On September 2, 1945 the Supreme Commander of the Allied armies, US Army General Douglas MacArthur suggested praying for peace that had been reestablished.
On that day, the ceremony of signing the Act of Japan’s unconditional surrender took place in the Bay of Tokyo aboard the US battleship “Missouri”. On one side of the table, representatives of Australia, the UK, Holland, Canada, China, New Zealand, the USSR, the USA and France – countries that had won the war – stood in open order, on the other side, representatives of Japan, which had been defeated, stood in a shapeless cluster. The ceremony which lasted for 45 minutes signified the end of the Second World War.
That epochal event became possible after the Soviet troops completely defeated the main Japanese force, the million-strong Quandong army in Manchuria. The swift thrust of the Soviet troops, seasoned in the heavy fighting against Hitler’s army, lasted less than a month. That final operation of the Second World War, referred to in the West as “August Storm”, is still studied in European and American military academies as a brilliant piece of military craftsmanship.The USSR entered the war against Japan as a result of a few events.
Straight after Japan attacked the US base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941, which pushed the USA into the Second World War, Roosevelt started thinking about using the Soviet territory for attacking Japan from the air. Records of diplomatic talks in Moscow and the US President’s personal correspondence with Stalin testify to that. But it was impossible for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan in that period, when the USSR was fighting against the Nazi German army on its own territory, says Mikhail Miagkov, Ph.D, professor of the Russian Foreign Ministry University.
“Nevertheless, already at the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin promised Roosevelt and Churchill that 2 or 3 months after the end of the war in Europe, the USSR, true to its commitments to its allies, would join in the war against Japan. Later it was confirmed in secret minutes at the Yalta conference in 1945.”
Speaking about those events, we should remember that in 1941, shortly before the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union signed a Pact of Neutrality with Japan, valid until April 1946. But two months after signing the pact, the Japanese headquarters worked out a plan of hostilities meant to conquer the Soviet Far Eastern territories.
"That plan was amended and extended until 1944," Mikhail Miagkov stresses. "We had to keep considerable forces there. Sometimes our troops in the Far East had more tanks than the troops in the frontline against Nazi Germany."
In April 1945 the USSR renounced the Soviet-Japanese Treaty of Neutrality and informed Japan about it in good time. American atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not break Japan’s spirit. Those cities did not have large military forces, the main Japanese Quandong army was stationed in China at that time.
The overwhelming advance of the Soviet troops began on the 9th of August. On the 17th of August, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito had to admit that now that the USSR was in the war, continuation of resistance would mean an end to the Japanese Empire. Soon after that, the Quandong army was completely defeated.
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