Peter G. Tsouras

by Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War

  All the chapters in this book point to one inescapable conclusion: the roads not taken could have led to the world resounding with the cry of “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

  Peter G. Tsouras

  2001

  Notes

  1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1.3 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1976), 101.

  2. Napoleon, The Military Maxims of Napoleon, trans. Burnod (1827), in T. R. Phillips, ed., Roots of Strategy, Book 1 (Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, 1985), 436.

  3. Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy (Kodansha International Ltd., Tokyo, 1979), 232.

  CHAPTER 1

  Hokushin

  The Second Russo-Japanese War

  Peter G. Tsouras

  The Kremlin, November 1939

  Stalin gloated. Bundle after bundle of samurai swords was dumped ostentatiously at his feet by Red Army officers as their commander, Georgii Zhukov, looked on with pride. These were the trophies Zhukov had taken in the Mongolian desert at Nomonhan (Khalkin Gol) in October when he crushed the advance of the Japanese Kwangtung Army into the Soviet protectorate with a masterful orchestration of all arms in overwhelming force. The Japanese 6th Army had suffered 21,016 casualties, including 8,629 dead, in what has been called “a gravevard of reputations.” Soviet casualties numbered 15,925.

  Certainly Stalin had reason to be pleased. His suspicion of Japanese intentions in the arc of Soviet territories from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok had been proven correct. And he was always pleased when his suspicions were proven correct. The Soviet Far East was a treasure house of minerals and forests, and a handy place to lose millions of political prisoners. And Stain knew how much the Japanese coveted it. Had they not already shamed the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) by snatching Manchuria? Their current adventure to conquer China had not prevented them from building up their Kwangtung Army in Manchuria to a dangerous level. And their intentions had been proven when they sent their army into neighboring Mongolia, a Soviet republic in everything but name. Well, Zhukov had administered a sound thrashing and thrown the militarists out on their ear; but Stalin had no doubt they would be back. He was not one to be content with a victory. The buildup in the Transbaikal and Far East Military Districts continued at an accelerated pace.

  Tanks and planes flowed east by the thousand to fill out the divisions trained to a high pitch by Army Commander 2nd Grade G. M. Shtern, a brilliant officer whose talents had been unleashed by the Revolution. Shtern had commanded the 39th Corps in the undeclared border war with Japan fought out at Lake Khasan, south of Vladivostok, in 1938. For that performance he had won the Order of Lenin. He had played a tactful but vital supporting role for Zhukov in Mongolia in 1939. Transferred in 1940 to the Finnish Front, he distinguished himself in command of the 8th Army, earned promotion, and was then given command of the Far East Military District.2 He was one of the stars of the prewar Red Army, one of the few left by the purges, something Stalin had not forgotten.

  Lessons Learned—or Not

  Nomonhan had stunned the Japanese army. Not since its founding during the Meiji Restoration had it been so thoroughly humbled and shamed. Everything was done to hide castrophe from the world, and even from Japan. Survivors were isolated and quietly discharged. So many white boxes of ashes had to be shipped back to the homeland that it was done in three shipments so as not to stun the nation.

  Stalin was right. The Japanese did covet the Soviet Far East. Even more, they feared the growth of Soviet power to their north, which the shock of Nomonhan did much to feed. They worried about a Soviet attack on their rich Manchurian province while they were deeply involved in China. Not least, the very existence of the monarch-murdering Bolshevik regime was an affront to his Imperial Majesty. By 1934, when Manchuria was finally under Japanese control, offensive war plans were prepared against the Soviet Union. “This plan laid down the principle that operations against the USSR should be offensive in nature, with the battlefield chosen in Soviet territory from the first, and with the major offensive launched from the eastern front of Manchuria. The final operational objective was set as the vicinity of Lake Baikal.”3 It was in this direction that the 6th Army had marched in July 1939, only to stumble back in ruin. It was obvious there were lessons to be learned.

