Early in World War II, two hundred years after Vitus Bering made the first Siberian connection with Alaska, Russians once again returned to Alaska as part of the U.S.-Soviet Lend-Lease program to ferry American-made aircraft to Siberia.
American Lend-Lease generosity helped to join Russia and America in a wartime alliance against Germany. However, Russia, suspicious of American sincerity, delayed the establishment of an Alaska-Siberia delivery route (known throughout the war as ALSIB) to the German war front. Instead, other routes via the North Atlantic and the Persian Gulf were employed...

As war spread across the world at the end of 1941, the Soviet Union found itself between a rock known as Nazi Germany and a hard place called imperial Japan. With all its forces battling Germany in the west, the Soviet Union had to keep peace on its isolated and vulnerable eastern borders. To avoid risking its status as a neutral country in the war between the United States and Japan, the Soviet Union interned many American flyers who crashed or made emergency landings in Soviet territory after bombing Japanese targets.
This is the long-secret and nearly forgotten story of how the Soviet...