Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army's Victory That Shaped World War II

by Stuart D. Goldman

  Upon retiring from CRS, I decided to return to my work on Nomonhan. I was encouraged in this by the release in post-Soviet Russia of a growing number of Soviet-era documents that not only confirm but strengthen my interpretation of the influence of the Nomonhan conflict on Soviet foreign and military policy. In addition to the official two-volume set of Soviet Foreign Ministry documents for 19395 and such collections of documents as God Krizisa 1938–1939 (Year of Crisis, 1938–1939),61941 God Dokumenty (The Year 1941, Documents),7 more documents from the archives of the Communist Party, various government ministries, and intelligence services have been released or ferreted out, despite the efforts of the Vladimir Putin regime to check this flow and salvage the reputation of Soviet foreign and defense policy.

  The idea of a connection between Nomonhan and the nonaggression pact, however, still has not received adequate attention from scholars. The two published studies in English that focus on Nomonhan treat it as an obscure East Asian military episode, ignoring its connection to the coming of the war in Europe.8 Many Japanese and Russians have written about this conflict. The Japanese authors, however, show little interest in the complex European diplomacy. And in Putin’s Russia, the Hitler-Stalin Pact remains a sensitive, if not downright dangerous, subject for Russian scholars.9 Most U.S. and European analyses of the origins and outbreak of World War II ignore or briefly gloss over the Soviet-Japanese conflict.10 Several historical studies contain tantalizing references to a possible connection between the Nomonhan conflict and the German-Soviet pact,11 but none have developed the idea fully. This book is intended to fill that gap.

  The organizational scheme for this book is chronological, but not linear. It has two stories to tell: a military history of the Soviet-Japanese conflict on the Mongolia-Manchuria border, and a diplomatic history of the coming of the war that is Europe-centered and global in scope. To avoid creating an ungainly two-headed monster, the narrative shifts back and forth between the disputed inner-Asian borderland and the political/diplomatic maneuverings of the major powers, highlighting the relationships among these events. The analysis does not stop in September 1939 with the end of the fighting at Nomonhan and the outbreak of the war in Europe. The Soviet-Japanese conflict at Nomonhan influenced decisions in Tokyo and Moscow in 1941—Japan’s decision for war with the United States and the Red Army victory in the Battle of Moscow—that helped shape the conduct and the outcome of the war. Appreciating the significance of this seemingly obscure East Asian military episode and placing it in the broader geopolitical context sheds new light on, and provides a more complete understanding of, the Second World War. Nomonhan is, arguably, the most important World War II battle that most people12 have never heard of.

  Map 1. Manchuria and Environs in the 1930s

  CHAPTER 1

  __________________________

  THE LEGACY OF THE PAST

  War and Revolution

  The year 1853 was a momentous one in Japan and Russia. Few could have predicted that events set in motion that year would put the two on a collision course leading to war a half century later. In 1853 American Commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron of “Black Ships” steamed imperiously into Tokyo Bay, precipitating the end of Japan’s feudal regime and ushering in a rush toward modernization the spectacular success of which would become one of the wonders of the modern world. Also in 1853 Russia invaded the Turkish-controlled Danubian Principalities, triggering the Crimean War, in which an ineptly led Anglo-French force humiliated the Russian army on its own soil. This defeat too spurred modernization. Russia’s temporary diplomatic isolation in Europe also led the Tsarist government to redirect its attention toward Asia in order to reassert its great-power status.

  Russian expansion into Asia had begun in earnest in the sixteenth century and proceeded eastward through the Eurasian corridor until checked by Manchu China a hundred years later, deflecting Russia northeastward to the sparsely populated North Pacific rimland. By the nineteenth century, however, the Manchu empire had entered into a period of decline and was beset by the seafaring European imperialist powers and by Russian pressure from inner Asia.

  Only a few years after its defeat in the Crimean War, Russia forced the Manchu court to sign the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860), whereby China ceded the huge swath of territory north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri Rivers to Russia. Russia then began applying pressure on China’s faltering control of Manchuria and Korea, a policy both symbolized and accelerated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Tsarist push toward Manchuria and Korea aroused suspicion and hostility not only from Russia’s traditional western rivals, but from a new competitor for power in East Asia—Japan.

  From the very inception of the new regime in Japan, its leaders determined to see their nation take its place among the great powers. The logic of geopolitics dictated that if Japan were to expand, it was in the direction of Northeast Asia that she first must move—at the expense of the crumbling Chinese empire and in competition with Imperial Russia. This became clear during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, when Japan successfully fought China for control of Korea and South Manchuria, only to have Russia intervene, at the head of the so-called Triple Intervention, depriving Japan of one of the most important fruits of her victory, the Liaotung (Kwantung in Japanese) Peninsula in South Manchuria. Russia further antagonized Japan by taking control of that peninsula itself in 1898, by occupying most of the rest of Manchuria in 1900 in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, and by penetrating Korea economically, politically, and militarily.

