To the question "What caused the surrender of Japan?" There are two popular answers. Option A - atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Option B - Manchurian operation of the Red Army.
Then the discussion begins: what turned out to be more important - the dropped atomic bombs or the defeat of the Kwantung Army.

Both proposed options are wrong: neither the atomic bombings nor the defeat of the Kwantung Army were of decisive importance - these were only the final chords of the Second World War.

A more balanced answer assumes that Japan's fate was determined by four years of fighting in the Pacific. Oddly enough, but this answer is also the truth with a "double bottom". Behind the landing operations on tropical islands, the actions of aircraft and submarines, heated artillery duels and torpedo attacks on surface ships, there is a simple and obvious conclusion:

The Pacific War was planned by the US, initiated by the US, and fought in the interests of the US.

The fate of Japan was predetermined in the early spring of 1941 - as soon as the leadership of Japan succumbed to American provocations and began to seriously discuss plans for preparing for coming war. To a war in which Japan had no chance of winning.

The Roosevelt administration had calculated everything in advance.

The inhabitants of the White House were well aware that the industrial potential and resource base of the United States many times exceeded those of the Japanese Empire, and in the field scientific and technological progress The US is at least a decade ahead of its future adversary. The war with Japan will bring huge benefits to the United States - if successful (the probability of which was considered equal to 100%), the United States will crush its only rival in the Asia-Pacific region and become absolute hegemons in the vast Pacific Ocean. The risk of the enterprise was reduced to zero - the continental United States was completely invulnerable to the Imperial Army and.

The main thing is to force the Japs to play by American rules and get involved in a losing game. America should not start first - it should be a "war of the people, a holy war", in which the good Yankees smash the evil and vile enemy who dared to attack America.

Fortunately for the Yankees, the Tokyo government and the General Staff turned out to be overly arrogant and arrogant: the dope of easy victories in China and Indochina caused an unjustified feeling of euphoria and illusion own strength.
Japan successfully spoiled relations with the United States - back in December 1937, aircraft of the Imperial Air Force sank the American gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River. Confident in its own power, Japan did not look for compromises and defiantly went to the conflict. War was inevitable.

The Americans hastened the process, taunted the enemy with patently impracticable diplomatic notes and choked with economic sanctions, forcing Japan to make the only solution that seemed acceptable to her - to go to war with the United States.

Roosevelt did everything possible, and achieved his goal.

"how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves"
"... how do we get Japan to fire the first shot without exposing ourselves to significant danger"

- entry in the diary of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson dated 11/25/1941, dedicated to a conversation with Roosevelt about the expected Japanese attack

Yes, it all started with Pearl Harbor.

Was it a "ritual sacrifice" of the American foreign policy, or the Yankees became victims of their own slovenliness - we can only speculate. At least the events of the next 6 months of the war clearly indicate that Pearl Harbor could have happened without any interference from the "dark forces" - the American army and navy at the beginning of the war demonstrated their complete incapacity.

However, the "Great Defeat at Pearl Harbor" is an artificially inflated myth in order to provoke a wave of popular anger and create the image of a "formidable enemy" to unite the American nation. In fact, the losses were minimal.

Japanese pilots managed to sink 5 ancient battleships (out of 17 available at that time in the US Navy), three of which were returned to service in the period from 1942 to 1944.
In total, as a result of the raid, 18 of the 90 US Navy ships anchored in Pearl Harbor that day received various damage. Irrecoverable losses among personnel amounted to 2402 people - less than the number of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. The infrastructure of the base remained intact. - All according to the American plan.

It is often said that the main failure of the Japanese is due to the absence of American aircraft carriers in the base. Alas, even if the Japanese managed to burn the Enterprise and Lexington, along with the entire Pearl Harbor naval base, the outcome of the war would remain the same.

As time has shown, America could DAILY launch two or three warships of the main classes (aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines - minesweepers, hunters and torpedo boats do not count).
Roosevelt knew about it. The Japanese are not. Desperate attempts by Admiral Yamamoto to convince the Japanese leadership that the existing American fleet is just the visible tip of the iceberg and an attempt to solve the problem by military means will lead to disaster did not lead to anything.

