by Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War
Complicating deliberations was Japan's membership in the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which obligated the other members to come to one another's aid if attacked. As the Germans had initiated the war raging in Western Europe, the Japanese did not feel obliged to enter it against the British, French, and Dutch. But collapse of the last two powers and the desperate straits of the British beckoned the Japanese to exploit their weakness to seize the resource-rich South. The reappearance of Shtern as Commander, 1st Far East Army, was also a source of apprehension for the Japanese, who remembered him from Lake Khasan.16 The Go South option seemed to have gained the upper hand.
Historians would later identify Matsuoka's visit to Berlin in late March as the pivot upon which Japanese policy turned. Matsuoka had been prepared for some discussion of a joint war against the Soviet Union by the Japanese ambassador, Gen. Hiroshi Oshima.17 Still, he was thunderstruck by Hitler's blunt and insistent proposal for a joint attack. A flurry of messages flew between Berlin and Tokyo as the formal proposal was transmitted. On his return to Japan through the Soviet Union, Matsuoka was instructed to conclude a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, which Stalin was eager to sign on April 13. As with the western allies, Japan was under no treaty obligation to attack the Soviet Union, but Operation Barbarossa-the German plan to invade Russia-had completely changed the equation of power among the nations. If opportunity beckoned against the western colonies to the south, a greater and immediate opportunity now beguiled them from across the Sea of Japan, on their very doorstep. One Japanese general put his finger on the issue when he said that Japan should not “miss the bus.” When asked about the timing of the operation, the Germans said late May, when the mud had dried in Russia. And yes, there was one more piece of good news. Shtern had been arrested and shot on Stalin's orders.
In Tokyo the lights burned late at Imperial General Headquarters. Already the senior ministers and flag officers had determined to catch the bus. Matsuoka carried the day by explaining the logic of the anti-Soviet war. An attack to the south would leave a major enemy in their rear while simultaneously gaining three new enemies. A Japanese attack on the Soviet Far East would guarantee the collapse of the Bolshevik experiment. The resulting German domination of Europe would concentrate the western allies in their own backyards. Even the United States would have to choose between Europe and Asia, and there was little doubt where her decision would lay. The navy was grudgingly won over with the prospect of eliminating the U.S. Navy by a stroke of policy. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, had actually been relieved at the change in the situation. The prospect of a prolonged war of attrition against the United States filled him with dread at facing its industrial might and warlike people. He supported the Go North plan and called in a certain staff officer, “Madman” Genda by name, to plan something special for the first blow from the sea.
“There's a Rout. Do You Understand? A Rout!”
There was little time to prepare. It was agreed between Germany and Japan that the Japanese blow would follow the German attack by several months to maximize the disruption of Soviet operations, especially the movement of reserves. The Japanese would pick the time that presented the greatest opportunity. They also needed a longer mobilization lead time than a simultaneous attack would allow. Tojo ordered a general mobilization on April 30, which sent reinforcements flowing to Manchuria under the Hachi-Go Plan with the cover explanation of “Special Maneuvers.” By 1941, Japan had increased its army to fifty-one divisions—Tojo's order would concentrate the great bulk of it, 1.3 million men in forty-two divisions (eighty-two percent)—for Japan's death struggle with the Soviet Union. Imperial General Headquarters heard with relief of the German postponement of their attack caused by the unexpected campaign into the Balkans triggered by Mussolini's ill-considered attack on neutral Greece.
For the Japanese, the extra month was vital if their armies were to have any time to assimilate their reservists and new units. It also made sense to profit from the withdrawal of Japanese divisions from China and northern Indochina. They paraded it as a goodwill gesture toward the United States in settling the China problem. Faced with the evaporation of much of the anti-Japanese sentiment at home by newsreels showing Japanese soldiers by the thousands boarding transports for home, Roosevelt could only read the MAGIC intercepts of Japanese diplomatic traffic and shake his head. He could not get Stalin's attention with a sledgehammer. The United States would have to look out for its own interests in the Atlantic now that the Japanese were going to go north. Stalin had had plenty of warning from his own military intelligence, as well as from the Americans, who were reading Oshima's diplomatic traffic, but the bearers of unwanted bad news had only earned firing squads for their dedication to duty.
