Guests of the Kremlin is an almost completely forgotten account of the Doolittle Raid, which was a turning point of the war against Japan. On April 18, 1942, 16 airplanes took off from the Aircraft Carrier Hornet on a mission to bomb Japan. They did not have enough fuel to return, so their plan was to fly over Japan and find somewhere to land in China.In flight, one of the crews realized that they did not have enough fuel to make it to China, but that they did have enough fuel to make it to the Soviet Union, which is almost directly north of Tokyo.Therefore, after dropping their bombs on Tokyo, they turned north.All of the 15 other crews headed for China, but none of them landed safely there. Some ditched in the ocean. Others parachuted out. Some were captured, tortured and executed by the Japanese. However, the crew that headed for the Soviet Union by chance found a remote landing strip near Vladivostok and landed safely there.As the Soviet Union was not yet at war with Japan and wanted to avoid any conflict with Japan for the time being, the Soviets took this crew of five and held them prisoner for the next 13 months.At that time, the Soviet Union under Stalin was closed and isolated. Nobody could get in, and nobody could get out.Suddenly this crew of five was experiencing what nobody in the outside world knew about it: Life in the Great Soviet Union. As prisoners, they were moved about from place to place in Siberia. They were able to see that the Soviet People were suffering from extreme poverty and deprivation, not only because of the war, but because of the inefficiencies of Soviet System. Even the Russians assigned to guard them would actually fight to eat the left-over scraps from their table.
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