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

by Stuart D. Goldman

  Foreign Minister Matsuoka, the architect of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, urged scrapping the pact and joining Germany in the war against Russia. A minority at Imperial General Headquarters agreed, but most of Japan’s military leaders rejected the idea. Japanese military intelligence was quick to note that the Red Army continued to offer stubborn resistance despite its huge losses, that the German invasion was falling behind schedule despite its great victories, and that the defense of the Soviet central front had been entrusted to Georgy Zhukov, a soldier they had learned to respect. General Tojo Hideki, the powerful army minister and future premier, who commanded the Kwantung Army at the time of the Amur River Islands incident, opposed attacking Russia at that time. Between July and September 1941, amidst internal wrangling in which Foreign Minister Matsuoka was forced to resign, the decision was reconfirmed in Tokyo to hold to the southern course, even if that meant war with America.

  Major General Eugene Ott, the German ambassador in Tokyo, persistently pressed his government’s arguments that Japan’s interests would be served best by striking swiftly at the Soviet Far East. His early optimism that Japan would enter the war against Russia was tempered by Matsuoka’s fall. On September 4, Ott sent a long telegram to Ribbentrop describing the situation in Tokyo. Ott explained that the Japanese General Staff was doubtful of its ability to achieve decisive results against the Soviet Union before the onset of winter, and that it was influenced “by the thought of Nomonhan, which is vividly remembered especially by the Kwantung Army.”9 By November, the Japanese decision to move south was irrevocable. Ott summarized the Japanese decision for Ribbentrop as follows: “In my reports I have repeatedly pointed out that after the experiences at Nomonhan and in view of the Russian resistance to an army such as the German Army, the activists [in the Japanese army] consider participation in the war against the Soviet Union too risky and too unprofitable.”10

  General Ott, who was in close contact with the military men who were the real rulers of Japan by then, clearly believed that the Nomonhan incident had a significant influence on the Japanese decision to move south, rather than north, in 1941. Surprisingly few Western scholars have recognized this factor,11 although it has not been ignored by Soviet and Russian historians.12

  From the Japanese perspective, the relationship between Nomonhan and the decision to move south is obvious. Colonel Inada Masazumi, the former head of the AGS Operations Section, was forced out of the General Staff in the aftermath of the Nomonhan incident. Ten years after the end of the Pacific War, in a long retrospective magazine article, Inada had this to say about Nomonhan:

  Although very heavy casualties and the dishonor of defeat were among the high prices that we paid, what was more difficult for me to accept was that the Nomonhan incident destroyed our guiding principle of preparing for global conflict by consolidating our position in the North, which would have been achieved by settling the China War and building up our strength against the Soviet Union. Instead, after the Nomonhan incident Japan unexpectedly drifted toward the decision to move south, the invasion of French Indo-China, and finally the Pacific War. It was this change of policy which I regretted most after being expelled from the Army General Staff. The Nomonhan incident was a turning point which had a great influence on the history of Japan. Even now, when I look back, I think so from the bottom of my heart.13

  There is another dimension to the relationship between Nomonhan and Japan’s decision to move south: the matter of personnel changes at AGS. This was hinted at by Inada when he spoke of the regrettable change in army policy after his expulsion from the General Staff. Colonel Hayashi Saburo, another former General Staff officer, writes in his history of the Japanese army in the Pacific War, that “it is generally acknowledged by those who held contemporaneous High Command posts that the officers responsible for the Nomonhan debacle became strong advocates for launching the Pacific War.”14 The officers referred to are none other than the former Kwantung Army Operations Staff officers, Hattori Takushiro and Tsuji Masanobu. Less than a year after the Nomonhan incident, Colonel Hattori’s “exile” as an infantry school instructor ended and he was assigned to the Operations Section of the General Staff (October 1940). By July of the following year, Hattori was elevated to chief of the Operations Section, the powerful post formerly held by Colonel Inada. One of Hattori’s first acts in that post was to request the transfer of his friend and colleague, Tsuji, who was languishing in the research staff of the Japanese army on Formosa. Tsuji, by then a lieutenant colonel, joined Hattori in the Operations Section in July 1941 as head of the logistics unit.