On June 22, 3.5 million German and allied soldiers invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. At the same time, the Kwangtung Army was swelling with new divisions and hundreds of thousands of support troops. Over fifty railway station commands were created to bolster the railway system that was pulling the might of Japan to the vast camps hidden in the forests west of the Ussuri River.
Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was summoned home on the heels of Matsuoka from his military mission to Germany.18 As early as 1940 he had been made head of Unit 82, the planning team for the invasion of Malaya. He had kept that post even while on the mission in Europe. Yamashita had a reputation for innovative thinking and decisiveness, and the impressions he had gained around the world showed that he was willing to break with current army thinking. He was particularly impressed with the German coordination of all arms, the employment of armor and airplanes in one seamless effort. To remove a rival for defense minister, Tojo secured him the command of the 1st Army Area with its growing mass of divisions aimed at the Maritime Province. His chief of staff, Gen. Kitsuji Ayabe, had accompanied him to Germany and served in numerous staff positions in Manchuria and specifically in the eastern area of operations.19
It was in late April, as the mobilization began to fill the streets with men in khaki, that the second intelligence windfall fell into Japanese hands. Actually, he walked out of the German embassy and into the arms of the Japanese police. He was Richard Sorge, dean of the German press corps and trusted confidant of the ambassador. Unfortunately, he was also a most adept Soviet agent and the head of the espionage network in Japan. His reports were based on an intimate knowledge of everything that flowed through the German embassy as well as his privileged contacts with the Japanese government and armed forces. Sorge had served in the trenches in the German army in World War I and came out of them a committed communist. One of his agents had been compromised, and the resulting trail led directly to Sorge. The Japanese police made a clean sweep of his entire organization and even found the records of his radio operator's messages to and from Moscow. From this they were able to conclude that Sorge had diligently been warning Stalin of Japan's aggressive intentions, the first details of the mobilization, and the most intimate confidences shared by the foolish ambassador. For a while Sorge even dutifully reported on Lyushkov's activities. He could have saved himself the effort; Stalin was as incredulous of war warnings from Sorge as he was from his other agents reporting on the Germans. So it came as something of a shock when Lyushkov walked into Sorge's cell in the basement of the Japanese secret police headquarters and offered him a deal. It helped that the Japanese police had worked on him already—and on his woman.
The short interruption in messages from Sorge to his masters in Moscow had not been noticed. But when they resumed, their contents suddenly began finding favor at the top. He reported that the mobilization efforts were a ruse to lull the Americans into concentrating on Europe while the Japanese prepared to go south. Reconnaissance conducted by the Red Air Force in the Far East revealed that the enemy buildup was as quickly dismissed as that in the West. Still, if Stalin was pleased, no one objected. As the Germans gobbled up whole Soviet armies on the frontiers and thrust deeper into Russian territor
y, Stalin reviewed the cables from Sorge in Tokyo and ordered the divisions in the Far East to deploy to the western front.
