Originally Posted by
A_Van
The operation against Japan began exactly as it was agreed at the Yalta (Crimea) conference in Feb. 1945 where Britain and US urged the USSR to join the war against Japan in 2-3 month after "Hitler is kaput". Uncle Joe was keeping his word given to Roosevelt and Churchill, though the country was bloodily ruined and all expected to say farewell to arms in May '45.
Anyway, it was the biggest land operation in Far East with about 1 Mln Japanese troops involved and some 1.5 Mln Russian.
And the operation took place on the territory that was earlier occupied by Japan. So, it was rather a liberating action (for Mongolians, Chinese and Koreans).
As for the main topic (6th gen. fighter), I recall the British project called "Hotol" in 80's (stands for "horizontal take off and landing"). It was about a spaceplane. In reality there were just a few guys making drawings on paper with quite a limited budget. And much noise in aerospace journals. The French were very angry when this Hotol was compared to their Hermes. They already had a launcher at that time, a high fidelity mock-up, many onboard systems ready, ground test facilities and simulators, and astronaut candidates.
The Brits have done a lot of projects like that. I once met one of the guy's who worked on HOTOL, who was actually a woman and I asked her why did it die (like a load of other aerospace plane projects at the same time like the X-30). Her Reply "We all cocked the maths up". Hermes of course went nowhere as well.