This did not sit well with the Japanese Foreign Ministry, which had no intention of becoming a German cat’s-paw. The Japanese navy at that time also opposed any agreement that might bring it up against the combined naval strength of Britain and the United States. Therefore, in spite of the army’s willingness to accept the proposed German alliance, the Japanese government held out for reservations and qualifications that would direct the pact against Japan’s nemesis, the USSR.85
Hitler’s policies, however, were moving Germany steadily further away from the Japanese position. Chamberlain’s opposition to further German expansion after March 1939 was driven home in Berlin by his guarantee to Poland, his intensification of rearmament, and finally, his unprecedented request for peacetime conscription. The significance of these measures was underlined still further in Berlin by Poland’s rejection of German demands on the status of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. In dealing with Poland, therefore, Hitler realized that he might encounter more than mere verbal opposition. He still hoped to overawe Britain and France and force them to back down, but if it came to war over Poland, he correctly reckoned that his Wehrmacht was ready. However, the mistake of 1914 was to be avoided at all costs; Hitler did not wish to fight Britain, France, and Russia simultaneously. If he acquiesced in the Japanese desire for a military pact against the USSR, the effect might be to drive Stalin into alliance with the Anglo-French powers. Therefore, German diplomats steadfastly resisted Tokyo’s efforts to turn the projected military alliance against Moscow. Their resistance was stiffened further by the tantalizing statements of Astakhov in Berlin. Ribbentrop instructed his ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugene Ott, that, in regard to the proposed military alliance, “it is quite out of the question that an anti-Russian tendency should be allowed to appear in any of the articles of the pact.”86 This, of course, would rob the pact of its primary value to Japan. The Japanese government, conversely, while claiming to accept the principle of a general military alliance, sought German acceptance of a secret written understanding that would relieve Japan for the time being of any obligation to go to war with the Western democracies and would allow her to covertly inform London, Paris, and Washington that the new Rome-Berlin-Tokyo alliance was directed exclusively against the USSR.87 Naturally this was unacceptable to Berlin.
In view of the divergent interests of Tokyo and Berlin, it is not surprising that the negotiators could not draft a military pact satisfactory to both governments. The talks, however, continued into August 1939. Furthermore, through the efforts of Richard Sorge, the Soviet master spy in Tokyo, Moscow was kept abreast of the secret negotiations, and of Japan’s determination to make the pact an anti-Soviet military alliance.88 This too is part of the background against which the German-Soviet rapprochement developed.
Before considering the end game in this web of cross-cutting diplomatic and geostrategic relationships—namely, the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—it is necessary to bring one more critical and often-overlooked factor into focus. That factor is the eruption of large-scale Soviet-Japanese military conflicts in the summers of 1938 and 1939.
CHAPTER 3
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CHANGKUFENG
In the year following the Amur River incident of June 1937, enmity between Japan and the USSR increased. This was mostly related to the China War. Japan’s deepening involvement in its war in China emboldened Moscow to take a tougher stance toward Tokyo. Soviet aid to China infuriated the Japanese and Soviet penetration of the northwestern Chinese province of Sinkiang aroused anxiety and animosity in Tokyo. The atmosphere of Soviet-Japanese enmity also encouraged and was fueled by an increasing number of border violations and armed border clashes. These reached a new peak in July–August 1938 when a border dispute at the juncture of the USSR, Manchukuo, and Korea exploded into a major pitched battle, raising the specter of a second Russo-Japanese War.
