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

by Stuart D. Goldman

  The Depression, Ultranationalism, and Militarism in Japan

  In 1927 Japan experienced a preview in miniature of the worldwide depression that struck two years later. This was the result of an unsound credit system that led to a chain reaction of bank failures, including the state-related Bank of Taiwan, one of the largest in the country. As credit contracted, many small and medium-sized firms were forced into bankruptcy or taken over by the zaibatsu, the giant conglomerates that dominated Japan’s economy.6 Simultaneously, 1927 brought the first of four successive bumper rice crops. The precipitous decline in the market price of rice added to the burden of overtaxed farmers who had already borne much of the cost of Japan’s modernization. Thus, two years before the Wall Street crash, Japan was already experiencing hard times—which rapidly worsened.

  The depression immediately ruined the silk industry, the second-most-important agricultural product in Japan, as well as her leading export commodity. The year 1930 also saw the largest of the four huge rice harvests. The already-depressed rice market plummeted another 33 percent in four months. By the end of 1931, average farm income had dropped to roughly 50 percent of the already depressed 1929 level. In the autumn of 1931, an early severe frost destroyed most of the rice crop in the northeastern five provinces, bringing famine to that region. Desperation gripped the countryside as rural indebtedness rose rapidly, taxes fell into arrears, and daughters were sold into prostitution.7

  International trade contracted worldwide in the first phase of the depression and then came almost to a standstill as protectionist tariffs walled off one national economy from another. For resource-poor Japan, which had to buy heavily abroad in order to live and therefore was critically dependent upon a large volume of export trade, this was disastrous. This was further compounded by Japan’s rapid population growth, which was sending nearly half a million new workers annually into the labor market.

  Premier Hamaguchi Osachi, like most of his contemporaries, was unprepared for the economic crisis. The politically liberal but economically conservative Hamaguchi, who had come to power in July 1929, pledged to a balanced budget and reduced government spending, reversing the heavy military spending and aggressive foreign policy of his predecessor, General Tanaka Giichi. Hamaguchi cut government salaries by 10 percent, reduced military spending, and returned the Japanese yen to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the First World War. Such measures of fiscal austerity were the standard, orthodox governmental response to economic depression and were being instituted around the world. But they deepened the depression in Japan, as elsewhere. The government’s inability to cope with the economic crisis was evident.

  Economic ineptitude was compounded by political failings. “The main parties in the Diet dug their own graves,” wrote historian Richard Storry. The two scandal-ridden major political parties each were backed by one of the giant, and increasingly resented, zaibatsu, Mitsubishi and Mitsui. Bribery at election time was exceeded only by the “gifts” that politicians received from business interests. The party in office was invariably attacked on charges of corruption by the opposition, which, in turn, was open to the same accusations. Diet proceedings sometimes degenerated to rowdy brawls. This offended the Japanese public, which valued decorum and at least the appearance of harmony, further undermining the authority and prestige of the Diet and the concept of parliamentary democracy.8

  This scandal-plagued political ineptitude, coupled with the government’s failure to deal with the depression, might have been enough to sink Japan’s fragile young democratic experiment.9 But the perfect storm that drove Japan to dictatorship, war, and ultimately to ruin was further fueled by ultranationalism, militarism, and international crises.

  In its first half-century, Japan’s new Imperial Army had been dominated by men of the samurai class. By the 1920s, however, that dominance, and the iron discipline it instilled, was challenged by newcomers. By 1927 some 30 percent of the junior officers were of non-samurai origin, sons of small farmers and tradesmen. From this strata came hundreds of officers sensitive to the economic plight of the little man, officers who, despite the imperial prohibition against the participation of active-duty officers in politics, would be receptive to ultranationalist propaganda, agitation, conspiracy, and even insurrection.10 The political, economic, and social malaise in Japan, compounded by the growing sense of urgency regarding developments in China and the Soviet Union, seethed mostly beneath the surface throughout the 1920s. This violent energy was released in a series of upheavals beginning in 1930.

