China was posing seemingly little resistance, the Soviet Union had shown no intention of invading, and the United States was making significant gains in the South Pacific.
Was there a specific reason why so many troops were left on the mainland right up to the end of the war?
Asking especially since many of the other major Soviet-run war crimes tribunals were against Nazis and collaborators about war crimes on occupied Soviet territory. Were there plans since 1945 to put captured Kwantung Army officers on trial? If not, what did the Soviets plan on doing with them between 1945 and 1949?
Also, considering the seniority of some of the Imperial Japanese officers being tried (including the Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army himself), the trial was held pretty late in the post-WWII justice process, even after the other Nuremberg trials ended in April 1949. Why did a trial suddenly happen in late 1949? Was the Khabarovsk war crimes trial simply a sop to the newly-founded People's Republic of China, a belated Cold War-era effort to rival the US-led Tokyo Trials, or was it a genuine effort by Stalin to punish war crimes/deter biochemical warfare, etc? And how did the trial affect Soviet relations with China, Japan, the US, and other Pacific nations?
If the main reason for the failure of the Winter War was incompetent leadership due to the purge, why did the Soviet army succeed against the Japanese?
I was reading Phyllis Birnbaum's biography of Yoshiko Kawashima, "Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy", and I got to the chapter on the Battle of Rehe. There, Birnbaum states Kawashima's command over her honghuzi irregular cavalry division was more for the benefit of Japanese newspapers than an actual fact -- and that Kawashima most likely never saw action herself, but was content to act as a propaganda piece.
When I read that, I remembered how her cousin, Puyi, Kangde Emperor and nominal head of Manchukuo, was similarly a prominent puppet of the Japanese; and how the same went for Zhang Jinghui, the "Tofu Prime Minister" of Manchukuo; and that Unit 731 was stationed in Harbin, and that Manchurians were made to grow opium during the interwar years for the Japanese (including the opium that went into Golden Bat cigarettes and the Oroqen forced opium consumption).
With all that in mind, how much of Manchukuo was actually run by the puppet government, as opposed to directly by the IJA?
