LONDON - On Aug. 8, 1945 — a week before Japan's surrender in World War II — 1.5 million Soviet troops launched a massive surprise attack against Japanese occupation forces in northern China and Korea, an area the size of Western Europe. Within days, Tokyo's million-man army in the region had collapsed in one of the greatest military defeats in history.

"It was a massive campaign and a crushing blow for Japan which was already in a bad way after fighting for almost four years in the Pacific War," said Nigel Steel, a World War II historian at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Historians say the now largely forgotten Red Army victory — codenamed August Storm — not only hastened the end of World War II but also set the stage for the Korean War and for the victory in 1949 of the Chinese communists in the civil war against the Nationalists.

Some Japanese historians believe it had a greater effect on the decision of the Japanese leadership to end the Pacific War than the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which came within days of the Soviet attack.

"The impact of atomic bombs (on Japanese army's decision to surrender) is being overestimated," says Arai Shinichi, historian and professor emeritus of Ibaragi University and Surugadai University.

More important in persuading Tokyo to surrender were the Soviet decision to enter the war in the Far East, the Red Army's lighting advance through Manchuria, and the collapse of Japanese efforts to enlist the Soviets as peace intermediaries, Arai said.

Still, because August Storm came in the midst of the two atomic blasts, it has been largely neglected by Western historians.

"Cold War propaganda contributed to their being largely overlooked from the Anglo-American perspective," Steel said. "We always have focused on the atomic attacks, which for us represented the definitive blow."

In Russia, too, the far-off campaign was eclipsed by the bloody life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, dubbed the Great Patriotic War, said Alexander Koltyukov, director of Moscow's Institute of Military History.

Despite the unprecedented scale of the Soviet victory in the Far East, the relatively light casualties suffered by the Red Army in the Asia campaign also contributed to it being viewed as a sideshow, Koltyukov said.

Japan's forces in northeast Asia, known as the Kwantung Army, had already tangled with the Russians in 1939 when the Japanese tried to invade Mongolia. Their crushing defeat at the hands of Gen. Georgy Zhukov — an up-and-coming commander who later crafted the Soviet victory against the Nazis — persuaded Tokyo to turn against U.S., British, French and Dutch forces in Southeast Asia instead.

Moscow and Tokyo eventually signed a neutrality pact that kept the U.S.S.R. out of the Pacific War that followed Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. In fact, following the Nazi surrender on May 8, 1945, Tokyo looked to Moscow to mediate an end to the war in the Far East.

But unbeknownst to the Japanese, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had promised Washington and London that he would attack Japanese forces within three months of Germany's defeat.

A force of 1.5 million Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Aleksander Vasilevski poured across the Manchurian frontier in a huge battle of encirclement on Aug. 8, catching the Kwantung Army completely off guard. Despite tenacious, often suicidal, resistance by the Japanese, within days the quick-moving Soviets had penetrated 560 miles into China, Korea and the Kuril islands.

Up to that point — although Japan had been weakened by defeats in Burma, the Philippines and a string of Pacific islands — the Imperial Military Command believed it could still hold out against an Allied invasion of the home islands if it retained control of Manchuria and Korea, which provided Japan with the resources for war.

But then came the Soviet attack. After the death of 80,000 troops — compared to about 8,200 Soviet casualties — and the loss of the Kuril islands within striking distance of Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, Tokyo finally accepted the inevitability of defeat.

"The impact of the blow in Manchuria persuaded Japan's civilian and political leadership more than the atomic strikes to recognize they stood no chance at all of holding out even in the home islands," Steel said.

Although Moscow and Tokyo normalized diplomatic relations in 1956, Japan has refused to sign a peace treaty formally ending hostilities until the Soviet Union returns the "Northern Territories," four small islands off the coast of Hokkaido, which Tokyo claims have always been Japanese territory.

Hi Kevin

I often wonder about why people question the use of the two atomic bombs being dropped.

War is hell, it is as simple as that.

The two bombs saved countless Allied lives.  Talk to any veteran who came back from the Pacific Theater and they will tell you that not using the bombs would have been irresponsible of the Govenments in power.

Cheers...Happy Landings...Doug

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That's just one point of view. Did someone ever ask Japan for their opinions on the bombs?