  The Hamaguchi government aroused the hostility of the Japanese military establishment and nationalists in 1930 by acceding to U.S. pressure at the London Naval Conference to accept a ratio of 10:10:6 for American, British, and Japanese heavy cruisers respectively, despite the vehement opposition of the Navy General Staff, the Supreme War Council, the major opposition party, the Privy Council, countless nationalist societies, and much of the popular press. The iron-willed Hamaguchi succeeded in pushing the London Naval Treaty through ratification—but at great political and personal cost. “Hamaguchi’s vigorous stand released such a torrent of reaction from his opponents that in the long run the cause of parliamentary government suffered a disastrous blow—from which it was unable to recover until after Japan’s defeat in 1945.”11 Within months of the ratification of the treaty, the admirals who had supported the government’s position were forced into retirement by the angry naval establishment. On November 14, 1930, six weeks after ratification, Hamaguchi was shot and mortally wounded by a young “patriot,” a member of one of the ultranationalist societies that so despised his policies. This was the first of a series of murderous assaults and coup attempts that prompted an American journalist in Japan to characterize the situation as “government by assassination.”12

  The top military brass ultimately found a simpler way of bringing government fully under its control. An Imperial Ordinance dating back to 1900 stipulated that the army and navy ministers must be active-duty generals and admirals. Either service could thus cause the government to fall simply by withdrawing its service minister and refusing to put forward a replacement. By the late 1930s, this expedient effectively brought civilian government under military control. Before long, generals and admirals themselves headed the government.

  One ordinarily associates the notion of military rule—let alone military dictatorship—with very strict discipline. This was certainly what Japan’s military rulers imposed on the civilian population. But within the military there was a peculiar and distinctively Japanese aberration, known as gekokujo. The word literally means “rule from below”; more broadly, it is the usurpation and exercise of authority by subordinates. Gekokujo was at the center of Japan’s involvement in the Nomonhan conflict in 1939. It eventually helped lead Japan down the path to the Pacific War.

  Gekokujo sprang partly from traditions of extreme deference to people of high social status and advanced age, which tended to place such men in positions of nominal authority regardless of their ability. Real power often flowed elsewhere—below. This tendency was intensified as Japan leaped into the process of modernization, which suddenly put a high premium on specialized knowledge and technical skills, attributes not abundant among the venerable old men nor the scions of the great families who occupied so many positions of authority. This was particularly true in the army. This tradition fostered a strong sense of self-reliance among the elite young staff officers who were designated, or imagined themselves designated, the stewards of such great authority.

  These mid-level staff officers came to play a dominant a role in policy making. Many of them attended official military preparatory schools from the age of twelve or thirteen. The next step was the National Military Academy, which graduated about five hundred young lieutenants annually. These young officers then spent several years in regimental duty, after which some fifty of the most promising were selected annually to enter the Army War College. Graduates of the war college were t
he army’s elite, destined for important staff positions, with potential for high command. Their education and training stressed moral/spiritual strength in contrast to material factors and logical, critical thinking. This was partly a legacy of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, in which the Japanese army triumphed despite its often-inferior numerical and material strength. Army authorities maintained that moral and spiritual power—the samurai spirit of Bushido—rather than material strength, was the key to victory. However, Japan’s experiences in those conflicts would not apply in a struggle against an army qualitatively comparable to its own. Japanese military doctrine and training ignored this fact.

  The military academy’s curriculum that dealt with concrete strategy and tactics was skewed in a different way, focusing on complex strategies that might be useful to the cadets as division commanders twenty or thirty years later, rather than the tactics appropriate to the command of an infantry platoon or company. Similarly, at the war college the emphasis was on the command of whole armies, rather than medium-sized units. Thus, the army consistently prepared young officers to think in terms of command responsibilities far beyond those appropriate to their rank. This intensified the tendency toward gekokujo. The result, according to an expert on the Imperial Army, was a situation in which the influence of these mid-level staff officers constantly grew “until, by the late 1930s, they occupied the controlling positions in the decision-making process. Consequently, the sense of superiority and the dogmatism, irrationality and recklessness bred in them by their military training came to dominate policymaking within the army.”13

  Staff officers in Japan’s Kwantung Army stationed in southern Manchuria came to exemplify gekokujo in its most extreme form. Manchuria was very attractive to Japan economically. In the 1920s Japan imported from Manchuria huge amounts of soy, bran, flour, and other food stuffs, as well as increasing amounts of coal, iron ore, and timber.

