The surrender of the Kwantung Army

On 22 August 1945 ten Soviet transport aircraft landed at the airfield at Port Arthur. Some two hundred soldiers under Lieutenant General Vladimir Ivanov, deputy commander of the Transbaikal Front, climbed out and, without firing a shot, took over the fortress that Russia had ceded to Japan forty years earlier. That same day an airborne force occupied the nearby port of Dalian (formerly Dalny, Japanese Dairen). This was the final act of the surrender of the Kwantung Army – Japan’s largest land force, which had ruled Manchuria since 1931. Within a few days of the Emperor’s announcement that the war would end, its soldiers across north-eastern China were laying down their arms to the Red Army.

War chronologies record under this date that “Japanese armies surrender to the Red Army in Manchuria”. This is a simplification: the surrender was not a single act on a single day but a process spread over 16–22 August. The Kwantung Army command issued the order to lay down arms on 16–17 August, its representative accepted the surrender terms on 19 August, mass surrenders began on 19–20 August, and on 22 August, with the occupation of Port Arthur and Dalian, the Soviets took control of the last major centres in Manchuria. Isolated units nevertheless went on fighting after that date.

The Kwantung Army in August 1945

The army took its name from Kwantung – the leased territory on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, including Port Arthur and Dalian, which Japan had taken over from Russia after the war of 1904–1905. From a garrison guarding the leased territory and the South Manchuria Railway, the Kwantung Army grew into an independent political force: in 1931 its officers staged the Mukden Incident, seized the whole of Manchuria and in 1932 proclaimed Manchukuo – formally the state of Emperor Puyi, in practice run by Japanese officers. In 1939 it was the Kwantung Army that clashed with the Red Army and the Mongolians at Khalkhin Gol and suffered a severe defeat.

In the 1930s the Kwantung Army was regarded as the elite of the Japanese ground forces. By 1945 it was only a shadow of its former self. From 1943 its best divisions, tanks, artillery and aircraft had been transferred to the Pacific, to the Philippines, Okinawa and Japan proper. Their place was taken by units hastily formed from reservists, settlers and schoolboys, often without full equipment. The army’s commander, General Otozō Yamada, had some 700,000 troops in Manchuria itself and, together with the forces in Korea, on Sakhalin and in the Kurils, about 900,000 according to various estimates; in addition there were the weak armies of Manchukuo and Mengjiang. By Japanese assessments, many divisions had barely a fraction of their nominal combat value. The defence plan envisaged delaying the Soviets in the border zone and withdrawing the main forces into the mountains of south-eastern Manchuria, close to Korea.

An attack from three sides

On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union, in breach of the neutrality pact of 1941, which was still formally in force, and in keeping with the promise it had made to the Allies at Yalta, declared war on Japan. During the night of 8–9 August three fronts under the overall command of Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky – Rodion Malinovsky’s Transbaikal Front, Kirill Meretskov’s 1st Far Eastern Front and Maksim Purkayev’s 2nd Far Eastern Front – struck simultaneously from the west across the Greater Khingan, from the east out of the Maritime Province and from the north across the Amur, launching the Manchurian operation. After a few days Soviet armoured spearheads were hundreds of kilometres deep inside Manchuria, while the Kwantung Army was defending itself in the fortified border districts and around Mudanjiang, unable to restore a coherent front.

From the broadcast to the surrender (15–20 August)

At noon on 15 August Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast announced the acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. In Manchuria, however, it did not stop the fighting. On 16 August the Red Army General Staff announced that the Emperor’s statement was merely a general declaration, that Japanese forces had received no order to cease fire and were still resisting, and that the offensive would therefore continue. Meanwhile Tokyo was sending ceasefire orders to its forces overseas; Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda flew to the Kwantung Army headquarters in Changchun (then Xinjing, the capital of Manchukuo) to confirm the Emperor’s will in person.

