ABSTRACT
It was unusually warm and humid throughout much of northern Manchuria on 8 August 1945. There was little breeze anywhere to relieve the blistering heat that seared the land. Anxious, frightened Japanese and Soviet soldiers who confronted each other along the tense Manchurian-Siberian border later recalled how sweat dripped constantly down the sides of their summer uniforms. Both sides were heavily armed because bloody skirmishes had punctured the peace of the region periodically from the late 1930s to the present. In anticipation of an inevitable future Japanese-Soviet war, fortifications were extensive along much of the flat terrain of the frontier. Japan, hemorrhaging from the constant fire bombing by the Allied forces, who were preparing to move in on the Home Islands, expected Manchuria to be one of the sites for a last stand in an Asian version of Gotterdammerung.