  The defense minister, General Hata, responded to the concern of a member of the Diet: “Please rest assured that we shall not have wasted the blood that was shed on the sands of Nomonhan.”4 Hata convened a special commission to decide what lessons needed to be learned, and to recommend solutions. There was no lack of firsthand, blunt information from officers who had served in the campaign. But this was not the Japanese army's first warning of the might of materiel. In 1938 they had engaged the 19th Division against the Soviet 39th Rifle Corps, commanded by Shtern, at Lake Khasan, near the Soviet border with Korea. The seesaw fighting was eventually decided by the weight of Soviet numbers and material, and the Japanese were driven back. One participant said, “All we experienced directly was one edge of Soviet combat power.” A General Staff expert concluded, “We learned that Soviet strength was up to expectations, whereas Japanese arms and equipment had to be improved and reinforced.” On top of the experience of Lake Khasan, the Japanese army was finally able to digest four bitter lessons of combat with the Red Army:

  1. The Soviets were clearly superior in armor and artillery and the ability to deliver accurate firepower on a scale that dwarfed Japanese capabilities.

  2. Soviet logistics were highly impressive, especially their ability to transport large mechanized forces 600 kilometers from a railroad head.

  3. The Soviets were flexible in the application of tactics to different circumstances.

  4. The Soviets were tough fighters, determined to win.5

  But then things went awry. Faced with attempting to match the Soviets' overwhelming superiority in matériel and production, the Japanese found themselves with an insurmountable problem. There was no way Japan's industrial base could match the advanced design, quality, and output of the Soviet arms industry. The Red Army had used almost 6,000 trucks to support its forces in the Nomonhan campaign, while there were only 9,000 motor vehicles of all types in Manchuria. Japan was a nation of railroads and small medieval roads.6

  But there was a greater and deeper problem. The Japanese army had been spared the horrors of World War I; it had only the smallest taste of the crushing wars of matériel in the Mongolian desert. The salient experience was still the largely nineteenth-century Russo-Japanese War. Since then, a perverse mutation of the samurai code of Bushido had permeated the army's thinking. It was an unabashed triumph of the spiritual over the material. The “Yamato damashii,” or spirit of Japan, the distilled essence of the Japanese nation, was infinitely superior to a reliance on the material aspects of war. Of course, improvements in firepower and logistics would have to be made, but the real superiority of the Japanese soldier still resided in his spirit. The Japanese disadvantage in matériel would be more than compensated for by strengthening the will of the soldier. There was more than a passing resemblance to the French obsession with their own form of spirit, called élan. That died on the Western Front, its tombstone inscribed with Marshal Pétain's two words, “Fire kills.”

  Pétain had come close to ruin as a colonel before the war by his advocacy of firepower, but rivers of French blood vindicated him. Japanese Pétains after Nomonhan were either ignored or driven out of the service. Harping on the importance of the material aspects of war was defeatist. At the beginning of 1941, when the army should have been in high gear implementing lessons learned, Tojo issued a new senjinkun (moral code) for the Japanese soldier, which stated: “A sublime sense of self-sacrifice must guide you throughout life and death. Think not of death, as you push through, with every ounce of your effort, in fulfilling your duties. Make it your joy to do everything with all your spiritual and physical strength. Fear not to die for the cause of everlasting justice.”7


  The artillery school remained satisfied that horse-drawn pack artillery was best suited for the infantry divisions rather than the recommended 150mm motorized artillery. Only one improvement crept through—the development of a one-ton, 300mm bunker-busting howitzer shell, designed to smash the numerous concrete tochka pillbox emplacements the Soviets had strung along their border. Tank production would be only 573 in 1940, compared to 3,000 for the Soviets. Production was doubled in 1941 to a still meager 1,024, all of the models inferior to newer Soviet ones. Aircraft production presented a better picture, with production rising to 4,768 in 1940 and 5,088 in 1941, with the emphasis on fighters. Far worse was the continued reliance on hundreds of thousands of horses for transport; wartime planning called for fewer than 15,000 vehicles to be brought from Japan to support operations against the Red Army.8 With the beginning of the war in China in 1937, Japanese war industries had been tasked with a great increase in the production of munitions. By 1941 this plan had succeeded so well that the Japanese army could be kept well supplied in simultaneous wars with China and the Soviet Union.9

