Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [335]
ON THE MORNING of 9 August, the Guandong Army’s commander, Otozo Yamada, called on the palace of Emperor Pu Yi at Changchun. Yamada, a slight, moustachioed cavalry veteran of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, was habitually solemn and taciturn. Now, crisis rendered him voluble. His assertions of confidence in victory were somewhat discredited by the sudden wail of air-raid sirens, followed by the concussions of falling Russian bombs. Emperor and general retreated to continue their conversation in a shelter.
Pu Yi, a hypochondriac prey to superstition and prone to tears, was consumed with terror that either the Japanese or Chinese would now kill him. A tall, gangling, immature creature of thirty-nine, for years he had indulged his sexual enthusiasms with a bevy of consorts and concubines, his petulant sadism by beating domestics. Under the Japanese, he enjoyed a much-diminished portion of the trappings of majesty. At his court, only ten eunuchs remained of the 100,000 who had served the Ming emperors, or of the hundreds whose quarters he liked to snipe at with an airgun in his earlier life as child-emperor. As nominal ruler of Manchukuo, Pu Yi signed official documents, death warrants and industrial plans without discrimination, earning the loathing of the Chinese people for his collaboration. His pages were recruited from Changchun orphanages, where they languished after their parents were killed by the Japanese. He was saluted as a head of state, yet in reality was merely Japan’s most prominent prisoner.
Now, the prospect of becoming a dead one threw him into ecstasies of terror. He began to carry a pistol day and night. On 10 August, a Japanese officer arrived at the palace to announce that the army was withdrawing south. The emperor must prepare to leave immediately for Tunghua. Pu Yi’s pleas secured a two-day postponement, but the Japanese said bleakly: “If your majesty does not go878, you will be the first to be murdered by the Soviets.” When the emperor demanded food, he was told that all his cooks had fled. On the night of 11 August, carrying in the baggage his dynasty’s sacred Shinto objects, the wretched little imperial party set off on a slow, faltering private train.
THE CHIEF PROBLEMS facing the Russians were those of terrain. Gunners dragged artillery pieces by brute force through marshes, while infantrymen discarded their rifles to help build tracks for the passage of heavy equipment. Troops of 1st Far Eastern Front ferried across the Ussuri River found themselves wading through chest-high swamps on the Manchurian shore. Engineers struggled to cut wire and clear minefields under torrential rain. Forest approaches were no more hospitable. “Between the trees, thick undergrowth created a carpet of thorns, each as long as a man’s finger and sharp as a sewing needle,” wrote A. P. Beloborodov. “These created hazards879 that could cripple an unwary man in minutes, gashing flesh and piercing the soles of boots…Streams and creeks were so swampy that even tanks as powerful and manoeuvrable as T-34s became bogged.” The Khalkin-Gol River at the southeast border of Manchuria was not more than sixty yards wide and four feet deep, but its racing current overturned trucks and gun tractors. The Russians solved the problem880 in characteristic fashion, by deploying across the flow a line of Mongol cavalry on their shaggy ponies, riders locked knee to knee. Infantry then waded across upstream of them, gripping the beasts’ manes to keep their footing.
Everywhere, the Soviets forced passages. Again and again they confounded enemy strongpoints built to cover roads by cutting across open country. Japanese suicide troops—smertniks, as the Russians called them—launched raids by day and night against sappers clearing minefields and in the attackers’ rear areas. But these could do nothing to halt the relentless advance. A Soviet account described a rare set-piece