In September 1931, a section of the railway was lightly damaged by the Japanese Kwantung Army as a pretext for an invasion of Manchuria.

In other international issues, Beria ( along with Mikoyan ) correctly foresaw the victory of Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War and greatly helped the communist success by letting the Communist Party of China use Soviet-occupied Manchuria as a staging area and arranging huge weapons shipments to the People's Liberation Army, mainly from the recently-captured equipment of the Japanese Kwantung Army.

After initial successes the Japanese assault on Mongolia was checked by the Red Army that inflicted the first major defeat on the Japanese Kwantung Army.

This operation destroyed the fighting capability of the Kwantung Army and left the USSR in occupation of all of Manchuria by the end of the war.

Later, the Japanese Kwantung Army found him too independent, so he was assassinated in 1928.

During this battle, a combined Soviet-Mongolian force defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army ( Kantōgun ) supported by limited Manchukuoan forces.

The commanding officer of the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo was additionally the Japanese ambassador to Manchukuo.

After the defeat of Japan in World War II, Khabarovsk was the site of the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials, in which twelve former members of the Japanese Kwantung Army and Unit 731 were put on trial for the manufacture and use of biological weapons during World War II.

Already controlling an area directly surrounding the South Manchuria Railroad, Japan's Kwantung Army further invaded Manchuria ( Northeast China ) in 1931, following the Mukden Incident, in which they claimed to have had territory attacked by the Chinese ( a few meters of the South Manchuria Railway was destroyed in a bombing sabotage ).

** Kwantung Army

In 1928, however, the machinations of the ultranationalist secret societies and the Kwantung Army resulted in a crisis: the assassination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin and the failed attempt to seize Manchuria.

Reassigned to the Kwantung Army in September 1912, Koiso was promoted to major and Battalion Commander of the 2d Infantry Regiment in August 1914.

In February 1932, Koiso became Vice-Minister of War and in August 1932, concurrently Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army.

# REDIRECT Kwantung Army

# the size of the Kwantung Army was three times that of the Soviet Union's Far Eastern forces

" This information made possible the transfer of Soviet divisions from the Far East, although the presence of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria necessitated the Soviet Union's keeping a large number of troops on the eastern borders ..."

Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army.

In 1936, Hirohito authorized, by imperial decree, the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department.

From August 1940, all these units were known collectively as the " Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army ( 関東軍防疫給水部本部 )" or " Unit 731 " ( 満州第731部隊 ) for short.

Included among those prosecuted for war crimes including germ warfare was General Otozō Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.

was a Manchu princess brought up in Japan, who served as a spy in the service of the Japanese Kwantung Army and Manchukuo during the Second World War.

In 1933, she offered the unit to the Japanese Kwantung Army for Operation Nekka, but it was refused.

Eventually, Russia agreed to offer a diplomatic solution ( See Kwantung Leased Territory ) to the Chinese Empire, and agreed to a token lease of the region to save face, instead of annexing Manchuria outright, its de-facto effect.

As a consequence of the Treaty of Portsmouth ( 5 September 1905 ), which ended the Russo-Japanese War, both sides agreed to evacuate Manchuria and return its sovereignty to China, but Japan was given the lease for the Liaotung / Liaodong ( Kwantung Leased Territory ).

However, Japan retained the Kwantung Leased Territory as a territory apart from the nominally-independent Manchukuo until its surrender at the end of World War II in 1945.

This name was also used by the Japanese to their leased territory of Dalian, as Kwantung Chou, and its Kwantung Army which was later mobilized to set up the puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China.

In terms of a permanent standing organization, the Japanese Army created the Kantōgun, usually known in English as the Kwantung Army, to manage its overseas deployment in the Kwantung Territory and Manchukuo from 1906.

The rapid defeat of Japan's Kwantung Army was a very significant factor in the Japanese surrender and the end of World War II, as Japan realized the Russians were willing and able to take the cost of invasion of its Home Islands, after their rapid conquest of Manchuria and southern Sakhalin.

The company also ran services connecting metropolitan Japan to its exterior provinces ( Chosen, Karafuto, Kwantung, Formosa and South Mandate ) of the Empire.

The Korean Army also came to the assistance of the Kwantung Army in its unauthorized invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Displays about Taiwan, Korea, the Kwantung Leased Territory, and the Ainu from Hokkaidō were meant to demonstrate that Japan was following in Great Britain ’ s footsteps as an imperial power to improve the lives of the ‘ natives ’ in its colonies.

On August 19, the Far East Front continued its routing of the Kwantung Army by capturing Harbin and Mukden.

The Army strategists saw detailed data in their Intelligence headquarters in Manchukuo and Kwantung.

Originally the idea of a small group of Japanese government and military officials who saw a need for a population to be established in Manchukuo ( otherwise known as Manchuria ) and help build Japan's industry and infrastructure there, the primary members of this group included Captain Koreshige Inuzuka and Captain Norihiro Yasue, who became known as " Jewish experts ", the industrialist Yoshisuke Aikawa and a number of officials in the Kwantung Army, known as the “ Manchurian Faction ”.

Ishiwara quickly realized that the confused political situation in northern China, along with Japan ’ s already significant economic investments in the area, provided the Kwantung Army with a unique opportunity.

He then ordered Kwantung Army units to seize control of all other Manchurian cities without informing the new commander-in-chief of the Kwantung Army, General Shigeru Honjo, or the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff in Tokyo.

* Kantōgun ( often known as the " Kwantung Army ") originated as the division-level garrison of a Japanese colony in northeast China, in 1908 ; it remained in northern China until the end of World War II.

However, her very popularity created issues with the Kwantung Army, as her utility as an intelligence asset was long gone, and her value as a propaganda symbol was compromised by her increasingly critical tone against the Japanese military's exploitative policies in Manchukuo as a base of operations against China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and she gradually faded from public sight.

Prior to the escalation of World War II to the Pacific and East Asia, the Japanese planners regarded it as self-evident that the conquests secured in Japan's earlier wars with Russia ( South Sakhalin and the Kwantung Leased Territory ), Germany ( the South Pacific Mandate ) and China ( Manchuria ) would be retained, as well as Korea ( Chōsen ), Taiwan ( Formosa ), the recently seized additional portions of China and occupied French Indochina.

The Japanese government, however, claimed that this control included all the rights and privileges that China granted to Russia in the 1896 Li-Lobanov Treaty, as enlarged by the Kwantung Lease Agreement of 1898.

Two years later, Russia coerced a lease of the Liaodong from China and gained railroad right-of-way to join the Liaodong Peninsula to the Chinese Eastern Railway with a line running from Port Arthur and nearby Dalny ( Dalian ) to the Chinese city of Harbin ( see Kwantung Leased Territory ), and systematically began to fortify the town and harbor at Port Arthur.

The Kwantung Leased Territory was a territory in the southern part of the Liaodong Peninsula in Inner Manchuria ( northeast China ) that existed from 1898 to 1945.

The name Kwantung, or Guāndōng ( 關東 ) in pinyin, means " east of Shanhai Pass ", a reference to part of Qinhuangdao in today's Hebei province, at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China.

In negotiations with the Republic of China under the Twenty-One Demands, the terms of the lease of the Kwantung Leased Territory were extended to 99 years, or until 1997.

The Japanese included crack Kwantung Army units and equipment from Manchukuo, mechanized units, units from the North China theater and units from mainland Japan to participate in this campaign.

* Kwantung Leased Territory ( Japanese: 関東州 Kantōshū ), a Japanese possession in Northeastern China until the end of World War II