Shtern's replacement in the Far East was Gen. Iosif Radio novich Apanasenko, an able, energetic, and innovative officer, and a natural problem solver.20 The war now placed a great burden on all those qualities. Almost immediately upon the out break of war the Soviet General Staff had ordered the Far East to send west its entire mobilization reserves of weapons and ammunition. When his staff objected, Apanasenko roared back at them, “What are you talking about? There's a rout. Do you understand? A rout! Begin loading up immediately.” He was the only man in the eastern third of the Soviet Union who had a clear understanding of what was happening in the West. Although the General Staff relented on its order, deciding to take only half of the mobilization reserves, soon thereafter the order was sent to dispatch eight of the best divisions to fight the Germans, then four more, then two. Apanasenko dispatched them immediately and poured replacement personnel, equipment, and supplies onto their trains as they passed through Kuibe-shevka-Vostochnaya, headquarters of the 2nd Far East Army, near Blagoveschensk. He dutifully complied with the order from Moscow to see that the divisions were fully manned and equipped when they departed. Weeks later four more were ordered west. Within weeks most of the tanks and planes were gone. The irony was not lost on him that as he stripped his cupboard bare, the Japanese were stocking theirs just over the border.21
A more educated man would have given in to despair. But Apanasenko was a fountain of positive energy. The General Staff thought the bottom of the barrel had been scraped, but this former peasant who commanded a front was adept at finding a meal where staff officers would starve. So he set to work, and his energy crackled down through every military and civil official in the Far East. If the Japanese thought they could use the extra time provided by Hitler's Balkan detour, Apanasenko was even more happy to get it. Given complete powers by Stalin, he ordered a draconian conscription of all males up to fifty-five years old. He scoured the NKVD's gulag camps near the border and pressed thousands of prisoners (they called themselves zeks) into uniform. He also freed hundreds of officers who had been condemned in the purges. Industry was cranked up to provide new weapons and munitions while training weapons were converted for combat use. He began raising new divisions to replace those sent west.
It was plain to see that the most threatened front would be the border from south of Khabarovsk to Voroshilov. In this area, he concentrated his reconstructed formations. At least they would have the fortifications that had been under construction since 1932. The impenetrable swamps made most of the long stretch of frontier between Khabarovsk and Lake Hanka safe on the Japanese side. The danger point was at Iman, opposite the Japanese fort at Hutou. The guns of the fort could easily take the railroad under fire, effectively severing it. For some time the Soviets had been building fortifications in the high ground farther east. Apanasenko stationed a rifle division there along with one of his few tank brigades, one with the old T-26 light infantry tanks, mounting 45mm guns.
On the front from Lake Hanka south, there were three main defensive localities that barred their way in depth. In the north, on the edge of Lake Hanka at Turiy Rog, there was one rifle division. About fifty miles to the south was the linchpin of the front, Fortified Zone 105, at Grodekovo, defended by two rifle divisions. Fifty-five kilometers to the south was Fortified Zone 106, centered on Poltavka and defended by one division. Farther south, four more fortified zones, each with its division, defended the narrowing bottom sliver of the Maritime Province. Just south of Lake Hanka, two more rifle divisions and a few tank brigades formed a reserve at Khorala and Spassk Dalniy (see Map 1). The area north of the Mo River consisted of “rivers and crest lines, without any natural strategic defense line.” The sides of the crests were steep, but travel along the crests was easy. About thirty percent of this area was wooded and easily passable. Along the border between Turiy Rog and Grodekovo ran a dense forest, covered only by observation. South of the Mo was a “great area of rolling hills with gentle slopes.” There was little forest, and most was tilled land.22
Voroshilov was the key to the entire region. It was the locus of the railroad; from it, reserves could be shifted to the fortified zones on the frontier. If it fell, the entire region's defense would collapse and seal the fate of Vladivostok, which would be cut off save for mountain roads. So Apanasenko concentrated his mobile reserves here: two tank and several motorized infantry brigades. One of the brigades was armed with the old T-26 light infantry tanks. The other had the new wonder tank, the T-34, which, incredibly, the General Staff had overlooked when everything but the junk was ordered west. He gave the command of one of the infantry units to one of his best staff officers, the feisty Ukrainian, Col. Petro Grigorenko. The T-34s were given to one of the camp veterans, Col. Sergei Golitsyn. Apanasenko was pleased to see the wonders men like these had done when he inspected their brigades in late August. Grigorenko he knew and respected. Golitsyn was a tank expert and had been one of the Tukhachevskiy crowd and was very lucky to be alive. When they were walking alone through the muddy ruts left by the big steel monsters, Golitsyn stopped the general and looked him in the eye. “Comrade General, I want to thank you for giving me this chance,” he told him. Apanasenko returned his look honestly. “I want to thank you for giving me the chance to prove that I am not a traitor to the Motherland” continued Golitsyn. The general clapped him on the shoulder. He knew now they would have a chance.
