were working together as they advanced through the Upper South. By November 1941 the American Soviet Republic in particular had more than doubled the territory under its control and was on the verge of invading northern Mississippi and Alabama. It was then, with the White Army fully committed to a losing defense and allies close at hand, that Benjamin Davis led the Organization in a full-scale uprising against the Montgomery Regime.

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Brown partisans during the 1941-42 uprising​



By mobilizing its total strength, BROWN was initially able to raise approximately 30,000-40,000 fighters across the South. Most of its forces were concentrated in Mississippi and South Carolina, although there was a substantial Organization presence in Georgia and Alabama, and a smaller one in Louisiana and Arkansas. In terms of effectiveness Brown fighters were on par with second- and third-line White paramilitaries that they faced. Davis avoided major cities where more competent troops were stationed, and instead focused on capturing the countryside and cutting off White communications and transport. African-American civilians were recruited (in a few cases conscripted) to bolster the Brown numbers, and by the end of the year there were growing pockets of liberated territory in the Deep South. Forced to split its attention in multiple directions, the demoralized White Army began to collapse wholesale. The Reds reached the camp at Lebanon, Tennessee and linked up with the African-American insurgents in northern Mississippi. Browns liberated the Klan concentration camp at Scottsboro as well as the camp at Sangaree. Blue partisans established similar free areas in the Appalachians mountains. In the second week of January 1942, a new uprising broke out in the city of Atlanta, Georgia by the city’s African-American community. For the first time BROWN made an assault on a White center of population and industry.



Opposing it were ten thousand army regulars from the 31st Infantry Division (White) and a similar number of paramilitary troops. On paper it looked clear-cut; there were only 6,000 Brown “regulars” operating outside of the city, inside were 1,000 Browns and about 50,000 rebelling civilians. About sixty percent of Atlanta was white and could not be expected to support the uprising. However the city was starving, 1/6 of its population had been conscripted, many had died, the Hunting Season and the string of subsequent defeats had left Atlantans disillusioned, miserable, and not eager to fight for the ailing government in Montgomery. Relatively few whites supported the rebels (several thousand did, mostly members of the suppressed trade unions) but virtually none supported the Whites. The soldiers themselves were in poor condition, they knew that they were losing the war and the damage that the purges had done to their morale are impossible to estimate. They had no gasoline for their vehicles, limited amounts of ammunition, and most just wanted to keep themselves and their families safe. Only the Silver Legionaires and Klu Klux Klan members truly fought hard- the leader of the Legionaires in Atlanta was a minister named Erich Burger. Before his men would execute captured rebels or black civilians he would call out “In the holy name of god, fire!”

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Silver Legionaries during the Battle of Atlanta

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On February 11, Davis himself arrived along with a force of several thousand additional men and women who had marched down from South Carolina. The commander of the Atlanta garrison was a World War I veteran and former National Guardsman named Albert Blanding who saw no value in fighting to the death for a losing cause. His men had begun deserting and he had no reason to believe that help was on the way. Blanding negotiated the withdrawal of his regulars with Davis, who agreed to let them leave unmolested along with any civilians who also wanted to go. The retreating regulars supervised a column of refugees, a combination of citizens who had been frightened by rumors of what the Browns might do to them, and citizens who just wanted to get away from the urban warfare that had convulsed their home. Before going, Blanding extracted a promise from his Brown counterpart that the whites who remained in Atlanta would be respected, Davis gave his word gladly and issued orders to that effect. The extent to which those orders were obeyed was very mixed, but they were at least given.



Burger and the remaining irregulars rejected the deal and fought on, but by the end of the month they had been defeated and their leader executed. By this point Milt’s combined army of Blues and Collectivists had reached South Carolina and the Red Guard was surrounding Montgomery itself. In Texas a group of previously unimportant Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson created a rival state government in Amarillo which joined the Continental Congress. Across the country optimists predicted that war was nearly over.

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Lyndon B. Johnson as Texas Commissioner of Education before becoming Acting Governor of Texas​



On March 8, 1942, in the city of Atlanta, Benjamin O. David Jr., Harry Haywood, Gabriel Johnson, and seven others put their names to a document which read;



“On this day, the eighth day of March in the forty-second year of the twentieth century we the undersigned have gathered here to issue a declaration of independence for the African Nation of America, and to list the causes which have driven us to take this step.



First that despite our most sincere loyalty and devotion to the United States of America, the government of the United States and of its several states has oppressed and degraded us, denying us the rights and freedoms which we as men and women deserve.



Second that we have repeatedly and peacefully sought the redress of our grievances to no avail.



Third that the government of the United States of America to which we previously owed and provided our full and undivided loyalties has ceased to exist, being brought down by revolution and illegal usurpation of power.



