Word: sakhaline
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that if the harness breaks and no other is available, string should be used. . . . Many harnesses have been broken, so much string will have to be used." The particular string with which Kiralfy would bend his bow is an Allied invasion of Japan from the half-Russian island of Sakhalin. Sakhalin is almost within firing distance of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Says Expert Kiralfy: "As the key to victory in the Pacific lies in the north, so does the key to the north lie in Sakhalin...
Geographic obstacles and poor communications should not be permitted to dim the value of this front. Retrospective foresight would recommend that the estimated losses of a year be concentrated and accepted in an offensive that would not only eject the Japanese from Karafuto [southern half of Sakhalin] but follow them into Hokkaido, with Honshu [the main Japanese island] and Tokyo as the objective. This is direct war in its simplest form. Because the successive fronts are narrow, Japan's advantage in numbers would not prove decisive. Because of the wild nature of the northern Nipponese islands, the resourcefulness...
...stocks enough for about 15 months of all-out war. Normally consuming 28 million barrels a year, she can command from Manchukuo. Sakhalin, Formosa, and her own wells and synthetic productions only some 7 ½ million barrels...
...denied, but officially confirmed by the Japanese War Office, was a subsequent skirmish on half-Russian, half-Japanese Sakhalin Island. Soviet frontier guards were said to have crossed the border and fired on a band of Japanese policemen. The incident developed into a dogfight in which, the Japanese claimed, "a dozen" Russians and "several" Japanese were wounded...
...Sakhalin, a 600-mile-long, fish-shaped island directly north of Japan, has always been a dark spot. Before 1850, the island was scarcely inhabited. In 1875, Japan agreed to let Russia have the whole storm-beaten spit. Russia made a grim prison of it, and every year exiled to it some 7,000 prisoners-who then had a 4,000-mile walk across the ice of Tartary Strait and Siberia to the nearest court of appeals. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, Japan won the half of the island which lies south of latitude 50° north...