![]() The assurance of Soviet neutrality encouraged Japan towards Southern expansion and the invasion of the European colonies in Southeast Asia. The Neutrality Pact proved beneficial for both countries. With the German invasion of France and the Low Countries and the subsequent expansion of the Axis Powers in Europe, the Soviet Union, anxious not to face two fronts at the same time and to safeguard its eastern border, signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on 13 April 1941. The Soviet-Japanese border conflicts lasted until 1939 and the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, which saw the Japanese defeated. Japan turned its military interests to northeast China, a region bordering the Soviet Far East, and disputes over the demarcation line led to growing tensions with the Soviet Union. In 1932, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the ‘puppet state’ of Manchukuo, Soviet-Japanese relations further deteriorated after Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Hitler’s Germany in November 1936, which was designed as a defence against international communism. In addition to a strategic rivalry dating back to the 19th century, they now nursed an ideological enmity born of the Bolshevik Revolution and the ultraconservative military’s growing hold on Japanese politics. By the 1930s, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Imperial Japan both viewed themselves as rising powers with ambitions to expand their territorial holdings. The Soviet Union had an interest in the Far East long before the Second World War. However, in this blog I will not be going through the debate between those two camps, but I will highlight the crucial role the Soviet Union played in the termination of the Second World War. The ‘revisionist historians’ argue that Japan was already ready to surrender before the atomic bombs. According to the ‘traditional narrative’, the atomic bombs were the cause of the Japanese surrender. ![]() There are many theories about what caused Japan to surrender. The Pacific War came to an end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. By the first half of 1945, Okinawa was to be a staging area for Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. However, about six months after Pearl Harbor, an important turning point in the Pacific campaign allowing the United States and its allies to move into an offensive position occurred: the battle of Midway, in June 1942. This event in the Far East had made the Second World War truly global.ĭuring the first part of the war, British colonies in the Far East – Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma – and Siam were overrun by the Japanese Southern Expeditionary forces. The attack had led to the United States’ formal entry into World War II on the next day. The Second World War in the Far East had started with Japan’s attack of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941. 75 years ago today, in the morning of Sunday 2 September 1945, the Japanese representatives signed the Instrument of Surrender, which officially ended the Second World War.
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