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By Root 938 0

waterside. Here, beginning in 1933, the Guandong Army created the most elaborate defensive system in Asia: its commanders were rash enough to call it their “Maginot Line.” Hutou was centred upon five forts built on neighbouring hills which rise up to four hundred feet above the riverbank. The concrete roofs and walls were nine feet thick, with generators, storerooms and living quarters sunk deep underground, linked by tunnels. The whole system was almost five miles wide and four deep, supported by some of the heaviest artillery in Asia, including 240mm Krupp guns and a 410mm howitzer. The Chinese assert that the 30,000 slave labourers who built the fortress were killed when their work was complete, and indeed many bodies were exhumed after 1945.

To the Japanese, Hutou was an unpopular posting, remote from any pleasures or amenities. For those who occupied its echoing caverns, it was also chronically unhealthy—moisture dripped off the concrete walls, rusted weapons, spoilt food. In winter the bunkers were icy cold, in summer stiflingly hot. Anyone familiar with the 1916 casemates of Verdun would readily have recognised 1945 Hutou. Through the years of war, veteran units had been removed from the fortress garrison and replaced by less impressive human material. Despite evidence of Soviet patrolling and the discovery of pontoons drifting on the Ussuri, Hutou’s commander was absent at a briefing on the night of the initial attack, and was never able to return to his post. The defence was therefore directed by the local artillery commander, Captain Masao Oki.

The initial Soviet barrage cut road links and spread terror among the few hundred hapless civilians living behind the fortress. On 9 August, the Chinese inhabitants of Hutou township, a wattle-and-wooden settlement, were awakened in the early-morning darkness by the roar of aircraft overhead, the whistle of falling bombs and thud of shells. Some fell on the Japanese defences, others among the houses, killing five Chinese. Jiang Fushun and his family huddled terrified beside a brick bed, the most substantial object in their flimsy hut. After two hours the shelling stopped, and hundreds of villagers ran out into the street. They saw the horizon rippling with gun flashes from the Russian shore of the Ussuri River, and at once understood that the Soviets were coming. Japanese soldiers ran into the town. Though some buildings were already blazing after being hit by bombs and shells, they merely claimed that an air-raid practice was taking place. All civilians must move immediately into the nearby woods. There was no time to gather food or possessions. Jiang’s father cried: “Go-go-go! I’ll stay and look after the house948.” The family fled, along with hundreds of others.

The defenders exploited a lull in Russian artillery fire to move all the garrison’s family members and nearby immigrant Japanese farmers into the tunnel system. As well as six hundred regular troops, there were then sheltering underground a thousand civilians, some with militia training and weapons. An hour later, shelling resumed, and at 0800 Soviet infantry started crossing the Ussuri. The Japanese responded with mortar fire. This inflicted some casualties, but within three hours the attackers had secured a bridgehead. Amazingly, Hutou’s biggest artillery pieces did not fire. They were short of gunners, and Captain Oki was preoccupied with directing the infantry defence. All that day and the next, Soviet troops continued to shuttle across the river. The local Japanese army commander, Lt.-Gen. Noritsune Shimuzu, telephoned Hutou on the evening of the ninth to deliver a wordy injunction to Oki to hold fast: “In view of the current war situation949 and the circumstances of the garrison, you are all requested to fight to the last breath and meet your fate, when it comes, as courageously as flowers, so that you may become pillars of our nation.” After this heady torrent of mixed metaphors, all contact was lost between the defenders and the outside world.

By nightfall on 10 August the surrounding area was securely