Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [330]
In Nanjing, Japanese staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki and his colleagues at China Army headquarters said to each other: “At last!858” They had always anticipated such an assault, “yet we felt very bitter towards the Russians for doing it now. It was so unfair! We had been obliged to send so many men to other Pacific fronts. It was as if they were burglars breaking into an empty house.” In Manchuria, no steps had been taken to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians even from border regions, on the grounds that such precautions would promote defeatism. The Guandong Army’s commanders found themselves in the same predicament as the British in Malaya and the Americans in the Philippines in December 1941: struggling to defend wide fronts with weak forces and negligible air support. It was now the turn of Japan’s most cherished colony to suffer the fate which had befallen the West’s imperial possessions in Asia almost four years earlier.
Russia’s official war history declares: “The Soviet Union’s aims859…were…the provision of security for its own far eastern borders, which had been subjected to threat again and again by Japan; the fulfilment of obligation to its allies;…to hasten the end of the Second World War, which continued to bring incalculable suffering to the people; the desire to provide assistance to the workers of east Asia in their liberation struggle; and the restoration of the USSR’s historic rights in territory which Japan had earlier seized from Russia.” In truth, of course, Stalin’s simple purpose was territorial gain, for which he was prepared to pay heavily. Before launching their assault in Manchuria, the Soviets made medical provision for 540,000 casualties, including 160,000 dead. Here was a forecast almost certainly founded upon an assessment of Japanese paper strength, of much the same kind as the Americans made about a landing on Kyushu.
Since 1941, Stalin had maintained larger forces on the Manchurian border than the Western Allies knew. In the summer of 1945 he reinforced strongly, to create mass sufficient to bury the Japanese. Three thousand locomotives laboured along the thin steel thread of the Trans-Siberian rail link. Men, tanks, guns fresh from the Red Army’s triumphs in eastern Europe were loaded onto trains at Königsberg and Insterberg, Prague and Brno, for a journey that took a month to accomplish. Moscow strove to disguise the significance of the huge migration. Soldiers were ordered to remove their Leningrad and Stalingrad medals, to repaint guns emblazoned with such slogans as “On to Berlin!” No one doubted their new objective, however. As the troop trains crawled across Russia, at stations sympathetic locals called to their passengers, craning from windows: “Ah, boys, they are taking you860 off to fight the Japanese—the yaposhki.” A veteran muttered wryly: “So this is military secrecy!” Men of Maj. Vladimir Spindler’s rifle regiment gave away their bulky European loot to Russian civilians whom they met as they moved east. Spindler gazed pityingly on starving urchins crowding the rail tracks. Some asked wistfully: “Uncles, is our daddy861 among you by any chance? He fought against the Germans too.”
“Everyone slept a lot862, catching up on all the sleep we’d lost,” said soldier Oleg Smirnov. They discussed the eastern campaign. Most soldiers grudgingly acknowledged that “the samurais,” as Russians called the Japanese, had to be dealt with. “We reckoned it would take a month to sort them out,” said Smirnov, “which proved about right. Myself, I couldn’t help thinking what a pity it would be to die in a little war after surviving a big one.” Lt. Stanislav Chervyakov and the men of his katyusha