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

by Stuart D. Goldman

  At the same time, France, the dominant military power in Western Europe for most of the interwar period, experienced a crisis of national confidence and will. Even the electoral victory of the French Popular Front in May 1936 did not reverse this drift. Many observers expected that the new Popular Front government led by Leon Blum, himself a socialist and a Jew, would take the lead in opposing fascism and Nazism in Europe. Such was not the case.

  France already had suffered a major strategic and psychological defeat in March 1936, when an ineffectual caretaker government in Paris allowed Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland. This direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles seemed to bar easy access into Germany by the French army, an access guaranteed to France at Versailles by the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland. Deprived of that assurance of German vulnerability, France lost most of whatever confidence it had in its ability to deal militarily with Germany. A few months later, the brand new Popular Front government was confronted with the challenge of Italian and German intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Blum’s initial reaction was to aid his Popular Front colleagues in Madrid, but because of the Catholic Church’s support of the Nationalist cause and the violent anticlericalism of the Republicans, this threatened to reopen the schism that had split French society since 1789. Furthermore, the Tory government in London, which was suspicious of the leftist coalition in Madrid, put tremendous pressure on Paris to remain neutral in the Spanish struggle. Beset by these and other problems, Blum and his successors virtually abandoned conducting an independent foreign policy and, in effect, made themselves wards of the British Foreign Office. They then entrenched their still first-rate army behind the Maginot Line and dispiritedly awaited the deluge.

  Thus, with the United States seemingly off on some other planet, as far as European diplomacy was concerned, and with French interests in a kind of diplomatic receivership in London, the Chamberlain government, haunted by its sense of weakness and vulnerability, faced the Axis powers. Chamberlain turned a conciliatory face to Hitler, to Mussolini, then back to Hitler again, hoping thereby to convert at least one of them into a “good European.” “The dictators,” Chamberlain confided to his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, “were … men of moods. Catch them in the right mood and they will give you anything you ask for.”53 But with this attitude, it was Chamberlain, of course, who did most of the giving.

  The British government showed no sign of challenging Hitler over the question of Anschluss with Austria, and after the German army marched into Vienna in March 1938, London heaved a veritable sigh of relief. At least the Austrian question had been settled peacefully, albeit unilaterally, and war had been avoided. European attention immediately turned to Czechoslovakia, where Nazi propaganda on behalf of the Sudeten-German minority was turning bellicose. The Chamberlain government wanted to avoid war, if possible. The situation was complicated, however, because both France and the Soviet Union were pledged by formal treaty commitments to the defense of Czechoslovakia, and the Czech government, unlike Austria, showed every intention of defending itself. With the specter of a general European war looming over their deliberations in the latter part of March, the government in London sought to find the course that would involve the smallest risk of war. The chiefs of staff contributed their melancholy military assessment on March 21, noting that Britain and France lacked the means to prevent Germany from overrunning Czechoslovakia, and that if Britain became involved in war with Germany, Italy and Japan would probably seize the opportunity to drive her out of the Middle East and East Asia. The next day the cabinet concluded that Britain should offer no guarantee to either France or Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack, and that the government in Prague should be pressed to compromise with Hitler.54 Thus, six months before the Munich Conference, Chamberlain’s course was already set.

  Since British and French leaders believed that their own resources were inadequate to check Axis aggression, without powerful allies their global strategic dilemma appeared insoluble. However, as powerful allies, the United States seemed inaccessible and the Soviet Union undesirable. British and Russian foreign policy had been fundamentally antithetical since the fall of Napoleon, except for the brief episodes when fear of Germany’s colossal power drove them reluctantly into each other’s arms. With the temporary elimination of the German threat in 1918 and the replacement of the tsars by commissars, the longstanding Anglo-Russian geopolitical rivalry was compounded by ideological antagonism. London perceived Bolshevism as a deadly threat to everything Britain and the empire represented and took the lead in armed intervention in the Russian Civil War to overthrow the red menace. Moscow saw Britain as the archetypal capitalist imperialist power, the nemesis of the international proletarian revolutionary movement. These deep-seated perceptions may have been stereotyped and overdrawn, but neither was without substantial validity; Soviet and British interests remained essentially antithetical through the 1920s and early 1930s. The profound suspicion and antagonism between the two powers could not be dispelled readily by Moscow’s foreign policy shift of 1935. The appeal for a united front against fascist aggression received a cool reception in London.

