The HELL of Soviet IS-2 Tanks Against Japan's Kwantung Army

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]At 10 minutes past midnight on the 9th August 1945, a Soviet artillery officer in eastern Mongolia gave the order to fire. What followed was not a battle. It was an erasia. In 11 days, Japan's largest field army on the Asian mainland would be broken, surrounded, and forced to surrender. 700,000 men, more than 30 infantry divisions, the Empire's showcase ground force gone. And at the front of the Soviet spearhead were heavy tanks armed with a gun so powerful that one shell fired at a Japanese tank from over a kilometer away could punch straight through the first tank, keep going, and destroy the tank behind it.

[00:00:44]Soviet afteraction reports recorded the moment with one dry line, one 122 mm shell, both tanks destroyed. This is the story of the Joseph Stalin 2 heavy tank, the gun it carried, and what happened when Marshall Alexander Vaselvki pointed it at the Quanung army. To understand how a single round could do that kind of damage, you have to understand who built the weapon, why they built it, and who they originally built it to kill. The Joseph Stalin 2 was born in the worst year of the Soviet Union's war, late 1943.

[00:01:20]The Red Army had survived Stalingrad. It had survived Kursk, but it was still losing heavy tanks faster than it could build them. And the tanks it was losing were being killed at ranges where Soviet crews could not even see the enemy gun flash. The German army had introduced the Tiger 1, 88 mm of armor punching gun, 100 mm of frontal armor, a tank that could sit at 2,000 m and pick apart Soviet armor at leisure. Then came the Panther, faster, sloped, even more dangerous on the flanks. The Soviet heavy tank of the moment, the KV series, was already a relic. Too slow, too mechanically fragile, outgunned, and outranged. Inside the Chelabinskira plant, an industrial city in the southern Eurals that the Soviets nicknamed Tanker, a chief designer named Ysef Cotin was given a brutal mandate.

[00:02:15]Build a heavy tank that could break through fortified defensive belts, smash bunkers, and kill tigers and panthers at combat range. Build it fast, build it cheap, build it in numbers. Cotin's team looked at every option. The first attempt was called the Joseph Stalin 1.

[00:02:33]It mounted an 85 mm gun. By the time it rolled off the line, the 85 mm was already too small. So, Cotin tore the turret design open and asked a different question. What is the biggest gun we can possibly fit into this hull? The answer came from a Soviet artillery designer named Fedor Petrov. In September of 1943, Petrov sent Cotin a letter. He proposed taking the 122 mm A19, a core level field gun that was already in mass production and adapting it for tank use.

[00:03:07]Petrov's own design bureau at plant number nine in the Eurals did the work.

[00:03:12]They fitted a muzzle brake. They redesigned the recoil gear. They mated the cannon to the gun mount from the 85 mm design. The new weapon was called the D25T and it changed everything. The D25T fired a shell that weighed 25 kg. 25 kg.

[00:03:32]That is the weight of a small child. The armor-piercing version, the BR471, left the muzzle at roughly 781 m/s.

[00:03:42]The shell carried 156 g of TNT inside it for a delayed burst after penetration.

[00:03:49]The high explosive version carried so much filler that a single round could collapse a stone building. The first Joseph Stalin 2oss rolled off the Chelabinsk line in December of 1943.

[00:04:01]By the spring of 1944, they were heading west attached to specialized formations called Guards Heavy Tank Regiments.

[00:04:09]Their first real test came in August of 1944 outside a Polish village called Oglendu. A Soviet heavy tank regiment dug into the edge of a wheat field ambushed a column of German Tiger 2s.

[00:04:23]The Tiger 2 was the heaviest production tank of the war, almost 70 tons. Frontal armor that could shrug off most Allied guns at most ranges. The Joseph Stalin twos waited. When the Tigers exposed their flanks, the Soviet gunners fired at 800 m. The first shell went through a Tiger 2 side plate like paper. The second shell hit another. The third shell hit a third. By the end of the day, the German heavy tank battalion had been gutted.

[00:04:55]Not by air power, not by mass numbers, by a small unit of heavy tanks with a 122 mm gun and the patience to wait for a sideshot.

