By Brad Tytel
At 1:45 a.m. on the morning of August 9th, 1945, Gennady Dmitrievitch Petrov crossed the border. A torrential rain was falling. The day before, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan. Now the Red Army was invading Manchuria. Petrov, an artillery radioman in the 261st Rifle Brigade, was stationed near Vladivostok. But at 4 a.m., as the sun began to rise, he found himself at Tungning, fighting to take the border city. The Soviets were split on either side of the river, pouring fire into the Japanese positions. By 11 p.m., the town was secure, but not at peace. “I looked at the city,” says Petrov. “And it was burning. I was shocked by the scene. There were soldiers on one side, civilians on the other—how could anybody be alive in such a place, with the fire and the shooting?”
This summer marks the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped on August 6th and 9th, respectively. The Japanese formally surrendered on September 2nd. But as Americans commemorate these events, veterans like Petrov are living reminders of another anniversary worth recollecting. On August 8th, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, arguing that Japan was “the only great power that still stood for the continuation of the war.” The next day, over a million and a half men attacked Japanese-held Manchuria and Asia as part of operation August Storm. This lightning-fast Soviet assault, which stretched from Mongolia to the Sea of Japan on a battlefield the size of Western Europe, played an important role in convincing the Japanese to surrender. It also helped set the stage for communist victory in China, the conflict in Korea, and over forty years of Cold War.
Petrov, now in his eighties, wears a plain gray suit with a dark blue, spotted tie. His hair is combed straight back up the middle, where he is balding. But the sides of his head are still thick with hair, and it sprouts up and out, like short wings or ailerons. Speaking through an interpreter, Petrov recounts his experience as a young soldier during World War II, known to Russians as “The Great Patriotic War.” Throughout the war, as the Soviet Union struggled for survival against Nazi Germany, over forty Soviet divisions guarded the east against a potential Japanese invasion. From 1943 to 1945, Petrov’s unit lived in shelters dug out of the Siberian soil, waiting for an attack that never came.
In February, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea to continue planning for the post-war period. In exchange for a pledge to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender, Stalin was promised the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands in the Pacific, as well as interest over other strategic cities in Asia. The Soviet declaration of war against Japan was announced three months to the day after the German surrender. Although politics, and the dropping of the atomic bomb, may have influenced the date of the attack, there is no doubt that August Storm was meticulously planned and precisely executed. According to Lt. Colonel David M. Glantz, in an account of the offensive written for the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, August Storm was the “pre-eminent Soviet military effort in World War II.”
Key to the success of August Storm was the Soviet Union’s ability to move approximately three-quarters of a million men to the Far East, doubling the strength of the force there. Over three months, 136,000 rail cars were used in the redeployment; hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened Soviet soldiers traveled up to 12,000 kilometers to take up their new positions. Alexey Pavlovich Cheblikin was one of those men. Now a frail, white-haired veteran with a heavily-lined, Asiatic face, in 1945 Cheblikin was, at 22, a three year veteran, already wounded in combat. An artillery commander in the 52nd Rifle division, Cheblikin fought at Stalingrad, in the Ukraine, and throughout the Carpathian mountains. In the East, he found himself in Mongolia, at the opposite end of the line from Petrov. On August 10th, the 52nd division crossed the border in the second wave of the Russian operation.
Cheblikin’s unit was on the move for three weeks, reaching the city of Darien even after the cessation of hostilities. Operating far to the west of Petrov, he experienced no major battles. But there was the heat, and the lack of water. “It was never less than 50 degrees centigrade [122 degrees Fahrenheit],” says Cheblikin. “We had to carry our weapons, our equipment, our cannon. It was so hot that European horses died in a week, and we had to catch camels, bulls, and Mongolian horses, and train them to carry our weapons. We traveled mainly at night.”
The Japanese army retreated in the face of the Soviet assault. But there were night attacks by small groups of soldiers. “The samurais were a serious problem,” Cheblikin recalls. “They surrounded us noiselessly, their knives in their teeth. Later we learned how to fight them.” Some Japanese refused to surrender. Cheblikin remembers seeing one soldier commit suicide rather than be taken alive. “It was,” he says, “the most dreadful experience of my life.”
Operation August Storm was essentially over by August 16th, when the Japanese emperor Hirohito declared a ceasefire in the region. But Soviet troops continued advancing, unopposed, until early September. Having fulfilled its obligations under the Yalta agreement, the Soviet Union was given sovereignty over the promised territories. With most of Manchuria under Soviet control, Chinese communists under Mao Zedong had a secure base of operations from which to continue, and later win, the Chinese Civil War. After the Chinese communist victory, Manchuria was returned to China.
As the Soviet Army advanced overland from the north, some units were parachuted into key cities, or landed amphibiously in Korea. In 1945, Philip Alexievich Konkin was a deck commander on the Soviet destroyer Redkiy, operating in the Pacific. With his grandfatherly face, and a string of combat ribbons on his gray civilian jacket, Konkin recalls the high morale of his fellow sailors, and the eagerness with which they joined the war to liberate Manchuria, China, and Korea. “Our sailors were brave,” says Konkin, “and had no hesitations. We knew that Japan had done a lot of harm to the Soviets Union throughout the 1930s and 40s.”
During August Storm, Konkin’s ship took part in several Korean incursions, destroying gun batteries that protected the coast from assault. When his ship was ordered to remain in port, Konkin was one of about 700 sailors who volunteered to be trained as an amphibious soldier. The war ended before he could take part in any assaults. But while the August Storm land advance never reached the Korean peninsula, amphibious troops were able to establish control in the North, effectively dividing the country. Thus the Soviet campaign led directly to the Korean War, and the peninsula’s continued divided status.
While more Japanese were killed in the Hiroshima bombing than the Soviet campaign in the East, the operation, and the loss of Manchuria, likely contributed to the Japanese decision to surrender when they did. According to Gantz, Japanese intelligence had assessed that the Soviet Union “would not conduct major operations until the fall of 1945, after the end of a rainy season, and perhaps even as late as the spring of 1946.” Instead, the Red Army was able to seize objectives up to 900 kilometers away over a 4,400 kilometer field of battle before August was even over.
Petrov, Cheblikin, and Konkin have all long since retired. Petrov stayed in the army, while Cheblikin became a teacher and Konkin became head of a regional sports committee. All are now active in veterans’ activities in the Rostov region of southern Russia. But having been defined by a war that came to define their nation, they remain in many ways men of that time. All three speak nostalgically of Stalin; despite his brutality, says Konkin, “Stalin was right. There was severity, discipline, order. He had an urge to strengthen our state, lower prices, and manufacture goods.” According to Konkin, Russia today is too corrupt, with too large a gap between the rich and the poor. Democracy is preferable, but, as Petrov puts it, “Democracy is not chaos.”
But these are the thoughts of older men, not the young Russian soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. “We were too young to think about politics,” says Cheblikin, “we just struggled as we could to defend our country.”
Beyond the politics and the history and all the strategic planning, the veterans of the August Storm campaign would prefer to think of peace, and of their small roles in securing that peace for their nation. “War is awful,” says Petrov, “It is shameful; there is no law. People die before your eyes. It is horrible to watch, and nearly impossible to get used to”
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