The Other Two Front War
Until 1945, Soviet reluctance to fight a two-front war and Japanese acquiescence to the movement of vital lend-lease supplies to the Soviet Far East ensured Soviet neutrality in the Pacific War. A frustrated U.S. government, which had sought basing rights for heavy bombers in Siberia, finally secured Soviet agreement at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, to enter the war by pledging U.S. military support and territorial concessions to the Soviet Union. In Project HULA, from April to September, a special U.S. Navy detachment trained Russian officers and men in handling the naval vessels scheduled for transfer to the Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet. This top-secret operation brought Russian and American sailors together in the largest and most ambitious lend-lease program of World War II. Its unique purpose was to equip and train Soviet amphibious forces for the climactic fight against Japan.
According to Norman Davies, fighting between 400 German and Soviet divisions on the Eastern Front went on for four years. The front itself spanned 1,600 km. In the meantime, the fighting on the Western Front involved 15-20 divisions at most. The German army suffered 88% of its casualties on the Eastern Front. It was the Soviet troops who broke the will and the capacity of the German army to carry out massive front offensives in 1943. The Battle of Kursk – that is the name historians must remember! Norman Davies writes that the key role of the Soviet army in WWII will be so obvious to future historians that they will merely credit the US and Great Britain with providing a vitally important support.
Western historical literature tends to minimize the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of imperialist Japan. American and British historians claim that Japan was crushed only by the efforts of American hoisted forces and mainly by the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
This line is especially clearly drawn in the book "Campaigns of the Pacific War", published in 1946 in Washington and which is the official report of a commission created by order of the president. The authors of this book depict the matter in such a way as if only America was waging war with Japan, that it was some kind of isolated, “American” war, not connected with the common struggle of the allies. the right of the United States to single-handedly intervene in all Pacific affairs after the surrender of Japan.
Both in the book "Campaigns of the War in the Pacific" and in other works of Anglo-American historians, the military operations of the Soviet armed forces to defeat the Kwantung Army in Manchuria are hushed up, and the operations of the Soviet Pacific Fleet to seize the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and Japanese bases in Korea are not covered.
At the same time, it is common knowledge that the Soviet Union made an important contribution to the struggle against imperialist Japan. Strictly fulfilling allied obligations, the Soviet armed forces dealt a crushing blow to the main, most powerful grouping of Japanese troops and thereby significantly accelerated the end of the final stage of the Second World War. Some Soviet soldiers saw the end of the war as time to pay back what the Germans had done to Soviet citizens with destruction, looting and rape. Historians estimate that at least 2 million German women were raped at the end of World War II. That figure is based on German hospital and abortion clinic records. The violent excesses perpetrated by the Red Army in the eastern half of the country, where brutality, gang rapes and incidents of looting have dominated the public perception of the Soviet occupation. Another estimate, stemming from US criminology professor Robert Lilly, who examined rape cases prosecuted by American military courts, arrived at a number of 11,000 serious sexual assaults committed by November, 1945. Rape was denounced as a war crime by the Responsibilities Comnission at Paris in 1919; and this classification was adopted by the United Nations War Crimes Commission.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