  Paris seemed less hostile to the Soviet demarche, as attested to by the Franco-Soviet Mutual Defense Pact of May 1935. However, the cunning French premier, Pierre Laval, had his own reasons for this move, which had more to do with French politics than with national security.55 The French Chamber of Deputies took nearly a year to ratify the treaty, which was never consummated by joint military staff consultations or by any other meaningful joint strategic understanding. The treaty was, in fact, a dead letter in all but name. Nor did the inauguration of Blum’s Popular Front government bring any real warmth to Franco-Soviet relations. As France bound herself ever more closely to British foreign policy, London’s attitude toward Moscow prevailed. Thus, despite the great show of Soviet diplomatic activity in the mid-1930s—establishing relations with Washington, entering the League of Nations, concluding defense pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, furnishing aid to Republican Spain and Nationalist China, and so forth—in a deeper sense the USSR remained diplomatically isolated.

  Moscow’s isolation in this period of deepening international crisis was a source of danger and instability. The danger to the Soviet Union is readily apparent. However, the danger was not only to the Soviet Union. Western diplomats had long realized, in theory, that a desperate Soviet Russia might attempt a rapprochement with either Japan or Germany as a means of avoiding a potentially disastrous two-front war. However, the real-life possibility of such a development often was dismissed rather casually. In the words of Sir Victor Wellesley, British deputy secretary of state for foreign affairs, “At present there is fortunately no chance of the Russians and Germans coming together … which would be the most formidable thing [Europe] has as yet had to encounter. We have reason to bless both Hitler’s blindness and bolshevism which makes this impossible at present. Long may they both live!”56 Comments such as these can be found scattered throughout the foreign ministry archives of numerous Western states. Yet precious little was done to forestall the dreaded development. Even after Britain’s global predicament vis-à-vis the Axis powers had become ruefully apparent in London, the Foreign Office continued to maintain that cooperation with the Soviets would be reprehensible and counterproductive, a step to be taken only as a last resort. From this perspective, the USSR was seen as part of Britain’s international problem rather than as part of a solution to that problem.

  Stalin contributed to Soviet isolation at this time. The general suspicion with which the Soviet Union was regarded in the West was compounded in 1937–38 by the bizarre reports of the purge of Soviet political and military leaders. Although the vast extent of the purge was scarcely realized in Western capitals, the fate of prominent political figures and top military brass was followed closely. The almost unanimous evaluation by foreign military intelligence experts was that the purge had crippled, perhaps irreparably, the morale a
nd fighting effectiveness of the Red Army, thereby undermining still further the usefulness or desirability of the Soviet Union as an ally. Even the outrageous allegations that the Stalin regime hurled at its victims came back to damage the USSR. If the Red Army really were riddled from top to bottom with treasonous wreckers and spies who regularly betrayed all manner of secret information to enemy agents—as was loudly proclaimed by the Soviet judicial system and the state’s news organs—all the more reason for Western governments to be leery of alliance with the USSR. Might not their own military secrets be fatally compromised thereby?57

  Of course, as seen from Moscow, the diplomacy of the 1930s was dominated by a single, all-important factor, stated succinctly in the opening paragraph of a book by the Soviet historian Leonid Kutakov: “The formation of the German-Japanese military-political alliance, which hastened the outbreak of the Second World War, was facilitated by the anti-Soviet policy of the United States, Great Britain and France, which were loath to accept the Soviet proposals for collective security, and hoped that Germany and Japan might be turned against the USSR.”58

  As we shall see, in the final analysis this Soviet accusation, though one-sided and incomplete, has some validity.