This crisis, referred to by the Japanese as the Changkufeng incident and by the Soviets as the battle of Lake Khasan, took place in strategic circumstances very different from the Amur River incident. By mid-1938, Japan was deeply committed to subduing China. July of that year found the greater part of the Japanese army embarked on a massive operation to capture the triple cities of Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankow in central China, known collectively as Wuhan. Situated at the junction of two major north-south railway lines and the Yangtse River flowing west-east, Wuhan was a vital communications hub for both sides in the China War. Chiang Kai-shek had moved his capital to Hankow after being driven out of Nanking in December 1937. Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo already had been forced to draw heavily upon Kwantung Army’s anti-Soviet reserve, and by July 1938 only six divisions remained in Manchukuo, plus one in Korea, to cope with possible trouble from the north. The Soviet Red Banner Far Eastern Army by that time was estimated to have reached a strength of approximately twenty divisions.1 These figures bespeak a dramatic shift in the balance of power in Northeast Asia. However, this was not widely appreciated or accepted by the Japanese military establishment, which held a very low opinion of the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. This impression was reinforced by the spectacle of self-destruction as Stalin’s purge swept through the Soviet High Command like a manically wielded sickle. The purge of the armed forces that began in earnest in the spring of 1937 reached its zenith in the summer of 1938 and tapered off by that autumn, but not before it had swept up one-quarter to one-third of the entire officer corps, including 80 percent of the staff of the Red Banner Far Eastern Army.2 Thus, with the bulk of the Japanese army ready to plunge into central China, the Red Army writhing in a dance of death at home, and the Czech crisis holding the center of the international stage, a series of obscure and seemingly insignificant events began to unfold in the vicinity of Changkufeng Hill.
Opening Phases
At a tripoint on the Tyumen River about ten miles inland from the Sea of Japan and seventy-five miles southwest of Vladivostok, the borders of what were then Korea, Manchukuo, and the USSR met. For a distance of twenty-five miles northwest of that meeting point the Soviet and Korean frontiers ran near one another, separated by a narrow, tapering finger of Manchurian territory. The Tyumen River provides the boundary between this strip of Manchurian territory and Korea. The boundary between that part of Manchukuo and the USSR, as established by the Russo-Chinese border pacts of 1861 and 1885, was less precise, following a series of ridges from Lake Hanka to the point on the Tyumen River where Korea, Manchuria, and the USSR met. On the southern extremity of this ridgeline, between the villages of Yangkuanping and Podgornaya, three miles north of the point where the three boundaries merge, humpbacked Changkufeng Hill rises some 450 feet high and dominates that end of the tapering ridgeline. Dotted occasionally with short scrub pine and shrubs, the clearly defined, nearly bald, reddish hill is flanked on the west by the Tyumen River and on the east by Lake Khasan. Between Changkufeng Hill and the Tyumen River, the Manchurian salient is only one mile wide.
Changkufeng Hill, unlike Kanchatzu Island, was strategically significant. The high ground commanded the immediate vicinity for miles in all directions. To the west, within easy sight—and artillery range—was the Rashin-Hsinking railroad, which ran alongside the Tyumen River and was one of the major arteries between Manchukuo and Northern China. A few miles further to the south lay Poset Bay, where the Soviets were busily constructing a submarine base. Only sixty miles up the coast from Poset Bay is Vladivostok.
The dispute arose in this sensitive area over conflicting interpretations of the Hunchun Protocol of 1886, which fixed the boundary between the Russian Maritime Province, Manchuria, and Korea. The Soviets relied upon the Russian text and the Japanese upon the Chinese text, both of which were considered official, but which were not identical in defining the boundary. This situation was further confused by a number of additional factors. The strip of Manchukuoan territory was inhabited largely by people of Korean extraction. Furthermore, the salient belonged to Manchu
kuo in 1938, and the responsibility for the defense of Manchukuoan territory had been assigned specifically to the Kwantung Army by an Imperial Order of 1932. The peculiarities of local geography and logistics, however, prompted military authorities to assign defense of the Manchukuoan salient to the Army of Korea, which, like Kwantung Army, was a territorially defined, wholly Japanese force. Both Japanese and Soviet border garrison units had been stationed in this area since the Japanese seizure of Manchuria and tacitly had arranged themselves so that they occupied alternate points of high ground along the ridgeline boundary. If the crest of the ridgeline was an international boundary, as the Soviet side maintained, the practice of having key high points occupied in alternating sequence by the troops of either side was of dubious wisdom and legality, because the troops and their fortifications would inevitably spill over onto both sides of the crest line, thereby constituting a technical border violation. This situation invited conflict. Indeed, at Shuiliufeng Hill, some miles north of Changkufeng and occupied by Japanese troops, a minor conflict arose between small Japanese and Soviet border patrols in October 1937, but the Soviet forces soon withdrew and the area reverted to uncontested Japanese control. Changkufeng itself, however, lay at the extreme end of the ridge and apparently had been overlooked by both sides.3
Map 2. Locale of Changkufeng Incident, July–August 1938
This oversight ended abruptly on June 16, 1938. On that day, General Genrikh Lyushkov, commander of NKVD (the main Soviet internal security service, predecessor of the KGB) forces in the Soviet Far East, defected to the Japanese, walking across an unguarded stretch of the frontier in the vicinity of Changkufeng.4 Lyushkov’s name, like that of so many other high-ranking officials, had just found its way onto one of the innumerable lists of future purge victims. But this particular general, all too familiar with the ways of the NKVD and the purge, discovered he was a marked man and defected to the enemy rather than be devoured by the apparatus he had helped to operate.
