Most
historians agree that World War II’s first real turning point occurred in
December 1941 when Red Army troops led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov smashed through
the German lines encircling Moscow and shattered the siege of the city.
The epic
“Breakout from Moscow,” spearheaded by 18 fresh divisions, 1,700 tanks and
1,500 planes hastily recalled from the Soviet Far East, spurred a chain of
events that literally sent Hitler’s forces reeling from the gates of Moscow to
the gates of Berlin. Larger Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, in all
likelihood, would not have followed if Moscow had fallen.
“It was the beginning of the end for Germany,” John Pike, an
intelligence expert who heads military think tank Globalsecurity.org in Washington, D.C.
told Asia Times.
Hotsumi Ozaki
As the world this month celebrates the 70th anniversary of
Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II, it would do well to remember
that the crucial intelligence which allowed Zhukov to transfer these
desperately needed forces to Moscow came from a now-forgotten Japanese
journalist named Hotsumi Ozaki.
Ozaki was a Japanese newspaper correspondent and pivotal member of the
legendary Tokyo spy ring headed by Soviet spymaster Richard Sorge.
Sorge’s most famous feat involved giving Stalin advance word of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — a tip his Kremlin master ignored. But
arguably, the most critical information he relayed during the war was
confirmation, from reliable sources, that the Japanese Army would not relieve
Germany by opening a second front against the USSR. The tip allowed Zhukov to
redeploy his battle-hardened men and armor to Moscow. The final confirmation of
what Japan would do came from Ozaki.
The greatest
spy story of all time
“If there is a single piece of intelligence that changed the course of
World War II, it was Sorge’s report to Moscow that the Japanese would not
invade Russia,” said Bob Bergin, a former US foreign service officer who writes on the history of
World War II intelligence operations. “Sorge’s ring – and Ozaki’s role in it —
may be the greatest spy story of all time.”
Richard Sorge
Ozaki and Sorge were both arrested for espionage and hanged by Japanese
authorities. Ozaki, however, has the distinction of being the only Japanese
civilian executed for high treason in World War II.
A chubby-cheeked ladies’ man who worked for the Osaka Asahi, Japan’s
leading newspaper at the time, Ozaki was an unlikely choice for his telling
historical role.
He was born on in Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture on May Day in 1901.
He was descended from an old samurai family. But his father made his
living as an almost penniless journalist. His family moved during his youth to
the new Japanese colony of Taiwan for economic reasons. It was here that
Hotsumi, an irrepressibly impulsive and open-minded man, became acquainted with
Chinese culture and the awkwardness of being a member of the island’s ruling
class.
“My connection with the controlling and governing classes was revealed
to me as a concrete fact of daily life. This experience later aroused in me an
extraordinary interest in the problem of national liberation, and it also gave
me an insight into the China problem,” Ozaki is quoted as saying in Japan
expert Chalmers Johnson’s 1990 biography,
“An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring.”
Ozaki returned to Japan in 1922 and studied law at elite Tokyo Imperial
University. But he soon dropped out, and threw himself into Communist Party
activities. His conversion to Marxism and opposition to the Japanese government
was shaped in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 when he
watched local police and officials incite mob hysteria that led to the
slaughter of more than 6,000 Korean residents of Tokyo.
“Violent mobs seized, tortured, and killed Koreans in the frantic belief
that they were using the disaster as an opportunity for rebellion,” Johnson
wrote. Authorities also used the quake to arrest or kill many Japanese labor
leaders.
The young radical followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a
journalist. He was hired by the Asahi Shimbun as a reporter in 1926 and was
soon writing stories about Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Asahi posted him
to Shanghai in 1928 where he became friendly with leftist American reporter
Agnes Smedley. Ozaki also began to secretly assist members of the city’s
Chinese Communist Party.
Fateful
meeting
A gnes Smedley as a young woman
It was Smedley who introduced Ozaki to Sorge during one of the latter’s
trips to China. “Can you introduce me to a Japanese to help improve my
knowledge of Japan’s policy towards China?,” Sorge was quoted as asking Smedley
in Robert Whymant’s 1996 book,
“Stalin’s Spy.” Smedley introduced Sorge, her then lover, to Ozaki.
