“The historical evidence indicates that it was the Soviet onslaught in Manchuria which pushed the Japanese military and political elite into the recognition that there was no alternative to ‘enduring the unendurable.’”
By Peter Harmsen
TEN MINUTES AFTER midnight on Aug. 9, 1945, one of the largest and most ambitious offensive operations in the history of war kicked off.
Reconnaissance units of the Soviet army stealthily crossed the border from eastern Russia into Japanese-occupied northeast China. Four hours later, the main Soviet columns started down three major axes. The Red Colossus was on the move.
It was a staggering enterprise, across a 5,000-kilometer (3,100-mile) frontline. Altogether 1.5 million men and 85,000 vehicles of various types were advancing into Japan’s last major stronghold, three large Chinese provinces known then as Manchuria.
Many of the Red Army soldiers were tough veterans of the recent fierce battles that had brought Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich to a humiliating end.[1]
The Soviet troops only met scattered resistance during the first hours of the offensive. In one instance, modern tanks simply swept aside small groups of Mongolian cavalry acting as auxiliaries for the Japanese.[2] In another, desperate Japanese infantry tried to counter the approaching juggernaut with the suicide tactics adopted earlier throughout the Pacific, but to no avail, as this Japanese account testifies:
Each man of the Raiding Battalion’s 1st Company equipped himself with an explosive charge and dashed at the enemy. However, although minor damage was inflicted, the charges – seven to sixteen pounds – were not powerful enough to stop tanks.[3]
The Soviet advance went almost as smoothly as if it had been a peacetime maneuver, and by nightfall on Aug. 9, some vanguard units had penetrated 150 kilometres (95 miles) inside Japanese-held territory. Even by the standards of World War Two, when technological progress and tactical innovation had taken mobility to previously unimaginable extremes, this was truly remarkable.
It was proof of the military professionalism that the Soviet military had attained after four years of war with the German army, arguably the most potent fighting force ever, but it was also a triumph of meticulous planning and patient preparation.
The Red Army buildup along the Manchurian frontier began in March, when the war in Europe was approaching its end. During the intervening months, Soviet commanders had used a total of 136,000 rail cars to transport men and materiel across distances of up to 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) to be ready for the assault.[4]
Marshal Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Vasilevsky, the commander-in-chief of Soviet Far East forces during the offensive, later enumerated the various elements that went into creating the crushing success:
The enormous scope of armed combat in an extremely complex combat theater, the organization of strategic deployment to create a new combat theater, the massive regrouping of forces over great distances, the successful achievement of the surprise of powerful initial strikes.[5]
Surprise had indeed been achieved, as Vasilevsky noted, and news of the Soviet assault came as a shock in Tokyo. When Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Sakomizu Hisatsune heard the initial reports about the crumbling front in Manchuria, he felt “as if all the blood in my body flowed backward.”[6]
Admiral Ugaki Matome, in charge of naval aircraft defending the Japanese home islands, had personally hoped for continued peace with the Soviet Union, but now, he wrote in his diary, “every hope is completely ruined. Now this country is going to fight alone against the whole world. This is fate indeed!”[7]
There was no question that the Soviet offensive was a severe blow to Japan. Manchuria, the provinces of northeast China, was a larger territory than Germany, France and Spain combined. The region had been under Japanese control for nearly 14 years. It was arguably the jewel in the crown of the Japanese Empire, a source of vital raw materials and also a frontier region where Japan tried to settle part of its surplus population.
It was also garrisoned by more than a million men, both Japanese troops and auxiliaries. The core of this impressive force was the Kwantung Army, led by fiercely nationalistic officers and widely rumored to constitute the cream of the Japanese military. But the way the fighting was going during the early hours of the battle for Manchuria, it was clear that it was no match for the Soviet war machine.
For Japan, World War Two not only ended in Manchuria, it also began there. In a way, the campaign of late summer 1945 was just the second act of a Soviet-Japanese conflict that had flared up in the late 1930s and had lain dormant ever since, as both adversaries had been busy fighting other wars elsewhere.
But for the Japanese army, unlike the navy, the Soviet bear had remained the primary enemy and the true existential threat. Ultimately, the fight against the western Allies to the south of Japan was an unwelcome distraction from the real task of national salvation.
How much the Soviet threat mattered is evident from this fact: Just hours after the Soviet avalanche, the centre of the port city of Nagasaki was obliterated in a powerful atomic blast, but generally this received far less attention among senior Japanese decision makers. Admiral Ugaki, who had seen all his hopes dashed by the news of the Soviet invasion, did not even mention the Nagasaki bomb in his diary until the day after.[8]
Indeed, the world’s first nuclear attack, on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, while rattling the Japanese leaders, had not achieved the kind of impact that the Soviet attack now had. To be sure, the Japanese high command was now aware that the United States was in possession of a weapon of unfathomable power, and that it could level one Japanese city of another. But most major cities had already been levelled by months of American bombing raids.
The Soviet assault was a different story, and the reaction of army deputy chief of staff Torashiro Kawabe gives an explanation why. Kawabe was awakened to the news just hours after the Soviet assault, and shortly afterwards jotted down his first impressions in his diary: “The Soviets have finally risen! My judgment has proven wrong.”
