Can't say this is something I've given much thought to- "On August 8, 1945, Joseph Stalin, keeping his promise to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Yalta the previous February to intervene 90 days after Germany surrendered, declared war on Japan. Right into early August, Japanese officials clung to the hope that the Soviets might negotiate a peace deal with the Western Allies. That hope dissipated in the lightning advance of the Red Army launched on August 9. Named the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation but better known now as “August Storm,” a term popularized by historian David Glantz, it was a gargantuan undertaking coordinating air, sea, and land forces. Soviet troops, 1.5 million of them commanded by Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, steamrolled into Manchuria and, subsequently, conducted amphibious operations on southern Sakhalin Island, in northern Korea, and on the Kurile Islands. Faced with this onslaught, the Japanese Kwantung Army, along with its Manchurian and Mongolian auxiliaries, surrendered. After initial resistance, Japan’s forces on the Korean peninsula, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles also laid down their arms to the Soviets. The number who surrendered in the weeks after August 9 is astounding—between 1.6 and 1.7 million men. This was just under half of the 3.5 million Japanese combatants left abandoned outside of Japan when Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s acceptance of Allied terms. Thousands of Japanese civilians, as well as Koreans and Manchurians, were also rounded up. Similar to the atrocities they perpetrated in Germany, Austria, and Hungary earlier in the year, the Red Army sullied their triumph by engaging in mass rape and systematic pillage against the populations of these newly occupied areas. That the Japanese gave up in such incredible numbers seemed miraculous at the time. The indoctrination these men had undergone in Japanese military culture taught them to prefer death to surrender. American experiences on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and other islands, where so few Japanese surrendered, cemented the expectation that the armed forces of Japan, if not the civilian population, would fight bitterly to the very end if the country were invaded. Soviet forces encountered a very different enemy, though. By August 1945, war weariness, overwhelming odds, and sheer self-preservation exerted countervailing pressures to the indoctrination. While they did fight hard at the outset of August Storm, Japanese soldiers eventually capitulated in droves to the Soviets. What lay ahead for them in Siberia was long and dreadful." www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-pows-in-soviet-captivity?fbclid=IwAR1jFeN4lBkJUOO_uIY2ppO-gjRFlwR_pUscVva-OQj4CDOf2J3l0fpYITE
We all should know the Japanese Manchurian Army was a puppet left but at that time the original plan was to do this. Then again the Japanese were afraid they would be occupied by the Red Army.
Among the prisoners was Gogen "The Cat" Yamaguchi, then a civilian employee, who founded the Japanese Goju Ryu Karate. He was imprisoned in Siberia but his captors discovered who he was and he was made to train Soviet troops in his brand of Karate.
