Smertnik

Smertnik ('condemned man') was the pejorative nickname used by Red Army personnel during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (August 1945) for infantrymen of the Imperial Japanese Army that launched suicidal attacks against Soviet armored columns.

Background

Japanese–Soviet relations had been somewhat stable throughout most of World War II. In April 1941, the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire signed a neutrality treaty that even held in spite of the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union by Japan's key European partner, Nazi Germany. On the flipside, the Soviet Union's preoccupation with the war against Germany prevented it from helping the Western Allies in their war against Japan following the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin felt assured that the Japanese course of expansion pointed southwards and thus away from the USSR, keeping the country safe from Japanese attack and reducing the urgency of committing Soviet troops against Japan. After tentative promises at the 1943 Moscow Conference to Cordell Hull and W. A. Harriman that the USSR would enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated, Stalin made a full commitment to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference later that year.

After the German surrender on 8/9 May 1945, significant troop transfers were undertaken by the Red Army to bolster its forces in the Far East. Shortly after midnight on 9 August 1945, Soviet forces attacked across their own country's border into Manchukuo, which was a puppet state of the Japanese Empire at the time.

Combat record

The second-rate troops of the Imperial Japanese Army guarding the Manchurian border found themselves technologically outmatched by Soviet armor; the Type 94 anti-tank guns were only effective against light tank models such as the T-26 or BT-5, but proved subpar when faced with models such as the T-34/85 or the ISU-152. These heavier armored vehicles were used in particularly large numbers by the Far Eastern Front, where the initial fighting of the Soviet invasion was fiercest. Japanese artillery pieces that might have been capable of penetrating stronger Soviet vehicles if given the correct ammunition usually lacked the critical armor-piercing shells that would have been required for their task. Even weakly-armored Soviet models such as the SU-76 light self-propelled gun suffered remarkably low casualty rates (20 casualties from enemy action out of 952 vehicles used), signalling an acute weakness of Japanese anti-tank capabilities in the sector.

As a result, Japanese commanders resorted to kamikaze-esque suicide attacks by infantry squads with satchel charges and improvised explosives. These Japanese soldiers were to charge at the enemy tanks and throw themselves under the vehicles to destroy them with detonations near the weak bottom armor. Attacks of this kind were usually repelled under devastating casualties, though some of the Japanese soldiers whom their Soviet opponents soon dubbed smertniks, 'condemned men', managed to destroy several T-34s at Mudanjiang. In some cases, the suicide runners reached their targets, but the explosive charges proved too weak to disable the targeted Soviet tank. Smertniks continued their charges against Soviet troops of various types, including against Soviet sappers clearing Japanese minefields. The impact of their attacks on the overall operational situation was marginal; the Soviet advance continued unimpeded.