The capabilities of American industry made it possible to instantly compensate for ANY losses, and growing by leaps and bounds, the US Armed Forces literally “crushed” the Japanese Empire like a powerful steamroller.

The turning point in the war in the Pacific came already in late 1942 - early 1943: having gained a foothold in the Solomon Islands, the Americans accumulated enough strength and began to destroy the Japanese defensive perimeter with all their fury.

The sinking Japanese cruiser Mikuma

Everything happened as the American leadership expected.

Further events are a pure "beating of babies" - in the conditions of the absolute dominance of the enemy at sea and in the air, the ships of the Japanese fleet died en masse, not even having time to approach the American fleet.

After a multi-day assault on Japanese positions using naval artillery, not a single whole tree remained on many tropical islands - the Yankees literally wiped the enemy into powder.

Post-war studies will show that the ratio of losses of personnel of the US and Japanese Armed Forces is described by a ratio of 1:9! By August 1945, Japan will lose 1.9 million of its sons, the most experienced fighters and commanders will die, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the most sensible of Japanese commanders, will “leave the game” (killed as a result of a US Air Force special operation in 1943, a rare case in, when killers are sent to the commander).

In the autumn of 1944, the Yankees kicked the Japanese out of the Philippines, leaving Japan practically without oil, along the way, the last combat-ready formations of the Imperial Navy were defeated - from that moment on, even the most desperate optimists from the Japanese General Staff lost faith in any favorable outcome of the war. Ahead loomed the prospect of an American landing on the sacred Japanese land, with the subsequent destruction of the country of the Rising Sun as an independent state.

Landing on Okinawa

By the spring of 1945, from the once formidable Imperial Navy only the burnt ruins of cruisers remained, which managed to avoid death on the high seas, and now slowly dying from wounds in the harbor of the Kure naval base. The Americans and their allies almost completely exterminated the Japanese merchant navy, putting island Japan on a "starvation ration". Due to the lack of raw materials and fuel, Japanese industry practically ceased to exist. Big cities the agglomerations of Tokyo, one by one, turned into ashes - massive raids B-29 bombers have become a nightmare for residents of the cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the most devastating conventional raid in history took place: three hundred Super Fortresses dropped 1,700 tons of firebombs on Tokyo. More than 40 sq. kilometers of the city, more than 100,000 people died in the fire. Factories shut down
Tokyo experienced a mass exodus of the population.

“Japanese cities, being made of wood and paper, will catch fire very easily. The army can self-praise as much as it wants, but if the war starts and there are large-scale air raids, it’s scary to imagine what will happen then. ”

- Admiral Yamamoto's prophecy, 1939

In the summer of 1945, carrier-based aircraft raids and massive shelling of the Japanese coast by US Navy battleships and cruisers began - the Yankees finished off the last pockets of resistance, destroyed airfields, once again “shaken up” the Kure naval base, finally finishing off what the sailors did not have time to finish off during battles on the high seas .

This is how Japan of the August 1945 model appears before us.

Kwantung pogrom

There is an opinion that the crooked-legged Yankees squabbled with Japan for 4 years, and the Red Army defeated the "Japs" in two weeks.

In this, at first glance, an absurd statement, both truth and fiction are plainly intertwined.
Indeed, the Manchurian operation of the Red Army is a masterpiece of military art: a classic blitzkrieg on a territory equal in area to two Western. Europe!

Breakthroughs of motorized columns through the mountains, daring landings on enemy airfields and monstrous cauldrons in which our grandfathers “boiled” the Kwantung Army alive in less than 1.5 weeks.
No less great were the South Sakhalin and Kuril operations. It took our paratroopers five days to take the island of Shumshi - for comparison, the Yankees stormed Iwo Jima for more than a month!

