By August 1945, the Empire of Japan was nearly defeated, with the Allied forces closing in on the island nation. Shortly after the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon at Hiroshima, the Soviet Union struck from the west on August 9, 1945. The campaign for Manchuria, which had been under Japanese occupation since 1932, lasted only 11 days but would impact regional and global politics for decades to come. The Russian invasion of Manchuria caused the loss of access to natural resources for the Japanese. This and another nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki by the United States forced the Japanese to surrender on September 2, 1945
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria began planning after the Tehran Conference of 1943 and the Yalta Conference of 1945, where Josef Stalin, the Soviet Premier, met with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the Allied strategy during WWII. By May 1945, the war in Europe ended, with the Axis Powers surrendering to the Allies. Afterward, preparations began to focus all efforts on forcing Japan into capitulation.
By August 6, the United States sought to end the war before an invasion of Japan quickly was necessary. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was supposed to help build pressure on the Japanese to end the war. The next step occurred on August 8, 1945, when the Soviet Union formally declared war on the Empire of Japan. This was followed by an invasion of Manchuria commencing the following day. Soviet forces under the leadership of Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who had served in Stalingrad and the Soviet counterattack against Germany, struck the Japanese in China to cut off their supply of resources for continuing the war. While this would not produce immediate results, it would lead to the eventual surrender of Japan to the Allies by September 1945.