During the night of 16–17 August Yamada and his staff decided to comply with the order from Tokyo. On 17 August Yamada proposed to Vasilevsky that hostilities cease. The Soviet commander-in-chief replied that talks about a ceasefire were out of the question: from noon on 20 August the Japanese were to cease fire along the whole front, lay down their arms and give themselves up as prisoners. Until then Soviet forces continued to advance. On 19 August the Kwantung Army’s chief of staff, General Hikosaburō Hata, flew in for talks with the Soviet command – according to Soviet accounts, to the command post of the 1st Far Eastern Front, where he was received by Vasilevsky and Meretskov – and accepted the surrender terms. The picture, found in some studies, of a surrender signed by Yamada himself at Vasilevsky’s headquarters is a simplification: the commander of the Kwantung Army issued the order to lay down arms, but the terms were agreed on his behalf by his chief of staff.

Before the Soviet armoured columns reached the large cities, the Soviets sent airborne detachments there, made up of a few hundred soldiers and staff officers, to take over authority from the Japanese garrisons and secure airfields, bridges and depots. On 18 August a detachment landed in Harbin, and on 19 August in Mukden, Changchun and Jilin. The Japanese garrisons for the most part laid down their arms without a fight. At Mukden airfield Soviet paratroopers detained Puyi, who after abdicating on 17/18 August was waiting there for an aircraft to Japan; the last emperor of Manchukuo was taken into captivity in the USSR. According to Soviet figures, just over 41,000 soldiers had surrendered by 19 August, and from 19–20 August the Japanese were giving themselves up almost everywhere in whole divisions. By 20 August the leading elements of the Soviet fronts had linked up in central Manchuria.

22 August: Port Arthur and Dalian

The last objective was the south – the Liaodong Peninsula with Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) and Dalian. For Moscow it had a special significance: in 1898 Russia had leased it from China and built a naval base there, and in 1905, after the siege of Port Arthur, it had been forced to cede it to Japan. The Yalta agreement granted the Soviet Union a lease of Port Arthur as a naval base and a privileged position in the commercial port of Dalian. On 22 August General Ivanov’s force landed at Port Arthur airfield, while an airborne detachment simultaneously occupied Dalian; over the following days ground units of the Transbaikal Front and ships of the Pacific Fleet arrived. The fortress’s Japanese garrison laid down its arms without a fight.

The same day brought two more events that show how far Soviet ambitions reached. On 22 August Joseph Stalin called off the planned landing on northern Hokkaido – after President Harry Truman had refused him the right to accept the Japanese surrender on the island. That same day, off the coast of Hokkaido, ships evacuating Japanese refugees from southern Sakhalin were sunk, attacked – it is generally assumed – by Soviet submarines; according to Japanese estimates some 1,700 people were killed. In Korea a Soviet landing force took the port of Wonsan (Wŏnsan) without a fight on 22 August, and over the following days Soviet troops entered Pyongyang and reached the 38th parallel, which the American General Order No. 1 had laid down as the boundary between the zones for accepting the surrender.

Despite the surrender, the fighting did not die out at once. Some Japanese units, cut off from communications or disbelieving the order, held out in the fortified border districts – the garrison of the Hutou fortress on the Ussuri, according to most studies, until 26 August – while on the Kurils the fighting for Shumshu went on until 23 August. These, however, were isolated pockets of resistance rather than the operations of an army. Japanese losses in the campaign as a whole remain disputed: according to Japanese medical data cited by the historian Alvin Coox, 21,389 soldiers were killed, while the Soviet side gave a figure of 83,737 dead. Soviet historiography, moreover, did not regard the operation as closed until 2 September, the day the instrument of Japan’s surrender was signed.

Unit 731 covers its tracks

Among the formations the Kwantung Army evacuated first was Unit 731 – the biological weapons research centre at Pingfang near Harbin, headed by General Shirō Ishii. Criminal experiments on human beings were carried out there: according to the estimates most commonly accepted in the literature, at least 3,000 prisoners died at Pingfang alone, mainly Chinese but also Russians, Koreans and Mongolians; some accounts by former members of the unit speak of a much larger number. Epidemics unleashed in the field by this and related units claimed, according to various estimates, tens or even hundreds of thousands of victims.

