Peter G. Tsouras
Page 4
To the north of Lake Hanka, the 5th Army ran into trouble. The Japanese guns at Hutou had successfully taken the railroad under fire, but the army's crossing of the Ussuri River had not gone well. A few bridgeheads were taken, but they had been isolated. Enemy aircraft from Khabarovsk, which had not been within range of the first strike, were contesting the sky quite well. “Well,” he commented to Ayabe, “a plan must have many branches, so if one is broken, another can be followed.”25 The sacrifices in the Iman crossings would still serve a purpose if they pulled the Red Army's reserves to that spot. He had the initiative, a priceless advantage from which he would forge more trouble for the Soviets. He was a patient man who could strike like a cobra when ready.
Apanasenko was on the phone to Moscow. “Yes, Iosif Vis-sarionovich, the enemy has been held all along the frontier,” he told Stalin. “The fortified zones have held, for the moment, but the Japanese are grinding through them. They have cut the Trans-Siberian Railroad at several places. Their gunboats have entered the Ussuri from the Sungari River and destroyed several railroad bridges near Khabarovsk . . . Yes, they have all been sunk, but raiding parties are attacking bridges and tunnels all the way from Khabarovsk to Blagoveschensk. They have succeeded in only a few places, but most of the damage is minor and can be easily replaced ... No, Iosif Vissarionovich, no. I realize that no reinforcements can be spared from the West... I have concentrated my reserves at Voroshilov to counter any breakthrough.”
He was going to need those reserves soon. The division at Turiy Rog was in trouble. An estimated two of the big Japanese divisions were overwhelming the boys up there. Boys, peasants, zeks. Apanasenko was proud of them. He let himself think, Russians. Yes, that's why they are fighting. Not for Stalin. Had that been all, most would have shot their officers and rushed out to meet the Japanese, like so many had happily surrendered to the Germans. But it was Russia they fought for, and there was nothing wrong with Russia that Japan would set right. It was a war of the narod, the Russian people. It was easier to recognize it here than with the Germans, who looked like them. The Russian visceral hatred for the Oriental would be his great weapon. The Mongols had driven this fear to the bone. Nothing in Russo-Japanese relations had proven the feeling misplaced. A panasenko then ordered the rifle division from Spassk-Dalniy to help the troops at Turiy Rog.
Yamashita continued to be surprised by the enemy's defense of the fortified zones. What had a German general mentioned to him about the Russians? “It is not enough to kill a Russian, you must knock him down, too.” Well, the Yamato spirit was doing a lot of knocking down as well. The casualty lists were alarming, but he was proud of his warriors, his samurai. They were as tough as their grandfathers in the Russo-Japanese War. He laughed quietly. Or should he say the First Russo-Japanese War? His junior officers were on the sword's edge of the fighting, holding their units together and encouraging them to superhuman feats of will and daring, and dying in great numbers—a blizzard of cherry blossoms. The Japanese soldier was being exceptionally well led at the battalion level and was showing a real flair for infiltration through difficult terrain and around enemy strong points.
While the 3rd and 7th Armies continued to pound away at the fortified zones, they also constantly pushed strong forces through the open woodlands and hills between them. These efforts drew more and more of the enemy's reserves to cover a longer and longer front. A supporting attack by a division from Korea tied down more of the enemy far from the main effort. Still, prisoners were now being taken from the garrisons of fortified zones that had not been engaged to the south. Although Yamashita was an army group commander, that never stopped him from visiting the front. He could feel the rhythm of operations along the 200-kilometer eastern front, could feel the crisis building as the enemy used up his reserves. To the north, the 5th Army had finally expanded its bridgeheads over the Ussuri and pushed inland to seize Iman. A nasty enemy attack supported by tanks had driven the 9th Division back to the river and handled the 23rd Tank Regiment roughly, but the enemy attack had petered out, impaled on the will of the Japanese soldier, who coolly manned his antitank guns or raced in among the tanks with his Molotov cocktails. A German officer attached to his headquarters remarked that the fighting in the fortified zones reminded him of the trenches in France in World War I. He was visibly fretting over the casualties and missing the window of opportunity that was about to open.
The window simply blew out on the fifteenth day of fighting. The Sendai coolies had done their work well. When the last screen of trees fell, Maruyama rushed his division south, leaving a broad road for Yamashita's reserve divisions to pour through. They bypassed the edge of the tochka belt to their south and brushed aside a few Soviet cavalry patrols. Maruyama pushed on quickly to the Mo River and the railroad crossing that supplied the enemy at Turiy Rog. The tanks of the 7th Tank Regiment splashed through as his men waded across downstream. It was a shallow river, no great obstacle. Hurry! Hurry! Everywhere, he was pushing his command along in its long khaki columns as the Soviets melted away in front of them. Now they were in rolling farmland, whose only feature was the collective farm villages. Here and there Soviet units attempted to defend them, but Maruyama just bypassed them, now heading for the rear of Fortified Zone 105.26
He strode up Hill 341, a bump in the earth but still an elevation. He could see the railroad to Voroshilov five kilometers to the south. The 7th Tank Regiment raced ahead, with his 16th Infantry Regiment close behind.