  From their pivotal position in the Operations Section of the General Staff, using all the leverage afforded by gekokujo, Tsuji and Hattori vigorously pressed for southward expansion and for war. An important reassessment of the road to war published in 2006 by a group of Japanese scholars (From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?) concludes that Hattori, Tsuji, and a third hard-liner “were in charge of operations planning for the Army, and they advocated that Japan should go to war with the United States.”15 Tsuji, rarely constrained by conventions, went so far as to hatch a plot with the ultranationalist leader Kodama Yoshio to assassinate the premier, Prince Konoye, if the latter succeeded in his eleventh-hour attempt to arrange a personal meeting with Roosevelt in order to avert war.16 General Tanaka Ryukichi, who was chief of the Military Service Bureau in the Army Ministry in 1941, wrote after the war that “the most determined single protagonist of war with the United States had been Tsuji Masanobu.”17

  It would be a colossal overstatement to claim here that Tsuji and the Nomonhan incident were the principal factors responsible for war between Japan and the United States. However, a plausible argument can be made that they were significant contributing factors. Inada’s view of Nomonhan as a turning point in Japanese policy is a point worth pondering.

  What If …?

  To those who believe, as I do, that men choose, whether rationally or not, among alternative courses, and that historical developments are not predetermined and inevitable, it is interesting to look back at Soviet-Japanese relations and consider some of the roads not taken.

  What if there had been no immediate Japanese military threat to the Soviet Far East in 1939? If there had been no serious Soviet-Japanese conflict in 1939 and tension along the frontier had declined, perhaps as a result of deeper Japanese penetration into Southwestern China or an irreconcilable Japanese confrontation with British and French interests in Asia, developments in Europe might have been different. If Stalin did not face the immediate danger of a two-front war in the summer of 1939, he would have enjoyed an even freer hand in Europe. To the extent that the Japanese threat was lessened, the pressure on Stalin to conclude an agreement with Hitler—thus isolating Japan—was reduced. In that case, Stalin might have tilted less in favor of Hitler and given greater encouragement to the Anglo-French-Polish forces. Without the assurance of Soviet neutrality in 1939, Hitler might have hesitated to risk war. If Stalin had given the appearance of joining the antifascist powers, even if only nominally and cynically (which seems to be the sort of “alliance” sought by Chamberlain as well) Germany might have been deterred. Conversely, it is possible and perhaps likely that even without an immediate Japanese threat on his eastern flank, Stalin would have played the same game in Europe, promoting conflict between the fascist-militarist capitalists and the bourgeois democratic capitalists—a conflict from which Stalin could stand aside and eventually profit.

  What then if the Nomonhan incident had not occurred, or if it had ended differently—say in a stalemate or a limited Japanese victory, and Stalin then signed the nonaggression pact enabling Hitler to launch his attack against Poland? Under such circumstances it is quite possible, and perhaps likely, that the train of events resulting in Japan’s decision to expand southward would have been derailed, or at least delayed. If the Japanese had not been thrashed by the Red Army at Nomonhan, and were not committed so irrevocably to a c
ourse of southern expansion by the time of the German onslaught against the USSR, then the fateful decisions of 1941 might have turned out very differently. A Japan still confident of its superiority over the despised Bolsheviks in 1941 and faced with choosing between joining Germany in the war against Russia or attacking the Anglo-American powers might have found the northern course less risky, more attractive.

