While the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, one million six hundred thousand Soviet soldiers suddenly attacked the Japanese army in the east of the Asian continent.
In a matter of days, the million-strong army of Emperor Hirohito was defeated.
It was a pivotal moment of World War II in the Pacific that is hardly mentioned by historical writers who emphasize the two atomic bombs dropped within one week 65 years ago.
Recently, however, some historians have begun to argue that the actions of the Soviet troops influenced the outcome of the war to the same, if not more, than the atomic bombing.
In a recently published book by a history professor at the University of California, this point was further developed. Its essence is that the fear of the invasion of Soviet troops forced the Japanese to surrender to the Americans, because they were confident that they would treat them better than the Russians.
In northeast Asia, the Japanese fought against Soviet forces in 1939 when they tried to enter Mongolia. Japanese troops were defeated in the battles near the Khalkhin Gol River, which forced Tokyo to sign a neutrality treaty, thanks to which the Soviet Union was not involved in hostilities in the Pacific Ocean.
Thus, Japan was able to focus its efforts on the war with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands, as well as on the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
After Germany signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender on May 8, 1945, as well as a series of defeats in the Philippines, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Japan asked the USSR for mediation efforts to end the war.
However, the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, had already made a confidential promise to Washington that he would start a war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany. Disregarding Japan's requests, he deployed over a million soldiers along the border with Manchuria.
The operation, codenamed "August Storm", began on August 9, 1945, almost simultaneously with the bombing of Nagasaki. For two weeks of fighting, Japan lost 84,000 soldiers killed, and the USSR - 12,000. Soviet troops did not reach only 50 kilometers to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
“The entry of the Soviet Union into the war influenced the decision of the Japanese leadership to surrender to a much greater extent than the atomic bombing. It dashed Japan's hopes of a Soviet-mediated withdrawal from the war, said Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, author of Racing the Enemy, which explores the end of the war using documents recently declassified in Russia., USA and Japan.
The Japanese "hastened the end of the war in the hope that the US will deal with the defeated better than the USSR," Hasegawa, an American citizen, said in an interview.
Despite the large number of deaths as a result of the atomic bombing (140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki), the Japanese leadership believed that it could withstand the invasion of the anti-Hitler coalition if it retained control over Manchuria and Korea, which supplied resources for the war, Hasegawa and Terry believe. Charman, a fellow at the Imperial War Museum in London specializing in World War II history.
“The Soviet strike changed everything,” Charman said. “The authorities in Tokyo realized that there was no hope left. Thus, Operation August Storm influenced Japan's decision to surrender to a much greater extent than the atomic bombing."
In the United States, bombing is still seen as a kind of last resort that had to be used against an enemy who is ready to fight to the last soldier. For their part, US President Harry Truman and his military advisers assumed that a ground operation would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.
The impact of the rapid Soviet offensive can be judged by the words of the Japanese Prime Minister of the Second World War, Kantaro Suzuki, who called on his government to surrender.
As Hasegawa writes in his book, Suzuki said the following: “If we miss this opportunity, the Soviet Union will take over not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also Hokkaido. We need to end the war while we can still negotiate with the United States.”
Dominic Lieven, a professor at the London School of Economics, believes that due to the anti-Sovietism of the West, the importance of the military successes of the USSR was deliberately understated. In addition, "very few British and American people witnessed the Soviet advance in the Far East with their own eyes, and Western historians did not have access to Soviet archives," Lieven adds.
But the greatest surprise is that in Russia itself, this military operation was not given special attention. Apparently, the defeat of the Japanese could not be compared with the victory over Nazi Germany. Likewise, the human losses were incomparable: 12 thousand killed during the hostilities with Japan and 27 million in the war with Germany.
“This operation was of great importance,” said retired general Makhmut Gareev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. "Having entered the war with Japan … the Soviet Union brought the end of World War II closer."
