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

by Stuart D. Goldman

  Nor was it forgotten at Kwantung Army headquarters. The more aggressive staff officers vowed that they would never again allow their proud field army to be shackled by central authorities in dealing with border disputes with the Soviets or to be humiliated in exercising command authority over their own subordinate units. When more serious border conflicts arose in 1938 and 1939, Major Tsuji Masanobu, the sole holdover from the Amur River incident period, but an exceptionally charismatic leader, would instill this truculent spirit in his colleagues.35

  Many observers, such as the U.S. ambassador to China, concluded from this incident that the Soviets had “lost confidence in their arms” and that the Soviets’ ability to undertake significant military operations in the Far East was “to no small extent paralyzed.”36 Kwantung Army showed by its subsequent actions that it too drew this conclusion from the Amur River incident. This was a serious miscalculation, for Japan immediately embarked upon the China War, an event that fundamentally altered the East Asian balance of power. The wonder is that the Japanese, especially Kwantung Army, failed to recognize that when fighting a major war against China, they could no longer afford to deal carelessly or rashly with the USSR. The subsequent Soviet-Japanese crises of 1938 and 1939, which seemed to bring the two countries to the brink of war, can be attributed in no small part to this Japanese failure—or refusal—to recognize the new reality.

  From Moscow, the able U.S. diplomat Loy Henderson cabled to Washington the Soviet reaction to these developments: “From remarks made by Soviet officials … it would appear that the Kremlin is pleased at seeing Japanese attention directed away from the Soviet-Manchurian and Manchurian-Mongolian frontiers, and the Japanese army becoming more and more involved, and probably weakened, in Central China.”37

  The China War

  Japan’s plunge into China, which greatly reduced the threat to the Soviet Far East, wrought a predictable change in Soviet policy toward Japan. In Moscow’s view, the need to appease Japan was gone. In December 1936 the Soviets had acquiesced to Japanese pressure and extended the disputed fisheries agreement despite the recently announced anti-Comintern pact, and, more significantly, had backed down ingloriously in the Amur River Island incident. But after the outbreak of the China War, Moscow adopted a more truculent attitude toward Tokyo. Soviet military aid to China was one obvious manifestation of this new attitude.

  In October 1937 William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to France, reported a conversation with socialist premier Leon Blum, who headed the popular front government in Paris: “He [Blum] had had many discussions with Litvinov in Geneva recently. Litvinov had talked to him frankly and as an old friend. Litvinov had said that he and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China. He believed that Japan would be so weakened … that the Soviet Union was now completely assured of peace in the Far East for many years to come. Litvinov had added that he hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible and would result in an attempt by the Japanese to swallow just as much of China as possible.”38

  Soviet leaders did not sit by idly, merely hoping that the China War would continue “just as long as possible.” In August 1937, a month after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Soviet Union granted Chiang Kai-shek’s government credits of 100 million dollars for the purchase of Soviet war materiel. In December of that year, Moscow extended an additional 200 million dollars in credit. Soon two hundred modern Soviet fighter and bomber planes, accompanied by forty flying instructors and several hundred “volunteer” pilots, arrived in China. By May 1938 five squadrons of Soviet aircraft, manned by Soviet pilots, were operating in China.39 On August 21, 1937, a nonaggression pact was concluded between the USSR and China. Its precise terms were less important than its timing, which put Tokyo on notice that the Soviet Union was standing by China. The extent to which Moscow was willing to back Chinese resistance to Japan was spelled out by Stalin in a meeting with the Chinese special envoy, Sun Fo (son of Dr. Sun Yat-sen). Stalin assured Sun Fo that he knew “China was fighting Russia’s battle as well as her own; that it was the ultimate objective of the Japanese to capture the whole of Siberia as far as Lake Baikal; that China would continue to receive all possible help from Russia in the form of munitions, airplanes and other supplies; that the Soviet Union would not, however, intervene in the war.”40

