Introduction
In the fall of 1944, as the Western Allies and the Soviet Union closed on Germany, it became apparent that defeat for the Nazis was only a matter of time. Strategic planners began to ponder the problem of how to conclude the war against Japan. One of the major obstacles to final victory in the Pacific War was the Guandong ("Kwantung", old style) Army, the Japanese military force that had overrun Manchuria in 1931, created the puppet Empire of Manzhouguo, and guarded its rich natural and industrial resources (see Pu Yi and Manzhouguo, Cry "Havoc! #28). The campaign to defeat this army was the third largest campaign of World War Two. It was also the very last one of the war, and perhaps the shortest and least balanced as well.
Soviet Preparations
For a number of diplomatic and geographical reasons, the Soviet Union was to undertake this campaign. Technically, the USSR and Japan were not at war. The Nomonhan Incident of 1939 had been officially concluded by a neutrality pact that was due to run out in April, 1946. However, the Western Allies realized they would not be able to defeat Japan alone without unduly prolonging the war and incurring unacceptable casualties. It was also much easier for the USSR to transfer land and air forces from Europe to Asia over land. The Allies, much less conveniently placed, would have had to make several amphibious invasions at points along the Korean and North Chinese coast to acquire adequate bases for operations against the Guandong Army and the Home Islands.
Roosevelt and Churchill first raised the question with Stalin at the November 1943 Teheran conference. He agreed to intervene against Japan after Germany had surrendered, since he intended to strip the country of its industrial infrastructure and natural resources much as he would shortly do to Germany. Stalin clarified his commitment at the February 1945 Yalta conference by promising to strike Japan three months after V-E Day, and named his price: the return of Tsarist territories lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and an official request by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek, old style) to intervene in Manchuria in order to justify breaking the neutrality pact.
The Soviet Far Eastern Front, stretching from the satellite state of Outer Mongolia to Vladivostok, had been inactive since 1939 and little had changed. There were still two tank divisions in the theatre, a formation that had been abandoned in Europe at the end of 1941, tank brigades used obsolete T-26 and BT-5 cavalry tanks, and many soldiers wore uniforms of pre-war design.
In March 1945, Stalin began to send reinforcements, new equipment, and experienced senior commanders from his strategic reserve to the Far East. When Germany capitulated on 8 May 1945, the rate of reinforcement was raised to about 10 new divisions a month. Within 90 days of the German surrender, 52 divisions had joined the 28 assorted units already there and were ready to advance. It was a force totalling over 1.5 million men, 25,000 guns and mortars, 5,500 AFV, and 5,000 combat aircraft, organized into three Fronts (First Far East, Second Far East, and Trans-Baikal).
The plan was to execute a giant pincers movement to cut off two-thirds of Manchuria before moving southwards into Korea and northern China. The majority of mechanized forces were given to the Trans-Baikal Front that formed the western pincer. The Front was given the mission of penetrating the Greater Hsingan Mountains and breaking out into the central Manchurian plains beyond, linking up with the eastern pincer of the First Far East Front around Changchun.
Japanese Preparation
Fourteen years before, the Guandong Army had in six months overrun an area the size of the northeastern United States and built a puppet state of thirty million slaves for the Emperor with little more than one infantry division and six battalions of railway security troops. The Army reached the peak of its strength in 1939, when it contained about 300,000 men organized into nine good-quality infantry divisions, several independent tank and cavalry brigades, eight regiment-sized border garrison units, and 600 modern aircraft.
When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, the option of invading Siberia was considered but the strategic decision to strike south into the Pacific had already been taken.
After 1939 the number of divisions in Manzhouguo remained high and even rose but quality declined steadily as men, equipment, and fuel were withdrawn to satisfy the needs of the other fronts. This gave little cause for concern as the Army's main task was suppressing guerrillas, but by late 1944 whole units began to be transferred out for the defence of the Home Islands.
General Yamada Otozo, Commander in Chief of the Guandong Army, was aware of the Soviet buildup and had good cause to worry about his ability to resist a Soviet attack. He had tried to make up for the decline in quality by such expedients as upgrading the border garrison units into divisions, and in January 1945 decided to increase the number of units again by mobilizing the last recruits. In three successive levies between February and July, 250,000 Japanese colonists in Manzhouguo and Korea were drafted to make a total of 663,000 all ranks. The recruits formed nine new divisions and seven Independent Mixed Brigades, and fleshed out the 21 divisions and four brigades already there.
The quality of these last-minute reinforcements can be imagined. They received little training and there were very few officers and NCOs to provide leadership or cohesion. There was little equipment to issue them, either - many reservists did not receive full uniforms or even rifles, there were few machine guns, and locally made mortars were often the only artillery available. Unit commanders tried to compensate for the complete lack of anti-tank guns by training the men to attack tanks with Molotov cocktails or demolition charges strapped to their bodies. There were not enough engineers or service troops to support the new divisions, as most of them had been withdrawn to Japan to build fortifications.
All in all, the older divisions had perhaps 30-40% of the combat power of a pre-war division, the newer ones 25-30%. The 117,000 troops of the puppet Manzhouguoan Army had never had to fight anyone except guerrillas and could no longer be judged politically reliable.
The only advantages the Guandong Army had were knowledge of the terrain and the prepared positions they had been occupying on the borders of Manzhouguo for over ten years. However, faced with the obvious inadequacy of the new units and the strategic futility of trying to stop the Soviets at all points along the borders, the Army Command decided to concentrate most of the main units into a "redoubt zone" in the southwest along the Yalu River and leave stay-behind detachments to harass the Soviet rear areas.
