Things You Didn't Know About Hitler That Will Blow Your Mind

It will not come as a surprise to American readers that when the Japanese emperor delivered his surrender message on August 15, 1945, Allied forces led by the United States had thoroughly defeated Japan’s naval and air power in the Pacific. 

They may be less familiar with the fact that the bulk of Japan’s land forces were still largely intact. In three years of intense combat beginning in late 1942, Allied forces had retaken control of many islands in the Pacific, notably the Philippines and Okinawa, and had routed the Japanese defenders. At that point, however, they had not defeated key units of the Japanese Army.

When the cease-fire took effect, a depleted force of some 300,000 Japanese soldiers in Manchuria had fallen victim to the sudden attack of the Soviet Union on August 8, 1945, and many were on the run. All of the other Japanese divisions that were scattered throughout East Asia remained fully intact. These included Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Thailand, Burma and French Indochina. Although weakened by relentless American submarine and air attacks against Japanese shipping, these forces had hardly even been tested in combat.

The largest contingent of Japanese soldiers in East Asia—about 1.2 million of them—were still stationed in China when the war ended. Beginning in 1937, Japan had vainly attempted to subdue the Chinese only to discover they were strengthening nascent Chinese nationalism. The Japanese had seized China’s largest coastal cities and controlled the main communications arteries in the eastern part of the country, but huge areas of China remained outside Japanese control. Chinese Nationalist, Communist, and warlord armies sporadically fought the Japanese and occasionally each other. As late as the spring of 1945, Japanese armies staged a major offensive to seize airfields in western China that were being used by American bombers.

The war in China was a drawn out, leisurely kind of conflict, punctuated by occasional Japanese victories in the field but no final resolution. It was marked by relatively few Japanese casualties and a Nationalist foe that preferred to husband its resources rather than risk losing large numbers of men and scarce weapons in pitched combat.