However, for each of the miracles there is a logical explanation. One simple fact speaks about what the “formidable” 850,000-strong Kwantung Army was like in the summer of 1945: Japanese aviation, due to the combination of many reasons (lack of fuel and experienced pilots, outdated materiel, etc.), did not even try to rise into the air - the offensive of the Red Army was carried out with the absolute dominance of Soviet aviation in the air.

In the units and formations of the Kwantung Army, there were absolutely no machine guns, anti-tank rifles, rocket artillery, there was little RGK and large-caliber artillery (in infantry divisions and brigades as part of artillery regiments and divisions, in most cases there were 75-mm guns).

- "History of the Great Patriotic War" (vol. 5, pp. 548-549)

It is not surprising that the Red Army of the 1945 model simply did not notice the presence of such a strange enemy. Irretrievable losses in the operation amounted to "only" 12 thousand people. (of which half was claimed by illness and accidents). For comparison: during the storming of Berlin, the Red Army lost up to 15 thousand people. in one day.
A similar situation developed in the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin - by that time the Japanese did not even have destroyers left, the offensive came with complete domination of the sea and the air, and the fortifications on the islands of the Kuril ridge were little like what the Yankees encountered on Tarawa and Iwo Jima.

The Soviet offensive finally put Japan to a standstill - even the illusory hope of continuing the war disappeared. The further chronology of events is as follows:

August 9, 1945, 00:00 Trans-Baikal time - Soviet war machine was put into action, the Manchurian operation began.

August 10 - Japan officially announced its readiness to accept the Potsdam terms of surrender with a reservation regarding the preservation of the structure of imperial power in the country.

September 2 - The signing of the Act of Surrender of Japan took place aboard the battleship USS Missuori in Tokyo Bay.

Obviously, the first nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) could not change the decision of the Japanese leadership to continue senseless resistance. The Japanese simply did not have time to realize the destructive power of the atomic bomb, with regard to severe destruction and losses among the civilian population - the example of the March bombing of Tokyo proves that no less victims and destruction did not affect the determination of the Japanese leadership "to stand to the last." The bombing of Hiroshima can be viewed as a military action to destroy a strategically important enemy target, or as an act of intimidation against the Soviet Union. But not as a key factor in the surrender of Japan.

As for the ethical moment of the use of nuclear weapons, the bitterness during the years of World War II reached such proportions that anyone who had such a weapon - Hitler, Churchill or Stalin, without blinking an eye, would give the order to use it. Alas, at that time nuclear bombs only the United States had - America incinerated two Japanese cities, and now, for 70 years, it has been justified for its actions.

The most difficult question lies in the events of August 9 - 14, 1945 - what became the "cornerstone" in the war, which finally forced Japan to change its mind and accept the humiliating terms of surrender? Repetitions of the nuclear nightmare or the loss of the last hope associated with the possibility of concluding a separate peace with the USSR?

I am afraid that we will never know the exact answer about what was going on in the minds of the Japanese leadership in those days.

Tokyo on fire

The atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are crimes against humanity. To justify these atrocities, huge information efforts are being made today. On the next anniversary of this crime, the following “postulates” can be read in abundance on the Russian Internet and the media. Like, an atomic strike, of course, is not a good thing, but it helped save the lives of American soldiers. They even call the figure - 100,000. You can guess where these numbers came from - about the same number of Japanese died in the fiery whirlwinds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But on this information soldiers, standing guard over the interests of the United States, are not appeased. They lie further - it turns out that the dropping of atomic bombs helped save ... the lives of the Japanese. They would have died more if the real “final” landing of the US army on Japanese territory had begun. But that's not all. The Japanese should be grateful to the States - after all, it turns out that they ... saved them from communism. The logic here is cannibalistic. Following it, the prisoners of Auschwitz should have been grateful to their jailers that they killed them and thus saved them from communism.