Lyushkov, one of the highest-ranking Soviet officers ever to defect, was a tremendous prize for the Japanese, who publicly announced his presence in Tokyo on July 3, hailing it as a major intelligence coup. And so it was. Lyushkov, recipient of the Order of Lenin, member of the USSR Supreme Soviet (elected in 1937), and commander of twenty to thirty thousand NKVD troops, brought with him a wealth of information about Soviet troop dispositions and border security. NKVD troops, not regular Red Army troops, were responsible for border security throughout the Soviet Union. He also had some insight into the workings of the highest levels of Soviet power. He had received detailed instructions in a long meeting with Josef Stalin, Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, Army chief of staff Kliment Voroshilov, and others in June 1937 before assuming his post as Far East NKVD commander. He even knew of the dark cloud hanging over the head of the Marshal Vasily Blyukher, the renowned commander of the Soviet Red Banner Far Eastern Army, but now believed by Stalin to be “unreliable,” and soon to be arrested.5 Lyushkov revealed this and more to his Japanese captors/protectors.
One can imagine the consternation and anxiety the news of Lyushkov’s defection caused in Khabarovsk, where purges and liquidations had been conducted for months on the flimsiest of pretexts. Now, with a real case of treason and conspiracy with the enemy at their doorstep, heads surely would roll. Not only was the local border garrison commander removed, fate unknown, but a brand-new border garrison unit was assigned to tighten security in the Changkufeng sector. In the flurry of activity surrounding the reshuffle of the local security forces, the new Soviet officer in charge of the Lyushkov defection area sent a radio message on July 6 to his commander, Lieutenant General V. D. Sokolov, in Khabarovsk. This message, intercepted by Kwantung Army intelligence, sought permission to occupy Changkufeng.6 That same day Japanese border guards observed three Soviet horsemen briefly on Changkufeng Hill. On July 9 the local Soviet commander reported that thirty of his troops had occupied Changkufeng and dug trenches along the crest with the intent of “preventing the Japanese from taking this hill-top, advantageous as it is for the continual surveillance of our territory. There was no breach of the frontier,” he added.7
The Japanese troops responsible for the defense of the frontier in that region were elements of the 76th Infantry Regiment, 19th Division, Chosen (Korean) Army. The 19th Division commander, Lieutenant General Suetaka Kamezo, took no immediate action other than to inform the Chosen Army commander, Lieutenant General Koiso Kuniaki, who promptly notified IGHQ in Tokyo. General Koiso recommended that even in the face of an obvious Soviet border violation, on the eve of the Wuhan offensive, vital operations in China should not be jeopardized by minor diversions in the north; therefore, he would try through local diplomatic means to persuade the Soviets to withdraw and would consider resorting to force only if negotiations failed.8
The Japanese chargé d’affaires in Moscow met with Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Stomonyakov and requested an immediate Soviet withdrawal from Changkufeng. Stomonyakov replied that the hill was within Soviet territory and their troops would not withdraw. Ambassador Shigemitsu Mamoru hastily returned to his Moscow embassy and took up the issue with Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov. While the diplomats bandied arguments and maps, their negotiations were overtaken by events.