  At the very least the Japanese might have adopted a more opportunistic wait-and-see attitude toward the German-Soviet war, rather than plunging down the road to Pearl Harbor. As it was, the decision reached at the Imperial conference of July 2, 1941, which confirmed Japan’s determination to advance southward into French Indochina even at the risk of war with the United States, contained an important caveat: “In case the German-Soviet war develops to our advantage, we will settle the Soviet question and guarantee our northern border militarily.”18 Operationally, this was taken to mean that if the Soviet Union transferred 50 percent or more of its Far Eastern forces to the European front, conditions would be favorable for a Japanese attack. To prepare for this contingency, Imperial General Headquarters authorized Kan Toku En, Kwantung Army Special Mobilization, in which Kwantung Army’s strength, for a brief period, was built up to an all-time high of nearly 700,000 men, with the majority deployed near the Soviet frontiers.19 To meet this threat, the whole Red Banner Far Eastern Army was mobilized. According to a Western estimate, twenty-five Soviet infantry divisions with full armor and air support waited to meet the Japanese onslaught which was “hourly expected.”20 A more recent Soviet account said that despite the desperate efforts to halt the German onslaught, more than one-fifth of Soviet ground forces and one-third of all Soviet tanks were held in the Far East at this time.21

  The Japanese attack, of course, never came. Richard Sorge, the peerless Soviet spy in Tokyo, rendered the most valuable service of his career at this juncture, providing Moscow with the most reliable and up-to-date intelligence on the great debate in Tokyo as to whether to move north or south. In July Sorge reported that Japan would send its troops into French Indochina but would also build up its strength in northern Japan and Manchuria to prepare for a strike north if the Red Army were defeated. At the bottom of this document, General Aleksei Panfilov, acting deputy head of Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence, wrote, “In consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted.”22 The translations of several of Sorge’s messages from this period, found in the Soviet archives, bear Stalin’s and Vyacheslav Molotov’s signatures, indicating that the actual texts, not just summaries, were read by the top leaders. After having ignored Sorge’s warnings in May and June of the coming German attack, Soviet leaders, belatedly, believed him. Thus forewarned, Moscow took care not to weaken the Red Banner Far Eastern Army during the period of Kan Toku En.23

  On August 9 Imperial General Headquarters secretly rejected the option of attacking northward that year. In the next few weeks Sorge and his key Japanese collaborator, Ozaki Hotsumi, an adviser to Premier Konoye, confirmed this decision. On August 25–26 Sorge drafted this message to Moscow: “Invest [Ozaki’s code name] was able to learn from circles closest to Konoye … that the High Command … discussed whether they should go to war with the USSR. They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year.”24

  At an Imperial conference on September 6, the decision to advance southward was reconfirmed. Tokyo began withdrawing some of the forces poured into Manchuria during the Kan Toku En. Sorge learned from Ozaki and Ambassador Ott (who was briefed by the Japanese foreign minister) what decisions had been reached. Ott confided to Sorge the total failure of his efforts to persuade the Japanese to attack Russia. On September 14 Sorge reported even more emphatically to Moscow that “in the careful judgment of all of us here … the possibility of [Japan] launching an attack, which existed until recently, has disappeared at least until the end of winter. There can be absolutely no doubt about this.”25 Only then did the Soviet High Command undertake a massive transfer of forces from east to west. Fifteen infantry divisions, three cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft—more than half the strength of the Soviet Far Eastern Army—were shifted from the east to European Russia in the autumn of 1941. The majority went to the Moscow front.26 It was these powerful forces, commanded by the hero of Khalkhin Gol, that turned the tide in the Battle of Moscow.

  According to conventional wisdom, the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943) was the crucial turning point and the most decisive battle on the eastern front, and hence the most important battle of the Second World War. Without gainsaying the enormity of the struggle at Stalingrad, an argument can be made that the Battle of Moscow a year earlier was the real turning point: the biggest, the most important, and the most decisive battle of the war.27 It was then (October–December 1941) and there (across the entire eastern front, with Moscow at the epicenter) that Germany came closest to defeating the Soviet Union. Some seven million German and Soviet troops were involved in some portion of this battle. Of those, 2.5 million were killed, captured, missing, or seriously wounded—1,896,500 on the Soviet side, 615,000 Germans. Stalingrad, by comparison, involved 3.6 million men, with total losses on both sides of 912,000.