The conflict there provides the famous story about the Il-2 that was attacked until the japanese guy was out of ammo. The russian tailgunner was quoted afterwards "... and then i blew him out of the sky."

They attacked the US w/o a formal declaration of war.

War Crimes:
Japan and Japanese citizens, mostly military forces, carried out a campaign of terror during World War II that is unsurpassed in bestiality and savagery in modern times. On top of combat losses, Asian and Allied nations lost millions of non-combatant dead to all causes: bombardment of cities, slave labor, massacres, summary executions, medical experiments, germ and gas warfare, beheading, beating and rape, stabbing, gun shot, hanging, torture, boiling alive, impaling on bayonets, burning alive, starvation, medical neglect, etc. Japanese businesses and the Kwantung Army cooperated in the operation of the Opium Monopoly Bureau to finance Japan's war machine with the creation of millions of Chinese addicts. At least 200,000 women were forced to serve as sex slaves. Allied POW survived World War II at a 2% rate in Nazi camps, but POW held by the Japanese died at more than a 37% rate ( list of camps). Of all the belligerents, only the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics treated POW with the same brutal indifference as Japan. In 1945, Japanese leaders ordered the death of all remaining POW, "leaving no trace". The Japanese reign of terror began in earnest in 1931. The nightmare did not end until late 1945, only after allied forces entered territories held by the Japanese, often days, weeks and even months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945).

My estimate is that 11M civilians and 4.5M soldiers died in the Asian/Pacific War. That's 15,500,000 deaths which can probably be blamed on the Japanese to one extent or another.


Nuff said

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Yes, I understand that and agree with you. But the fact remains that up until the Japanese attacked the US. They were trying to stay out of the war. Yes, they were sending aid to Britain all along. Yes, they would have probably eventually entered the war anyway.

I had 2 uncles that served in the Pacific during WWII and both had stories of the atrocities committed by the Japanese. One was even on a destroyer that was attacked by Kamikazes that injured him badly.

But when you consider the horrific things perpetrated by the Japanese on Nanking that are most notorious. Over the six weeks of the massacre, in addition to the murder of about 300,000 civilians, the Japanese troops raped over 20,000 women, most of whom were murdered thereafter.

Women of all ages (including children as young as seven and elderly women in their seventies) were violated, many of them being gangraped or attacked on multiple occasions. Some women were held captive so that the could be repeatedly abused. Rapes were committed in broad daylight, in front of spouses, children, or other family members, and with appalling frequency. The soldiers' usual practice, officially condoned by high-ranking officials so as to "avoid difficulties," was to murder the women when they were finished with them. This was most often done by cutting off their breasts and/or disemboweling them with a bayonet to the abdomen. Senior officers were not only aware of these acts, but participated in them as well.

Particularly disturbing is that the Japanese perpetrators derived great pleasure from these heinous crimes, while their superiors condoned and even supported them. One outstandingly revolting account is of several soldiers who, after raping and killing a pregnant woman, presented her fetus on a bayonet to their commanding officer, who replied with laughter. There were innumerable gruesome occurrences like this ...
acts of cruelty seemingly beyond human capacity ...but commonplace, in the massacre of Nanking.

This is but one in a long history of atrocities committed by the Japanese from 1931 through 1945. The Japanese as far as I'm aware are completely unrepentant about this, so why would one expect the US to be repentant about saving the lives of an estimated 1 million soldiers and God only knows how many non-combatants?

BTW, I have no hatred for the Japanese, in fact I dearly loved the country and it's people after my short stay there in the 1970's. I'm just stating historical facts.

Wasn't there some documentary awhile back about Allied Pacific atrocities?

There's two sides to every page...

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I'm certain there were and normally these came as a response to atrocities that have been witnessed. But I honestly haven't heard of any that on the scale that the Japanese or Germans did to allied troops.

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The Pearl Harbor attack was far worse than it should have been. The Japanese aircraft had been picked up on the then new fangled invention known as radar and though a trained operator figured it out in time to warn his superiors. Those superiors put it off as a flight of B-17's. Despite the fact that it was coming in from the NW instead of the East. That and the exceptional intelligent move of placing all aircraft in a group where they could be easily destroyed.