  Tokyo viewed this Russian thrust with anger and alarm. Not only was the Russian bear encroaching on what the Japanese considered to be their sphere of influence, but also Russia’s push into Korea also threatened what the Japanese saw as their own legitimate defense perimeter. After securing a military alliance with Great Britain in 1902, Japan sought an agreement with Russia for the division of the Northeastern Chinese empire. The Russians demanded all of Manchuria as a Russian sphere of influence, northern Korea as a buffer zone between them, and southern Korea as a Japanese sphere, with certain limitations. Tokyo found these proposals unacceptable and in 1904 decided on war. In the David-and-Goliath–like struggle, the upstart Japanese, whose warrior class had relied on swords, bows and arrows, and spears only fifty years earlier, astounded the world by vanquishing its huge foe.

  In the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, Russia recognized Japan’s “paramount political, military and economic interests” in Korea and ceded to Japan its leasehold (from China) on the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula—renamed Kwantung Leased Territory by the Japanese. Russia also ceded to Japan the southern half of Sakhalin Island and a 150-mile section of the South Manchuria Railway. Both powers agreed to evacuate Manchuria, which had been the principal battleground, and to return that province—temporarily—to Chinese administration.

  The strategic 1,300-square-mile Kwantung Leased Territory commanded the seaward approach to Peking and contained the port of Dairen and the fortress/naval base of Port Arthur. In 1919 Japan established a special force, the Kwantung Army, to administer and defend the Kwantung Leased Territory. The Kwantung Army would become the spearhead of Japanese expansion on the mainland.

  Less than two years after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the former combatants concluded a secret treaty recognizing Korea as a Japanese sphere of influence. In return, Japan acknowledged a Russian sphere of influence in Outer Mongolia. Manchuria was to be divided roughly in half, with Japan exercising dominant influence in the south and Russia in the north. Such new and far-reaching cooperation between nations that had recently been at war was made possible, in part, because Russian foreign policy had taken a periodic swing back toward a primarily European focus. Also, both nations were suspicious of the Asian ambitions of the Western European powers and the United States. Finally, the imminent demise of the Chinese empire offered the prospect of enough territory to satisfy both Russian and Japanese imperialists. Russo-Japanese cooperation wou
ld be paid for in Chinese coin. Naturally, neither Russia nor Japan consulted their intended victims, nor did they delay implementing their agreement. In 1910 Japan formally annexed Korea. A year later, Outer Mongolian leaders, with the assistance of Russian agents and Russian guns, proclaimed the independence of Outer Mongolia from China. By 1912 Outer Mongolia was, de facto, a Russian protectorate.

  There remained the question of Manchuria. With the waning of central authority in China, it seemed inevitable that Russian and Japanese forces, encroaching from opposite directions, would meet—and perhaps clash—at some point in central Manchuria. As it happened, the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 and the subsequent upheavals in Russia intervened, so that when the collision finally came in the 1930s, the point of impact was not in central Manchuria but many hundreds of miles north and west, along the Manchurian–Outer Mongolian frontier.

  The second decade of the twentieth century presented extraordinary opportunities for Japanese expansion. The disintegrative end-of-dynasty syndrome in China entered its critical phase in 1911–12 with the onset of revolution, the abdication of the Manchu imperial house, and the establishment of rival successor regimes. Then, just as the “Great Game” in China appeared to be reaching its climax, Europe descended into its great bloodletting of 1914–18, with the result that the German colonial empire in China and the Pacific fell into Japanese hands, while Britain and France, wholly absorbed by the struggle in Europe, faded as East Asian powers. The Russian empire seemed to disintegrate no less dramatically than that of China in the revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war and foreign intervention. In the course of a few years, nearly all of Japan’s traditional rivals—with the notable exception of the United States—had been seriously weakened, paralyzed, or liquidated.

  These developments emboldened Tokyo’s continental ambitions. Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, a clumsy attempt in 1915 to make China a vassal state, aroused anti-Japanese nationalist passions in China and fixed the image in the public mind of Japan bullying a helpless China, an image that would bedevil Japan’s relations with the West for years to come.

  Japan’s intervention in Siberia during the Russian Civil War was a more far-reaching and, ultimately, costly failure. Japan sent some 70,000 troops into the Russian Far East, by far the largest foreign contingent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. This Siberian expedition, which brought Japan little profit and no glory, did bear some fruit—mostly bitter.1 Japan’s involvement prolonged the Russian Civil War, in which some 13 million people perished. It provided little combat experience for the Japanese army but it did initiate some young staff officers, future leaders of the Kwantung Army, into the world of political manipulation, intrigue, and insurgency, which would be put to fateful use later in Manchuria. Japanese troops remained in eastern Siberia until 1922, by which time the Bolsheviks had triumphed throughout Russia and Japanese hopes of acquiring control of the Russian Far East had faded.