But the lies don't end there. Conscientious and independent bloggers write with a blue eye that the US atomic attack on Japan helped save ... lives Soviet soldiers. Although the blow of the Soviet army on the Kwantung army occurred after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the liberation of the Kuriles and Sakhalin took place after that. And the Japanese resistance was broken not by atomic strikes, orders to surrender or fear, but by the military skill of the commanders and the soldierly prowess of the Russian soldiers.

The atomic strike did nothing to end the war. Japan surrendered because the USSR entered the war. There was no point in fighting any further. The last hope of Tokyo collapsed - that Stalin would act as a kind of mediator for the conclusion of acceptable peace terms between Japan and the USA and Great Britain.

This is the article of the leading expert on Japan in our country, Professor Anatoly Arkadyevich Koshkin.

Preparing for the first strike

For the first time in the world, an atomic strike on living people - children, women and the elderly was entrusted to the 509th air group of the 20th Air Army, relocated in January 1945 to Cuba, where in deep secrecy the crews practiced bombing, including using radar guidance.

The commander of the air group was twenty-nine-year-old Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets, who was repeatedly awarded for successful air battles with the German Luftwaffe. The colonel began to prepare his group for a special task in the summer of 1944, when the atomic bomb was not yet ready. He himself made up the team of the 393rd bomber squadron, which was to drop the "product". The 509th air group was supplied and equipped "according to the highest rank". From various parts of the US Air Force, 14 B-29 bombers of the latest modification were withdrawn and sent to this air group.

Although the island of Guam was better equipped, the American command and personally Admiral Chester Nimitz chose Tinian Island, also located in the Mariana Ridge, as the base from which the B-29 with nuclear cargo was supposed to fly. This island is located 150 km closer to Japan than Guam, it had a perfectly flat coral area for use as a runway and was convenient for landing large bombers from the sea.

The components of the atomic bomb were delivered to the harbor of Tinian on July 26, 1945 by the cruiser Indianapolis. Washington was informed that the bomb would be assembled and ready for use by August 1st. Then, on August 4, seven crews were briefed, prepared for the unusual task. The pilots were shown a film about the atomic bomb test at Alamagordo. Particular attention was paid to the need to leave the bombardment site as soon as possible after the explosion, so as not to fall into the rising radioactive cloud.

The next day, the order was given to drop a black-and-orange bomb filled with uranium-235, dubbed "The Kid", on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The order was to be obeyed by the B-29 crew, under the command of Colonel Tibbets, who named the bomber carrying the deadly atomic device after his mother, Enola Gay.

The aircraft was escorted by two more B-29s. One was a technical board, on which three scientists flew to be present during the experiment and parachute ejection measuring instruments. Another aircraft with cameramen on board was intended to capture on film the historic event of the world's entry into the era of nuclear weapons.

Explosion on August 6

On the night of August 6, after taking off from the Tinian airfield, American bombers headed northwest towards Japan. At 7.30 am, the Japanese coast appeared on the horizon. The weather was favorable - the bright sun shone, rare clouds glided across the sky, visibility was excellent. When approaching the city, the crews examined its quarters and the Hiroshima feudal castle, which stood out for its architecture. The release of the "Baby" to the center of Hiroshima was supposed to take place at 8.15 Japanese time. And so it happened - the delay was only 17 seconds. In the United States, the date of the first military use of atomic weapons is different - 19:15 on August 5, 1945.

The bomb was detonated at an altitude of 580 meters. It was believed that it was as a result of an air explosion of an atomic bomb that the maximum damage would be inflicted on the city and the population. At the same time, the Americans did not give any warning about an atomic strike. On the other hand, the air-raid signal had been sounded only fifteen minutes before the explosion. However, seeing only one plane in the sky at first and not expecting a massive bombardment, few people hurried to the bomb shelter. This greatly increased the number of victims.

Determining the number of dead, among whom there were many incinerated and wounded, was difficult due to the uncertainty of the population of Hiroshima at the time of the explosion. The figures vary from 255 thousand to 350 thousand people. This is due to the large migration of urban residents who fled from the bombing in the villages. According to data published by the Ministry of the Interior of Japan on September 6, 1945, the victims atomic explosion became 70 thousand dead and 130 thousand wounded.