Five kilometers south of the railroad, on Hill 388, Colonels Grigorenko and Golitsyn were looking north at the column of Japanese tanks and infantry. It would be a race to see who got to the railroad first. Already Grigorenko's infantry were mounted on the backs and sides of Golitsyn's tanks. They rumbled north and crossed the tributary of the Mo and then the railroad before the Japanese. Even before the tanks came within shooting distance of one another, a battalion of motorized artillery deployed and got in the first shot, its salvo straddling the 16th Infantry. The T-34s opened up at a longer range than the Japanese Type 98 tanks could reach, their 76mm guns quickly finding targets as Japanese tanks began to blossom then burn. The Soviet attack would have swept over Hill 341 and Maruyama himself if not for a swarm of Japanese planes that showed up to strafe and harry the Soviets. A few of the surviving Red Falcons arrived in turn to provide support, enabling the Soviet tanks and infantry to push as far as the base of the hill before the combined weight of Japanese artillery, antitank fire, and air attacks finally stopped them. Under the cover of the few remaining Soviet planes, they withdrew to the railroad.
Over the next week Grigorenko and Golitsyn fended off the determined thrusts of a growing Japanese force trying to cut off Fortified Zone 105. Grigorenko's men were doing well. He had been lucky in this command; most of his men had been in an officer-cadet school, which was shut down. The quality was high, but few were left after a week. Incessant Japanese attacks were inching closer to the railroad. Already the front had swung backward from Turiy Rog after the Japanese bypassed it. Two divisions were lost there. Then word came that the enemy had broken through at Poltavka, twenty kilometers to the south, with a horde of tanks. Their orders were to hold open the rear door to let the survivors of the two divisions escape. It was during this desperate attempt that Golitsyn died with his last five tanks. Grigorenko's few men were swallowed up by the rush of fugitives from the fortified zone.27
As Yamashita knew it would the Soviet front had broken wide open. He had stressed it to the breaking point and then slipped through every hole he could. It was a simple matter of judo. The Sendai had done well. Now it was the turn of the tank corps and a matter of forty kilometers to Voroshilov. Outside of the town the Soviet commander threw in his last reserve, the T-26 tank brigade and some infantry. They fought the Japanese tank corps to a standstill, but a draw was the same as a defeat for the Soviets. Japanese infantry divisions flowed around the tank battle, closed around Voroshilov, and headed south again. The town surrendered. Yamashita rode
southward on the wave of victory to thunderous shouts of Banzai! as he passed the endless columns converging on Vladivostok. It was September 23—forty-seven days since the beginning of the offensive.
On September 26 he stood looking down at the port city on its peninsula jutting into Ussurisk Bay. A pall of smoke hung over it. He again laughed to himself. Over the years, he had studied in war games how to seize the fortified Bataan peninsula in the Philippines, but never Vladivostok. Well, he would leave the siege to General Homma. Homma had always spoken highly of General Nogi's siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War. Again he laughed to himself. Oh, yes, it should now be called the First Russo-Japanese War. His thoughts returned to Homma. “Let's see what he learned about sieges,” he said to his chief of staff.
Yamashita could see Yamamoto's battleships parading back and forth firing their big guns into the city's defenses. The admiral had crushed the minor threat of the Soviet fleet. Most of the submarines had been sunk where they were moored by naval aircraft or smashed up by gunfire. Their crews had been pressed into the naval infantry and fed into the defenses of the port. A few had gone to sea to sting the Imperial Navy here and there, sometimes painfully. Yet Yamashita had to admit that Yamamoto had skillfully shown off the navy's ability. Despite that, the war had been an army victory. Let the navy try to emulate the army this winter when it would go south. Now he had to worry about phase two—Khabarovsk, and that same winter—and the message announcing his victory to His Imperial Majesty.
