Kwantung Army

We explained this before, but elements of the Soviet government wanted to steamroll the Japanese and kick them out.

And likewise, the military faction of the Japanese government and their largely self-acting Kwantung Army wanted to do the same thing to the Soviets.

But the whole thing got put on hold thanks to a non-aggression pact between the Soviets and the Nazis that green-lighted the Soviet invasion of large parts of Eastern and Northern Europe.

That was more important to them.

He was previously rising through the political ranks of the military faction of the Japanese government, but was banished back to field command after Hideki Tojo, the military faction prime minister, resigned after Japan started losing the war.

A man who would famously go on to fail in killing himself.

For starters, there was the Kwantung Army, which we have framed in a very specific kind of light on this show as being a perfectly capable army group.

But we've never talked about them beyond the late 30s.

The Red Army came down through Manchuria.

It wiped out the Kwantung Army, which was Japan's most fearsome killing machine.

And they wiped them out, not within, you know, within weeks, the Kwantung Army was completely routed.

And this is really the reason why Japan surrendered to the Allies, because not because of Hiroshima, you know, they had seen, you know, equal devastation from the fire bombings that never made them budge.

But when they saw their most fearsome military, the literal killing machine of the Kwantung Army, melt like butter under the attack of the Soviet Red Army, what we now understand as Soviet operational art.

It's like watching Mike Tyson go after somebody.

They simply steamrolled, hit the Japanese from all angles, And the Japanese surrendered, something that they they, you know, never do.

15 years too late, not quite vintage.

Wow, so on the 18th of September 1931, Japanese Kwantung Army officers staged the Mukden incident, a fabricated explosion on the South Manchuria Railway as a pretext to invade and seize Manchuria from China.

Within months, Japan had established the puppet state of Manchukuo.

The League of Nations condemned the invasion but took no effective action and early signal of the organisation's inability to prevent aggression by major powers.

It was on September 18, 1931, and is now considered to be the starting date of the overall war of resistance against Japan, which is what China's World War II is called, the Japanese invasion.

So on the evening of September 18, and this was a false flag operation, so The Kwantung Army was a Japanese army that was officially not even affiliated with the Japanese civilian government in Tokyo at the time.

A couple junior officers exploded a bomb on the railway tracks outside of the city of Mukden, today's Shenyang, in the northeast.

And they claimed pretty much that it was set off intentionally by Chinese nationalists to derail a Japanese train, which was not true at all.