At 3:40 in the afternoon of August 7, 1945, Japan’s foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, sent a single urgent instruction to his ambassador in Moscow: secure the meeting with the Soviet leadership that Tokyo had been seeking for weeks. The ambassador, Naotake Sato, finally got what he had been chasing. Vyacheslav Molotov agreed to see him at five o’clock the following afternoon, Moscow time, and Sato wired home to confirm. Nobody on the Japanese side expected anything but an answer at last to Tokyo’s request that the Kremlin receive a peace envoy from the emperor.
What Molotov handed him was a declaration of war, effective the next day. Far to the east, along Manchuria’s eastern border, rain fell hard through that evening. On the Soviet side, the downpour lasted about six hours, heavy enough that across most of that front the attacking armies dropped their planned artillery preparation and simply went in without it. At the Kwantung Army’s headquarters in Changchun, the city Japan had rebuilt as the capital of its puppet state of Manchukuo, radio sets were kept tuned to Moscow through the night.
For the first hours of the war, they had nothing to pass on. Sato’s cable announcing the declaration never arrived in Tokyo. The Japanese government would learn it was at war with the Soviet Union through a different channel entirely. The account written after the war by twelve former Japanese officers, all returned from Soviet captivity, gives the headquarters night almost hour by hour.
Japanese Monograph Number 154, prepared at the direction of the occupation authorities, records that at about one in the morning on August 9, a telephone report came in from the First Area Army in the east: the enemy in front of Dongning and Suifenhe had attacked. A second report followed, saying the city of Mudanjiang was being bombed. Around half past one, aircraft bombed Changchun itself, and staff officers hurried to their offices. The monograph is blunt about what came next.
For years, the Kwantung Army had followed a national policy of keeping the peace with the Soviet Union, and its standing orders had told frontline commanders again and again to keep border clashes small and local. Before headquarters could tell anyone to fight, it first had to lift its own restrictions. At two in the morning, with no declaration of war in hand, it ordered every army to hold the enemy at the border and prepare for war everywhere else. At six, it put its delaying plan into force and canceled the border guide issued the previous August for keeping incidents from spreading.
The commander-in-chief was not there for any of it. His staff had warned General Otozo Yamada against a scheduled trip south to Dairen, but he went anyway on the eighth, returning to Changchun only on the evening of the ninth. At four in the morning, the headquarters monitoring sets caught a TASS bulletin announcing the declaration. That same four o’clock broadcast was picked up in Japan by the Domei news agency, and that is how Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo learned the Soviet Union was at war with it.
The Kwantung Army had sent Tokyo its own report of the steps it had already taken, but the monograph notes that its message arrived after the news agencies. Sato’s cable, on the best reconstruction, never left the Soviet capital at all, in all probability held at the telegraph office on government orders. In Tokyo, the telephone call went to Hisatsune Sakomizu, chief cabinet secretary to the prime minister, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki. He had been up until two in the morning setting up a meeting of the six-man Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the inner committee of the prime minister, the foreign minister, the army and navy ministers, and the two chiefs of staff.
Suzuki had wanted the council convened after Hiroshima was bombed on the sixth. It had taken three days to arrange, the secretary later explained, because some military leaders had prior commitments, and it was set for the morning of the ninth. He went to bed thinking about Sato’s appointment, and a Domei newsman woke him with the TASS report. The hour of that call remains one of the small, stubborn gaps in the record.
In the memoir Sakomizu published in 1964, the telephone rang at three. In the version he published in 1973, it rang around one, and the Domei man’s own account puts it at four. An American document settles which is possible. In Washington that afternoon, the senior Soviet diplomat there told acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew that Molotov would announce the war at ten that night, Moscow time, which was four in the morning in Tokyo.
Grew, who had spent ten years as ambassador to Japan, remarked that this gave the Japanese two hours to get ready. Across the city, the deputy chief of the army general staff, Lieutenant General Torashiro Kawabe, was asleep at headquarters. At about six, his aide woke him. The Army’s Intelligence Division had intercepted broadcasts from Moscow and from San Francisco, both reporting the declaration.
He put his first reaction into his diary: the Soviets had finally risen, and his judgment had proven wrong. He had reason to write it that way. The Army’s whole plan for meeting an American invasion of the home islands rested on the Soviet Union staying out, and he had pushed the Foreign Ministry hard to keep it out through negotiation. In the same entry, he wrote that the Soviet move had been half expected, that there was nothing left to think about, and that the only way to save the nation’s honor was to keep fighting.
Togo was woken with the news as well, and according to the monograph’s editors, he was stunned because Moscow knew that Tokyo was weighing whether to accept the Potsdam terms. The Soviet ambassador in Tokyo, Jacob Malik, did not hand him the formal note until 11:15 on the morning of the tenth. At the Navy General Staff, Admiral Soemu Toyoda had kept the Moscow approach even tighter. Questioned by the Strategic Bombing Survey in November, he said just two men in the entire navy had known about it, himself and the Navy Minister, and that he had told his own deputy that talk of ending the war was not an affair for officers.