  Stalin, unlike Tsar Alexander I in 1812, made a decision to stand and fight at Moscow. Not just to make a fight of it, but to hold Moscow at all costs. Moscow was a far greater prize in 1941 than in 1812. By 1941 Moscow was the political, strategic, and industrial center of the country and also the hub of its highly centralized transportation system. The loss of Moscow would have been a devastating blow to the Soviet war effort. To prevent that, Stalin committed the bulk of his reserves. If the Germans had been able to break the back of the Red Army at Moscow, they might have won not just the battle, but the war. The orthodox view of Soviet historians has been that even if Moscow had fallen, the Red Army would have continued the fight to final victory. But the distinguished Russian military historian Boris Nevzorov states flatly “If they had taken Moscow, the war would have ended with a German victory.”28 It is an open question.

  Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, recalled a conversation with Stalin after the battle. “Stalin told me that the Germans had made a great mistake. They tried a three-pronged drive” toward Leningrad, Moscow, and the south. “Stalin said that if they had concentrated on the drive toward Moscow, they could have taken Moscow; and Moscow was the nerve center and it would have been very difficult to conduct major operations if Moscow had been lost… . So Stalin said they were going to hold Moscow at all costs.”29

  It was a very close thing. By the first week of December, the lead German panzer units, the tip of the spear, stood twelve miles from the Kremlin. German officers could see some of Moscow’s main buildings in their binoculars. Then, on December 5–6, Zhukov launched a massive counteroffensive, spearheaded by “the Siberians,” the fresh reserves recently arrived from the Soviet Far East—including many of the units he had commanded at Nomonhan. Using the same combined arms tactics he had honed at Nomonhan, but on a much grander scale and with vastly more at stake, Zhukov threw the Germans back about one hundred miles and held them there through the winter. It was a do-or-die effort. The reserves from the east, clad in full winter gear, were decisive. The visiting British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, recalled Stalin telling him plainly in December 1941, “The bringing in of fresh reinforcements was the cause of the recent success.”30

  A day after Zhukov began his counteroffensive, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on the United States and vice versa, bringing America into the war in the Pacific and in Europe. It was the most decisive week of the war—the week that doomed the Axis.

  However, if Japanese army leaders in 1941 still held their overoptimistic pre-Nomonhan attitude about the Red Army, things might have been very different. A Japanese decision in July or August 1941 to attack northward w
ould probably have brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid Japanese victory in the east would not even have been necessary to achieve that result; the mere existence of a large-scale Asian front would have prevented Moscow from shifting those eighteen army divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft to the European theater. The economic contribution of the Soviet Far East to the overall Soviet war effort also was substantial, particularly in light of the massive disruption of industry in the western portions of the USSR in the first year of the war. The Soviet margin of victory at Moscow in 1941, and again at Stalingrad a year later, was exceedingly slim. A determined Japanese foe in the east might well have tipped the balance against the USSR. Many military analysts, including Russian generals, assert that the Soviet Union could not have survived a two-front war in 1941–42.

  During the height of the fighting in 1941, Major General Arkady Kozakovtsev, chief of operations of the Soviet Far Eastern Army, confided to his comrade, General Petro Grigorenko, “If the Japanese enter the war on Hitler’s side … our cause is hopeless.”31 Furthermore, if Japan moved against the USSR in 1941, she certainly could not also have attacked the United States that year. The United States might not have entered the war until a year later, under circumstances perhaps even less favorable than the grim conditions that prevailed in the winter of 1941–42. If the Soviet Union had been defeated in 1941–42, how then would Nazi domination of Europe have been broken? Would the continent be speaking German today?