Infantry, tank, horse cavalry, and mounted infantry, supported by river flotillas, air fleets, and 4,300 Soviet planes, would commence the invasion by striking Japanese convoys and cities in Manchuria and North Korea. (You can read more about the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Second World War, including the bitter fighting across the Eastern Front, inside the pages of WWII History magazine.) “The Scale of These Attacks is Not Large”Īfter bewildered Japanese units on the Manchurian border were hit with heavy shelling and massive ground assaults in the early morning hours of August 9, Japan’s Imperial headquarters issued an emergency announcement reporting that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan and had begun entering Manchurian territory, but added absurdly, “The scale of these attacks is not large.” In reality, the first elements of a 1.5-million-man Soviet host, backed by small cavalry units of its ally, Outer Mongolia, were already in motion. The Soviet assault, a classic double-pincer movement with attacks from the west, north, and east, extended across water and land fronts some 2,730 miles from the Mongolian desert to the densely forested coast of the Sea of Japan. Since the previous midnight, Soviet armies numbering over a million men, backed by armored, air, and naval forces, had begun sweeping into Manchuria-the Japanese puppet state on the East Asian mainland that the occupiers called Manchukuo-in what would be the last great military operation of World War II. But it was also the day that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria officially began. It was the second of two atomic bombs dropped in three days’ time on Japan by an American government intent on forcing the aggressor nation’s unconditional surrender and hastening an end to World War II. The bomb, generating the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT, killed at least 30,000 people instantly.
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At 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, an American warplane dropped an atomic device nicknamed “Fat Man” onto the city of Nagasaki, Japan.