  The recall of Japan’s Siberian expedition in 1922 was the first step in a Soviet-Japanese detente. Three years later, they reached a broad diplomatic settlement providing for the withdrawal of Japanese forces from Northern Sakhalin, the recognition by the Soviet government of certain Japanese commercial interests in Northern Sakhalin and on the Soviet Maritime Coast, and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two nations.2

  The profound hostility of Japanese authorities toward communism, and the Soviet government’s deep-seated suspicions of Imperial Japan’s intentions in Northeast Asia, did not disappear. But for the next five years, Soviet-Japanese relations were “proper.” The largest issue between them during the 1925–30 period, literally as well as figuratively, was China. And in those years the influence of the China question on Soviet-Japanese relations was not entirely negative.

  Both Japan and Russia felt threatened by an upsurge of militant Chinese nationalism, which demanded abrogation of the hated “unequal treaties” and the driving out of all imperialists, be they Western, Soviet, or Japanese. Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s near extermination of the Chinese Communists during the 1927–28 period led to the rupture of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the Nationalist government in Nanking. The Nationalists then tried to take Peking, the traditional capital. Japanese forces twice moved into the Shantung Peninsula during the 1927–28 period, temporarily blocking Chiang Kai-shek’s advance. Moscow did not protest these Japanese actions.

  Similarly, Tokyo did not object to a Soviet military action in Manchuria directed against Chinese nationalism. The “Young Marshal,” Chang Hsueh-liang, warlord of Manchuria, launched a vigorous anti-Soviet and anti-Communist campaign in 1928, with Chiang Kai-shek’s blessings, and in July 1929 seized the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) and arrested its Soviet personnel.3 The Red Army promptly invaded northern and western Manchuria, routed the warlord’s poorly equipped troops, and forced him to restore the status quo ante on the CER, whereupon Soviet forces promptly left Manchuria.4 The civilian-led Japanese government maintained a benevolent neutrality throughout the affair.

  By the late 1920s, however, the winds of political change, of strident nationalism and militarism, were rising in Japan and would grow through the next decade to typhoon strength. At the same time, the “Stalin revolution” would radically transform the USSR economically, politically, and militarily.

  Stalin’s Industrial Revolution

  In 1928 Josef Stalin emerged victorious from the succession struggle of the twenties and promptly put his stamp on Soviet Russia with his policies of forced collectivization of agriculture, rapid industrialization, and ruthless terror. In Stalin’s view, collectivization was necessary to bring the agricultural sector under state control and harness it to support his industrial policy. Massive rapid industrialization, he argued, was necessary not only for modernization, but also for survival. The first Five-Year Plan did not emphasize military production, focusing instead on basic industries and industrial infrastructure. But it laid the foundation for the subsequent militarization of the Soviet economy. In a famous speech to factory managers, in which Stalin urged completion of the first Five-Year Plan in four years, he warned,

  It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it… . To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten… .One feature of the history of Old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness… . Now we are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.5

  The plan was predicated on short-term peaceful relations and economic cooperation with capitalist states, but it also foresaw ultimate conflict with hostile capitalist forces. The plan was drafted during the golden years of Weimar democracy in Germany and the brief flowering of parliamentarianism in Japan. On the day of its completion, however, the entire capitalist world groaned in the throes of the worst depression in history, fascism was on the march across Eurasia, Japanese armies in Manchuria threatened three thousand miles of the weakly defended Soviet Far Eastern frontier, and Adolf Hitler was thirty days from being appointed Reich chancellor.

  When the plan was officially declared completed in December 1932, electric power generation in Soviet Russia had increased 165 percent, coal and oil production by 81 percent and 83 percent, and iron and steel output by 112 percent and 47 percent, respectively. Assessments of the first Five-Year Plan tend to vary according to whether one emphasizes its considerable achievements—gross industrial production more than doubled in four and a quarter years, its staggering human and material costs, or such long-range consequences as the creation of an industrial base that made possible the defeat of Nazi armies in World War II. But even many who were hostile to Soviet goals and who abhorred Stalin’s methods paid grudging tribute to this raw industria
l achievement.

  To many contemporary observers, Soviet economic accomplishments were all the more impressive in contrast to the near paralysis of the capitalist economic order. Conservative political and economic leaders the world over, confused and alarmed by the unprecedented scope of the Great Depression, were genuinely frightened by the implications of the Soviet achievement, both in terms of growing Soviet power and of the potential political impact on their own impoverished working class. It is ironic that the very success of the Five-Year Plan and its attendant propaganda contributed not only to the prestige of the Soviet Union and communism, but also to the rapid growth in many countries of violent, right-wing, anti-Communist movements, pledged to protect society from the Bolshevik menace. This theme is well known to Western readers in the context of German politics and the rise of Nazism. In Japan too, the depression and the perception of the danger of Bolshevism, as well as an upsurge of Chinese nationalism, led to traumatic and ruinous political developments.