Fourth that a body claiming falsely to be the successor to the above government has deliberately and knowingly engaged in the wholesale slaughter and systematic murder of the African Nation of America with the intention of reducing that people to a state of complete destruction or at least subservience.



Fifth that these repeated experiences have proven unquestionably that the African Nation of America will never be truly free so long as it lacks the freedom to determine its own future and is reliant on others to supply its god-given rights, rather than being able to assure those rights itself.



Sixth that this freedom and these rights can only be safeguarded by the existence of a sovereign, democratic, Afro-American state.



Therefore we the undersigned, acting as representatives of the African Nation of America, do in the name and authority of the above nation’s people, solemnly publish and declare the existence of the Free and Independent Republic of New Africa, with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do."

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Although the original document was lost in a fire in 1960, several original copies of the New African Declaration of Independence survive, including the one pictured above​

- 1940-1941Japan entered the year 1940 with growing confidence and grim optimism. They had faced defeats in northern Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, but they had begun retaking territory in the most recent offensive. “Once the intervention in America bears fruit,” Prime Minister Sugiyama informed his cabinet “there will be nothing stopping us from liberating Munchukuo and Mengukuo and pressing on as far as Omsk.” On the home front propaganda trumpeted Japan’s victories and also urged on the total commitment necessary for victory. “100 Million Hearts Beat as One” the slogans said, and reported on examples of particularly self-sacrificing individuals who were committed to the war effort. The child who donated his lead toys to melted down into bullets was popular, so was the family who went without heating so that more fuel could go to military purposes. One propaganda film told the story of a group of workers in a factory who heroically drove themselves to meet and surpass their production quotas, overcoming personal and emotional struggles along the way. To make the film (it was called) appeal more widely the product the workers were making was never specified- the though was that it would allow the message to apply more universally. The entirety ofwas on a seven-day work week, even school children watched their academics cut further and further away so they could assist in agricultural work and help fill the labor shortage. 1.4 million women entered the workforce, relatively few as the government discouraged “the disruption of family life”. Large numbers of Korean and Chinese laborers were imported, many were forced to work in miserable conditions for no pay.Industrial production increased, but not enough.Aware that Soviet troops couldn’t yet match their Japanese counterparts in terms of quality, General Zhukov had turned to a strategy of quantity with the assent of Stalin. Using the lull that accompanied winter as a respite, the Red Army moved forty divisions east with about 800,000 men and 10,318 tanks between November 1939 and March 1940. When the USSR invaded Manchukuo the Red Air Force had been a joke, more focused on performing stunts and setting aviation records rather than preparing for actual combat. As such it had fared poorly against the air arms of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy whose planes were vastly superior and whose pilots much more experienced. But the Soviet Union had the highest industrial output of any country on earth and the number of planes in the Red Air Force doubled in the time from August 1939 to August 1940. Aircrews became increasingly skilled as they gained more experience, and the high attrition rate in pilots was overcome simply by training more faster than they could be killed. The Yakovlev Yak-1 couldn’t quite go toe-to-toe with the Mitsubishi Type O, but it came close, and by using massed air attacks similar to those employed by thein Europe the Soviets were able to seriously challenge Japanese control of the air going into the spring offensives of 1940.Perhaps the most important of Zhukov’s projects was the extension and further development of logistical connections between Siberia and the rest of the USSR. With only a single supply line- the Trans-Siberian Railroad- to rely on the Soviet Army faced a tremendous logistical bottleneck with regards to bringing men and materials east. New tracks were laid, increasingly the railroad’s capacity and providing alternate routes so that a single break in the line couldn’t halt the flow of supplies. Armies ofpolitical prisoners doing forced labor- carved new roads and highways out of the Siberian tundra at a staggering cost in lives. But the development was invaluable for prosecuting the war, and it’s doubtful that Stalin lost any sleep over the 40,000 workers who died in the process.With the coming of the spring thaw the war intensified. General Umezu Yoshijirō- the “Stoneman”- was determined to retake Harbin and go back onto the offensive. The Kwantung Army had been bolstered by a wave of Korean conscripts that Umezu intended to use as cannon fodder (a departure from previous policies of keeping Koreans out of combat) and by a force of about fifty Lt-35 tanks that had been first purchased by Admiral King, later captured by Filipino forces when the Philippines declared its independence, and finally transferred to the IJA. The front line was vaguely triangular, the IJA holding two diagonal fronts that shielded most of Manchukuo’s major cities and industrial centers. The Manchukuoan capital of Xinjing was at the tip within artillery range of the Red Army with the lines sloping down to the east and west where Communist advances had forced the Japanese back. By recapturing Harbin they would be in a position to cut off the eastern Soviet salient which was aimed at the border with Japanese Korea. Unfortunately for Umeza he launched his offensive on April 3, and two days later General Zhukov launchedoffensive.