The two hit it off. “Ozaki was affable, interesting and ready to help.
They recognized each other’s intellectual ability and before long discovered
shared interests,” Whymant wrote of the chemistry between the two men.
Ozaki joined the ring and the pair teamed up in Japan after Sorge, who
was posing as a pro-Nazi journalist for Russian military intelligence, was
posted to Tokyo. Other key members included Yotoku Miyagi, a Okinawan, Branko
Vukelic, a Yugoslav, and Max Clausen, a German wireless operator.
“If I reflect deeply, I can say that I was indeed destined to meet Agnes
Smedley and Richard Sorge. It was my encounter with these people that finally
determined my narrow path from then on,” Ozaki observed after his arrest.
Sorge was a brilliant spy and a man of great courage. But he knew little
about Japan. Japanese politics, institutions and culture was a cipher to him.
It was Ozaki who schooled him, and it was the chatty Japanese scribe who
recruited other anti-militarist Japanese who served as the ring’s human sinews
in Japan.
While history rightly credits Sorge with relaying key intelligence to
Moscow as the brains and guts of the operation, it’s doubtful if Sorge (who
couldn’t speak or read Japanese) could have succeeded without Ozaki’s access to
the innermost circles of Japanese government.
A leading China authority, Ozaki had charmed his way to become an
adviser and confidant of Japanese Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe and
other top officials. He met regularly with Konoe and his coterie of friends at
the prince’s residence in Tokyo. It was here that Ozaki gleaned critical
information about Japanese military strategy and policy toward the Asian
mainland.
Code-name
Otto
Ozaki, code-named “Otto,” and Miyagi, code-name “Joe,” undertook risky
missions in Japan, Manchuria and other parts of Asia to report on Japanese
troop movements. They also corroborated information Sorge received from German
diplomats.
It’s ironic that Ozaki managed to evade Japan’s coldly efficient wartime
security apparatus for so long. In a classic case of cultural blindsiding, no
one on the Japanese side suspected that someone who had attended an elite
Japanese university could be working for Stalin.
Sorge also was a journalist who used his cover as a correspondent for
Germany’s Frankfurter Zeitung to win the trust of German diplomats in Japan.
Badly wounded in World War I where he won the Iron Cross, Sorge was first
swayed to the cause of the Great Proletarian Revolution by a communist-leaning
nurse who tended his wounds. An edgy adventurer fond of wine, women and
motorcycles, he had a German father. But few knew of a Russian mother who
imbued him with other loyalties. Some of Sorge’s biggest intelligence
coups were tied to a torrid affair he carried on with the wife of the German
ambassador to Japan.
A
glorious way to die
Ozaki was a true believer who had chosen his side in the fight against
the Axis.
“I would like to go and die splendidly as a communist. I have nothing to
regret, and I am fully prepared,” Ozaki remarked to a visitor, shortly before
he was executed.
Did he know of Stalin’s crimes or communism’s dark side? It makes no
difference. Untold millions were saved because of what he did.
A description of the ruses that the Tokyo espionage ring used to probe
the Japanese military’s designs toward the USSR’s eastern flank could fill
volumes. The skinny is as follows: Zhukov had annihilated the better part of
two Japanese divisions in a short but vicious war with Japan in 1939 at
Nomonhan, along the Russian-Mongolia frontier. “It was enough to convince the
Japanese that attacking Russia would be a tough nut to crack,” Pike said,
stressing that the battle, also known as Khalkhin Gol, was a little-appreciated
prelude to Moscow. Sorge, Ozaki and Miyagi also played a critical role at
this time by relaying intelligence on Japanese troop movements to Zhukov.
The Japanese continued to mass troops near Russia’s border with
Manchuria after their humiliating defeat. Berlin, meanwhile, kept pressing
Tokyo to reopen hostilities. Stalin feared Japan would attack as German troops
invaded Russia from the West in 1941. Encouraged by early German successes
against Russia, Japan appeared to mobilize for a strike.
