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of the Russians, as they found themselves facing wholesale rape: “We didn’t like them at all,” said Liu Yunxiu, who was twenty-one and living in Changchun. “They stole food, they raped women in the streets. Every woman tried to make herself look as ugly as she could, to escape their attentions. My parents hid me for weeks, in which I was never allowed out of the house.” Some Soviet soldiers afterwards claimed that their army’s excesses were chiefly committed by veterans of Rokossovsky’s front, notorious for its conduct in Europe. “They did not behave very well,” said Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov. “They were always showing off, saying ‘We’re Rokossovsky’s boys!’” Souhei Nakamura’s thirty-one-year-old aunt, a married woman, offered herself to the conquerors in the absurd hope, she claimed, of sparing some virgin from rape. Her reward was syphilis, which she sought to conceal from her husband when he eventually returned from Soviet captivity, and thus infected him. Communist guerrilla Zuo Yong was among those appalled by the behaviour of the Red Army: “The Russians were our allies945—we were all in the same boat. We thought of their soldiers as our brothers. The problem, however, as we discovered, was they had no respect for our people. Their behaviour in Manchuria was appalling.” Jiang De, another guerrilla, shrugged: “The Russians simply behaved946 in the same way they did everywhere else.”

EVEN AS SOVIET armies completed the occupation of Manchuria after the Japanese surrender, amphibious units were assaulting the Pacific islands promised to Stalin at Yalta. Eight thousand men were dispatched across five hundred miles of sea to the Kuriles, a chain of some fifty islands situated north-east of Japan. The northern Kuriles were defended by 25,000 imperial troops, of which 8,480 were deployed on the northernmost, Shannshir, eighteen miles in length by six wide. Their morale was not high. This was, by common consent, one of the most godforsaken postings in the Japanese empire.

On the night of 14 August, Shannshir’s senior officer, Maj.-Gen. Fusaka Tsutsumi, was alerted by 5th Area Army to listen with his most senior staff to the emperor’s broadcast next day. Having done so, Tsutsumi awaited the arrival of an American occupation force, whom he had no intention of fighting. Instead, however, at 0422 on 18 August, without warning or parley a Russian division assaulted Shannshir—and met resistance. For all the Red Army’s experience of continental warfare, it knew pitifully little about the difficulties of opposed landings from the sea. From the outset, the Shannshir operation was a shambles, perfunctorily planned and chaotically executed. The landing force was drawn from garrison troops without combat experience.

At 0530 Japanese shore batteries began to hit Soviet ships as they approached. Some assault craft were sunk, others set on fire. Those who abandoned foundering boats found themselves swept away by the currents. The invaders’ communications collapsed, as radios were lost or immersed when their operators struggled ashore. Sailors laboured under Japanese fire to improvise rafts to land guns and tanks—the Russians possessed none of the Western Allies’ inventory of specialised amphibious equipment. A counter-attack by twenty Japanese tanks gained some ground. What was almost certainly the last kamikaze air attack of the war hit a destroyer escort. Early on the morning of the nineteenth, the Soviet commander on Shannshir received orders to hasten the island’s capture. Soon afterwards, a Japanese delegation arrived at Russian headquarters to arrange a surrender. Yet next morning, some coastal batteries still fired on Soviet ships in the Second Kuril Strait, and were heavily bombed for their pains. Tsutsumi’s men finally quit on the night of 21 August, having lost 614 dead.

SAKHALIN REPRESENTED a less serious challenge, for its nearest point lay only six miles off the Asian coast, and its northern part was Soviet territory. But the island was vastly bigger—560 miles long and between 19 and 62 miles wide. Japan had held the southern