World War II's last blitzkrieg

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): Aug. 9, 1945. Even now, for some Japanese, Aug. 8 to 9 1945 is a day that will live in infamy, in much the same way that most Americans remember the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Fifty years later, this bitter Japanese memory is still of topical relevance, as it explains an enduring tension in East Asia.

In Moscow, at 5 p.m. on the evening (11 p.m. Tokyo time) of Aug. 8, then Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov received the Japanese Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Naotake Sato, in the Kremlin. It was an appointment which Ambassador Sato had sought for weeks as Tokyo bombarded him with requests that he broach increased Japanese-Soviet cooperation at the highest level.

Sato had told his Foreign Ministry superiors, in bravely forthright terms, that they were backing the wrong horse. Still, at the very least, he had been ordered to pursue Russian mediation to end the war. The Japanese government hoped thereby to get around the Anglo-American demand for their unconditional surrender. At the most, Sato was to suggest the possibility of military alliance.

But Molotov quickly made it plain that there would be no discussion on any of these topics. His terse statement emphasized that the Soviet Union was becoming an ally of the United States, Great Britain and China in the Far East. It was a move calculated to hasten the restoration of peace. "So, the Soviet government declares that from tomorrow, Aug. 9, the Soviet Union will consider herself in a state of war against Japan".

Sato, shocked but not surprised, was never able to inform Tokyo of the development. Molotov granted the ambassador permission to send a cable in code. But the Soviet authorities cut off all his communications before he could do so.

Two hours after the interview, 1 a.m. Japan time, Japan's crack Kwantung Army, in the Japanese colony of Manchukuo (China's northeastern provinces, acquired in 1931), came under murderous pressure from two directions. One Soviet Field Army based near Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East drove west into Manchukuo, while two Soviet Field Armies drove east, as they attacked the Japanese from Outer Mongolia and Siberia.

For a few days, the Kwantung Army, already depleted because some of its troops had been sent to reinforce the homeland against an expected American invasion, held out against the massive pincers. But once the vast array of Russian tanks broke through the outer defenses, the Japanese, who had few tanks with which to give battle, were frequently outflanked.

Nevertheless, bitter fighting between the Russians and Japanese continued long after the ostensible Japanese surrender on Aug. 15. Once it had destroyed the Kwantung Army, the Russians decimated the industries which Japan had developed in Manchukuo, hauling a vast array of booty back to the Soviet Union, much to the chagrin of the Chinese.

The follow-up Soviet offensive in the Kurile islands was still being contested by the Japanese late in August and on into early September -- even as the Japanese surrender was being signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

During the three to four-week Soviet blitzkrieg, the Russians took hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners, many of whom were then shipped to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners died in captivity. Many of the Japanese prisoners-of-war were only returned home years later.

Seen against the background of 1945, the most surprising thing was that the Japanese were surprised, and felt betrayed by the Russian attack. (Their subsequent postwar treatment, of course, gave ample grounds for additional bitterness).

By early 1945, it was obvious that with the looming end of the war in Europe, the U.S. and Britain would urge the Soviet Union to help end the war against Japan. From May onwards, when Germany collapsed, Russian troops and tanks were quickly redirected. Japanese diplomatic couriers traveling to Moscow reported troop trains every two or three minutes moving east along the Trans- Siberian Railway.

Ambassador Sato warned Tokyo that the Russians would stick with their Western allies but the Gaimusho still bombarded him with orders to get the Russians to help negotiate an end to the war. Declassified documents of American code-breaking now show that the Japanese government even went as far as suggesting a Soviet-Japanese united front in continuing the war against the Anglo-Americans.

Sato asked Tokyo to tell him what concessions it would offer to Moscow, as the price for its mediation or partnership. He never got a straight forward reply. Yet the Anglo-American leadership had already conceded Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union as a reward for entering the war. U.S. military supplies were still helping maintain the Soviet war machine. By contrast, the Japanese had nothing to offer in the bidding for Soviet help.

The fact that Tokyo was surprised brilliantly illustrates the unreal atmosphere which pervaded the Japanese militarist- dominated government as it pursued its suicide strategy in the last year of the war -- and which prevented it from surrendering long before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Japanese leaders expected the Soviet Union to abide by the Treaty of Non-Aggression, or Neutrality Pact, between Moscow and Tokyo. But that, too, was hardly realistic since the Russians had already given notice that they would allow the pact to lapse when it ran out early in 1946.

The Japanese naively hoped that the Soviet Union would return a favor. Tokyo had abided by the Neutrality Pact in 1941 when Hitler was at the gates of Moscow. Had Japan then attacked the Soviet Far East, instead of Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union would probably have collapsed fifty years before it did.

The fact that the Soviet leader Stalin instead sought, in 1945, to bring about Japan's collapse helps explain Japan's lingering bitterness, and also the Japanese government's lack of realism. In power politics, nations pursue interests, not gratitude.

Seen against the background of 1995, these encapsulated events explain why Japan and Russia remain at loggerheads over territorial disputes, and why no peace treaty has ever been negotiated, let alone signed, by Tokyo and Moscow.

These events also explain why, in one crucial way, it is a misnomer to talk of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

In the legal relations between two major world powers, Russia and Japan, World War II is not yet over.