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It is often said that Germany, also a defeated country in World War II, has a responsibility far beyond Japan, whether it is the former chancellor's shocking kneeling to the victims of the concentration camps, or the reparations that continue to be paid to other countries, all show their sincerity in atonement.
But in fact, Japan also bowed its head after the war, but they bowed their heads to the United States, the Soviet Union, and even Australia, and did not sincerely surrender to China......
Revenge of the Soviets
When it comes to grievances in World War II, the Soviet Union has more say than the United States.
As early as 1918, during the Soviet Red Revolution, Japan took the opportunity to invade Siberia, once stationed more than 70,000 troops north of Sakhalin Island, and illegally occupied the territory of the Soviet Union for six years.
This was the first time that Japan bowed its head between the friction between the Soviet Union and Germany, and the Soviet Union at that time was still in a state of chaos that had just re-established order, and had no time to take care of the problem of the Siberian direction, so it also took advantage of the situation and accepted Japan's show of weakness, but what I didn't expect was that Japan did not settle down for long.
Japan coveted the northeastern part of the continent, and Germany needed Japan's energy to involve the Soviet Union in East Asia, and Germany and Japan began to hook up in the 20s of the 20th century, and reached an "anti-communist pact" in 1936.
In 1939, Germany was winning in the European theater of war, and on May 11, the irrepressible Japanese army began to call for a German offensive, and on the Eastern Front, with the so-called puppet Manchu army, troops out of the Khalkhin River, raided the Mongolian border guards.
Stalin
This plan has been planned for a long time, although the Soviet Union lacked the energy to deploy layers of defense in Siberia, but in order to maintain the port in the direction of the Bering Strait, it also increased its troops many times in the past ten years, and the reason why the Japanese army chose to march from the direction of Mongolia was to avoid the Soviet front.
The Soviet Union attached great importance to this, and Stalin personally ordered to strike the Japanese army so hard that they did not dare to fight back and ensure stability in the Siberian direction, for this reason, Marshal Zhukov personally went out and reorganized the First Army in July, and gave the Japanese a head-on blow with a steel torrent of 498 tanks, 385 armored vehicles, 542 artillery pieces and mortars, and 515 aircraft.
In the end, it took only four days for the Soviet army to defeat the Japanese army on the 20-kilometer-deep Nomenkan front, and more than 75,000 people of the Sixth Army of the Kwantung Army were encircled and annihilated, at least 18,000 people were killed, and the total attrition reached more than 40,000 people.
Zhukov
Seeing this, the Japanese side immediately bowed its head, submitted an armistice request to the Soviet Union, and signed an agreement, and did not dare to take a single step forward with the Soviet Union until the end of World War II, but this time, the Soviet Union did not forget what Japan had done.
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union, which had finally withdrawn from the European theater, quickly mobilized a large army and launched 1.5 million troops, more than 28,000 cannons, more than 5,000 tanks, and 4,300 aircraft to launch a comprehensive encirclement and annihilation of the Japanese Kwantung Army before Japan's surrender.
In just seven days, the remaining Kwantung Army was annihilated by at least 80,000 men, and it was not until Japan announced its surrender that the Soviet Union, in obsessed with international law, suspended the pace of its offensive and turned to capturing Japanese prisoners.
Subsequently, the Soviet Union spent 12 days capturing a total of about 600,000 Japanese soldiers, of which only more than 90,000 disabled prisoners who were unable to work were handed over to the Kuomintang government, and the remaining 499807 prisoners of war were all transferred to Siberia.
The Soviets were not merciful to the Japanese, allowing them to keep a minimum of their personal belongings, to wear thin uniforms, to give them any heating equipment, and not to give them medical treatment, leaving them to fend for themselves in sickness and a winter of -40 degrees Celsius
In the end, only 411057 Japanese prisoners of war registered into the Siberian prisoner of war camps, as for the whereabouts of the tens of thousands of people lost on the way, the Soviet Union did not keep a record, and all of them were treated as "missing".
Surprisingly, these cruelly treated prisoners of war showed amazing enthusiasm in their work, perhaps inspired by a certain servility in the hearts of the Japanese, who were extremely obedient in the prisoner of war camps, and would be grateful to Dade even if the management gave them an extra mouthful of porridge.
After World War II, Japan also had an almost absolute fear of the Soviet Union because of its powerful power, which shows the importance of an iron-fisted policy, and in fact, not only one country launched a "retaliation" against Japan after the war, but one country even did it even more ruthlessly than the Soviet Union.
Australia refuses to accept surrender
On December 7, 1941, the Pearl Harbor incident shocked the whole world, but in fact, on the same day, Japan also sent another force to the Malay Peninsula to land on the beach at Pattani Harbor, defeating the British troops stationed in the colony.
Soon after, the Japanese army entered Kuala Lumpur and directly captured more than 90,000 British troops, a considerable number of whom were born in Australia under the British Commonwealth flag.
In World War II, the Japanese were known for their brutality, and the Japanese army in Southeast Asia was the most inhumane of the entire Japanese army, they pursued a "no prisoner policy", did not recognize the Geneva Convention, and treated prisoners of the United States and Britain and other countries in the war to the extreme.
Punishments imaginable by ordinary people, such as whipping and soldering irons, abound, and all kinds of physical torture that ordinary people can hardly imagine, such as forcing prisoners of war to die in the scorching sun of 40 degrees carrying firewood, freezing prisoners of war to death in water prisons for several days, or forcing prisoners of war to eat food soaked in feces, or even dismembering and eating prisoners of war who tried to escape......
