[introduction.]

The Soviet Union’s decision to enter into the war against Japan was prompted by its Allied commitments and served the interests of the peoples of all countries engulfed in the world conflagration. The Soviet Union had to ensure the safety of its Far Eastern borders, which Japan had threatened throughout the entire history of the Soviet state. Japan’s conduct was menacing when the situation on the Soviet-German front was particularly grave for the USSR. It was then that Japan, acting in violation of the SovietJapanese Treaty of Neutrality, had its forces poised.for attack on the USSR, and kept putting it off solely because of the continual reversals that the Wehrmacht suffered at the hands of the Soviet army. The treacherous policy of the Japanese government tied up 40 Soviet divisions on the Far Eastern borders throughout the entire period of the war at a time when these forces could have been used in the fight against the Nazis.  [150•1  Thus, the Soviet Union’s war against Japan was a logical continuation of the Great Patriotic War.  [150•2 

Falsification of Events
in the Far East

p The Soviet contribution to the victory over militarist Japan has for a long time been a subject for discussion in the bourgeois literature about the Second World War. Asked by American historians about the Soviet role in the victory over Japan, President Truman said curtly: "No military contribution was made by the Russians toward victory over Japan.” This irresponsible statement, rare even among bourgeois politicians, was made public in an official American study on the Second World War,  [150•3  and was later picked 151 up by many bourgeois historians and memoir-writers. Louis Morton set out to prove that by the summer of 194.5 Japan had been utterly defeated, which meant that the Soviet Union’s entry into the war was not in answer to the Allied request.  [151•1  Raymond Garthoff used this distorted interpretation of the events in the Far East in order to discredit the wartime policy of the Soviet Union. He writes: "Having been promised most of their objectives by the Western Allies at Yalta as reward for assistance against the Japanese, the Russians denounced their non-aggression treaty and then, while it was still in effect, attacked in August 1945. They would in any case have stepped in to share in the fruits of victory, but Stalin was able to minimize the blame for his violation of the non-aggression treaty by requesting, and getting, a letter from President Truman asking the USSR to enter the war.”  [151•2 

p But history is a severe judge of anyone who tries to distort it.

p The epic battles on the S.oviet-German front which turned the tide of the Second World War prompted the belligerents to revise their Pacific strategy and forced the Japanese command to assume the defensive.

p The C-in-C of the U.S. forces in the Far East, General MacArthur, issued a communique, not long before the surrender of his Philippines garrison in 1942, declaring that "the world situation at the present time indicates that the hopes of civilisation rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army".  [151•3 

p The defeat of Nazi Germany and its surrender predetermined the outcome of the war. But the victory over Nazi Germany did not automatically bring Japan to her knees. It took time and effort to rout the Japanese aggressors and in this way to end the Second World War.

p According to George Kennan, "At the Second Quebec 152 Conference, in September 1944... the Combined Chiefs of Staff took as the target date for the Japanese surrender a time eighteen months after the end of the war with Germany."This means that the war was expected to last until late 1946”.  [152•1  The Allied armed forces were yet to rout a fivemillion-strong Japanese army which included several thousand kamikazes. U.S. military circles were particularly worried about the presence of Japanese troops in Manchuria and other border areas of the USSR where Japan had two-thirds of her tanks, half her artillery and the elite imperial divisions. The Americans regarded them as the cream of the Japanese army and believed that any prolonged fighting with them would increase American casualties by more than a million. It is true, though, that some American historians sought to belittle the actual might of the Kwantung Army, and failed to provide any cogent facts on this point.  [152•2 

p As the American army moved closer and closer to Japan, the Japanese stiffened their resistance. On June 18, 194.5, General George C.Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, told President Truman at the White House that in the battles for the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa the Americans lost three times as many troops as in the battles for the islands of Leyte and Luson. The Japanese militarists announced total mobilisation, as the Nazis had done in Germany, and in this way hoped to turn Japan into an impregnable fortress. General Marshall pointed out that the Soviet Union’s entry into the war might be crucial in forcing Japan to surrender.

p Kent Greenfield believes, however, that the American Chiefs of Staff misjudged the situation. In his view, "in combination with naval power, the air forces of the United States 153 forced the Japanese to surrender without an invasion of their homeland by the Army".  [153•1  But Greenfield says nothing about the fact that by the beginning of 194.5 the Japanese invaders had scored major military successes in China. The Japanese advanced; to the southwestern parts of that country and linked up with their troops operating in French Indochina, thus establishing an unbroken frontline from Peking to Singapore. Japan’s land forces were still very strong and there was still a long struggle ahead to destroy them.

All that led the United States and Britain to ask the Soviet government to join in the war against Japan.