[00:05:07]That was the weapon. That was the doctrine.

[00:05:11]And 11 months later, with Germany already defeated, the Red Army loaded that same kind of weapon onto rail cars and sent it east. The journey was the longest tank deployment in human history.

[00:05:25]Between March and August of 1945, the Soviet Union doubled its strength in the Far East. The garrison there had been 40 divisions. By August, it was 80. 20 to 30 trains per day, every day, rolled east along the Trans Siberian Railway.

[00:05:45]They carried tank brigades, artillery regiments, fuel trucks, ammunition trains, engineers, sappers, signals units, and the men who had survived Berlin.

[00:05:57]Roughly 750,000 veterans transferred from the European theater across 9,000 km of single track railway. They went quiet.

[00:06:08]Soviet planners knew the Japanese had observers along the border, so the troops were assembled in rear areas well back from the frontier out of view. Some units crossed Siberia in their own vehicles instead of by rail just to ease the bottleneck. As the deadline neared, the assault forces moved forward only at night under blackout to staging areas the Japanese had no idea existed.

[00:06:36]The Soviets called this kind of deception mascarovka.

[00:06:40]They had used it to surround the Germans at Stalingrad. They were about to use it on the Quantung army. In command of the whole effort was Marshall Alexander Vasilvki, the man who had helped plan the encirclement at Stalingrad.

[00:06:56]Vasileski was not a flashy commander. He was a planner, a staff officer. The kind of general who arrived at a problem with maps, timets, and silence.

[00:07:08]And the problem he had been handed was the destruction of Japan's most prestigious ground army. Under Vasileski were three fronts. The Transbcal front under Marshall Rodon Malinowski would strike west to east out of Mongolia toward Muktton.

[00:07:27]The first far eastern front under Marshall Kuril Moritzkovv would strike east to west from the Soviet maritime province.

[00:07:36]The second far eastern front under General Maxim Perkayv would push south from the Amur River. Three pincers, one target, the Quanung army. When Soviet planners briefed the operation, they wrote the numbers down dryly.

[00:07:55]1.6 6 million troops, 27,000 guns and mortars, 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns, 3,700 aircraft.

[00:08:08]Against them, on paper stood 713,000 Japanese troops under General Otozo Yamada.

[00:08:17]The Quanung army was supposed to be the empire's finest, the army that had bullied Manuria for 14 years. the army that had fought a forgotten border war against the Soviets in 1939 and lost.

[00:08:31]That forgotten war is the part you need to understand because the men in the Quanung army staff offices in August of 1945 had been there in 1939 and they had not forgotten what happened. The place was called Kkin Gaul. The Japanese called it the Nonhan incident.

[00:08:53]In the summer of 1939, a border dispute between Japanese- held Manuko and Sovietbacked Mongolia turned into a 4-monthlong undeclared war.

[00:09:05]75,000 Japanese soldiers were committed.

[00:09:09]Against them stood 60,000 Soviet and Mongolian troops under a general the Japanese had never heard of, Gayorgi Zhukov.

[00:09:19]On 20 August 1939, Zhukov launched what is widely called the first true combined arms offensive of the modern era. 557 aircraft hit Japanese positions at dawn. Soviet artillery shattered the line. Then Soviet armor swept around both Japanese flanks at once and locked the trap behind them. The Japanese 23rd Infantry Division was encircled and destroyed.

[00:09:49]Total Japanese casualties ran past 20,000 killed, wounded, and missing. The political fallout reshaped Japan's strategy for the rest of the war. The northern faction inside the Japanese army, the officers who wanted to fight the Soviets, lost the argument permanently.

[00:10:09]The Navy's strike south faction won.

[00:10:12]Japan turned away from Siberia and pointed at Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

[00:10:18]The road to Pearl Harbor ran through Kking Gaul, but the Quanung army never quite admitted what had happened.

[00:10:26]Officially, the incident was downplayed.