According to American data, 64 thousand people were killed and 72 thousand people were injured. This did not take into account those who died from the consequences of the atomic bombing over the next few months, there were from 50 to 60 thousand. It is believed that in total, up to 1950, about 200 thousand inhabitants of Hiroshima died from radiation and other diseases caused by the explosion. The survivors of the “hibakusha”, as the irradiated Japanese and their descendants in the second and third generations were called in Japan, practically all became disabled due to the disease.

On September 2, 1945, Japan's surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri, ending World War II.

From the USSR, this most important historical document was signed by Lieutenant General Kuzma Nikolaevich Derevyanko, the Soviet representative at the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, General MacArthur.

Many are still interested in why this right was granted not to one of the famous marshals, but to a little-known general, of whom Soviet army in 1945 there were about six thousand. After all, from the side of the allies on board the Missouri there were "stars" of the first magnitude, led by the five-star General MacArthur (at that time there were only four of them in the US Army).

From the Americans, the triumphant Midway and Leyte Admiral Nimitz accepted the surrender, from the British - the commander of the fleet of the empire in the Pacific Ocean, Admiral Fraser, from the French - the famous General Leclerc, from the Chinese - the head of the operational department of the headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek, General Su Yongchang.

It seemed that in this company the presence of the commander-in-chief of the Soviet troops on Far East Marshal Vasilevsky or one of the commanders of the fronts that had just defeated the Kwantung Army - Malinovsky, Meretskov or Purkaev. But instead of them, Derevyanko was on board the Missouri, who had recently held the relatively modest position of chief of staff of the 4th Guards Army.

On this occasion, some liberal historians even came up with a hypothesis according to which, by sending only a lieutenant general to sign the act, Stalin wanted to belittle the significance of the war in the Pacific, in which the Americans played the leading role. Here, the surrender of Germany was accepted by the most famous Soviet commander Zhukov, and for Japan, one of the staff officers also fit, which somehow attracted the attention of the "bloody tyrant on the Kremlin throne."

In fact, everything was not so, and the decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief to choose a Soviet representative to participate in the final episode of the Second World War was based on completely different motives ...

By that time, relations between the Soviet Union and the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition had seriously deteriorated. Having got rid of a common enemy, our yesterday's partners began to prepare for a clash with the USSR. This was clearly confirmed by the Potsdam Conference, during which Stalin had to deal with the inveterate Russophobe Truman.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, General MacArthur, also did not hide his anti-Soviet views. Moscow was also well aware of the American commander's passion for theatrical gestures: what was the cost of one of his recent shows called MacArthur Liberates the Philippines. The Kremlin was sure that something similar would happen aboard the Missouri.

"Pacific Napoleon" did not deceive expectations, turning the surrender of the Japanese into a real performance with himself in the lead role. MacArthur ordered a table for the ceremony to be set up on the upper deck to provide convenience for the press and the public, which the battleship's sailors made up, gave a short speech for the story ("We are gathered here ... to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace can be restored ...") and arranged a whole show from the procedure for signing the act.

Inviting generals Percival and Waynright released by him from Japanese captivity as assistants, MacArthur signed in syllables, constantly changing pens. Used writing supplies, he immediately handed out as souvenirs. The audience roared with delight.

Stalin, knowing about this weakness of MacArthur, sensibly reasoned that the participation of any of the Soviet marshals in this circus could lead to a conflict, which under these conditions was completely unnecessary. Therefore, the representative of the Soviet Union at the benefit of the Americans was not a military leader, but a diplomat.

But the employees of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs were not suitable for this role, among the allied generals they would have looked like black sheep. So, it was necessary to find a military man with diplomatic experience, and a sufficiently high rank.

In addition, it was impossible to miss a unique chance to look at the process of the beginning of the occupation of Japan by the Americans, so to speak, from the inside. Again, such an opportunity might not present itself. Therefore, a person was needed who spoke English and Japanese, who could not only speak, but watch, listen, memorize and analyze. Moreover, such qualities should not be obvious to the allies.