  Madrid and Munich: Failure of the United Front Policy in the West

  As the depressing sequence of international developments in 1938 dragged the powers inexorably toward war, the isolation of and danger to the USSR grew more acute. This was symbolized by the military collapse of the Communist-supported forces in Spain and by the Munich Conference.

  Although in the long-run Stalin was well served by the results of his aid to the Spanish Republic, he must have been disappointed that the maximum objective of his Spanish gambit—the promotion of conflict between the bourgeois democratic capitalists and the fascist capitalists—did not materialize. After all, it was a logical idea. Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, for reasons both ideological and strategic, should have roused itself to aid the Popular Front government in Madrid. France and Great Britain should have been alarmed by the fascist military activities in the Western Mediterranean. Yet, despite the tug of political sympathy and strategic self-interest, Paris stuck by the policy of nonintervention dictated by London, where the Conservative government displayed a predisposition for the Nationalist forces of General Franco. In effect this nonintervention policy meant that France and Britain would refrain from “intervening,” that is, refrain from furnishing assistance to the democratically elected, internationally recognized Republican government. No effective means were found to prevent the actual intervention by Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union.

  By mid-1938, Stalin decided to pull out of Spain. Although few recognized it as such at the time, the Soviet withdrawal from Spain signaled Stalin’s acknowledgment of the failure of his united front/popular front policy.

  As the Spanish tragedy dragged on toward its foreseeable conclusion, the Czech crisis grew more intense. Even though Czechoslovakia was tied to France and the USSR with mutual defense treaties and possessed a modern, well-equipped army of its own, in the face of the German threat, Britain was the key to the entire situation. France had bound herself hand and foot to British diplomacy. The Soviet-Czech treaty did not oblige Moscow to act on behalf of Prague unless Paris did so first. Furthermore, the strategic position of Czechoslovakia had been undermined by the Austro-German Anschluss, incorporating Austria into the Third Reich and allowing the German army to outflank the Czech western defense wall, exposing southern Czechoslovakia to German invasion.

  Moscow did what it could to stiffen anti-German resistance in Prague, Paris, and London. The Soviet government and the Comintern criticized the earlier weak-kneed diplomacy of the Western powers, and in contrast trumpeted reports of the “powerful rebuff” just dealt to the “Japanese aggressors” in a battle at Changkufeng on the Soviet-Korean border (described in detail in the next chapter). To quell any doubts about Moscow’s willingness or ability to meet its military commitments in the West in light of the Soviet-Japanese conflict, the Soviet ambassador in Prague assured Czechoslovak president Eduard Benes on August 4 (at the height of the Changkufeng Battle) that the Soviet Union would stand by its military obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack, regardless of the Far Eastern situation.59 Similar representations were made by Soviet diplomats in London and Paris, to no avail. Britain and France had seriously overestimated Russian military potential on the eve of the First World War and were intent upon not repeating that mistake. Throughout the crises preceding the Second World War, they consistently underestimated Soviet Russian strength and acted—or failed to act—accordingly. In the Czech crisis there was another complicating factor. The governments of Poland and Romania, whose territory completely separated Czechoslovakia from the USSR, refused to allow transit rights to the Red Army. This rendered even more problematic the efficacy of Soviet military assistance to Czechoslovakia.60

  In any case, Chamberlain was not seeking a Russian ally beside which to fight, but was seeking to avoid a fight. Therefore, he agreed with Hitler and Mussolini to exclude Stalin from the climactic Munich Conference, on the outcome of which hung the issue of peace or war, because the prime minister knew full well that Soviet diplomacy would strive to prevent the consummation of appeasement. So the Soviets were excluded, as were the Czechs themselves, from the conference at Munich that determined the fate of the Sudetenland, and of so much more.