  Operational Plan No.8

  Nomonhan did have a major impact, however, on Japanese war plans. Interestingly, 1943 was chosen as the date by which Japanese preparations would be advanced enough to engage the Red Army in the Far East. That was the same year Hitler had chosen for general war, when the strengthening of the Wehrmacht would be complete. Until 1940, Japan's strategy, Operational Plan No.8 (Hachi-Go Plan), had been based on a powerful main thrust across the Greater Hsingan mountain range into the Lake Baikal region. The advantage lay in the severing of the entire Soviet Far East from Chita to the Pacific. By early 1939 the general staff informed the Kwangtung Army that such plans required the provision of 200,000 motor vehicles and a great expansion of railroads in the region. Nomonhan had been a rehearsal. The Japanese rightly concluded that they did not have the logistics or matériel to support an offensive of that distance. Japanese attention consequently shifted to the northern and eastern theaters.10

  Compared to striking out into the great void leading to Lake Baikal, vital objectives lay just across the Manchurian borders demarcated by the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. A fact of geographical life in the Soviet Far East was its absolute dependence upon the Trans-Siberian Railway, which-essentially from Blagveshchensk to Khabarovsk, the Soviet regional administrative and production center, to just north of Vladivostok, the major Soviet port in the Pacific-ran perilously close to the Manchurian border. In particular, the Maritime Province, or Primorskiy Kray, was vulnerable. It was wedged between the Manchurian border and the Sea of Japan, with the railroad running within easy artillery range of the Japanese for much of the way north of Lake Hanka. The Japanese fortress at Hutou directly overlooked the railway at Iman. So blatant was the threat that the Red Army had begun construction of a defensive belt farther to the east, leaving the railway uncovered. Already major elements of the Kwangtung Army were stationed directly across the border south of the lake. It was a bare sixty kilometers to the critical junction of Voroshilov (modern Ussurisk), the fall of which would sever the railway and cut off Vladivostok.

  The 1940-1941 modifications of Hachi-Go confirmed the main Japanese operational thrust in this eastern theater. The western and northern theaters would go on the defensive. Second phase operations in either of these theaters would depend upon opportunities presented by the success of the first phase along the Ussuri.

  Hachi-Go called for the eventual commitment of the bulk of the Japanese army, thirty-two divisions in the first phase and ten or eleven in the second. To the twelve divisions in the Kwangtung Army, ten more would be added from the homeland and ten from the operations in China. The second phase would see another seven divisions from the homeland and a further three or four from China. In the first phase, twenty divisions would be massed along the Ussuri under the 1st Area Army (army group) in three armies. The 3rd and 7th Armies with eight divisions would strike toward Voroshilov; the 5th Army with five divisions would strike at Iman and sever the railway. Remaining divisions would conduct supporting operations or be in reserve. Along the northern front, the 4th Army with four divisions would engage in delaying actions north of the Lesser Hsingan Mountains. Along the western front, the 6th Army, also with four divisions, would engage in holding operations west of the Greater Hsingan Mountains. Second phase operations on the eastern front would have the 3rd and 7th Armies advance upon Vladivostok while the 5th Army struck north to seize Khabarovsk.