  On the night of September 18, 1931, a clique of staff officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the tracks of the Japanese-controlled South Manchuria Railway near Mukden. They then used this provocation as a pretext to unleash a preplanned invasion of Manchuria. Within a matter of months, Japanese troops occupied all of Manchuria and set up a puppet government—Manchukuo, nominally ruled by “Emperor” Henry Pu Yi—all controlled by the Kwantung Army.

  Many accounts have detailed the clandestine plotting among Kwantung Army staff officers, the complicity of senior Army General Staff (AGS) officers in Tokyo, Kwantung Army’s night attack on the Chinese army barracks in Mukden and its rapid expansion of the combat zone throughout South Manchuria, and, finally, the government’s inability to reverse or even slow Kwantung Army’s operations in Manchuria in the face of that army’s open defiance and the complicity and/or sympathy of many key AGS and Army Ministry officers. After the Manchuria incident, the term “Kwantung Army” came to be applied in Japanese army circles to any force in the field that ignored central authorities’ orders.

  That the Manchuria incident was a decisive event in world history is beyond debate. Some historians view it as the start of the Pacific War. This study will focus on the impact of Japan’s seizure of Manchuria on Soviet-Japanese relations and the less well-known conflict between those powers.

  Deterioration of Soviet-Japanese Relations

  Japan’s occupation of Manchuria profoundly altered its relations with the Soviet Union. To the north and east, Manchuria shared a long border with the Soviet Far East; to the west lay the Mongolian People’s Republic. The Japanese empire had suddenly and violently acquired a three-thousand-mile border with the Soviet empire.

  In late 1931 and early 1932, while Japanese military operations were under way in Manchuria, Stalin, aware of his military weakness in the Far East, adopted a policy of strict neutrality. Not only was there no Soviet military intervention, but also the Red Army even refrained from mounting a show of force along the border. Moscow also refused to participate in the League of Nations’ Lytton Commission, which investigated the conflict and barred its members from crossing Soviet territory en route to Manchuria. Soviet appeasement of Japan went further. In December 1931 Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov proposed a nonaggression pact to the Japanese ambassador, which was rejected by Tokyo. Sensing Russian timidity, the Japanese demanded and obtained the right to have their troops transported across Manchuria on military missions by the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway. Moscow denied use of the CER to Chinese forces to avoid being accused by Japan of a breach of neutrality. Acquiescing to the Japanese demand not only vitiated Soviet “neutrality,” but it also facilitated the very invasion that increasingly imperiled Soviet security. As a final indignity, the Japanese refused to pay for their use of the railroad and soon owed millions of rubles to the CER.14 Both the balance of power in East Asia and the perception of that balance had shifted dramatically, to the disadvantage of the USSR.

