Historical Events
China · Events 4
The Pacific War
The Pacific War was the 1941 to 1945 conflict that entered its full phase when Japan attacked American and British positions on 7 December 1941. Its background was the war in China since 1937 and Japan's drive for resources and empire. Facing sanctions on oil and strategic materials, Japanese leaders sought Southeast Asian resources and hoped to shock the United States into negotiation, but Pearl Harbor brought it into total war. Japan rapidly seized the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, yet Coral Sea and Midway exposed the limits of its offensive. From Guadalcanal in 1942, Allied offensives across the Southwest and Central Pacific gained ground. The recapture of the Philippines and seizure of the Marianas in 1944 brought Japan within bombing range. In 1945 blockade, bombing, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan converged. Japan announced surrender on 15 August and signed the Instrument of Surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.
The Soviet Entry into the War against Japan
The Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation, from 9 August to 2 September 1945, was the last major land campaign of World War II. At Yalta in February 1945, Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan within two to three months of Germany's surrender; a secret protocol awarded the USSR southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and a Port Arthur lease. The Soviets denounced the Neutrality Pact in April and moved over 400,000 troops and 2,000 tanks from Europe to the Far East. On 8 August, Molotov declared war; just after midnight, Vasilevsky's 1.5 million men attacked from the west, east, and north simultaneously. The Kwantung Army had over 700,000 troops but its best units had been transferred to the Pacific. Soviet armored superiority and operational skill destroyed organized resistance in ten days. Some 600,000 Japanese prisoners were sent to Siberian camps.
The Korean War
The Korean War began with the southward attack of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on 25 June 1950 and stopped with the armistice of 27 July 1953. Kim Il-sung had asked repeatedly from 1949 for approval to unify by force. Stalin gave it in the spring of 1950, judging that the United States would not intervene and reckoning that the founding of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet atomic test had shifted the balance, but he ruled out direct Soviet participation. When the United States intervened under a UN command and the Inchon landing reversed the front, China sent the People's Volunteer Army, and from the summer of 1951 the line hardened near the 38th parallel. Soviet involvement stayed limited to weapons, advisers, and the pilots who flew MiG-15s from Manchurian bases, a presence both sides long denied officially.
The Sino-Soviet Split
The Sino-Soviet split is the process by which the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China moved from ideological dispute in the late 1950s to a rupture of state relations in the 1960s and to armed clashes on the border in 1969. It began with the Twentieth Congress. The Chinese party called the demotion of Stalin and the line of peaceful coexistence revisionism, a compromise with imperialism and an abandonment of revolution. Conflicts of state interest ran alongside. Moscow ended its help with Chinese nuclear weapons in 1959 and withheld the backing Beijing wanted in the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and the border dispute with India. In 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew more than 1,300 technical advisers at once, cutting the spine of economic cooperation. The argument spread through the international communist movement, forcing parties everywhere to choose a side.