  Thus Stalin’s policy toward the China War came to resemble his policy toward the Spanish Civil War. By supplying the Spanish Loyalists and the Chinese Nationalists with enough war materiel to prevent them from being overwhelmed, the Soviet Union, at relatively little cost to itself, was able to keep the three anti-Comintern powers occupied in combat at the two extremities of Eurasia, far from Soviet borders. This strategy was less effective in the West because Spain absorbed only a small fraction of Germany’s war potential, but the concept was the same in both theaters of operation. In the Far East, the results were, from the standpoint of the Kremlin, highly rewarding. When the crucial Soviet-Japanese confrontation arose in mid-1939, twenty-eight of the thirty-six Japanese infantry divisions on the Asian mainland were deployed in China.41 The China War became an endless quagmire for Japan. So much of its resources of men and materiel were eventually committed to China that large-scale operations against the USSR were out of the question. At the same time, Soviet aid to China and the Japanese divisions tied down in Manchuria by the growing Red Banner Far Eastern Army,42 helped prevent a swift Japanese victory in China. Caught in a classic vicious circle, the only means of extrication for Japan would have been a settlement of the China War or a rapprochement with the USSR. In the period 1937–39, the Japanese were unable to achieve the first and unwilling to attempt the second.

  From September 1937 to June 1941, Russia supplied China with 904 planes, 82 tanks, and 1,140 pieces of artillery, several thousand military specialists, and over 450 pilots. In May 1938 Ambassador Coulondre reported from Moscow that “M. Potemkin calls the situation in China splendid. He is counting on resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the U.S.S.R. This opinion appears to be shared by the Soviet leadership.”43

  In the final analysis, the China War and Moscow’s role in that conflict exerted a dual and contradictory effect upon Soviet-Japanese relations. On the one hand, it drew the Japanese army away from the Soviet borders and made a major Soviet-Japanese conflict less likely. On the other hand, by stiffening Chinese resistance, it further embittered the Japanese toward the Soviet Union and made many military men—especially in the Kwantung Army, which now languished in the noncombatant backwaters of Manchuria—doubly eager to avenge themselves against the Soviet Union.

  As the scope and intensity of the fighting in China grew in the second half of 1937, that struggle soon was enshrined in the pantheon of Comintern causes célèbres, second only to that of Spain. Scarcely a week went by without an article on the events in China appearing in one of the Communist news organs. Chiang Kaishek, who had been vilified by the Comintern since 1927 as one of the most notorious fiends in history, was now praised as a national hero.

  As with Spain, the Western democracies were urged to come to the aid of the embattled Chinese people. The Comintern displayed a remarkable solicitude for European colonialism in this instance, pointing out time and again how the Japanese advance in China threatened the British and French imperial positions in Asia and urging them to defend their empires. A favorite argument, often directed to isolationist America, was that armed intervention was not even necessary; the scarcity of raw materials in Japan was so acute that a Western boycott of the island empire would soon bring Tokyo to her knees. Nor was the Comintern above playing on racial emotions to provoke the West into resisting the new “yellow peril.” An Inprecor headline of January 15, 1938, warned that, “The Japanese Program of Driving the Whites Out of Asia Is on the Way to Realization Unless Democratic Powers Offer Energetic Resistance.” The same source later played up a report of Japanese soldiers
undressing and slapping helpless British women in Tientsin.44

  The Soviet tactics in Spain and China were quite similar. The primary difference was one of emphasis. In Spain, Stalin’s main interest was in promoting hostility between the West (particularly France) and the Rome-Berlin Axis, and possibly embroiling those two blocs in war. The diversion of a fraction of the Axis military resources to the remote Iberian Peninsula was a fringe benefit of lesser significance. In China the paramount factor was the tying down of the bulk of the Japanese army in the South. The attempt to further involve Japan in conflict with the West was, in comparison, a secondary goal.