With the fall of British colonial rule to Manila, Batan, Luzon and other important islands in Southeast Asia, and the almost complete collapse of the United States' port base deployment in Southeast Asia.
In Milne Bay, in order to "deter the enemy", the Japanese army pulled the Australian prisoners to the beach, tortured them with small bayonets and bled them, and even cut off the captives' genitals and sewed them on the captives' lips, whether the captives eventually died of blood loss or starvation, this act of torture and killing can be called one of the most horrific acts in human history.
In addition, since Australia was a Commonwealth country and had a very close relationship with Britain at that time, many colonies were already under the responsibility of Australia, so when Japan took almost all of Southeast Asia into its hands, Australia was the next target of attack.
Thomas Bremy, the Australian commander in New Guinea at the time, gave a speech to his soldiers, saying bluntly that the Japanese are beasts in human skin, and that you should not have any mercy when fighting wild beasts, and that you will only be safe if you kill the Japanese.
In March 1943, the Battle of New Guinea broke out, and the long-prepared Australian Corps, together with the American army, launched an all-round encirclement of the Japanese army, thus setting off one of the deadliest battles in human history.
More than 200,000 Japanese troops were surrounded by the Australian and American forces in the stronghold in New Guinea and could not move, and Australia used its artillery superiority to bombard the Japanese army day and night, compressing the Japanese defense line little by little into the last few small bomb shelters.
The remaining 200,000 Japanese soldiers, in the dark and narrow holes, breathed turbid air, drank dirty water, food had been cut off, they could only live by eating the corpses of their comrades, there was no medicine, malaria and other infectious diseases were raging wildly, and a large number of Japanese soldiers died of illness and starvation directly in the caves.
In the end, the Japanese army couldn't hold on and launched a surrender, the Australian officer directly ordered the army to refuse to accept the surrender, the front-line soldiers saw that the Japanese army no matter how the other side reacted, and shot directly to death, the commander claimed that this was to avoid the charge of "indiscriminate killing of prisoners" so he simply refused to accept the surrender, and the feedback of the front-line soldiers was more direct, they said that they did not feel that they were killing, and the Japanese army could only be regarded as animals.
There are three versions of the death statistics of this battle, 170,000, 190,000, and 200,000, but no matter which version, the death rate of the Japanese army in the battle exceeded 80%, and less than one-tenth of the Japanese soldiers were finally captured by the US army in the prisoner of war camp.
Australia's actions did have an absolute deterrent effect, and Japan did not dare to say a word about the ownership of many Pacific islands after World War II, and also paid reparations, which played a very important role in Australia's economic recovery after the war.
Chiang Kai-shek's compromise
If you want to say that the most complete object of Japan's submission after the war, everyone knows it, it is the United States.
After the war, the United States made many arrangements for Japan, which fundamentally changed the structure of Japan, a former feudal state, by decomposing the power of the emperor on the one hand, supporting proxies on the other, and directly stationing troops in Japan on the other hand, almost completely depriving Japan of its sovereignty.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has never relaxed the dog leash in its hands, and although the United States does not support colonization in name, anyone with a discerning eye can see that Japan does not have any autonomy under the United States.
This situation has not changed much today, after the US economy and stock market were severely hit during the pandemic, and in order to alleviate the economic deficit, the US has made Japan continue to eat hundreds of billions of US bonds at the cost of tax increases, and now it has become the largest country in US debt.
It is rare for Japan to bear the economic pressure on another country at the expense of its own economic fluctuations.
What few people know is that, theoretically, China should also have the right to station troops in Japan, and the Potsdam Proclamation stipulated that the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China had the right to garrison Japan and manage Japan's administration.
Moreover, as the victorious power, China had the right to seek compensation and territory from Japan, a defeated country, and in the first claim document drafted by the Kuomintang, "China's Statement on China's Demand for Reparations against Japan," it was clearly demanded that China should receive at least 50 percent of Japan's reparations for the defeat in Asia.
However, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union followed, and the United States intended to directly use Japan as an advance base against Soviet maritime power, Chiang Kai-shek, who had a keen political sense, immediately took the opposite attitude, and as another loyal brother in the American camp, he quickly instructed his men to slow down the progress of the claims and further wait and see the American attitude.
This wait-and-see was only after the War of Liberation, when the Kuomintang government was driven to the island of Taiwan in 1951, and the Japanese reparations conference led by the United States was officially launched, when the United States did not recognize the communist regime and still regarded Chiang Kai-shek as "orthodox", which led to the fundamental exclusion of our party from the conference.
At the meeting, the Japanese side whimsically proposed that the factories and materials left on the mainland by the Japanese army when they retreated were worth tens of billions of dollars, so they could already be used as compensation, so they would not pay additional compensation.
At the same time, the Kuomintang government gave up its sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands, and in the end Japan did not hand over any of the territory it should have surrendered, and the Kuomintang government also signed a treaty that explicitly renounced the right to "accept labor dispatched by Japan".
The garrison, indemnity, territory, labor compensation, and all the compensation of the victorious countries were basically completely abandoned by the Kuomintang government, and Chiang Kai-shek also let go of Class A war criminals like Ninci in Gangcun, who should have been executed.
Compared with the response of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Australia to the Japanese army, Chiang Kai-shek's almost unlimited indulgence of Japan's behavior is really hateful. It is no wonder that post-war Japan has long lacked respect for China.
This article was originally written by "On History and the Present", and has been opened for the whole network to protect rights, and may not be reproduced without authorization, and infringement must be investigated.