[00:10:29]Unofficially, the senior officers carried it with them. They knew in a way the politicians never quite let them say out loud that the Red Army had broken them once already. And now, 6 years later, the Red Army was coming back. By August of 1945, the Quanung Army on paper and the Quantung army on the ground were two completely different things. The best divisions had already been stripped out, sent to the Philippines, sent to Okinawa, sent to defend the home islands. What was left was a hollow shell, raw conscripts, reserveists in their 40s, police units, Manurion settlers in uniform. Postwar Japanese assessments concluded that some of Yamada's divisions were no more than 15% combat ready. Their armor was a museum. The standard Japanese medium tank was the type 97 Chiha. It had been designed in 1936.

[00:11:30]The early production version mounted a low velocity 57 mm gun built for shooting at Chinese infantry, not at modern tanks. Its hull front was 25 mm of unsloped armor. Its turret front was the same. Its turret mantlet was 30 mm.

[00:11:49]The lighter type 95 HAR go was even thinner. For comparison, the Joseph Stalin 2 had a 100 mm sloped glasses.

[00:11:59]Its turret was over 100 mm of cast armor and it carried a gun that could throw a 25 kg shell straight through a chiha at any combat range. It was not a mismatch.

[00:12:12]It was a category error. At 10 minutes past midnight on 9th August 1945, Soviet artillery opened up across a 4,000 km front. The Japanese had received the formal Soviet declaration of war 1 hour earlier and were still trying to relay the news to forward units. 3 minutes later, Soviet ground troops crossed the border. The Quantung army was still scrambling to its alert posts. The most ambitious of the three pinsers was on the western flank, the Transbcal front. And inside the transcal front, the heaviest punch came from the sixth guard's tank army under Colonel General Andre Krafchenko. Kravchenko had been given an impossible job. He was supposed to take his tanks across the greater King Mountain Range. Japanese planners had labeled the Greater King impossible for armor. peaks rising above 2,000 m, elevations between 1,500 and 1,900 m on the passes themselves, narrow goat trails, no roads worth the name, no fuel depots on the far side. The Japanese had not bothered to fortify the western face of the Kingan because the Japanese had decided that no tank army could cross it. The Sixth Guard's tank army did it in 3 days. On the first day alone, Krafchenko's lead elements covered 150 km and were on the approaches to the passes. The advance moved at night to avoid the August heat.

[00:13:47]They burned fuel at rates nobody had planned for. Soviet sappers blew switchbacks into the mountain trails ahead of the columns. Engineers winched stalled tanks upgrades that should have rolled them. The bulk of Kfchenko's armor was actually Americanbuilt M4 A2 Shermans. Lend leased earlier in the war and stockpiled in the Far East made up most of the tank strength. But mixed in with them attached to the heavy regiments that came forward for the breakthrough work with a small number of Joseph Stalin 2s the Soviets had been able to ship east. 25 kg shells in the ready rack looking for something to kill. By the morning of the 12th, Krafchenko's lead elements were descending into the central Manurian plane. By the end of the sixth day, the sixth guard's tank army had covered more than 450 km and was deep in the rear of the Quanung army. Soviet planners had set the town of Lube as a fifth day objective. Krafchenko reached it 3 days early. The Quantum army's armor tried to make a stand in several places around the rail junction at Hila, around the fortress at Huto along the Manurian Railway. The fights all ended the same way. A Soviet afteraction report from a heavy tank unit recorded an engagement against type 97 Chihar at 1200 m. The report's wording is almost mocking. one 122 mm shell, both tanks destroyed.

[00:15:26]What the report meant was that the armor-piercing round had passed through the first chihar, kept its momentum, and killed the second chihar lined up behind it. One shell, two kills. A captured Quanung Army staff officer was later interrogated by American translators.

[00:15:45]His description of the Soviet heavy tank survives in the wartime archives.

[00:15:51]He called the Joseph Stalin 2 a weapon they had no equivalent for and no doctrine against. He was right. There was no Japanese gun in the theater that could reliably kill a Joseph Stalin 2 from the front at any meaningful range.

[00:16:07]The Chihar's 57 mm would bounce off the glassy. The standard Japanese 47mm anti-tank gun was barely better.

[00:16:17]Japanese tank doctrine, frozen in the 1930s, had no answer to a heavy tank that could fight at over 1,000 m and absorb hits that should have killed it.