Even though this meant surrendering most of Manchuria without a fight, this still seemed to be the best way to deal with both the expected Soviet attack and the American amphibious landings in northeast China and south Korea. Perhaps also they were inspired by the Allied diversion of effort against the fictitious German Alpine Redoubt in Bavaria. Through June and July, divisions began to shift southward as quickly and unobtrusively as possible with the limited transport available, in order to get into position in time without alerting the Soviets or panicking the civilian population.
The Storm Breaks
The original start date for the Soviet offensive was between 20 and 25 August, but the Japanese redeployment led the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, to suggest an earlier start to Stalin. Stalin considered the matter and on learning of the destruction of Hiroshima on 6 August, ordered Vasilevsky to start on 9 August. On the afternoon of 8 August Sato Naotake , Japan's ambassador to the USSR, had an audience with Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov. Sato had been trying to obtain a negotiated peace with the Allies brokered by the USSR, but instead of the negotiation session he was expecting he was read a declaration of war.
Sato tried to alert Tokyo but his cable was never sent: the first news the Guandong Army got of the offensive was by monitoring broadcasts of the TASS News Agency and frantic telephone calls from unit commanders who were being shelled and bombed.
In reaction, the Army accelerated its move southwards to the Korean border and prepared to shift its headquarters from Changchun to Tunghua. The plans came apart almost immediately, as no one was prepared for the speed and shock of the attack. General Ushiroku, commander of the Third Area Army, disobeyed the order to fall back and committed his units to a forward defensive line along the Mukden-Changchun axis. This left him able to defend many of the approximately one million Japanese colonists who had settled in Manzhouguo but out of contact with the rest of the Guandong Army.
On 14 August, a staff officer from General Yamada convinced Ushiroku to obey orders and fall back to the redoubt zone. He agreed but by this time the argument was academic. Though the advance of the 6th Guards Tank Army had been slowed by heavy rains, it had negotiated the mountains and taken Taoan the day before, splitting Third Area Army in two. The eastern pincer was faced with rougher terrain and entrenched defenders in greater numbers. Casualties were therefore much higher but by 13 August, leading elements of the 5th Army had taken Mutanchiang and the 10th Mechanized Corps was halfway to Changchun. On the same day a large force of Soviet naval infantry landed at Chongjin near the mouth of the Yalu River, outflanking the redoubt zone, and some Manzhouguoan units in Changchun mutinied.
Matters were heading to a foregone conclusion. Where they had a chance to occupy prepared positions and stockpile enough ammunition, the Japanese gave a good account of themselves, but in most places were simply overwhelmed by Soviet firepower or outflanked by mechanized units. The fighting withdrawal continued on 14 August and then, at noon on 15 August, came the Emperor's radio broadcast constituting an offer to surrender. That night the order from Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo suspending all offensive operations reached the Guandong Army.
General Yamada, Commander-in-Chief, was instructed to negotiate a ceasefire and surrender terms with Marshal Vasilevsky. Fighting continued for another day and a half before communications could be opened between the two. Marshal Vasilevsky set a deadline of noon on 20 August for capitulation of all Japanese forces, but the situation was complicated by the fact that all contact had been lost with many Japanese units who had not heard of the surrender, and that a number of senior officers had committed suicide immediately after the Emperor's broadcast. In fact, the last pockets of resistance did not surrender until 30 August. Total casualties were 8,219 Soviet dead to 21,389 Japanese. Over 594,000 became prisoners.
Aftermath
The Soviet objective now was to identify and secure as much industrial material as possible to take back as war booty. Realizing that possession is nine points of the law, their advance continued until the official end of the war on 2 September. Soviet units moved into Korea as far as the fateful 38th Parallel and detachments were air- or sealifted into major cities.
They left in the spring of 1946, after having removed every piece of industrial machinery, head of livestock, motor vehicle, and rolling stock that could be found. The troops of the puppet Manzhouguoan Army melted into the hills and became bandits. The Manchurian natives inflicted a terrible revenge on the unarmed Japanese colonists who had lorded it over them for 14 years, killing perhaps 200,000 of them. Meanwhile, the disarmed elements of the Guandong Army made their way to transit camps. They expected to be repatriated promptly as the Potsdam Declaration had promised, but instead were sent to labour camps in Siberia and Outer Mongolia. The last of them did not return until 1956, and thousands never returned at all.
Soviet historians maintained that it was the Manchurian campaign and not the atom bomb that forced the Japanese to surrender. American ones are just as inflexible in claiming the reverse. However, even the official British history of the Pacific War, The War Against Japan, argues that it was this massive conventional attack that forced the Supreme Council of the Japanese government to face reality, since the power of atomic weapons was so poorly understood at the time.
It certainly was an effective demonstration, to either the Japanese or the Western powers, of the speed and violence of Soviet-style blitzkrieg. Whatever the final effect of the offensive, it still spelled an inglorious end to the Guandong Army -- an army that, despite its previous victories, had in the end put up barely a week of serious resistance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coox, Alvin. Nomonhan: Japan against Russia. vol. 2. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1985.
Hooton, E.R. "Defeat of the Kwantung Army", in War Monthly #55, n.d.
"Manchuria" In The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Moscow 1972.
Toland, John. Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
Train, Brian. "Pu Yi and Manzhouguo", in Cry "Havoc!" (1999) 28:17-19
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