Back in midsummer I talked about doing one final post in the "The Imperial Japanese Army - What Went Wrong" series about "August Storm", the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in the late summer of 1945.
I spent a fair amount of time finding and reading LTC Glantz' monumental Leavenworth Papers on the thing (and have to say that they are, indeed, amazingly thorough and worthwhile pieces of historical research, and well worth reading...) to try and develop a post out of it and, unfortunately, struggling badly.
I just couldn't find a hook there to hang a post on.
Largely because the whole magilla is so vast. The Soviets mobilized a million and a half, the Kwantung Army defended with about 700,000, and the area of operations included the entire perimeter of Japanese-held Manchuria. Engagements included deliberate attacks in open, wooded, mountainous, and riverine terrain, hasty attacks, movement-to-contact and meeting engagements, and included assaults on fortified positions, amphibious operations, as well as a truly complex and monumental logistical support operation by the Soviet Far East Command.
But also simply because Glantz does such a good job. Anything I could do would simply be a recapitulation of his work. That's ridiculous along with being immense; I don't want to do that.
But I do want to say something about it. It seems to me to sum up the appalling failure of the Imperial Army that caused and led to so much suffering and destruction, including that of the very people and polity that the IJA was supposed to protect. I'm still going through the second of Glantz' publications, the case study paper, to see if there's a piece of this engagement that I can break off and chew on.
And at least it led me to this:
The whole "Taiwanese WW2 re-enactors do Soviets versus Japanese in Manchuria" thing is entirely made of 110% Taiwanese awesome, and I recommend you watch the whole thing while I scramble to come up with something just as worthwhile to entertain you with.
