| 60 years since the end of the Second World War September 3 has now become “the day of Beslan” for a long time, and last year’s events in the first school of this city will now, in terms of tragedy and significance for Russia, overshadow everything that ever happened on this day. And until 2004, on this day we celebrated - if, of course, we remembered - the half-forgotten “second Victory”. In 1945, this day was declared the day of victory over Japan - a day earlier, on September 2, the act of surrender of the Japanese armed forces was signed on the American battleship Missouri, which officially ended the Second World War. And although Hitler has always been a much more terrible enemy for our country than Emperor Hirohito, on whose behalf all the Japanese conquests were carried out, the participation of the Soviet army in the victory in the Far East should not be archived.
The Soviet-Japanese hostilities of 1945 can be considered perhaps the shortest campaign in the entire 70-odd years of the existence of the USSR. Although the Kremlin denounced the neutrality pact with Japan on April 5, 1945, hostilities began only towards the end of the summer. The first shots were fired on the demarcation line between Soviet and imperial divisions on August 9, 1945. However, Moscow's entry into the war in the Pacific Ocean pales in historical chronicles against the background of the second atomic bombing of the Americans. On the same day, the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, finally convincing Tokyo that it was time to end the resistance. But it is possible that the Russian attack from the north - in Manchuria, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands - also contributed greatly to the Mikado's decision to begin negotiations on surrender.
The USSR attacked Japan in several directions at once. The main blow was dealt to the Kwantung Army stationed in Manchukuo. Three Soviet fronts - the 1st and 2nd Far Eastern and Transbaikal - with the support of Mongolian formations, carried out a rapid operation to divide and destroy the Japanese troops. On August 10, hostilities began in Korea; on the 11th, the Soviet army attacked the Japanese in Southern Sakhalin. Almost nowhere did our troops encounter serious resistance; this was, apparently, one of the most successful operations of the Soviet troops in the entire history of the last century.
The Far Eastern campaign of August 1945 looks especially unusual against the backdrop of the actions of our troops against Nazi armies. The Great Patriotic War was a most difficult test for the country, requiring gigantic efforts and accompanied by millions of losses. Soviet troops marched into Germany for several years, literally scratching out every meter of territory. The last battle of that war - the capture of Berlin - was the most serious and difficult military operation, where battles took place for every district, street and house. The Manchurian offensive operation “dragged on” for 13 days, which included the defeat of the million-strong Kwantung Army, the landing in Port Arthur, the capture of the Emperor of Manchukuo Pu Yi and the surrender of Japan, which occurred less than a week after the start of hostilities.
Japan's decision to surrender to the mercy of the winner became known on August 15. However, the war did not end there: fighting in the occupied territories continued for about two more weeks. By September 2, when Japanese representatives signed the act of unconditional surrender of the empire, our troops returned South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands to the country, reached the Yellow Sea and took Pyongyang.
Of course, the significance of the blitzkrieg in the Far East is somewhat diminished by the peripheral nature of this campaign. In the end, the main military actions against Japan were carried out not by the USSR, but by the USA, and by 1945 that same Kwantung Army was more of a reserve, moved to the safest border of the empire. The Japanese offered the most stubborn resistance to the enemy on the Pacific Islands.
In a certain sense and in terms of the distribution of forces, the war in the Far East was a mirror image of the European campaigns. Hitler sent the most combat-ready and elite units to the Eastern Front to combat the Russian offensives, while in Western Europe the Allies encountered much less fierce resistance. In the Far East, the Americans acted as the main enemy; Japan did not take the Soviet threat seriously for a long time, and therefore our troops managed to defeat the Kwantung Army with little bloodshed.
“Little Blood” is also, perhaps, the most significant difference between the Far Eastern campaign and the war with Germany. As is known, Soviet losses in the Great Patriotic War, if we count the killed, wounded and captured, were several times greater than the losses of the Nazis. In the Finnish campaign of 1939-1940, more of our soldiers and officers also died than enemy soldiers. And the main complaint that historians sometimes make against Stalin, Zhukov and the entire Soviet military leadership is that our troops “filled up the enemy with corpses,” regardless of their own losses. The August blitzkrieg against Japan for the first time in all the years of the Second World War led to the fact that our losses in the campaign were significantly less than those of the enemy. Almost 600 thousand Japanese were captured, 84 thousand were killed or wounded. The Soviet army lost 12 thousand people killed.
An analogy can be drawn with the second front, the opening of which the Kremlin demanded from Great Britain and the United States for several years. Nevertheless, the Allied landing in Normandy occurred only towards the end of the Great Patriotic War, when, by and large, the outcome of the war in Europe was clear. In January 1945, at the Yalta Conference, Stalin promised Churchill and Roosevelt to begin military operations against Japan no later than three months after the defeat of Germany. As a result, the Soviet operation in the Far East started at the moment of preliminary analysis. And it should be noted that the USSR proved to be very successful in snatching up the hats left by the Japanese.
In August 1945, our country regained the Far Eastern territories lost by Tsarist Russia shortly before the 1917 revolution. After the catastrophic defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, we were forced to give Japan the entire Kuril ridge, Southern Sakhalin, as well as military bases in China on the Liaodong Peninsula, in particular the legendary Port Arthur (which, however, in 1950 the Kremlin donated to the then friendly People's Republic of China). Moreover, Tokyo’s aggressive policy continued during Soviet times, and the USSR had great difficulty in containing these diplomatic and military attacks. Thus, in 1921, during negotiations with the Far Eastern Republic (a temporary state formation in Primorye, dependent on Soviet Russia), the Japanese demanded that Northern Sakhalin be leased to them. In 1935, Moscow was forced to sell Manchukuo to the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER). Finally, in 1938, armed conflicts occurred between Soviet and Japanese troops on Lake Khasan in Primorye and in 1939 on the Khalkhin Gol River in Mongolia.
It was only after the signing of the neutrality pact in May 1941 that our relations with Tokyo stabilized somewhat. However, the main arguments in pacifying Japan’s onslaught in the northern direction were the war that soon broke out with the United States and the fact that the Nazis failed to take Moscow and Stalingrad and defeat the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, throughout the Great Patriotic War, Headquarters maintained a solid group of troops in the Far East, designed to deter a possible attack by the Japanese.
The comparative ease and speed of victory over Japan played a bad joke on its place in Russian history. May 9 has become the main national holiday, and the hardest victory in the Great Patriotic War is still perceived as one of the most important events of the last century. The victory in the East did not remain either in the memory of the people or in the official list of holidays, although after the signing of the agreement on the surrender of the Japanese Empire, September 3 was declared a holiday and a day off for some time. (It is curious that the dates of two memorable victories - in the West and in the East - experienced a similar calendar shift. The Allies celebrate both anniversaries on May 8 and September 2, but our domestic chronology shifted both victories a day later.)
There were almost no awards given for this war. The Great Patriotic War added several dozen items to the list of Soviet orders and medals - from the Diamond Order of Victory to massive medals for the capture of large cities. From August 1945, only the medal “For Victory over Japan” remained, which, due to its position, was pushed to the end of the chest iconostasis - after the not-so-well-known anniversary medal “Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” And the festive celebrations on the occasion of the victory over Japan have always been far from the solemnity of the Victory Day parades.
However, the Japanese campaign probably does not deserve to be forgotten. If only because our soldiers died there too, and the victorious soldiers - those who went through the most terrible and difficult war with Hitler, liberated their country and entered Berlin. And the fact that the Kwantung Army in the summer of 1945 did not pose a serious threat to them does not underestimate their merits. Vladimir DZAGUTO |
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