His admission carried a special significance. Kawabe was a proponent of the so-called ketsugo strategy, which was aimed at delivering such a decisive blow to the U.S. forces that the war-weary Americans would settle for a negotiated peace and eventually some agreement short of unconditional surrender.
This had attained extra relevance since late July when the United States. Great Britain and China had issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender, failing which, the three powers said ominously, Japan would face “prompt and utter destruction.”
The ketsugo strategy seemed increasingly desperate, and now that the Soviets were actively in the war, it had lost any remaining persuasive power. The influential members of the officer corps who had argued for a continuation of the fight had very few arguments left for not suing for peace.
The main political effect of the Soviet attack was, therefore, to finally persuade the war party in the Japanese leadership that continued resistance was useless. On Aug. 15, Emperor Hirohito went on air to address his people, uttering one of the greatest understatements ever when commenting that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” In the desperate situation, Hirohito said, there was no alternative to “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable” and opt for surrender.
The defeat of Japan was the result of a combination of factors, of which the nuclear attacks were one, as Hirohito himself indeed emphasized in his address to his people. The long, bloody campaigns across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, as well as the naval battles, also sapped the Japanese Empire to an extent where its ability to carry on the war was severely eroded.
However, the historical evidence indicates that it was the Soviet onslaught in Manchuria which pushed the Japanese military and political elite into the recognition that there was no alternative to “enduring the unendurable.”
Just as the Soviet Union was crucial in bringing about a speedy conclusion to the war in the Asia Pacific in August 1945, it can be argued that it had been a key factor even during the preceding four years when barely a shot had been fired in anger along the Manchurian border.
Throughout the war years, as the Japanese empire was facing mounting pressure along its entire periphery, the Japanese army had been compelled to maintain a force of about a million men along the Manchurian border with the Soviet Union. There they had been sitting idly by, at a time when they were sorely needed in vital theatres: from the jungles of Burma to the swamps of New Guinea and the blistering sands of the Central Pacific islands.
The fact that the mere presence of the Soviet threat to the north was enough for Japan to make painful strategic choices that ultimately hastened its defeat can also help throw light on one of the big what-ifs of World War Two history: what if Hitler had never attacked the Soviet Union? What if he had left Stalin alone and concentrated on bringing Great Britain to its knees? Wouldn’t he have had enough resources to beat the British into submission and win the war in Western Europe?
Well, maybe not. Even if war had not broken out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, it would have been a fragile and precarious peace, and just like the Japanese did in Manchuria, the Germans would have been forced to garrison large numbers of forces in the east for the eventuality that the Soviets might attack.
In other words, the Soviet Union was so enormous that whether it was fighting or not, by sheer weight alone it had the ability to determine the war at the strategic level. Red Colossus indeed.
Peter Harmsen is the New York Times best-selling author of Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943 (War in the Far East), the sequel to the 2018 War in the Far East: Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–1941. His other works include Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City. He studied history at National Taiwan University and has been a foreign correspondent in East Asia for two decades. He has focused mainly on the Chinese-speaking countries, but has reported from nearly every corner of the region, including Mongolia and North Korea. His books have been translated into Chinese, Danish and Romanian. Read his blog at www.chinaww2.com
[1] David M. Glantz, August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic Offensive in Manchuria (Leavenworth Papers No. 7), (Fort Leavenworth KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1983), 79-92.
[2] Glantz, August Storm, 79-80.
[3] Max Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (London: Harper Press, 2007), 534.
[4] Glantz, August Storm, 1-2.
[5] Quoted by Lilita I. Dzirkals, “’Lightning War in Manchura’: Soviet Military Analysis of the 1945 Far East Campaign,” (Santa Monica CA: RAND Corp., 1976), 3-4.
[6] Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, Racing the Enemy: Stalin Truman and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 197.
[7] Ugaki Matome, Fading Victory (Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 656.
[8] Ugaki, Fading Victory, 657.
While the Soviet declaration of war may have been a factor, the Japanese knew that that the Soviets had zero capability to attack the home islands. In their minds, if they could bring as much of is army in China back, it would help in the defense of the home islands.
By the same token, the Japanese high command knew that the Americans had the capabilities to invade Japan and had set about to make it as costly as possible, hoping the U.S. would give up and offer more generous terms. The two atomic bombs convinced the Emperor and the Japanese military that the U.S. could drop more and more atomic bombs for which they had no defense. It was the Emperor who said, after Nagasaki, enough is enough.
This article contains some inaccuracies. Far from the the “cream of the Japanese Army,” the Kwantung Army had been stripped of it’s best units and heavy equipment to defend other fronts by the time the Soviets invaded. Japanese sources claim their strength may have been down to as little as a third.
Also, the Japanese war party never agreed to support surrender. They continued to seek a final decisive battle for the Homeland. It was left to Emperor Hirohito to impose surrender upon them.
These facts are covered in the sources cited in the article.
I’m sure the Japanese army knew the Soviets unlike the Americans would be different. I’m sure they heard the stories when the soviet army did to the civilian population in germany when they fighting came close