Even his optimism needed reinforcement at this time. The news from the West reeked of one disaster after another. Right now the Germans were closing in on a huge Soviet concentration pinned to the ground in the defense of Kiev. He wondered if his Siberians, all the men he had sent off to that distant front eleven time zones away, would be in the thick of it.
Apanasenko was still laboring like Hercules when Yamashita struck.
Map 1. Japanese and Soviet Border Fortifications, Eastern Manchuria and Maritime Province, 1941
Map 2. Japanese Attack in Mo River Area, Soviet Maritime Province, August 7, 1941
Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
The planes came first, taking off at dawn on August 7 from their airfields in Manchuria, Korea, and aboard the four aircraft carriers of the navy's 1st Carrier Division in the Sea of Japan. Almost a thousand Japanese planes struck Soviet airfields from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok. Apanasenko had tried to ensure that his planes would not be slaughtered on the ground as they had been in the West, but his own reconnaissance assets had been thinned and thinned again and there were too many holes. The short distance from the border was just too much of an advantage for the Japanese. They worked over the Soviet airfields, although many of the Red Falcons rose to contest the skies. By the end of the day, Apanasenko's air force was badly wounded. Second and third waves of naval aircraft pounded the Soviet fleet's ships and facilities in Vladivostok and Nahodka. Yamamoto would leave no chance of the Pacific Ocean Fleet recovering. 23
That same morning Yamashita's three armies on the eastern front sprang forward (see Map 2).
North of Grodekovo, Lt. Gen. Masao Maruyama was filled with confidence even in the darkness of the forest. He was cheered by the incessant sound of axes in the hands of the thousands of Chinese coolies at the van of his 2nd Sendai Division. It was a good division, the men well trained with many veterans of combat in China and long service in Manchuria. They had just settled into their comfortable garrison in the division's hometown, the city of Sendai on Honshu, almost 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, when the order was given to return to Manchuria. Behind them, on the path cleared by the Sendai, came the 7th Tank Regiment and the 3rd Independent Antitank Battalion. He was honored that General Yamashita had given such a critical mission to his division. He would not fail. The spirit of the division was high.
But for the muffling sound of the trees, Maruyama would have heard the drumbeat of artillery on the fortified zone before Grodekovo as two divisions of the 3rd Army att
acked the defenses. The 300mm tochka busters were working quite well, but the infantry were paying a terrible price as they fought through one trench line after another. Yamashita knew it would be costly, but he wanted to fix the Soviets' attention on their main defenses. He had absorbed the blitzkrieg lessons of his German hosts; those lessons followed his own inclinations easily. They were a natural fit. Farther south the 7th Army, under Gen. Masaharu Homma, also drew the attention of the Red Army to their defenses around Poltavka. As a special reserve, Yamashita held four tank regiments, which he had brigaded into two division-sized formations and put through a month's intensive training with special motorized infantry regiments and designated fighter support. It was the largest mechanized force the Japanese army had ever assembled and it would be learning on the battlefield. Once Yamashita broke free of the fortified zones, he would unleash it.
As the reports began to filter back, he was also pleased to see how quickly the fortified zones were breached by his forces. Many of the pillboxes that interspersed the defenses had been poorly made in the rush to fortify the area after the Manchurian Incident of 1932; many were of wood and earth, and easily destroyed.24 But it was the quality of the defenders, the work of the men in those positions, that surprised him. In most places the Soviet defense had been tenacious and costly. The artillery was surprisingly well served and using ammunition on a scale alien to the Japanese. NKVD units, especially, were diehards. Lyushkov's predictions were proving badly off. He was prowling around the headquarters somewhere. Yamashita had been briefed by Lyushkov and had taken an instant dislike to him; however useful he was supposed to be to the Emperor, the general felt a palpable distaste for him as a traitor.