Kuzma Nikolaevich Derevyanko was perfect for this role. A brave warrior with an open and honest Russian face, in enough high rank, but not belonging to the cream of the military elite of the USSR. Therefore, the allies could not have a more or less detailed dossier on him and he had to be perceived as who he seemed to be.

The calculation turned out to be correct. They treated the general friendly, but they didn’t take him under close guardianship and they didn’t drag him around parties with the participation of top officials - the figure was not of that scale. His strange requests, for example, for permission to visit the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which under other conditions might have aroused suspicion, were treated quite condescendingly: if he wants, let him go. What interesting things can be seen there by the former chief of staff of the army, who cannot know anything about the atomic bomb ...

Meanwhile, if the Americans could look into the personal file of the forty-year-old general, they would react differently. After all, the biography of the son of a stonemason from the Little Russian village of Kosenivka near Uman was not typical for an army general.

While still a cadet of the Kharkov school of red foremen, young Kuzma Derevyanko independently learned to speak and write in Japanese. Why did he need to study one of the most complex languages in the world, history is silent, but such a remarkable fact attracted the attention of the command. Apparently, it seemed to someone not rational to keep a talented nugget in combat positions, and he was sent to study at a special department of the Frunze Military Academy, where he, in addition to Japanese, mastered English.

After graduating from the academy, Derevianko served in military intelligence. He was instructed to organize uninterrupted transit from Soviet Union to China caravans with weapons that were necessary for the war with the Japanese. The mission was top secret - a leak of information threatened Moscow with a serious complication of relations with Tokyo, which were far from cloudless anyway.

For the successful completion of this task, Captain Derevianko was awarded the order Lenin, which for that time was an extraordinary event. Apparently, this seemed unfair to someone, and soon the party commission of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army took up the freshly baked order bearer. Derevianko was accused of having links with "enemies of the people" - shortly before that, two of his uncles and brother were arrested and convicted.

The debunkers of "bloody Stalinism" argue that in the late 1930s, even less reason was enough to part not only with the party card, but also with life. The fate of Derevyanko completely refutes this liberal theorem. After several months of proceedings, he was only reprimanded. But the obstinate intelligence officer achieved a review of the case. The reprimand was removed by the decision of a higher authority - the Party Committee of the People's Commissariat of the Ministry of Defense.

During Finnish war Major Derevyanko was the chief of staff of the Separate Special Ski Brigade, he repeatedly participated in reconnaissance and sabotage raids behind enemy lines. At the beginning of 1941, he carried out a secret mission in East Prussia, probably associated with obtaining data on the preparations of the Germans for war with the USSR.

Colonel Derevyanko met the attack of the Nazis in the position of head of the intelligence department of the headquarters Northwestern Front. In mid-August 1941, he led a raid behind German lines, during which from a concentration camp under Staraya Russa About 2,000 Red Army soldiers were released.

In May 1942, Derevyanko was appointed chief of staff of the 53rd Army with the simultaneous assignment of the rank of major general to him. Participated in the battle of Kursk, the battle for the Dnieper, the capture of Budapest and Vienna. For the successful development of operations, he was awarded a full set of "military" orders - Bogdan Khmelnitsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov. After the victory, for some time he participated in the work of the Allied Council for Austria.

Stalin instructed such a person to represent our country at a ceremony in Tokyo Bay. It is clear that this choice was by no means accidental.

During a month-long business trip to Japan, Derevyanko performed not only and not so much representative functions. So, he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki several times, literally climbing the scorched ruins with a camera in his hands. Upon his return to Moscow, the general was received by Stalin. Derevianko gave a detailed report on the situation in Japan, the state of its army and naval forces, the mood of the population. His report and photographs of the results were especially carefully considered. atomic bombings. The general's activities were fully approved, for the successful completion of the assignment he was awarded the second Order of Lenin.

