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By Root 984 0

and read aloud the terms of his nation’s declaration of war. Since Japan had rejected the Potsdam Declaration, said the Russian, “the Allies approached the Soviet Union with a proposal to join in the war against Japanese aggression and thereby shorten the length of the war, reduce the number of victims, and assist in the prompt re-establishment of general peace.” Russia accepted the Allied proposals, to save the Japanese people “from the same destruction as Germany had suffered.” Less than an hour later, Molotov informed the British and American ambassadors that, in fulfilment of its obligations, his country had declared war on Japan. Harriman expressed the gratitude and pleasure of the U.S., for he could do nothing else. A few hours later, shortly after Truman in Washington heard news of the Soviet action, Bock’s Car took off from Tinian for Nagasaki.

The second mission was launched without any further Washington directive, and simply because its weapon was ready. Twentieth Air Force’s mandate left the timings of both atomic attacks in the hands of local commanders, to be determined by operational convenience. The generals advanced the second strike by two days in the face of warnings of bad weather after 10 August, and “a general feeling among those in the theater that the sooner this bomb was dropped the better it would be for the war effort.” Washington’s only contribution was passive. The president and his advisers discerned in Japanese silence no cause to order the 509th Bomb Group to halt its operations. At 1102 on 9 August Japanese time, having found Kokura, its primary target, under cloud, Maj. Charles Sweeny dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, his secondary objective, generating the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT, killing at least 30,000 people. Since midnight, Soviet armies had been sweeping into Manchuria.

TWENTY

Manchuria: The Bear’s Claws

IN THE EARLY hours of 9 August 1945, Japanese outposts on the Manchurian border were bewildered to find themselves first under heavy shellfire, then attacked by infantry, swiftly identified as Russian. In some sectors the picture was confused by torrential rain. “It was the worst855 thunderstorm I’ve ever seen,” said Soviet sapper Ivan Kazintsev. “The lightning caused us to lose our night vision, our sense of direction—and lit us up for the enemy on Camel Hill. We managed to capture it by dawn, though.” Kazintsev’s general, A. P. Beloborodov of 1st Red Banner Army, wrote: “Lightning kept flashing unexpectedly. Dazzling streaks split the darkening sky, thunder growing ever louder. Should we delay the attack? No…The rain would hinder the enemy as much as ourselves.” Beloborodov was right about that. Japanese Imperial General Headquarters issued an emergency order, reporting that the Soviet Union had declared war and started entering Manchurian territory, but adding absurdly: “The scale of these attacks is not large.” In reality, the first elements of a 1.5-million-strong Soviet host were in motion: infantry, tank formations, trotting columns of horsed cavalry and mounted infantry, supported by river flotillas, air fleets, guns in tens of thousands. Assault operations extended across land and water fronts of 2,730 miles, from the Mongolian desert in the west to the densely forested coast of the Sea of Japan. This was the last great military operation856 of the Second World War.

The initial Japanese response accorded with every wider delusion about their nation’s predicament. Even those in Tokyo who had accepted that Stalin was “waiting for the ripe persimmon to fall,” who were warned of great Soviet troop movements eastwards, believed the Russians would not be ready to attack in Manchuria until that autumn, or even the spring of 1946. This was yet another gross miscalculation of the time available to Japan to find a way out of the war. Among Japanese civilians, the reaction of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi was typical. He was still reeling from news of Hiroshima when “a still more shocking report857 came in to us, announcing the bolt from the blue that Russia