  Germany and Japan

  On November 25, 1936, Germany and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact. The pact ostensibly was directed only against the Communist International, which was perceived as an arch enemy by the governments in Berlin and Tokyo. The pact provided for the coordination of German and Japanese efforts to thwart the activities of the Comintern, which Moscow had always insisted bore no official connection with the Soviet government. A secret protocol, however, bound the anti-Comintern partners “to take no measures which would tend to ease the situation of the U.S.S.R.” if the other party should become the object of an unprovoked attack or threat of attack. In a further secret article the two states agreed to “conclude no political treaties with the U.S.S.R. contrary to the spirit of this agreement without mutual consent.”45

  In explaining the rationale for the Anti-Comintern Pact to the Privy Council in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Arita Hachiro made clear its strategic implications against the USSR, stating that “Soviet Russia must realize now that she has to face Germany and Japan.”46

  Beyond their mutual hostility to Soviet Russia, the two signatories shared broader world views. Each, for somewhat different reasons, perceived itself to be a “have-not” nation, unjustly discriminated against by the dominant Versailles powers, the Western democracies. Each sought a fundamental revision of the international status quo. Each professed contempt for the decadence of Western bourgeois democracy and extolled the virtues of Teutonic/samurai military discipline and power. A year later, Mussolini brought Italy into this alliance, forging the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

  Sir Robert Vansittart, undersecretary of the British Foreign Office, was quick to perceive the menace of the Axis. In a memo he wrote in December 1936 appraising the recently concluded Anti-Comintern Pact, Vansittart observed that “at present the appearance is that of cooperation against communism; but the appearance convinces no one… . What the agreement clearly does do, however … is to introduce Japan into the orbit of European affairs at a particularly delicate and dangerous phase, and to increase the probability that, in given circumstances, Germany and Japan would now act together” (emphasis in the original).47

  The shadow of this threat had a numbing and sometimes paralyzing effect on British foreign policy makers and contributed to the climate of opinion in which the policies of appeasement grew.

  The Western Democracies’ Relations with Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union

  Japan’s expansion on the Asian mainland in the 1930s aroused growing enmity from the Western democracies.48 This was inevitable, since Japanese expansion required alteration of the international status quo that the Western powers had created in the nineteenth century. Great Britain, the preeminent colonial power in Asia, naturally had the greatest stake in maintaining the status quo. There was a firm conviction in government circles in London that Britain’s status as a great power depended on the maintenance of her imperial position not only in Africa, the Middle East, and India, but in East Asia as well. Britain may have been overextended around the world, but her government had little desire to pull back.

  With the outbreak of the China War in 1937, the feeling grew in London that if Japan triumphed in China, it might be emboldened to attack the British empire in Asia. Britain, therefore, came to view Chiang Kai-shek as the empire’s first line of defense. The Foreign Office officials concerned with East Asian affairs at that time did not advocate a policy of appeasement toward Japan. As Sir John Brenan of the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern Department frankly noted:

  The truth of the matter is that we acquired our dominant position in China as the result of our wars with that country in the nineteenth century and we can now only keep it by the same or similar methods. We must either use force, or otherwise bring sufficient pressure to bear on the Japanese authorities to compel them to relinquish in our favour what they regard as the spoils of victory… . It is futile to expect that we shall get what we want for the mere asking, or by protests about the infringement of our “rights,” or by a more friendly attitude.49

  Britain faced a daunting strategic dilemma. While the threat of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis grew, the conventional wisdom in London was that for reasons of fiscal integrity, Britain simply could not afford to undertake a major rearmament program without risking bankruptcy and total collapse. In the autumn of 1937, a special cabinet-level study of defense spending concluded that expenditures on rearmament must not be allowed to exceed 1.5 billion pounds for the entire five-year period 1937–41. The report declared that, “in the long run the provision of adequate defences within the means at our disposal will only be achieved when our long-term foreign policy has succeeded in changing the … number of our potential enemies.” This procrustean logic was approved by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—himself a former secretary of the Exchequer—and endorsed by the cabinet on December 22, 1937,50 only ten days after the unprovoked Japanese attacks against HMS Ladybird and USS Panay on the Yangtze River.

