On August 20, the troops of the Trans-Baikal Front occupied Port Arthur and reached the sea between Peking and Mukden. Troops of the Second Far Eastern Front occupied the southern part of Sakhalin Island and also the Kurile islands.
On August 23, the war in the Far East ended.
According to Soviet figures, some 84,000 Japanese troops were killed in these operations. (Japanese sources indicate a figure four times smaller— 21,000.) Approximately 600,000 Japanese were captured, including 148 generals. Red Army losses, according to Soviet sources, were insignificant: 32,000 dead and wounded.158
On August 14, the day of Japan's surrender, at the height of the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, a Sino—Soviet friendship treaty and other supplementary pacts were signed. One of these turned Port Arthur into a Soviet naval base, although formal civil administration remained in the hands of the Chinese. Port Dalny (Dairen) became a "free city," with a special zone for Soviet piers and depots. An agreement was also signed for joint utilization of the Chinese Eastern Railway. All these agreements were concluded for a thirty-year period. China agreed to recognize the independence of the People's Republic of Mongolia after a plebiscite, which was to be organized. 159 Through the war the Soviet Union was able to realize its military and political designs in the Far East to the fullest.
On September 2, the commander-in-chief of Allied troops in the Pacific theater, General Douglas MacArthur, accepted Japan's formal surrender aboard the aircraft carrier USS Missouri.
September 3, the day of victory against Japan, was declared an official holiday in the Soviet Union.
World War II had ended.
THE BALANCE SHEET
With the war over, the situation in the world changed radically. Millions of Allied soldiers had inundated Europe, but demobilization had begun and thousands were returning home. It was a happy time as families were reunited. A time of joy, a time of sorrow. A time of grief and remembrance. A time of hope and rebirth. A time to give life to new generations. In the
Soviet Union there was scarcely a family that had not lost someone in the war.
Of all the participants in World War II, the Soviet Union suffered the greatest losses. Figures differ on how great those losses were. According to Soviet sources, they amounted to 10 million soldiers and an equal number of civilians, a total of 20 million people.160 In 1973, the figures were given for the Russian Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Karelo-Finish SSR. Under the rubric "killed and tortured to death," 6,844,551 civilian casualties were cited, along with 3,932,256 prisoners of war.161 The figures for the republics of Transcaucasia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia remain unknown. Western historians have produced slightly different figures: 13,600,000 Soviet soldiers killed and 7,700,000 civilian casualties, a total of 21,300,000 victims, or 11 percent of the Soviet population in 1941.
In the six-year war, from 1939 to 1945, Germany lost 3,250,000 soldiers and 3,810,000 civilians, a third of the losses of the Soviet Union. In the same period Great Britain and the Commonwealth lost 452,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians, or forty-two times less than the Soviet Union. Between December 1941 and September 1945 the United States lost 295,000 men, seventy-two times less than the Soviet Union. Poland suffered very heavy losses: 5,300,000 people (mainly Jews) exterminated in the Nazi death camps, and 120,000 soldiers killed. These losses amounted to 20 percent of Poland's prewar population. Yugoslavia lost 1,300,000 civilians and 300,000 soldiers. The countries of the antifascist coalition lost 18,587,000 soldiers and 25,140,000 civilians, for a total of 43,727,000 people. The countries of the fascist bloc lost only one-fourth as many: 5,930,000 soldiers and 5,087,000 civilians, a total of 11,017,000.
The total number of deaths in World War II was 55,014,000, or 6.4 times the number of World War I (8,634,000).162 Military actions had brought ruin to many European countries.
The Soviet losses amounted to 38 percent of the total losses in World War II.
For one thing, the war was fought on Soviet territory for three and a half years. The Nazis sought the physical eradication of the Russians and many other nationalities of the USSR. In addition to those killed in military operations, many Soviet citizens were exterminated in mass executions, in prisoner of war camps, as well as in the Nazi death camps. On the other hand, the unprecedented Soviet losses were also a direct result of criminal negligence on the part of the leadership, Stalin and the members of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the government, in failing to prepare adequately for war. The policy of entente with Nazi Germany, from 1939
to 1941, also had extremely grave consequences. The elimination during the years of terror of almost all the upper echelons of the military command left the Soviet army in the hands of officers whose knowledge and military experience dated from World War I and the Russian civil war or who had been hastily trained and lacked experience.
In spite of its demagogic slogan, "People are the most valuable capital," the Soviet government showed total disregard for human life.
The Soviet command often sought to win a battle at any cost, rather than to win it without suffering unnecessary losses. The history of the Soviet- German war offers numerous examples of soldiers openly sent to their slaughter by order of the high command, of men killed because of the vanity and carelessness of their superiors, of ill-prepared offensives that lacked the necessary logistical support and ended in retreats and enormous losses. Even experienced commanders like Zhukov, Vassilevsky, Kirponos, Timoshenko, and Meretskov lacked the courage to oppose the adventuristic and erroneous orders of the supreme commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Stalin.
In the most difficult and dangerous sectors of the front, penal battalions were used. It was here that, according to the official account, military personnel served sentences for criminal or military offenses.163 However, it was easy to end up in a penal battalion because of an incautious word, criticism of the actions of the command, or a joke. Those in penal battalions were stripped of their military ranks and decorations. Few of the great number who served in penal units survived. How many perished? The official statistics are silent about this, but it is certainly a matter of many thousands.
During the war Stalin, with the knowledge and blessing of the Politburo, ordered the deportation to Siberia of tens of thousands of inhabitants of the annexed territories, many of whom died of hunger and disease. Over 1 million people were deported from the Crimea and the Caucasus in 1943 and 1944. Tens of thousands of lives were lost as a result. No one knows the number of victims arrested by the state security agencies as "enemies of the people" or "German spies"—except of course those agencies themselves. It is very likely that the vast majority of those arrested were not guilty of such offenses. But the work of the security police was judged in terms of the number of "hostile agents" rendered harmless, and the number was constantly increased. Thousands of Soviet soldiers who had the misfortune of becoming prisoners of the Germans but who miraculously survived turned up later in Soviet correction camps as traitors to the homeland.
For this reason, blame for the losses suffered by the Soviet people belongs not only to the Nazis and their satellites and collaborators and to the hazards of war. The Soviet leaders were also to blame, but not one of them was ever tried for these crimes.
Examples of heroism on the part of Soviet soldiers are numerous. In his unpublished memoirs, Colonel Novobranets describes the fierce hand-to- hand night combat the men of the Soviet Sixth Army engaged in as they broke out of encirclement in the first weeks of the war. In the border regions, the border guard units and the regular army troops that took part in the initial battles of the German invasion fought desperately. The resistance by the garrison of the Brest fortress was heroic, despite the fact that the command had abandoned it. The fortress was besieged on all sides by the Germans but continued to resist for twenty-eight days. The few survivors, after unprecedented suffering at the hands of the Germans, ended up in Soviet prison camp in Kolyma as "traitors to the homeland." They were not rehabilitated until many years after the war.