The Soviet Strategic Offensive In Manchuria 1945

This critical examination of the final Soviet strategic offensive operation during World War II seeks to chip away at two generally inaccurate pictures many Westerners have of the war. Specifically, Westerners seem to think that only geography, climate, and sheer numbers negated German military skill and competency on the eastern front, a view that relegates Soviet military accomplishments to oblivion.

Shortly after midnight on 9 August 1945, assault parties of Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Manchurian border and attacked Japanese positions in Manchuria. Thus began one of the most significant campaigns of World War II. Because of the combination of Soviet victories in the west and Japanese defeats in the Pacific, the potential for Japanese attack on the Soviet Far East diminished. Conversely, as allied victory over Germany approached in 1945, Allied leaders continued to press Stalin to commit his forces against Japan in order to complete the destruction of the Axis combination. Concentrating on Soviet ground operations in Manchuria proper, this study provides general information on the strategic context of the campaign, a detailed account of the operational techniques of armies, corps, and divisions, and the tactical employment of regiments, brigades, and lower echelon units. It also includes information concerning initial planning for the operation, redeployment of forces, high level organization for combat, and the essentials of front planning. It analyzes Soviet force structure and the published tactical doctrine governing the use of those forces in 1945, highlighting the tactical innovations and demonstrating the adjustments in force structure that contributed to Soviet victory.

This critical examination of the final Soviet strategic offensive operation during World War II seeks to chip away at two generally inaccurate pictures many Westerners have of the war. Specifically, Westerners seem to think that only geography, climate, and sheer numbers negated German military skill and competency on the eastern front, a view that relegates Soviet military accomplishments to oblivion.

[Includes 15 tables, 1 tables, 26 maps] In August 1945, only three months after the rumble of gunfire had subsided in Europe, Soviet armies launched massive attacks on Japanese forces in Manchuria. In a lightning campaign that lasted but ten days, Soviet forces ruptured Japanese defenses on a 4,000-kilometer front, paralyzed Japanese command and control, and plunged through 450 kilometers of forbidding terrain into the heartland of Manchuria. Effective Soviet cover and deception masked the scale of offensive preparations and produced strategic surprise. Imaginative tailoring of units to terrain, flexible combat formations, and bold maneuvers by armor-heavy, task-organized forward detachments and mobile groups produced operational and tactical surprise and, ultimately, rapid and total Soviet victory. For the Soviet Army, the Manchurian offensive was a true postgraduate combat exercise. The Soviets had to display all the operational and tactical techniques they had learned in four years of bitter fighting in the west. Though the offensive culminated an education, it also emerged as a clear case study of how a nation successfully begins a war in a race against the clock arid not only against an enemy, but also against hindering terrain. Soviet military historians and theorists have recently focused on the Manchurian offensive, a theater case study characterized by deep mobile operations on a broad front designed to pre-empt and overcome defenses. Because these characteristics appear relevant to current theater operations, the Soviets study the more prominent operational and tactical techniques used in Manchuria in 1945. What is of obvious interest to the Soviet military professional should be of interest to the U.S. officer as well.

This critical examination of the final Soviet strategic offensive operation during World War II seeks to chip at two generally inaccurate pictures westerners have of the war. Specifically, Westerners seem to think that only geography, climate, and sheer numbers negated German military skill and competency on the eastern front, a view that relegates Soviet military accomplishments to oblivion.

In this companion piece to Leavenworth Paper No. 7, "August Storm: The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945," the author focuses on the operational and tactical levels of the Manchurian campaign, highlighting the techniques that brought victory to Soviet combined arms during the last days of World War II. In eight case studies, it examines various kinds of military operations, from tank armies crossing mountains and desert to joint ground and riverine actions conducted over diverse terrain, from heavily wooded mountains to swampy lowlands.

This WWII military study examines the critical yet overlooked Soviet offensive on Japan’s puppet state and its influence on winning the Pacific War. Did Japan surrender in 1945 because the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or because of the crushing defeat inflicted by the Soviet Union in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in north-east China? In Stalin’s War on Japan, Charles Stephenson describes the Soviet offensive from the top-level decision-making and early planning stages to its decisive outcome on the ground. He also considers to what extent Japan’s capitulation is attributable to the atomic bomb or the stunningly successful entry of the Soviet Union into the conflict. Stephenson combines a vividly detailed narrative of the invasion itself with an absorbing account of the political and diplomatic process that gave rise to the offensive—with particular focus on the Yalta conference. There, Stalin allowed the Americans to persuade him to join the war in the east; a conflict he was determined on entering anyway. Stalin’s War on Japan sheds new light on the last act of the Second World War.