The Treaty of Manila
The letter to the Emperor was the easy part. Apanasenko fought a tough battle for Khabarovsk, but the game was up and even he knew it. The city fell in December, as winter closed down operations for the Japanese. It was never an excuse for inactivity to the Russians, who relocated the center of resistance to Blagoveschensk. Apanasenko would be remembered for his humane efforts to care for the hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians who fled west with his forces. He also threw open the gates of the camps as he retreated, forcing the camp guards and zeks into combat units. Most likely Stalin would have shot him, had the dictator lived past December, when he disappeared in the chaos of his flight from the fall of Moscow.28 The Siberian divisions had perished in the great encirclements at Kiev in September, and Bryansk and Vyazma outside of Moscow in October. Zhukov was to write bitterly in his memoirs that had those Siberians been kept in reserve, Moscow might have been saved.29
Apanasenko survived the disaster in the Far East, to hold off Yamashita the next spring, until the Treaty of Manila ended the war.30 The siege of Vladivostok went on for three months, tying down Homma's 7th Army and earning him an Imperial reproof. Grigorenko, released from Japanese captivity in 1943, became a successful civil engineer in the Russian Eurasian Federation (REF) and wrote the definitive history of the Second Russo-Japanese War. Lyushkov proved a surprisingly good governor of His Majesty's new Maritime Province. In fact, he was too good. The Japanese were never ones to quibble over his ruthlessness, but they did have to take drastic notice of his treasonous plans to reunite the province with the REF. Yamashita returned to a hero's welcome and a personal audience with the Emperor. The Tiger of Siberia would be denied nothing.
The Treaty of Manila, signed on March 2, 1942, had been sponsored reluctantly by President Franklin Roosevelt, who had more to worry about with Russia out of the war and a victorious Germany looking wolfishly across the Atlantic. That treaty kept the Philippines for the United States, but at the humiliating cost of looking east while Japan moved south in the winter and spring.
The Reality
This story follows actual events until Foreign Minister Matsuoka's visit to Germany in March 1941. In reality, Hitler broadly hinted about war with the Soviet Union. The Japanese ambassador had been reporting the coming war accurately, but the Japanese did not seem to take it seriously.
In this story, Hitler frankly asks for a joint German-Japanese attack on the Soviet Union. There was already considerable tension in the Japanese government and military about whether to attack the Soviet Union or the Western colonial powers in Asia to acquire their natural resources. Hitler's formal proposal could have concentrated the Japanese on the possibilities and given weight to those who urged Japan to hokushin or Go North. The mobilization plan and initial campaign plan are those the Japanese had actually devised for such an eventuality in 1941, and during the summer 1941 mobilization of the Kwangtung Army, Yamashita was actually assigned to army group command of those forces that would have attacked the Maritime Province. The heroic reorganization of the defenses of the Far East was in fact accomplished by Apanasenko. He would be killed by a stray bullet fighting the Germans after his transfer to the West in 1943.
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Notes
1. Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939 (1990), 916, 952, 1123. Total casualties were calculated by adding the total battle casualties in the secret Kwangtung Army Report at Appendix J with the number of ill at Table 39.1. G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (1993), 53.
2. Coox, op.cit.. 991.
3. Japanese Special Study on Manchuria, vol. I: Japanese Operational Planning Against the USSR (1995), 20.
4. Coox, op.cit., 1001.
5. Saburo Hayashi, Kogun, The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (1978), 14–16.
6. Alvin D. Coox, The Anatomy of a Small War: The Soviet-Japanese Struggle for Changkufeng/Khasan, 1938 (1977), 359.
7. Edwin P. Hoyt, Japan 's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (1986), 198.
8. Coox, op.cit., 1023–5.
9. Hayashi, op.cit., 25–26.
10. Japanese Operational Planning Against the USSR, 105–111.
11. Ibid., 79–85.
12. Ibid., 44.
13.
David Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army in the Pacific on the Eve of World War II (1998), 263–64.
14. Petro Grigorenko, Memoirs(1982), 111.
15. Alvin D. Coox, "The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General G. S. Lyushkov's Defection to Japan, 1938–1945, Part I," Journal of Slavic Studies, September 1998.
16. At this forces in the Trans-Baikal MD and Mongolia were ordered to report directly to Moscow and passed out of the control of the commander in the Far East.
17. Carl Boyd, Hitler 's Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, 1941–1945 (1991), 19.
18. Yamashita, born in 1885, graduated from the Central Military Academy in 1906. After troop and staff assignments as a junior officer, he was selected for grooming as a rising star. After attending the War College in 1916 and attachment to the General Staff in 1917, he was sent on a number of prestigious foreign assignments: military student in Switzerland in 1919, in Germany in 1921, and military attache to Austria and Hungary in 1927. He commanded the 3rd Infantry Regiment in 1930 and headed the mobilization section of the General Staff in 1931. In that year he played an important role in mediating between rebel officers and the War Ministry and was exiled to command a brigade in Korea in 1937 for apparent sympathy with the rebels. In the war with China he commanded a mixed brigade and served as chief of staff to the North Area Army, and then commanded the Kwangtung Army's 4th Division in 1938. In 1939 he was head of "Unit 82," the planning element for the "Strike South" invasion of the East Indies, Malaya, etc. Cited in Richard Fuller, Shokan, Hirohito's Samurai: Leaders of the Japanese Armed Forces, 1926–1945(1992), 236.