In the country rising sun, the language of which he had studied since his youth, Derevyanko spent another four years as a Soviet representative to the Allied Council for Japan. Despite the opposition of the Americans, the general consistently defended the positions of our power, regularly making statements and memorandums on issues sensitive to Soviet interests.

It was Derevyanko's persistence that made it possible for MacArthur to sign a directive instructing the Japanese government to "cease the exercise or attempt to exercise state or administrative power" on all islands north of Hokkaido. This implied Tokyo's complete abandonment of the Kuril Islands, both northern and southern. Although this was exactly what was envisaged by the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, the Americans, in the conditions of the flaring " cold war”, Were not averse to this question “play up”.

Derevianko returned from Japan seriously ill due to radiation exposure received in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He developed cancer. The general died at the end of 1954, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, and was buried on Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. The obituary, together with Minister of Defense Bulganin, was signed by marshals Zhukov, Konev, Vasilevsky, Malinovsky ...

In May 2007, the “square” authorities suddenly remembered that General Derevyanko was from near Uman, and by decree of President Yushchenko, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. Now the Kyiv rulers, known for their paradoxical assessments historical events, there are grounds for statements that Ukraine defeated Japan.

However, if Kuzma Nikolaevich suddenly found out that he was in the same company with Shukhevych and Bandera, he would certainly have refused his heroic title. The orders of Lenin, Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bogdan Khmelnitsky were dearer to him.

That Great Britain and France, engaged in a war in Europe, will not be able to allocate sufficient forces to protect their colonies and strongholds in Asia, while the USSR will direct its main efforts to a war with Germany.

Favorable opportunities were created for the seizure by Japan of territories in the Pacific Ocean and the South East Asia controlled by the then limited Allied forces. The primary objective was to capture French Indochina as a springboard for a subsequent offensive against China and the capture of Malaya.

On September 27, 1940, the tripartite pact of Germany, Italy and Japan (Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis) was signed in the German capital. It was announced that all three allied powers were concerned about establishing "peace throughout the world" and for this they were starting to build a "new order in Great East Asia and Europe."

In September 1940, after the surrender of France, Japan occupied the French North, and in July 1941 - South Indochina.

On December 7, 1941, with a sudden attack on the main US naval base Pearl Harbor, airfields in the Philippines, other US and British bases and airfields in the Pacific Ocean, Japan unleashed a war in this region. She seized strategic supremacy at sea and in the air. By the middle of 1942, the Philippines, Indochina, Thailand, Burma, Malaya and Indonesia were occupied, and a colonial regime was established in the occupied territories. In response, a struggle unfolded against the invaders, as a result of which Japan was forced to increase the power of the occupying forces several times over.

In May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the US Navy won the first victory over the Japanese fleet; in June 1942, the Japanese suffered a major defeat in the Midway-Aleutian operation. By December 1942, the balance of power in the Pacific changed in favor of the allies, Japan lost the strategic initiative and switched to strategic defense. In the summer of 1943, the Allies launched an offensive.

The situation in the Pacific theater of operations in January 1944-August 1945 was characterized by the complete transfer of the strategic initiative to the allies and their conduct of large-scale landing operations to seize the islands of the Pacific Ocean, active military operations in China, Burma and other parts of Asia. In January-July 1945, the Allies liberated a number of regions in China and Burma. In the summer, American aircraft intensified their air strikes against Japan; On August 6 and 9, the United States first used nuclear weapon by dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union, in accordance with the decision of the Crimean and Potsdam conferences officially joined the Potsdam Declaration of 1945 and entered the war with Japan on 9 August.

After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, many Japanese statesmen realized that the political and strategic situation in the Far East had changed radically and it was pointless to continue the war. On August 10, the Japanese government announced through the neutral countries of Sweden and Switzerland that it agreed to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration if the allies agreed not to include in it a clause depriving the emperor of sovereign rights. In the response of the governments of the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and China dated August 11, the Allies reaffirmed their demand for unconditional surrender and drew the attention of the Japanese government to the provision of the Potsdam Declaration, which provided that from the moment of surrender, the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government in relation to the administration of the state would be subordinated to the supreme commander forces of the Allied Powers, who will take such steps as he deems necessary to carry out the terms of surrender.