  These objectives were strategically and geographically much less far-reaching than the drive to Lake Baikal, but they had the great, even vital, advantage of minimizing the necessary logistics effort. The emphasis on the capture of Vladivostok had been at the insistence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which wanted the home base of the Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet eliminated. For that goal, the navy would actively participate by massing up to 350 aircraft, from land-based bombers to the planes of the 1st Carrier Division, to cooperate with the 500 aircraft of the Army's 2nd Air Group in surprise attacks to eliminate the Red Air Force in the Maritime Province.11

  The Red Army's order of battle in this theater was daunting. By 1940 the Japanese had concluded that the Red Army forces stationed from Vladivostok to Mongolia included thirty rifle divisions, two cavalry divisions, nine tank brigades, and one mechanized brigade, a total of 2,800 planes, 2,700 tanks, and 700,000 men.12 They were roughly correct, but the standard of mechanization escaped them. The Red Army actually boasted nineteen rifle divisions, six tank divisions, four mechanized divisions, two motorized rifle divisions, one cavalry division, and ten rifle brigades.13 But despite the aggregate matériel superiority, the Japanese had the important advantage of interior lines. The Red Army was spread out in a vast arc from Mongolia to the Pacific, depending solely on the vulnerable Trans-Baikal Railway. An important part of the mechanized force was at the western end of the arc in Mongolia and the Trans-Baikal MD. The Japanese would be concentrating the bulk of their army against the farthest end of the Soviet arc in the Maritime Province, which they estimated would be defended by thirteen divisions. Given that Red Army divisions were about half the strength of Japanese divisions, the advantage became impressive. The navy's advantage would be even more crushing, with the might of the Combined Fleet available to dispose of an estimated five destroyers, 200 torpedo boats, and seventy submarines. The latter posed a real threat to reinforcement operations across the Sea of Japan.

  A Present from the NKVD

  In 1938 the first of two incredible intelligence windfalls fell into Japan's lap. The Far East chief of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) walked across the border on June 13 and defected. Gen. Genrikh Samoelovich Lyushkov had a lot to say. An efficient and vicious climber, he had ridden the opportunities offered by Stalin to reach the top. But meanwhile he had become disillusioned that Stalin was not building the right kind of socialism. Perhaps after putting to death 5,000 people, Lyushkov feared becoming number 5,001. He was ready to help the Japanese. Coming at the height of the purges, he painted a picture of devastation in the command levels of the Red Army. A Soviet officer wrote of the lingering effects of the NKVD's handiwork two years later, in 1940:

  I saw for myself the aftermath of the destruction of officer cadres in the Far East. Almost right after my arrival in Khabarovsk, I went with Shtern to review his forces. Two years had passed since the mass arrests had come to an end, but the command pyramid had not yet been restored. Many positions remained unfilled because there were no men qualified to occupy them. Battalions were commanded by officers who had completed military schools less than a year before . . . How could anyone have thought that such a gap could be filled?

  In the 40th Rifle Division of the 39th Corps, which had played such a prominent role in the Lake Khasan victory, only one officer remained-a lieutenant.14 Lyushkov went on to paint such a picture of deprivation, despair, and pent-up hatred of the regime that he convinced important circles in the Japanese army that the Soviet Union was a
rotten house ready to collapse if attacked on its own doorstep. Lyushkov's insider views were very impressive, especially when his forecasts proved accurate. His reputation grew with the confirmation of his information and his ability to forecast events, not least of which was the German attack on the Soviet Union. By then he was already acting as the Soviet opponent in Japanese army war games,15 and being groomed as the governor of his Imperial Majesty's new Maritime Province.

  Go North or Go South?

  By July 1940 the strategic tension facing the Japanese national and military leadership had begun to intensify. Japan's war with China had earned it the increasing enmity of the United States, leading to one economic restriction after another. Should the United States and Britain engage in an economic embargo, especially of oil, Japan would be mortally wounded without a war. Much of the military leadership subscribed to this “gradual decline” view and advocated a nanshin or “Go South” strategy to seize the resources of Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies. Others advocated a hokushin or “Go North” strategy, seeing the Soviet Union as the greater threat that must be dealt with first. Adding weight to their argument was the support of the new foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and the new war minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, under the second cabinet formed by Prince Konoye. Strengthening their hand was the unease of the Emperor himself at leaving a powerful Red Army to their rear.