This question is a little more complicated than it appears on the surface. For instance, Germany and Japan were not formally allied in 1937 (the Tripartite Pact allying Germany, Japan, and Italy went into effect in September 1940), and the 1937 action in China predated by two years Germany’s 1939 entry into World War II.

Likewise, historians usually consider the Winter War fought between Russia and Finland from 1939 to 1940 separate from the Second World War; in any case, it occurred well before the United States and Russia were allied, which did not occur until December 1941. (At the time of the Winter War, Russia and Germany had signed a non-aggression treaty and would remain in a state of uneasy neutrality until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941).

Lieutenant General Lesley McNair was indeed killed by United States Army Air Force bombs in July 1945 as part of Operation Cobra, the breakout from the Normandy beachheads following the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. Along with Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner (killed by Japanese fire on Okinawa in 1945), General McNair was the highest-ranking American officer killed during the war.

In a larger sense, the question speaks to the confusion and chaos that forms an inevitable part of battle, and to the mistakes that confusion creates. Fratricide (the accidental targeting of friendly soldiers) has bedeviled armies for centuries. The development of gunpowder and firearms, which increased the distance between forces on the battlefield and thus expanded the chances for miscommunication, misidentification, and mistargeting in combat, increased the incidences of battlefield fratricide.

The advent of long-range artillery and air power in the 20th century created still more opportunities. So-called “friendly fire” episodes reflect not soldiers’ incompetence, carelessness, or treachery but the impossibility of determining precisely what is going on and who is who in the lethal and confusing environment of battle. In the 19th century, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz termed this confusion and ambiguity the “fog of war,” and it constitutes an unavoidable part of warfare.

Military history features many famous instances of fratricide. Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson was shot by friendly pickets as he reconnoitered after the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. In May 1940, three German bombers attempting to strike a French airfield became lost and instead bombed the German city of Freiburg by accident.

Scores of American GIs during the Second World War wrote of being strafed by American or British aircraft, being the targets of their own artillery shells (often fired from miles behind the front), or accidentally receiving fire from adjacent friendly units. Increasing distance between combatants, the impossibility of perfect communications, and more frequent actions at night have all made distinguishing friend from foe more difficult.

Amidst the chaos and terror of combat, even the most capable and well-intentioned soldiers sometimes mistakenly target their own troops. Nor have technological innovations such as night-vision goggles and precision munitions eliminated the threat of fratricide in combat. The 2004 death of Army Ranger and former NFL player Pat Tillman during a firefight in Afghanistan from rounds fired by fellow American soldiers is perhaps the best-known recent example.

I have found no indication of this figure in the works of several historians who have written about the fate of Allied POWs in Japanese captivity.

Gavan Daws, in Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, states, “Tokyo’s policy as of late 1944 was ‘to prevent prisoners of war from falling into the enemy’s hands,’” citing proceedings of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and a research report of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service Section as his sources. Drawing on a document in the National Archives dated February 26, 1945, entitled “Captured Japanese Instructions Regarding the Killing of POW,” of the Military Intelligence Division, Daws cites an entry in the journal of the Japanese headquarters at Taihoku on Formosa that called for “‘extreme measures’ to be taken against POWs in ‘urgent situations: Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of the prisoners as the situation dictates. In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.’”

Daws concludes, however, that with regard to carrying out the policy of killing POWs in various camps, “the picture was mixed.” In Palawan, in the Philippines, Japanese soldiers machine-gunned, clubbed, and bayonets 150 POWs trying to escape air raid shelters that the captors had doused with gasoline and lit. During the Battle of Manila in February and March 1945, guards at the camp at Bilibid left without harming the POWs.

Historian David M. Kennedy has summarized figures regarding the brutal treatment of American POWs by the Japanese. “Ninety percent of American prisoners of war in the Pacific reported being beaten,” Kennedy states. “More than a third died. Those who survived spent thirty-eight months in captivity on average and lost sixty-one pounds.”

After noting that 20 American POWs died as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to Japanese military commanders, and that between one and three American prisoners may have been killed by the Japanese after the bombing, Richard B. Frank states, “The average number of Allied prisoners of war or civilian internees who died each day of the effects of captivity at the hands of the Japanese easily doubled this toll.”

In a radio broadcast on the night of August 9, 1945, hours after the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, President Harry S. Truman linked the use of the bomb to the treatment by the Japanese of American prisoners of war: “Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.” In a letter two days later, Truman wrote, “nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am, but I was greatly disturbed by the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war.”

Most probably not. Although the Japanese generally avoided attacking Russian ships, there simply was not a lot of Soviet merchant shipping in the Pacific at the time. And perhaps more important, there were almost no Soviet warships in the region, so the chance of the Japanese attackers encountering and engaging with Russian ships by accident was small. Even if they had, Japan and Russia had chosen to gloss over incidents in the recent past because they calculated it was in their larger interests to do so. The chance that Japanese attackers might have damaged Russian ships did not affect Japanese planning.

American ports were not closed to Russian warships or merchant ships. A fleet of 11 Soviet ships, for example, left port at Balboa, U.S. Canal Zone, in July 1939, for the Russians' naval base at Vladivostok. Four mine layers among the fleet went by way of San Francisco, and the other ships went by way of the merchant shipping port facilities next to Honolulu.

