Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [334]
The Russian invasion of China, August 1945
In the north-west, as Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov’s vehicles approached the border at Atpor with their unit of the Trans-Baikal Front, a Soviet frontier guard waved enthusiastically: “Say hello to the Manchurians875 for me!” The central plain, where all the region’s important industries and commerce were concentrated, could be reached only by traversing great expanses of marsh, forest, mountains or desert. At H-hour in Oleg Smirnov’s sector, a T-34 with its lights on rattled past his infantry unit, slowed just short of the crest beyond which lay Manchuria, and fired its gun. “Immediately, hundreds of engines roared all over the steppe,” said Smirnov, “hundreds of lights blazed, and everything began to move.” The armoured columns met only isolated resistance from border posts. Pillboxes were quickly silenced. At dawn the tanks began to race forward across the Manchurian plain, dry riverbeds their roads, motorised infantry and fuel trucks in their wake. “Soon there was this crazy heat876 and dust—and no water.” Men developed nosebleeds from exhaustion and dehydration. They glimpsed lakes, rushed forward shouting with joy, only to perceive them as mirages. They passed their first dead Japanese without sentiment. “We knew it was necessary to finish the last battle of this great war.”
The Japanese had constructed fortified zones to protect recognised roads over the mountain passes, but they lacked men and materials to hold a continuous perimeter. In the first hours of the Soviet invasion, the defenders reacted with dazed bewilderment. It is hard to comprehend how the Guandong Army allowed itself to suffer such tactical surprise, when for years Tokyo had feared a Soviet invasion. Japanese officers knew of the huge deployment across the border. As so often in Japan’s high command, however, evasion of unpalatable reality prevailed over rational analysis of probabilities. Now, hasty staff meetings were held. A struggle began to evacuate tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and undertake belated demolitions. One Japanese commander led a convoy of trucks laden with evacuees and supplies to the Mudanjiang River, only to find that Japanese sappers had already blown the crossing, which proved too deep to ford. Eventually, soldiers and civilians alike took to their heels, throwing away weapons and baggage. Many artillery pieces were abandoned for lack of tractors.
Outposts reported by telephone that they were being overrun by “overwhelmingly superior forces.” A pitiful signal from one local Japanese commander on 10 August described how the hundred men of his kamikaze unit sought to stop a Soviet armoured column: “Each man of the Raiding Battalion’s 1st Company equipped himself with an explosive charge and dashed at the enemy. However, although minor damage was inflicted, the charges—seven to sixteen pounds—were not powerful enough to stop tanks.” The Japanese were astonished and dismayed by their first encounters with Soviet rocket launchers, the katyushas whose massed salvoes carpeted the paths of attacks.
Engineer assault groups of 1st Far Eastern Front were parachuted ahead of the ground advance, to seize intact tunnels and bridges on the vital eastern China railway. Most Japanese guards were stealthily dispatched with knives and clubs, but a few pillboxes offered resistance. After the tunnels were secured, Maj. Dmitry Krutskikh met a cart taking his casualties to the rear. He looked at one boy, no more than eighteen, obviously badly wounded, unlikely to live. Krutskikh asked: “Does it hurt?” The soldier said: “It does indeed, comrade officer, but I’ll fight again!” Krutskikh wrote long afterwards: “Sixty years have passed877, but still I remember that soldier’s voice and eyes. Those firefights were pretty rough.” The advancing Russians heard news of the atom bomb