Loyal to Its Allied Duty

p Loyal to its Allied commitments, the Soviet Union entered the war with Japan on August 8, 194,5, the agreed date, and struck a crushing blow at the strongest land forces of the Japanese army. Fighting was raging in Manchuria, Korea, South Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. In those days President Truman said that the U.S. government "gladly welcomed into this struggle ... our gallant and victorious ally".  [153•2  A few years later he would forget these words and say "dropping the bombs ended the war".  [153•3 

p This last statement was immediately pounced upon as axiomatic truth. What is more, The Reader’s Digest Association, in its book Great Events of the 20th Century, which in part dealt with the Second World War, does not so much as mention the fact that the Soviet Union also fought in the Far East. The last days of the war are described in these words: "On August 6, 194,5, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and the world was profoundly changed. Even the devastation of the previous six years seemed to pale in comparison with the nightmarish power of this 154 weapon. It ended the Second World War.”  [154•1  Der grosse Atlas zum II. Weltkrieg published in the FRG reads th?>.t Japan surrendered only "after two atomic bombs had t een dropped on it".  [154•2  World War II written by a group of British authors also claims that "the Atomic Bomb afforded their Emperor the excuse to accept an Unconditional Surrender, which had become inevitable".  [154•3 

p Moreover, their authors avoid giving a fair evaluation of this barbarous act which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and served as a tool of atomic blackmail against the Soviet Union and all progressive forces.

p Significantly, in Japan itself the importance of the USSR’s entry into the war (before and after the American atomic bombing raids) was at the time given a different interpretation from that of many historians in the United States today. "It is absolutely necessary, regardless of how the war against Britain and America may develop, that our Empire make supreme efforts to prevent the USSR from participating in the war against us because this will be a fatal blow to our Empire,"  [154•4  reads the communique of the supreme council of war which met in Tokyo in May 1945.

p Also worthy of note is the following view of some Japanese historians. "Although the United States is attempting to present the atomic bombing of Japanese cities as the result of its decision to put an early end to the war, in actual fact these bombs did not bend the Japanese government in favour of ending the war, in spite of the vast number of people killed.... It was not the civilian victims of the atomic bombing, but the fear of revolution in case the Soviet Union entered the war, that brought it to an early conclusion.”  [154•5  At its first meeting (August 9, 1945) after the 155 American atomic attacks, the Japanese cabinet discussed the new situation following the entry of the USSR into the war, and not the effect of atomic explosions on the military operations. Speaking before the supreme council of war, Prime Minister Suzuki said: "By entering the war this morning the Soviet Union has put us in a desperate position and has rendered its further prosecution impossible.”  [155•1 

p Another version of the events which is clearly aimed at denigrating the Soviet armed forces that took part in the war against Japan comes from Raymond Garthoff whom we mentioned earlier in this account. In an article, "The Soviet Manchurian Campaign, August 1945" published in Military Affairs, he writes that the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan before it had a chance to complete its "preparations for the offensive by 9 August. There were grounds to conclude that the Soviet decision to launch their campaign was suddenly precipitated somewhat earlier than they had planned.... The decision had been prompted by the first American atomic attack on Japan on 6 August.”  [155•2  The American historian either does not know or ignores some well-established facts. It is well known, for example that the Soviet armed forces started their preparations for war against Japan after the Crimean Conference where Britain and the United States insisted on Soviet participation in the military operations against Japan, and where the Soviet government gave its consent to join in that war. On February 11, 1945, the leaders of the three powers signed an agreement committing the USSR to start military operations against Japan two or three months after the defeat of Germany.

p The Supreme Command of the Soviet Armed Forces planned to deliver two main strikes-from the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Maritime Region-and several Auxiliary strikes converging on the Manchurian heartland. It was proposed that the Kwantung Army be .surrounded, dissected and destroyed.

p A vast number of Soviet troops were concentrated in the Far East. In addition to the 40 divisions already stationed there the Soviet command moved the 39th and the 5th armies over from eastern Prussia, the 53rd infantry and the 6th Guards tank armies and the cavalry group from Prague to the Far East. Between May and July a total of 136,000 carloads of troops and equipment arrived by railway from the West to the Soviet Far East and the regions south of Lake Baikal.  [156•1  To conduct the operation the Supreme Command set up the High Command of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Far East and organised three Fronts: the Transbaikal Front, the 1st Far Eastern Front and the 2nd Far Eastern Front. The commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces in the Far East was Marshal Alexander Vassilevsky. Operationally attached to the Transbaikal Front were almost all the armed forces of the Mongolian People’s Republic under the command of Marshal Choibalsan. The operations of the Pacific Fleet and the Amur Flotilla with land-based troops were directed by the outstanding Soviet naval commander, Admiral of the Fleet Nikolai Kuznetsov. The directives for the fronts were endorsed by the GHQ Supreme Command on June 28, 1945.  [156•2  All preparations had been completed on time, so that the Soviet Union was able to start the war against Japan three months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, as had been agreed at the Crimean Conference.

The crushing blows of the Soviet army supported by the offensive of the Mongolian armed forces and by the actions of the patriotic forces of other countries reversed the entire strategic situation in the Far East and gave a powerful impetus to the national liberation struggle of the peoples, to the revolutionary rising of the Japanese working class against the militarist clique which had brought disaster on the country. All these circumstances led eventually to Japan’s unconditional surrender.