When the Soviet offensive began on 9 August, the unit was ordered to cover its tracks. According to post-war accounts by its members and witnesses, the prisoners still held at Pingfang were killed and their bodies burned; no survivors were found. The buildings were blown up, most of the records destroyed, and the personnel and their families evacuated by rail southwards to Korea and on to Japan. Most of the leadership, with Ishii at its head, escaped Soviet captivity; in exchange for the results of their research the Americans later granted them immunity. More than ten members of the unit and related formations who fell into Soviet hands were tried at the Khabarovsk trial in 1949 – Yamada himself also sat in the dock.

Prisoners

The number of soldiers taken into Soviet captivity in Manchuria, northern Korea, Sakhalin and the Kurils is given variously. The Soviet side spoke of about 600,000 prisoners in Manchuria, including 148 generals, and of nearly 640,000 including the other areas. Historians’ estimates range from 560,000 to 760,000, and some are higher still. Among the prisoners were Yamada himself, taken to Khabarovsk, and Hata and almost the entire Kwantung Army staff.

In keeping with the Potsdam Declaration, Japanese soldiers expected to return home soon. Instead, on 23 August 1945, the day after the occupation of Port Arthur, the Soviet State Defence Committee ordered that 500,000 men fit for work be selected from among the prisoners and sent to camps in various parts of the Soviet Union. The prisoners were sent to several dozen camps in Siberia, the Far East, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, where they built railways – including sections of the Baikal–Amur Mainline – roads, factories and whole urban districts, and worked in mines and at logging. The first winter, 1945–1946, with shortages of food, clothing and fuel, brought the highest mortality.

The number of deaths is disputed. According to Soviet figures about 60,000 prisoners died; according to Japanese government figures about 55,000 of some 575,000 internees died; the American historian William F. Nimmo, counting the soldiers and civilian employees registered in Manchuria who never returned, arrived at 254,000 dead and 93,000 missing. Repatriation lasted from 1946 to 1950; the last prisoners, including those convicted in trials, were released only in December 1956, after diplomatic relations between the USSR and Japan had been restored. Yamada returned home among them and died in 1965.

Tragic, too, was the fate of some 1.5 million Japanese civilians in Manchuria, including more than 200,000 settlers from the agricultural colonies of the border regions. Left without military protection, they fled south on foot and by rail; many died during the flight, at the hands of soldiers or the local population, or from hunger and disease in the winter of 1945–1946, and some committed suicide. Thousands of children were left with Chinese families – their fate became a public issue in Japan only decades later.

What followed

On 23 August Stalin announced the end of the fighting in Manchuria in an order of the day, and Moscow celebrated the victory with artillery salvoes. On 2 September, the day the instrument of Japan’s surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri, he presented Japan’s defeat in a radio address as revenge for Russia’s defeat in 1905. The war, in which the Red Army had fought for less than a month, gave the USSR everything it had been promised at Yalta: southern Sakhalin, the Kurils, the base at Port Arthur, joint management of the Manchurian railways and an occupation zone in Korea.

The Soviets remained in Manchuria until the spring of 1946. During that time they shipped off to the USSR, as war booty, a large part of the equipment of Manchurian industry – power stations, steelworks, factories and mines; in 1946 the American mission led by Edwin Pauley put the total losses of Manchurian industry at about 2 billion dollars at the time’s prices. The weapons and depots of the Kwantung Army passed in large part, directly or indirectly, to the Communist forces of Mao Zedong, which as early as August had begun racing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists for control of Manchuria. In the following years the region became the main arena of the Chinese Civil War, and the Communist victory in Manchuria in 1948 decided its outcome. The Soviet Union did not return Port Arthur to China until 1955.

The surrender of the Kwantung Army closed the history of a formation that for fourteen years had been the driving force of Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland – from the Mukden Incident through Manchukuo to the war with China. In Korea the Soviet forces that accepted the surrender north of the 38th parallel laid the foundations of the state that three years later became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The hundreds of thousands of prisoners sent to labour camps burdened Japanese–Soviet relations for years, and the dispute over the Kurils, occupied in those same weeks, remains unresolved to this day.