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By Root 1174 0

in the hands of the invaders. When darkness came the Russians began attacks on the bunker system. All failed. It became plain that, against such strong defences, subtler tactics would be necessary. Through the days that followed, artillery was used to keep Japanese heads down, while infantry and engineer groups inched forward among the trenches. Soon they had isolated the individual forts, and destroyed Japanese artillery observation posts. The condition of the defenders became grim. “After the first [Russian] salvo950, we knew the battle could have only one outcome,” wrote one of the few Japanese survivors, gunner Gamii Zhefu. “In the tunnels beneath the fort, it was incredibly hot. We were desperate for water. The women were terrified. Then one soldier produced a canteen and gave everyone a sip, which did wonders for our morale. We were also very hungry, however, and started looking for food. We found some cans, ate—and started feeling thirsty again. Soon, for all of us, water became an obsession. It overcame even our fears about the battle and the threat of death. We were reduced to animal needs and desires.”

On 13 August, adopting a technique familiar in the Pacific island battles, Russians poured petrol down ventilation inlets and ignited it. Hundreds of defenders and their families perished in the conflagrations that followed. Yet the Japanese continued to surprise Russian troops with sallies, sometimes dislodging the attackers from newly occupied positions. One Japanese rush was led by a twenty-two-year-old probationary officer brandishing a sword, who fell to a Russian grenade. Hutou’s gunners, unable to use their huge weapons, destroyed them with demolition charges and formed suicide squads. A Japanese artillery piece was destroyed by a round from its neighbour, firing at point-blank range. The central heights of the fortress changed hands nine times.

The wretched defenders of Hutou knew nothing of the emperor’s broadcast on 15 August, nor of their country’s surrender. They rejected all Russian calls to lay down their arms. On the seventeenth, a five-man party of local Chinese and captured Japanese carrying a white flag was dispatched from the Soviet lines to tell the garrison that the war was over. The officer who received them dismissed such a notion with contempt. He drew his sword and beheaded the elderly Chinese bearing the Soviet proposals. “We have nothing to say to the Red Army,” he declared, before retiring into his bunker. The Soviet barrage resumed. Conditions underground became unendurable. Many of those in the tunnels and casemates suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. “There were plenty of951 bodies down there,” wrote Gamii Zhefu. “I heard a wounded man crying repeatedly ‘Water, water,’ but no one took any notice of him. I was momentarily excited by seeing a trickle of fluid running across the floor, until I realised that it was leaking from a corpse. I drank it. Another man said: ‘That stuff will kill you.’ I didn’t care. I was dying of thirst anyway.”

For hundreds of peasants sheltering in the woods, in the first days there was nothing to eat save a few berries and wild plants. They drank water from the river, and listened to the appalling cacophony of battle on the Hutou hills. A few Japanese immigrants huddled among them, but most had sought the shelter of the fortress. On the fourth day, while fighting still raged, Red soldiers appeared and herded the civilians down to the riverbank, which was now secure. The Russians smashed open a big Japanese food store, and invited the Chinese to help themselves. They were able to make rice soup to sustain them through another ten days of uncertainty and gunfire on the hills above.

On 19 August, a large party of Japanese from the fortress attempted a break for freedom. They were cut down by Russian machine guns. By the twenty-second, almost all the underground bunkers had become untenable. Soviet troops probing cautiously down the steps met a ghastly stench of humanity, cordite and death. In one bunker, the bodies of men, women and eighty children aged between