Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [332]
As the infantry marched, “the earth smelt not of sagebrush, but of petrol,” wrote a soldier. “Dust hung in a dense cloud over the column, it lay on our faces, rasped between our teeth. It was hot as hell, a hundred degrees or more. Sweat dripped into our eyes, our throats were parched—we could fill only one waterbottle a day.” Dust storms whipped the steppe. Captured German mess tins with covers became much prized, because only these excluded sand from everything eaten. Most men lost their appetites for food or cigarettes, caring only about thirst. When they reached a lake, the water proved saline. Those who drank retched in disgust. They marched day and night, with four-hour halts which offered little respite, because the bare earth was too hot for a man to lie upon without discomfort. “It took us a week870 to reach the Manchurian border. By the finish we were stumbling, falling asleep as we moved. The tramp of marching feet was always audible, even above the roar of tank and vehicle engines, the clatter of tracks.”
By early August, 136,000 railway cars had transferred eastwards a million men, 100,000 trucks, 410 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 3.2 million shells. Even firewood had to be collected from forests and shipped four hundred miles, to enable units deployed in treeless regions to cook their rations. Thirty-five thousand tons of fuel were needed on the Trans-Baikal Front alone, requiring as much haulage capacity as ammunition. As part of Stalin’s bargain with the Western Allies, he insisted that the U.S. should help to feed and arm the Soviet soldiers whose participation in the eastern war was expected to save so many American lives. This aspect of their forthcoming campaign did not escape the Red Army: “Guys rubbished the Americans871 for wanting to get other people to do their fighting,” said Oleg Smirnov. Moscow called on the U.S. for 860,410 tons of dry goods, 206,000 tons of liquids—mostly fuel—and 500 Sherman tanks. Most of these commodities and weapons were indeed shipped to Russia’s Pacific ports.
As troops approached the frontier, elaborate camouflage and deception schemes were adopted to mask their deployments. Senior generals travelled under false names: the commander-in-chief and victor of the East Prussian campaign, Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, became “Colonel-General Vasil’ev.” Vasilevsky, only forty-nine in 1945, was originally educated for the priesthood. He started his military career as a Tsarist officer, joined the Red Army in 1918 and was commanding a regiment a year later. Big, handsome, silver-haired, a surprisingly benign figure for a Soviet commander, he served as the Stavka’s representative at Stalingrad and Kursk. He was Zhukov’s closest colleague, yet never achieved the celebrity of some other marshals—nor incurred the consequent resentment of Stalin.
The Soviet plan called for massive envelopments of the Japanese defences by offensives on three axes, followed by the capture of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, and then if possible northern Hokkaido. The Trans-Baikal Front, commanded by Malinovsky, was to attack western Manchuria; Meretskov’s 1st Far Eastern Front was to drive into eastern Manchuria, heading for Mukden—modern Shenyang—Harbin and Jilin. In the north, Purkaev’s 2nd Far Eastern Front would launch supporting attacks, while a mechanised group headed directly for Beijing. This was to be a blitzkrieg, relying on speed to pre-empt Japanese responses. The Guandong Army—which Moscow estimated at a million men, instead