Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [304]
Yet if peace on the Russo-Manchurian border suited the two neighbours for three years, by 1944 it no longer suited the United States. A million Japanese soldiers in China might sooner or later be committed against the Americans. An invasion of Manchuria by the Red Army offered the most obvious means of deflecting such a redeployment. Stalin’s masses could reprise what they were so spectacularly doing in Europe—saving the lives of Western Allied soldiers by expending those of Russians. As late as 6 August 1945, MacArthur told an off-the-record press briefing in Manila of his eagerness for the Soviets to invade Manchuria: “Every Russian killed830 is one less American who has to be.”
Churchill and Roosevelt were thrilled by Stalin’s September 1944 promise to launch sixty Soviet divisions against Japan within three months of Germany’s collapse. “When we are vexed831 with other matters,” the prime minister wrote to FDR, “we must remember the supreme value of this [commitment] in shortening the whole struggle.” MacArthur was firmly of the view that “we must not invade Japan proper832 unless the Russian army is previously committed to action in Manchuria.” Marshall concurred. American field commanders wanted all the help they could get to diminish the numbers of enemy they might have to confront in the Japanese home islands. From Luzon, Maj.-Gen. Joseph Swing of 11th Airborne Division wrote home in May, dismissing reported British fears about the perils of admitting the Soviets to the Asian war: “Everybody wants the Roosh833 as soon as he will come and the more the merrier. As to what Uncle Joe Stalin will get in the East…he’ll demand and probably get anything he wants.”
Washington recognised that the Russians would not fight unless they received tangible rewards for doing so. To destroy the Nazis, the Soviet Union had already contributed twenty-five times the human sacrifice made by all the Western Allies together. After months of equivocation, at Yalta Stalin presented his invoice for an eastern commitment. Moscow wanted from Japan the Kurile Islands and southern Sakhalin; from China, the lease of Port Arthur, access to Dalian as a free port, control of the southern Manchurian railway, and recognition of Russian suzerainty over Outer Mongolia. On the fifth day of the conference, 8 February 1945, Roosevelt agreed to accept Moscow’s terms. The U.S. president acted with colonialist insouciance, making important Chinese territorial concessions without consulting the Chinese government. But these arrangements were nominally subject to Chiang Kai-shek’s endorsement, and in return Moscow pledged to recognise the Nationalists as China’s sole legitimate rulers. Both the Soviet and American delegations went home from Yalta well pleased with their bargain, indifferent to the fact that it would violate the Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact.
Yet in offering incentives, Roosevelt ignored the fact that Stalin never did—or forbore from doing—anything unless it fitted his own agenda. In 1945, far from the Russians requiring encouragement to invade Manchuria, it would have been almost impossible to dissuade them from doing so. As soon as Germany was beaten, Stalin was bent upon employing his armies to collect Asian booty. Ironies were thus densely woven into the events of the five months following Yalta. On 22 February, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, a former foreign minister, called on Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, on his return from the Crimean conference. Sato was assured that bilateral Russo–Japanese relations, the future of the two countries’ neutrality pact, had nothing to do with the Americans and the British. This bland deceit was gratefully received in Tokyo. Japan sought Russian goodwill to salvage its tottering empire at exactly the moment Stalin secretly committed himself to loot it.
As the Russians planned and