The answer Tokyo got from Moscow, he told his questioners, was a break in relations, and the whole effort had ended in flat failure. Suzuki saw two roads: resign, or act at once. Acting meant either declaring war on the Soviet Union and fighting until the country was destroyed, or accepting the Potsdam declaration. The American investigators’ report has him with the emperor at around seven in the morning and settled on Potsdam within a couple of hours, with the emperor’s agreement.
The premier still needed someone to tell him what the Kwantung Army could do about the invasion. Lieutenant General Sumihisa Ikeda ran the Cabinet Planning Board and had served with the Kwantung Army before coming home. After the war, he told American interrogators that when he heard the Soviets were in, he felt Japan’s chances were gone. Suzuki asked him whether the army in Manchuria could throw the Soviets back.
The Kwantung Army is hopeless, Ikeda told him, and Changchun would be in Soviet hands within two weeks. Suzuki asked whether it was that week. Ikeda said it was, and Suzuki said the game was up. What Ikeda knew is in the monograph in figures.
The First Area Army, facing the main Soviet blow in the east, had ten divisions and about 160,000 men, almost half the Kwantung Army’s fighting strength. Over the previous year, the army had shipped its old first-class divisions out to the Pacific and filled the gaps with new ones built from Japanese residents of Manchuria who had been exempt from call-up until then. Its units had never been in battle. Everyone was short of men and equipment, and few of the commanders had held their posts for a year.
One of the new divisions had a paper strength of 23,000 men and had 12,634. To arm its new artillery units, the army had pulled guns out of its own border forts. It forged swords and bayonets from the springs of scrap motor vehicles, and a third of its rear area troops still had no bayonet. The staff rated the whole area army at the fighting power of two and three quarter first-rate divisions.
Its best division scored 55 percent. Several scored 15, and the brigade holding Dongning scored 10. Changchun had hoped to hold the Soviets for three months, and on ammunition and fuel, it expected about one before the retreat. Against that, the Soviet Union had massed about a million and a half men on three fronts.
The Supreme Council was called for ten. Suzuki, Togo, and the Navy Minister, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, wanted to accept Potsdam with a single reservation: that the emperor’s position be left intact. The other three wanted more. The War Minister, General Korechika Anami, the Army Chief of Staff, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Toyoda held out for three further conditions: no occupation of the home islands, disarmament of Japan’s forces abroad by Japan itself, and trials of Japanese war criminals by Japanese courts.
Word arrived during the argument that a second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Two hours in, the council was still split three against three. The army side of the day had already been written down. After his diary entry, Kawabe set out his decisions in a short, clipped memorandum.
It listed four measures. The war against the United States remained the main task, and to carry it on, martial law was to be proclaimed, the cabinet dismissed, and a military dictatorship formed. Manchuria would be given up, and Korea defended with troops brought from northern China, while the emperor of Manchukuo would be brought to Japan. Martial law never came.
The first order Imperial General Headquarters sent out after the attack, Army Department Order Number 1374, signed by the emperor early in the afternoon of the ninth, opened with the facts as Tokyo had them. The Soviet Union had declared war and attacked at several places along the border at midnight. However, the scale of these attacks is not large. The monograph does not say what that sentence rested on.
Changchun’s own staff had known before dawn that the attack was coming on every front, and by evening Soviet tanks were bearing down on Hailar from three directions at once. The rest of the order set the course. Headquarters would prepare for all-out war against the Soviet Union, and for the time being, the troops already on the border would hold the enemy up. The army in Manchuria was to direct its main effort toward defending Korea, which Tokyo counted as Japanese territory, leaving a minimum force in southern Korea against an American landing.
The army in Korea came under its command from six the next morning, bringing it to 31 divisions on paper. Along the railway between Dairen and Changchun lived about 1,100,000 Japanese residents, and the order says nothing about them. When headquarters asked the Manchukuo government the next day to evacuate the capital, all it managed to put on the trains were the families of officers and of civilians attached to the army. Whether those first hours ended the war is an argument that started within months and has not stopped.
The Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946 that the Soviet entry neither defeated Japan nor materially hastened the acceptance of surrender. Historians working later from the same diaries and post-war statements, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa foremost among them, have argued nearly the opposite: that the Soviet attack hit Tokyo harder than the atomic bombs because it ended the last hope of a settlement short of unconditional surrender. Others give the bomb the heavier share. Toyoda, asked outright that November, would not name either one as the direct cause.
What he said was that the two together let Japan stop without too much chaos at home. Tokyo got the biggest news of its war second-hand, off a news agency’s radio set at four in the morning. Set down as numbers, the ninth comes to this: the first telephone report reached Changchun at about one in the morning, and the Moscow broadcast came in at four, heard in Changchun and in Tokyo at the same hour. Two orders went out, one from Changchun at two with no declaration in hand, and one from Tokyo early in the afternoon.
The six men of the Supreme Council had sat for two hours and divided three and three. At 11:30 that night, with the council still split and the Soviet columns still moving, the six men and the president of the Privy Council sat down before the emperor.