  At the same time (October–December 1937), the Air Ministry warned the cabinet that Hong Kong would be virtually indefensible against a determined Japanese air attack. The Admiralty provided even sorrier news. Three of the Royal Navy’s fifteen capital ships would be dry docked for approximately eighteen months, undergoing modernization. Of the remaining twelve, nine had been built before the Battle of Jutland and only one of them had yet been modernized. Thus, if Britain suddenly were forced to send a fleet to the Western Pacific adequate to match the Imperial Japanese Navy, she would have virtually no modern capital ships remaining in her home waters to deal with the Italian and German fleets, which were composed of comparatively new ships. Furthermore, it was reported that the new naval base at Singapore, the supposed cornerstone of imperial defense in East Asia, though formally opened in February 1938, would not be capable of performing large-scale repairs and other essential wartime functions until 1940 and that its air defenses too were hopelessly inadequate.51 It is not without cause that British diplomacy in the late 1930s proceeded from a sense of strategic vulnerability.

  Japan’s leaders were fully aware of Britain’s strategic difficulties and were determined to intensify their pressure on the British position in China. The British, however, did not yield very much. There was a growing belief (hope?) in London that Japan was stuck in an exhausting war in China and that Britain might be able to outlast her. While the Chamberlain government pursued appeasement in Europe, London sought ways to inhibit Japanese expansion and to assist China. Yet Britain’s military weakness, her entanglement in the deepening European crisis, and her inability to rely upon American support, prevented her from taking too vigorous a stand against Japan. The resulting British policy toward Japan brought antagonism without deterrence.

  U.S. policy toward Japan in the late 1930s was similarly flawed. Although the constraints on U.S. action regarding the China War derived more from domestic politics and public opinion (i.e., isolationism) than from a sense of military or strategic paralysis, the resulting policy resembled that of Great Britain. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vague words of warning and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s stern and righteous lectures on international law and morality, without the backing of force or the credible threat of force, also antagonized Japan without effectively deterring her.

  Many of Japan’s leaders, for their part, sincerely hoped that the strained relati
ons between their country and the Western powers would be relieved once the prime irritant, the China War, was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. However, that outcome, Japan’s conquest of China, was precisely what London and Washington were determined to prevent. Unless one side or the other altered its policy objectives, there was little possibility of reconciliation and increasing likelihood of conflict.

  In the decades between the world wars, Germany, perhaps even more than Italy and Japan, perceived itself as the victim of an unjust international order, symbolized by the hated Treaty of Versailles. The “good German” and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gustav Stressemann, shared with Adolf Hitler a desire to revise fundamentally, if not to nullify, the Versailles diktat. By the mid-1930s, many reasonable and influential men among the victorious Versailles powers had come to feel that there were some injustices in the treaty that warranted revision. On this issue, Hitler, despite his gangsterism, was capable of persuasiveness and, if it suited his purposes, even charm, when discussing Germany’s legitimate grievances.

  Hitler had another theme he used to great effect when dealing with the Versailles powers, and that was his much-touted anti-Bolshevism. Many foreign political leaders who otherwise would have found Hitler and Nazism utterly repugnant, were impressed with this feature of the Third Reich. Winston Churchill admitted that until 1937 even he was able to find some virtue in Hitler as a useful counterforce against the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in Britain and France, the horrors of 1914–18 on the Western Front were remembered all too well. Leaders in both nations were determined to avoid repetition of that catastrophe at almost any cost, a policy that enjoyed strong popular support. The British chiefs of staffs added to the sense of alarm with their report on imperial defense, occasioned by Italy’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937: “The outstanding feature of the present situation is the increasing probability that a war started in any one of these three areas [Europe, the Mediterranean, or East Asia] may extend to one or both of the other two. Without overlooking the assistance which we should hope to attain from France, and possibly other allies, we cannot foresee the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously” (italics added).52