Sorge, however, had heard in casual conversation from a German naval
attache in August 1941 that Japan had ruled out war with the USSR. Antsy about
a coming clash with the US, Japanese strategists were waiting until Russia’s
collapse became certain. If true, it meant that hundreds of thousands of Soviet
troops tied down in the Far East could be sprung. But this sizzling piece of
intelligence needed to be verified before it could be radioed to Moscow – and
it was Ozaki who did it.
In late August of 1941, Ozaki traveled to Japanese-occupied Manchuria
under the cover of attending a conference sponsored by Japan’s South Manchurian
Railway company in Dairen. His real purpose was to check the dispositions of
Japan’s crack Kwantung Army to ascertain if they were preparing for an invasion
of Siberia. He also collected statistics on Japanese army and navy oil stocks
for clues on military deployments.
Ozaki soon returned to Tokyo with the final piece in the puzzle. “The
danger has passed,” Sorge recalled Ozaki telling him in a diary entry. The
Japanese were withdrawing units from Manchuria and were not moving others
northward from China. An invasion of Russia’s eastern frontier was clearly not
in the offing. All signs were that Japan would strike southward — to the Dutch
East Indies and Singapore.
“It was Ozaki who was the real spy in this case,” Bergin told Asia
Times. “What Ozaki did and how he did it certainly deserves a great deal of
credit, perhaps the biggest part of it. He came to Sorge not as an
informant already in place, but as an outsider. It was through his
deliberate effort that he worked himself into the upper reaches of the Japanese
government and became a confidant of the Japanese PM. This must be what
all spies dream of, but almost never achieve. He put himself where the
intelligence had to be. Individual acts of spies do make a difference.”
The rest is history. On Dec. 5, 1941, massed formations of Soviet tanks
and troops in white winter camouflage (recently disembarked from rail cars that
had carried them from Asia) attacked under the cover of a swirling snowstorm.
The Germans were taken by surprise and never regained the initiative in the
field. Pike notes Zhukov’s reinforcements eventually struck southward and
broke the back of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.
What if …
What if Moscow had fallen? “The western allies were never sure of what
the Soviets would do,” noted Pike who has no argument with the view that Ozaki
and Sorge changed history. “Given Stalin’s track record, there was the clear
and present danger of a separate peace with Germany. The Soviets could have
said, ‘we’ve had enough’ and called it a day.” The full weight of the Axis war
machine would have fallen on Britain and the US.
One irony is that Stalin acted on Sorge’s tip because the ring’s earlier
information about a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had proved accurate. In the
earlier instance, Stalin had elected not to warn the US about the attack
because if it was true, he preferred the “ABC Powers” (America, Britain and
China) to consume themselves in a war with Japan and Germany – to Moscow’s
advantage.
The Tokyo spy ring was exposed when Japanese police discovered that
Miyagi had joined the Communist Party in the US years earlier.
Miyagi, after his arrest, tried to protect his colleagues by jumping out
of a window at police headquarters. Unfortunately, he survived the fall and
following interrogation, police were able to capture the ring’s members.
Ozaki and Sorge were brutally tortured and admitted their “crimes.” Both
were made to write long confessions, detailing their espionage.
Sorge would have gone to the gallows regardless of what he had written.
But in Ozaki’s case, it was possible the court would spare the noose if he
recanted the wrongness of his deeds by writing a so-called “tenkosho” or
statement of conversion.
Ozaki, however, found it impossible to recant. “It pained Ozaki to beg
for his life by disowning the beliefs and principles he had cherished,” Whymant
says. The court ultimately ruled that his “anti-state” views were unchanged.
Ozaki and Sorge were hung minutes apart on Nov. 7, 1944, in Tokyo’s
Sugamo prison after prolonged confinement. The date coincided with the 27th
anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ozaki was the first to die.
“(Sorge) was led to the trapdoor set in the floor and stood calmly as
his hands and legs were bound. He did not know that shortly after 9:30 that
morning, Ozaki Hotsumi, his loyal helper, had stood on this same spot, and been
hanged until he died at 9:51,” Whymant wrote.
Miyagi and Vukelic died in custody.
Sorge was proclaimed a “Hero of the Soviet Union” and posthumously
rewarded with a stone monument in Moscow. There is no monument to Hotsumi Ozaki
in Japan today.
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