Russian freighters and tankers often used port facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It was Russia's merchant ships, not its navy, that crossed the Pacific at this time. At the beginning of World War 2, many of the Soviet Union's warships, in fact, had been purchased from or built by the U.S. The bulk of its navy was based in the west, in Leningrad, Kronstadt, Sevastopol, Odessa, and Murmansk.

Soviet maritime activity, both mercantile and military, had waxed and waned from the late 19th century to the World War 2 period. Japan was a regional rival and this tension erupted in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, in the course of which Japan all but obliterated the Russian fleet and emerged as a world naval power. The 1917 Russian Revolution and 1919-21 civil war drew off much of the Russian military presence in the Far East and Pacific region, but it began to build up again, including at its Pacific base in Vladivostok, in response to Japanese incursions in China in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. The Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet at that time consisted almost entirely of small submarines, torpedo boats, and coastal patrol boats.

Almost all of the Soviets' "blue water," heavy warships were in the west. This did not have anything to do with American policy regarding its ports. In short, Russian warships would not have been cruising the Pacific, either in Hawaii or the Philippines, before the war. They were needed elsewhere.

The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed in April 1941. Cross-border skirmishes in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and in Mongolia motivated Japan to sign in order to keep Russia from tying it down in northern Asia while it accomplished its goals of territorial expansion in Southeast Asia. Russia signed it because it was focusing its military might to the west, supplying Germany with food and war material, in line with the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but also preparing for a confrontation with Germany itself. That came in June 1941, when Germany suddenly invaded the Soviet Union.

At that time, Japan, as an ally of Germany, apparently briefly considered abrogating its neutrality pact with the Soviets and invading Russia, but decided against it in favor of focusing on military conquests toward the south. Both the Soviets and the Japanese found it expedient to honor their neutrality pact throughout most of the war. That included, for Japan, allowing passage to Russian merchant ships that were carrying supplies from the U.S. to Vladivostok.

After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the U.S. had conducted its Russian trade warily, with some constraints on what it would allow to be sold to the Russians (to try to prevent material from being further shipped to Germany). Britain, during this time, pressed the U.S. to drastically reduce its trade with Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as Russia, as a partner in its "economic warfare."

From the summer of 1941, after Germany invaded Russia, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union went into flux, as FDR's administration moved to convert a near-adversary into an ally. In September 1941, for example, FDR promised Russia that the U.S. would deliver five new B-17s, flying them to Russia over the skies of Germany. U.S. constraints on sales were lifted and America began shipping food, fuel, and other war material to Russia, via Vladivostok, under the terms of the Lend Lease Act.

At nearly the same time, Roosevelt, not wishing to subsidize Japan's expansion in Asia, stopped shipment of U.S. oil and gasoline to Japan. It was at this point that Japan concluded that it would have to go to war with the U.S. in order to ensure its own territorial expansion. From Japan's point of view, at least privately, the die had been cast. The U.S. was still, however, trying to sort out its interactions with Russia under the changed circumstances. No joint naval operations, for example, had been authorized by the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations by the end of 1941.

Although the Germans pressured their Japanese allies to stop the shipping of U.S. goods via Russian freighters to Vladivostok, it continued, mostly unmolested, throughout the war. Both the Russians and the Japanese generally went out of their way avoid conflict with each other, despite isolated incidents. On May 1, 1942, a Japanese submarine sunk the Soviet cargo ship Angarstroi, loaded with sugar, in the Sea of Japan after it was detained, searched, and released by the Japanese Navy. At first, the Japanese blamed it on an American submarine, but the Soviets were not fooled and tensions escalated. The same month, a Japanese submarine exchanged fire with a Russian freighter off the coast of Australia.

At that point in the war, Japan was riding on the crest of victories at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and it is possible that some of its naval officers were emboldened enough to disregard the Russia-Japan Neutrality Pact. Both countries built up their forces facing each other, separating Siberia from Manchuria, and Outer Mongolia from Inner Mongolia, but Russian and Japanese diplomats and military officers decided to pass over the incidents at sea and Russia and Japan continued to avoid conflict.

The Japanese meticulously planned their attacks at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, on the following day, at Manila. Their goal, which they largely (though only temporarily) achieved, was to destroy or disable the American Pacific fleet, especially its capital ships (aircraft carriers and battleships), in order to clear obstacles to the Japanese invasion of suth and southwest Asia, starting with the Philippines.

For the Pearl Harbor attack, the attacking Japanese pilots knew the composition of the American fleet and targeted specific ships. They were even prepared to fly to Maui in pursuit of these particular ships if the fleet had moved to its occasional anchorage at Lahaina.

The attackers, in other words, were not aiming to cause general chaos and destruction, but rather to destroy specific warships, to the extent that they could locate them. (The Americans' aircraft carriers happened to be out at sea that morning). The Japanese did not attack the merchant docks in Honolulu Harbor, and so, whatever foreign freighters happened to be there were not imperiled. The attack on the Philippines 10 hours later was aimed particularly at destroying U.S. military airpower in the Pacific, the B-17s and P-40s at Clark and Iba air bases. This would give Japan's airplanes uncontested control of the air and, therefore, allow the Japanese army's invasion of the Philippines.