[00:16:28]The Quanung army's armor did not last days. It lasted hours. But the most brutal armored fighting of the whole campaign happened on the eastern Pinsir, not the western one. It happened at a railway town called Mudaniang.

[00:16:44]Mudan Jiang, also written as Muanchiang, sat at the eastern edge of the Manurian plane between mountains and a river. It was the gateway to Harbin. It was the gateway to the heart of Japanese occupied Manuria, and the Japanese had chosen to defend it.

[00:17:03]Marshall Moritzkovv's first far eastern front had been pushing east to west from Soviet maritime territory since the opening hour of the offensive. The drive on Mudaniang was led by two Soviet armies. Afanasi Bella Boradov's first red banner army and Nikolai Krylov's fifth army. Together they made up half the combat strength of Moritzkov's entire front. Waiting for them was the Japanese fifth army under Lieutenant General Shimizu Tsuninori.

[00:17:35]His three available infantry divisions, the 124th, the 126th, and the 135th were the only major formations in the path of two full Soviet armies. These were not the best Japanese divisions in Manuria.

[00:17:52]They were unmanned. They had divisional artillery companies instead of regiments. They had half their machine guns. Some had no ammunition for the heavy weapons they did have. But they had something the Quanung army's armored units did not have. They had cover. The terrain around Mudaniang was forest, ravines, steep hills. The Mudan River, swollen with monsoon rain, cut the approaches. Bridges had been blown.

[00:18:22]Roads turned to mud. The August air was hot and wet. Japanese infantry dug into reverse slope positions and overlooking the river crossings could not stop Soviet armor on open ground. But here in this funnel, they could make Soviet armor pay for every kilometer.

[00:18:42]On the 12th of August, the Soviet first red banner army and fifth army struck the main Japanese line of resistance.

[00:18:51]The 124th Division held the eastern flank. The 126th held the northeast.

[00:18:59]Fierce Japanese resistance caught the Soviet lead elements at the crossings.

[00:19:03]The 273rd Infantry Regiment attached to the 124th Division was nearly annihilated in a single day's fighting.

[00:19:13]The next day, the 20th Heavy Artillery Regiment and the Mudan Jiang Heavy Artillery Regiment were wiped out north of a position called Modawoshi.

[00:19:23]By the evening of 14 August, the 124th Division had been all but destroyed. The Japanese held longer than the Soviets had planned. Casualties on both sides were heavy. Soviet heavy armor in support ground forward through ravines and forest tracks, blasting Japanese strong points at point blank range. The high explosive round from the D25T turned out to be better suited to the actual fighting than the armorpiercing round. Bunkers collapsed under it. Log imp placements disintegrated.

[00:19:59]Infantry positions caught in the open simply ceased to exist.

[00:20:04]By dawn on 16th August, the Soviet final assault on Mudaniang itself began. At 7:00 in the morning, Soviet rocket artillery pulverized the remaining Japanese defenders. Tanks and infantry stormed the city. The defenders held on long enough for the Japanese command to begin pulling main forces eastward, then collapsed.

[00:20:28]Japan reported 25,000 losses across the Mutan Xiang fighting, including more than 9,000 killed. Shimeme's goal at Mudaniang had never been to win. It had been to buy time for the main Japanese forces to escape east. He bought it. The town fell 10 days ahead of the Soviet schedule, but the defenders did what they came to do. While Mudaniang was still falling, Emperor Hirohito's recorded voice broadcast across Japan and the empire on 15th August. Japan was surrendering. The Pacific War was over.

[00:21:12]The Quanung army did not get the message immediately or it pretended not to.

[00:21:18]Yamada delayed. His staff drafted protests.

[00:21:23]Some Japanese units fought on for days after the broadcast, either because they did not believe it, did not understand it, or refused to accept it. On 16th August 1945, General Oto Yamada issued the formal surrender order for the Quantung army.

[00:21:45]By 20th August, the main surrender was largely complete, but pockets of resistance fought on for days at the frontier fortresses, the very strong points Japanese engineers had spent 11 years building. There were 17 of those fortresses stretched along 5,000 km of border from Hunun in the east through Halong Jiang in the center to Ha in the west. The Japanese had started construction in 1934.

