Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [364]
Soviet transport aircraft flew many Chinese guerrillas back from Russia into Manchuria. On the landing strip at Bei An, Li Min and her party were amazed to see Japanese soldiers, albeit disarmed, talking to their Russian conquerors. The Chinese were even more astonished by the arrogance of some of their vanquished foes. One Japanese officer told them defiantly: “Give us ten years959 and we’ll be back!” An affronted guerrilla, Chen Ming, unholstered his pistol and shot the man dead. The Russians sternly ordered Chen to control himself.
Guerrilla Zhou Shuling returned to Manchuria from Russia in some style, in a car with her husband. His intelligence work finished, he boasted a chestful of Russian medals. Zhou said: “I was so excited, to see my own country again.” But that country was ruined by war, and now by Soviet pillage. Soon the Russians began to dismantle and remove wholesale Manchuria’s industrial plant. They asserted that this was Japanese property, and therefore represented legitimate reparations for the Soviet Union. Li Fenggui marched into Manchuria with Mao’s New 4th Army in October 1945, to find that “the Russians had stripped the peasants960 of everything—including the women’s virtue.” When Zhou reached her old village, she met desolation. The sole memorials of her family’s residence were four water tanks which had once belonged on the roofs of their houses, and now stood derelict on the blackened earth. Two of her four young children died amid the terrible cold and hunger of their first winter back in China. Her husband became a town chief of police, with herself as a precinct chief.
Zhuan Fengxian knew that the woman who returned to Manchuria from Russia, in the uniform of the Soviet army, was not the illiterate girl “frightened even of spiders” who had gone away to join the guerrillas five years earlier. She had achieved a fulfilment through her wartime experience quite unattainable by a woman, especially a peasant woman, in mid-twentieth-century Chinese society. She and her group flew home in Soviet transport aircraft, and wandered in bewildered horror through the Japanese prison in Shenyang where so many political prisoners had died. “We looked at the gallows, and even the device they had for crushing bodies so that no traces remained. What sort of people could they have been?!” In the chaos of the civil war that now began to overtake China, she had no time to go in search of her family. It was only long afterwards that she discovered that disease had killed her parents, hopelessly weakened by hunger, during the occupation. “They were sick—and they had no money961 to do anything about it.” Her father was fifty, her mother forty. She was reunited with her sisters only in 1949.
“An image of Manchuria962 after the surrender remains imprinted in my memory,” said Red Army radio operator Victor Kosopalov: “A lonely Japanese infantry soldier is limping along the road with a rifle upon his shoulder. One of our tank gunners jumps down from a T-34 beside the road, and gestures to the Japanese to surrender his weapon. The Japanese resists, shaking his head, but the tank man wrests the rifle from him. The Japanese shrinks back, expecting retribution. The tank man gestures him to move on. He limps away…”
In Manchuria and the island operations, the Soviets claimed to have killed, wounded or captured 674,000 Japanese troops at a cost to the Red Army of 12,031 dead, 24,425 sick and wounded. Stalin’s Far Eastern conquests thus incurred about the same human cost as the American seizure of Okinawa, though characteristically the Russians were far less troubled by their losses. First Far Eastern Front bore the heaviest casualties—6,324 dead; 2nd Far Eastern lost 2,449 killed; Trans-Baikal 2,228; the Soviet Pacific Fleet lost 998 naval infantry. Japan identified 21,000