On August 14, Emperor Hirohito of Japan recorded a radio address to his subjects announcing the need to stop the war and Japan's acceptance of unconditional surrender. Upon learning of the emperor's appeal, a group of fanatical officers on the night of August 15 decided to disrupt the surrender negotiations and continue the war. Their task was to eliminate the "supporters of peace" from the political arena, to persuade the armed forces to disobedience, and to prevent the emperor's decision from being made public, to remove the text with the recording of the speech before it was broadcast.

Most of the parts of the capital's garrison did not support the conspirators and remained faithful to the oath. The hastily organized coup was liquidated in the first hours.

On the same day, hostilities between the Anglo-American and Japanese armed forces were actually stopped, however, in the territory of Northeast China, Korea, South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, Japanese troops continued to resist the Soviet armed forces. Parts of the Kwantung Army did not receive an order to cease hostilities.

August 9 - September 2, 1945, the Manchurian strategic offensive operation of the Soviet troops was carried out with the aim of defeating the Japanese Kwantung Army, liberating the northeastern and northern provinces of China (Manchuria and Inner Mongolia), the Liaodong Peninsula, Korea, eliminating the bridgehead of aggression and a large military-economic bases of Japan on the Asian continent. opposed the Kwantung Army Soviet troops Trans-Baikal, 1st and 2nd Far Eastern fronts in cooperation with the Pacific Fleet, the Amur military flotilla and the troops of the Mongolian People's Republic. With the defeat of the Kwantung Army and the loss of the military-economic base in Northeast China and North Korea Japan lost real forces and opportunities to continue the war.

On September 2, 1945, Japan signed the Unconditional Surrender Act aboard the USS Missouri, which entered Tokyo Bay.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

ACT OF THE SURDEN OF JAPAN, See Art. Japanese surrender... Great Patriotic War 1941-1945: encyclopedia

JAPANESE SURRENDER ACT 1945- 2.9, Joint Document of the Allied Powers on the Unconditional Surrender of Japan, presented. its representatives. Signed on board Amer. battleship "Missouri" by representatives of Japan, USA, USSR, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, China, France, ... ... Encyclopedia of the Strategic Missile Forces

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Japan's Unconditional Surrender Act- signed on September 2, 1945, deprived Japan, which was defeated in the Second World War, of all the lands it had ever captured: South Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, etc ... Glossary of terms (glossary) on the history of the state and law of foreign countries

The style of this article is not encyclopedic or violates the norms of the Russian language. The article should be corrected according to the stylistic rules of Wikipedia ... Wikipedia

On September 2, 1945, the event that ended fighting in World War II. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost its combat readiness, and there was a threat of an Allied invasion of Japan. While ... ... Wikipedia

- 連合国軍占領下の日本 Military occupation ← ... Wikipedia

It was signed on September 2, 1945. Having made a preliminary decision and received the emperor’s approval for armistice negotiations, the Japanese government, overcoming internal difficulties, tried to contact the governments of the USSR, the USA and England in order to ... ... All Japan

Governor General of Korea 朝鮮 Governor General ← ... Wikipedia

Japanese surrender in World War II- When planning to enter the Second World War, the ruling circles of Japan expected that Great Britain and France, engaged in a war in Europe, would not be able to allocate sufficient forces to protect their colonies and strongholds in Asia, and the USSR would make the main efforts ... ... Encyclopedia of newsmakers

Books

• When cherry blossoms..., Alexey Voronkov. On September 2, 1945, Japan's unconditional surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri. Second World War ended, the armies returned to their places ...
• When the sakura blossoms, Voronkov A.A. On September 2, 1945, an act of unconditional surrender of Japan was signed on board the American missile cruiser Missouri. The Second World War is over, the armies have returned to their places...