At Kwantung Army Headquarters, news of the Soviet occupation of Changkufeng Hill triggered a quick response. Operations Section staff officer, Major Tsuji Masanobu (a man who will figure prominently in these pages) and a fellow officer were dispatched to Changkufeng to ascertain the situation. Their report, coupled with the moderate policy of the Chosen Army commander, confirmed the worst suspicions of the belligerently anti-Soviet staff officers at Kwantung Army Headquarters: a blatant Soviet violation of the territory of Manchukuo (Kwantung Army’s unique responsibility) was going unchallenged because of the “weak-willed” policy of Chosen Army.9
These officers, who savored Kwantung Army’s reputation as an elite force, remembered bitterly the AGS attempt to block their firm action against the Soviets on the Amur River a year earlier. The younger officers, especially, also burned with frustration over their sedentary role in Manchukuo while the China Expeditionary Army won fame and glory for themselves and the emperor in the growing war in the south. Kwantung Army sent a series of strongly worded telegrams to IGHQ and Chosen Army Headquarters, urging and then demanding the use of force at Changkufeng. They warned that if Chosen Army did not act forcefully and soon, Kwantung Army would itself expel the invaders. Kwantung Army began to concentrate troops in eastern Manchukuo to effect such a policy. This raised hackles at Chosen Army Headquarters, where General Koiso was in the process of being replaced by Lieutenant General Nakamura Kotaro in a prescheduled command rotation.
While this verbal struggle flared between Kwantung Army “firebrands” and the “moderates” of Chosen Army and IGHQ, a similar struggle was taking shape quietly within IGHQ, where some younger staff officers were questioning the wisdom of relying on diplomacy to resolve the problem at Changkufeng. The leader of these “activists” was Colonel Inada Masazumi, chief of the Operations Section of IGHQ. Inada proposed using the Changkufeng incident as a probe or reconnaissance-in-force to test Soviet intentions. He warned that Moscow might be planning to take advantage of Japan’s deepening involvement in the China war to attack Manchukuo. Therefore, before committing massive forces to the Wuhan operation, Japan should probe Soviet intentions with a controlled military challenge at Changkufeng. If the Soviets backed down, as they had a year earlier on the Amur River, or responded only locally to the probe at Changkufeng, Inada argued, Japan could continue its operations in China without anxiety and the USSR probably would be dissuaded from further border violations. If, however, the Soviets responded to the probe at Changkufeng by launching a major attack against Manchukuo, then the Wuhan operation must be canceled and combat in China minimized while Japan marshaled its main strength to deal a crushing blow to the Soviet Union.10
Inada succeeded
in rallying powerful support for his proposal; but not all those who backed the plan shared Inada’s motives. The deputy chief of AGS, General Tada Hayao, for one, had been arguing for some time that the China War be terminated so that the army could turn north and deal decisively with the USSR. He and other like-minded officers supported Inada’s proposal. Some in IGHQ who believed that the Soviets would continue their vexatious border violations unless dealt a sharp blow, and others who were stung by the taunting barbs from Kwantung Army, joined the group advocating action at Changkufeng.11 In a few days, Inada recalls, most of the key figures in AGS and the Army Ministry had been won over with surprising ease. The Navy General Staff in IGHQ was opposed at first, but navy opposition soon was overridden. On July 19 Inada’s plan was approved by a three to two vote at a five ministers’ conference, the main decision-making body in Premier Konoye Fumimaro’s cabinet. Prince Konoye and the army and finance ministers overrode the objections of Foreign Minister Ugaki Kazushige and Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa.12 However, as we will see, Ugaki, himself a full general and former army minister and governor general of Korea, and Admiral Yonai, a future premier, would not submit silently.
Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army's Victory That Shaped World War II Page 9