  By mid-1932 Japan had overcome all organized military resistance in Manchuria. The army was blooded but not exhausted. To some Japanese, it seemed that the time had come to deal decisively with the Russian menace while the Soviet Far East was still relatively weak. At a roundtable discussion, prominent Imperial Army generals unanimously supported a quick preventive war against the Soviet Union. This sensational news was reported in the Japanese press.15 It was not just empty talk. Japan’s war minister, General Araki Sadao, enthusiastically supported the idea. Araki’s service in Siberia during the Russian Civil War had led him to detest Bolshevism. Araki and several like-minded senior officers in the AGS and War Ministry spoke openly of the inevitability and desirability of war with the Soviet Union. This talk also appeared in the Japanese press and sparked a war scare. The Soviet ambassador to Japan expressed his alarm in a series of urgent cables to Moscow.16 The U.S. and British ambassadors informed their governments of the apparent war danger.17 The war scare was reported in newspapers from Mukden to Moscow to Milwaukee. The Araki clique’s advocacy of immediate war against the Soviet Union sparked a full-scale—and secret—policy debate within AGS. Most of the senior staff officers vigorously opposed the idea, and it was—secretly—rejected in May 1933.18 But the war scare lingered in public discussion for another year. Soviet attempts to improve relations with Japan were rebuffed by Tokyo. As the Japanese chargé d’affaires in Moscow put it to the British ambassador in November 1932, “Soviet-Japanese relations are good, but Japanese-Soviet relations are not so good.”19

  There are good reasons why the term “ill-defined” is so often applied to the three-thousand-mile border that separated the rivals in the 1930s. As recently as the 1850s, Korea, Manchuria, the Maritime Province, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and that vast expanse of eastern Siberia forming the northern watershed of the Amur River were all parts of the “Middle Kingdom,” either part of the Chinese empire proper or tributary states recognizing the suzerainty of Peking. Boundaries between these entities were not always precise, as most were not international borders. That changed in 1858–60, when China was forced to cede the Maritime Province and trans-Baikal Siberia to Russia. The new Russo-Chinese border was mostly riverine, following the Amur River eastward to its confluence with the Ussuri, thence south along the Ussuri/Sungacha system to Lake Hanka and beyond, to a point where the boundaries of Korea, Manchuria, and the Russian Maritime Province meet.

  The new boundaries, however, were ambiguous. The Chinese border was said to be the southern and western banks of the rivers, while the northern and eastern banks were the Russian border. This had the effect of making the rivers themselves neutral territory and said nothing about the sovereignty of the hundreds of islands within the river systems. At the western and southern extremities of the new border there were no convenient rivers to use as boundaries. Red lines were drawn on the negotiators’ often-inaccurate maps, across desert wastes, over obscure mountain ridgelines, and through swamps. On the basis of these maps, wooden boundary markers were erected. However, some of the map markings were unclear and the el
ements eroded many of the boundary markers. In some remote areas no boundary markers were erected at all.20 Thus, when Japan seized Manchuria from China in 1931, the international boundary was subject to dispute in many places.

  Japan suggested several times to the Soviet Union that they create a commission to establish precise international boundaries. Moscow rebuffed these offers, replying, not without sarcasm, that the border problems could be overcome most efficaciously if the Japanese only would return to Japan.21 Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that border disputes arose. Alleged border violations reported by one side or the other for the period 1932 to 1939 number well over one thousand, ranging from low comedy (charges that Soviet border guards stole fish from the lines of Manchukuoan fishermen) to bloody conflicts. Major military clashes that occurred in the summers of 1937, 1938, and especially 1939 are major foci of this book.

  According to Japanese military sources, while Kwantung Army was mopping up the last armed resistance in Manchuria, the Soviet Union began bolstering its defenses in the Far East. By the time Japanese forces turned their attention to the international boundary, the Soviets had made substantial progress in strengthening their defenses. These measures included double-tracking the Trans-Siberian Railway, constructing large-scale border fortifications, increasing the number of border garrison units from two or three in 1932 to twenty in 1934, and relocating border-area inhabitants.22

  In response, the Japanese began a major program of border fortification. In addition, new railroad lines were constructed in Manchuria, generally following military rather than economic criteria. This was one aspect of a Japanese program to secure and develop Manchuria as an integral part of the empire. Production of coal and ferrous metals in Manchuria doubled between 1931 and 1939 as Manchuria’s mineral wealth was mobilized to feed the industries of the home islands. In 1936 the Japanese government announced the goal of resettling one million Japanese farming families (approximately five million people) in Manchuria over a twenty-year period, a plan to “nipponize” Manchuria, sponsored by the Kwantung Army and the War Ministry.