Strike Missions: Manchuria

An exhilarating breakdown of some of history's most decisive battles. With expert analysis and eyewitness accounts examining the strategy behind the chaos of the war. Operation August Storm, the massive 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchuria, was Japan’s death blow and brought an end to World War II. It was the last campaign of the War and the largest of the 1945 Soviet–Japanese War which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace. More than one million Japanese soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed or captured in a month’s bitter fighting in a far-off land that even today remains somewhat mysterious. It ensured the end of World War II as much as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, yet it is often ignored in Western studies of the war.