[00:22:20]More than 80,000 permanent structures, reinforced concrete casemates, tunnels, artillery galleries cut into the rock.

[00:22:31]The largest was Hutoau on a ridge above the Usuri River. By August 1945, the garrison there had been stripped down to about 1,400 men of the 15th border garrison. They had limited equipment and limited ammunition.

[00:22:51]They also had orders not to surrender.

[00:22:55]The Soviet siege went on after the rest of the country had already laid down arms.

[00:23:02]Sappers blew bunker doors. Flamethrower teams worked through tunnels. The defenders fought until 26th August, 11 days after the emperor's broadcast.

[00:23:15]Of the 1,400 Japanese soldiers in the fortress, 53 survived.

[00:23:22]That was the kind of fight the Joseph Stalin 2 had actually been designed for, not a duel with another tank, a siege weapon, a breakthrough machine. The D25T's high explosive round fired at point blank range into a concrete casement was exactly the kind of payload Coten's team had built the tank to deliver.

[00:23:49]Soviet forces continued their advance beyond the fortress line into northern Korea into Sackalene into the Kurill Islands.

[00:24:01]By early September, Soviet officers were sitting across from Japanese officers accepting their swords. The numbers when the dust settled were almost embarrassing.

[00:24:14]About 600,000 Japanese soldiers surrendered to the Soviet Union in Manuria and Korea.

[00:24:23]Soviet sources put their own casualties at around 12,000 killed and 24,000 wounded.

[00:24:32]Japanese casualties, including killed, wounded, and captured, ran past 500,000.

[00:24:41]The campaign had lasted 11 days.

[00:24:44]The Quanung Army, the Empire's showcase ground force, the army that had ruled a province larger than Western Europe, the army that had carried Japan's flag across China and Mongolia and the Korean border for two decades had been broken in less time than it took for some American units in the Pacific to take a single island.

[00:25:13]Some of the prisoners would not see Japan again for a decade. Roughly 600,000 Japanese troops were transported into Soviet labor camps in Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Mongolia.

[00:25:29]They built roads, mines, and factories.

[00:25:33]Tens of thousands of them died in captivity.

[00:25:37]The last prisoners did not return home until 1956.

[00:25:43]For Yamada personally, the war ended with the Soviet sentence of 25 years of hard labor at a war crimes trial connected to the activities of Unit 731.

[00:25:58]He was repatriated to Japan in the mid 1950s after Stalin's death and lived until 1965.

[00:26:08]For the Joseph Stalin 2, the war had only just paused. The same kind of heavy tank that had killed Tigers at Oglendov and rolled across the Kingan against the Quanung army would go on to serve in Soviet, Chinese, Polish, North Korean, and Cuban service for decades.

[00:26:33]The factory at Chelabinsk had produced roughly 3,854 of them by the time the line slowed in 1945.

[00:26:45]Some are still in place today as gate guardians at former Soviet bases.

[00:26:52]Their guns are welded shut. Their hatches are rusted closed, but the silhouettes remain. The campaign in Manuria does not get the same attention as Stalingrad. It does not get the same attention as Kursk. It does not get the same attention as Berlin. It is a footnote in most histories of the Second World War. But for 11 days in August 1945, the Soviet Union showed the world what happens when a fully mobilized modern army built for breaking the veh is turned around and pointed at an army that had been preparing to fight 1939.

[00:27:31]The result was not a fight. It was a demonstration.

[00:27:36]Japan's Continental Empire, the territory the Quanung Army had bled for since 1931, was lost in less time than most modern military exercises take to plan. Some historians argue that the speed of the Soviet collapse of the Quanung army was as important as the atomic bombs in convincing Tokyo to surrender. The argument is still active.

[00:27:59]Either way, on the ground in Manuria, the answer was settled by tanks, by guns, by a 122 mm shell that could go through two tanks at 12,200 m and keep going. If you want to see more campaigns where the Eastern Front met the Pacific and where the Red Army's heaviest weapons met armies that were never built to face them, the video on screen right now is the place to start. And if you made it this far through the story of the Quanung army's last 11 days, subscribe.