After the conclusion of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin flew to Berlin and met with US President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others at the Séchielin Hof Palace near Berlin. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

At the conference, the leaders of the Central Powers reached a consensus on the distribution of territory in Europe after the war, the war reparations of the Axis powers, and issued the famous "Potsdam Proclamation", demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally, otherwise the Allies would concentrate their efforts on large-scale action against Japan.

Stalin even more openly stated that the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was no longer in force, meaning that the Soviet Union could start a war against Japan at any time, posing a serious threat to the Japanese Kwantung Army entrenched in northeastern China.

The Japanese side did not take this announcement seriously, they felt that although the United States had won the naval battle in the Pacific Ocean and dealt a heavy blow to Japan's naval strength, Japan's main forces were still entrenched in Japan itself, China, and the Indochina Peninsula (i.e., Burma, Vietnam, and Thailand), and they had won victory after victory, and there was no sign of defeat for the time being.

Although the Soviet Union won victory in the European theater and gained control of the whole of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe and most of northern Europe, and became a veritable "hegemon" in Europe, the Japanese army did not face up to this formidable enemy.

Because the overly optimistic Japanese felt that the Soviet Union's military power in the Far East was still weak, and although it could resist the Japanese invasion, it was not enough to launch an attack on the northeastern China and Inner Mongolia controlled by the Japanese army.

Coupled with Japan's military development in recent years, the Japanese army in 1944 was much stronger in terms of strength and equipment than during the Battle of Normenheim in 1939, so that the optimistic and belligerent Japanese had the illusion that Japan's military strength was not what it used to be and that it could repay the shame of Normenhan.

However, the Japanese seem to have consciously or unintentionally ignored a major fact, that is, the Soviet army is also developing, and in the case of opening a big hanging, it is developing at a speed against the sky.

In less than five years, the Soviet Red Army had suddenly developed into the most powerful military force in Eurasia, surpassing Japan not only in terms of numbers, but also in its army equipment (such as the T-54 tank) and air force equipment (MiG-9 jet fighters) that were a generation more advanced than their Japanese counterparts.

Of course, if it is compared with the navy, the Soviet Union is still inferior to Japan for the time being, and its number of ships and shipbuilding technology are not as good as Japan on the other side of the sea for the time being.

However, on land, the Japanese navy could not play any role at all, and the Soviet army, with its absolute superiority in the army and air force, could easily defeat the Japanese Kwantung Army, liberate Northeast China and Inner Mongolia, and even further occupy the Korean Peninsula and kill the Yellow River.

According to the agreement of the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Red Army would enter the war against Japan within three months of the end of the Soviet-German war, that is, on or before August 1944, but the Japanese believed that the Soviet Army would not act until at least October 1944.

As a result, the Japanese, who underestimated the enemy and blindly judged, finally miscalculated, and the Soviet Red Army fulfilled the agreement of the Yalta Conference and launched an attack on the Japanese-controlled northeastern region of China just three months after the surrender of Germany.

On August 9, 1944, three months after the German surrender came into effect, the Soviet Red Army gathered 89 divisions with a total of 1.5 million men, more than 5,000 tanks, more than 2,000 self-propelled guns, about 100,000 vehicles, and 6,000 aircraft, and launched a surprise attack on the Kwantung Army.

Unlike in the past, the Soviets did not prepare their artillery before the attack. They did not adopt the previous combat method of first sweeping the ground with artillery and then launching a large-scale "Ula charge," but formed a number of assault teams to cross the border under the cover of night and sneak attack the Japanese devils on the border.

Because of the negligence of the Japanese army, coupled with the fact that the main force of the Japanese army had withdrawn to the fortress and at the same time focused on blocking the road area, the Soviet commandos completed the task without encountering much resistance.

Subsequently, by the next morning, the main forces of the Soviet Red Army, armored units, and thousands of aircraft crossed the border one after another and launched a large-scale attack on the Japanese Kwantung Army.

As early as a month earlier, Japanese reconnaissance intelligence officers had already discovered that the trains of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the USSR were particularly active, thus deducing the conclusion that the Soviet troops were preparing for war.

Although this intelligence aroused the attention of the Japanese high-level troops, they not only did not take the Soviet Red Army seriously, but also withdrew the main force of the Kwantung Army, focusing on defending the existing fortified areas, blocking the main roads in northeast China, and also formulated a set of plans to lure the enemy deep into and completely annihilate the Soviet army in northeast China.

However, the Japanese seriously underestimated the strength of the Soviet Red Army.

If the Soviet army had only sent out 300,000 or 400,000 this time, it would still be possible to be surrounded and annihilated by the 700,000 Kwantung Army, but the number of Soviet soldiers who came this time reached 1.5 million, and the number of tanks and self-propelled guns exceeded 7,000, and the number of troops was even greater than that of the Japanese army. Not to mention the encirclement and annihilation of the Soviet army, whether the Japanese army can block the attack of the Soviet army is also questionable.

The commanders of the Soviet Red Army were much more mature in mentality, and although they had superior forces and used equipment that was a generation ahead of the enemy, they did not despise Japan, a fanatical and belligerent enemy, so they were more well prepared, and they also developed a lot of backup plans, just in case.

In just one week, the Soviet Red Army had already routed the Japanese troops stationed on the border, destroyed countless Japanese fortresses, and advanced hundreds of kilometers.

In front of the Soviet T-34/85 tanks, the thin-skinned tanks of Japan had no combat effectiveness at all. Soviet 85mm tank guns could easily penetrate the weak armor of Japanese tanks at a distance of two kilometers, while the main guns of the Japanese Type 95 light tanks and Type 97 medium tanks could not penetrate the frontal armor of the T-34/85 tanks at any distance.

In the face of the torrent of Soviet tanks, the Japanese had no choice but to resort to suicide attacks, allowing soldiers to rush under the chassis of the tank with explosives to detonate it, and the Soviet tanks were killed together.

There was no shortage of soldiers in the Japanese army who were "willing to be loyal to the emperor (sent to death)", but the speed of these soldiers could not keep up with the reaction speed of the Soviet machine gunners and tank gunners, and when they appeared in front of the tank, most of them had already been swept away by the machine guns, and only the one or two devils who were left with Hong Kong reporters had a chance to complete their mission to death.

In a month's time, the Soviet Red Army successfully liberated most of Northeast China, and the Transbaikal Front and the First Far Eastern Front joined forces in Changchun, besieging hundreds of thousands of the main forces of the Kwantung Army in the Heilongjiang area.

At the same time, the Soviet 16th Army also eliminated tens of thousands of Japanese troops stationed in the southern part of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, and successfully recaptured the territories that Japan had seized from Russia that year.

From the moment the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan, the scales of victory had completely tilted to the side of the Allies. The defeat of the Japanese army in northeast China gave great confidence to the anti-Japanese forces in China and made the people of all Asia realize that the Japanese devils were not invincible.