  The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at Munich was not the crucial turning point in European diplomacy that it is often made out to be. Munich was the logical culmination of the policy of appeasement that the West had practiced since 1935. Nor did the Munich Conference result in a fundamental reorientation of Soviet policies. The outcome must have heightened Moscow’s alarm over the immediacy of the German menace. And Chamberlain’s conduct at Munich probably reinforced Stalin’s suspicion that London and Paris meant to channel Hitler’s future aggression eastward. Dismaying as this may have been, it can hardly have shocked Stalin very much. Playing enemies off one against the other was a favorite tactic of Stalin’s. It had also been a prominent feature of Soviet foreign policy for years. Still, the events of mid-1938 marked an intensification of Moscow’s diplomatic isolation and of the German danger, and although the Japanese had been dealt with firmly at Changkufeng, the situation in the West seemed critical.

  Stalin’s Desperate Six Months

  By mid-1938, Stalin had been forced to reevaluate the European situation. Whereas in the mid-1930s the greatest danger to the Soviet Union seemed to be the possible victory of fascism on the continent and the formation of a four-power pact (Germany, Italy, France, and England) against the USSR, it must have become clear by 1938 that Germany alone—or with the benevolent neutrality of the West61—posed a serious military threat. Thus, while the possibility of a four-power pact still had to be guarded against, now thought had to be given to the threat of a German attack.

  To deal with the Nazi menace that loomed ever larger and closer on his western frontier, Stalin had two options: to turn Hitler’s thrust westward, away from the Soviet Union, or to find allies in the West against the possibility of a German attack. Stalin pursued both options. The first alternative was the more desirable. This because of the threats—real or imagined—that a major war posed to Stalin’s rule, and also because a great war in the West promised the exhaustion of the capitalist powers, leaving the Soviet Union as the arbiter of Europe.

  However, this does not mean that Stalin did not consider seriously the second option. He was not clairvoyant and could not see ahead to the events of 1939. He could not be certain that Poland would resist Hitler, that the Western democracies would undertake to guarantee Poland without a Soviet commitment, and that the West would remain faithful to such a guarantee. Nor could he be certain that Hitler, under any circumstances, would conclude an agreement with the USSR. For these reasons—or until these uncertainties were resolved—Stalin had to consider the alternative of an a
lliance with the West against Hitler. Soviet dealings with the West in these years may have been two-faced, but they were more than a mere charade.

  Munich, however, did produce a change in Soviet tactics. From 1935 to 1938, the USSR had called upon the West, openly and continuously, to join it in a “peace bloc” against fascist aggression. Litvinov’s oratorical efforts were directed most often toward this goal. However, the Soviets’ repeated requests for an antifascist alliance—requests that at times resembled anxious pleas62—ended abruptly after the Munich Conference. Stalin did not lose interest in the project. To the contrary, at least the appearance of cooperation with the Western democracies was absolutely necessary for Stalin, even and especially if he sought an agreement with Hitler. For Stalin could achieve a satisfactory deal with Hitler only if he held some high cards in his hand. And the highest card of all would be the possibility of a military alliance between the USSR and the West. To achieve this goal, Stalin now, in effect, would attempt to play hard to get. By muting his previously too-eager solicitation of an alliance with the West, he hoped to awaken the desire for just such an alliance in Paris and London. The new line from Moscow stated that the strength of the Red Army made the Soviet Union virtually invulnerable. Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, it was asserted, preferred easier prey. Therefore, the British and French were in grave danger. This theme was elaborated upon in the highly publicized speeches given in Red Square on November 7, 1938, and at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March of the next year. It was neatly capsulated for Western readers in Comintern news organs: “The day that the democracies of the West cut themselves off irrevocably from the great Socialist country in the East is the day that Hitler opens his offensive against the West.”63 This theme, with variations, was repeated many times by Litvinov and his subordinates in conversations with Western diplomats during the winter of 1938–39.64 While Soviet diplomacy pretended coolness and aloofness bordering on disinterest, Communist propaganda directed toward the British and French public told a very different story.