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

by Stuart D. Goldman

  Stalin won the diplomatic war in 1939. But in September diplomats gave way to generals, and the brilliance of Stalin’s achievement was eclipsed by the awesome display of German military power in Poland and the following spring in Western Europe. In playing off Germany against Britain and France Stalin got more than he bargained for.

  Soviet-Japanese Detente

  As was the case after the conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, Russo-Japanese relations improved rapidly after the cessation of hostilities at Nomonhan. The Molotov-Togo agreement of September 15 and the supplementary local truce agreements arranged at Nomonhan on September 19 were observed scrupulously by both sides. On October 27 the two nations settled another vexing dispute when they agreed to a mutual release of fishing boats that had been detained on charges of fishing illegally in one another’s territorial waters. On November 6 the USSR sent a new ambassador, Konstantin Smetanin, to Tokyo, after having been represented there for sixteen months by a chargé d’affaires.36

  Ambassador Smetanin’s first meeting with the new Japanese foreign minister, Nomura Kichisaburö, in November 1939, received broad and favorable coverage in the Japanese press. Contrary to normal diplomatic practice, that first meeting was not confined to formalities. Before Smetanin presented his credentials, Nomura handed the ambassador a draft proposal for a new fisheries agreement and a memo concerning the functioning of the joint border commission that soon was to begin work in the Nomonhan area. On December 31 an agreement was reached concerning the final payment by Manchukuo to the USSR for the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and on the same day the Soviet-Japanese Fisheries Convention was renewed for the year 1940.37

  In due course, the boundary near Nomonhan was formally redemarcated. An agreement between Molotov and Togo in November 1939 established a mixed border commission representing the four parties to the dispute. After much wrangling, the border commission achieved a final redemarcation of the border on June 14, 1941. The actual construction of new border markers was completed in August 1941. The new border conformed generally to the line claimed all along by the Soviet-MPR side, running ten to twelve miles east of the Halha River. With that, the Nomonhan incident finally was closed.

  Meanwhile, during the course of the border commission’s deliberations, the international scene underwent a remarkable transformation. The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis was strengthened in September 1940 with the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact. Then, in April 1941 Japan and the USSR concluded a neutrality pact, only nine weeks prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of the year Japan had struck at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war in Europe and the Pacific. In scope and intensity it was the most total and terrible of all wars. Japan and the Soviet Union, however, remained at peace until the war’s final days.

  CHAPTER 7

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  NOMONHAN CASTS A LONG SHADOW

  Lessons of Nomonhan: Learned and Not Learned

  Kwantung Army and Red Army leaders alike strove to “teach a lesson” to their foe at Nomonhan. The phrase recurs again and again in documents and memoirs from both sides—“we must teach them a lesson.” The Nomonhan incident provided lessons to both sides, but not all were well learned.

  For the Red Army, the lessons of Nomonhan were intertwined with the laurels of victory, a gratifying, although sometimes distracting, combination. Georgy Zhukov fully appreciated the lessons from his initiation into modern warfare that summer. He had been given the rare opportunity of relatively unhampered command in an intense but narrowly circumscribed conflict and he made the most of it. Zhukov came away from Nomonhan with more than an enhanced reputation and a promotion. He gained invaluable command experience and confidence. At Nomonhan he demonstrated the characteristics and employed the techniques that later would become his hallmarks: the ability swiftly to grasp complex strategic problems; decisiveness in moments of crisis; painstaking attention to detail, especially in logistics and elaborate deceptions; patience in methodically building up superior strength and then striking with devastating force at his enemy’s weakest point; coordination of massed artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry with tactical air support; and employment of all these elements in large-scale double vertical envelopment. All these lessons were later applied in battle at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, among others, leading ultimately to Berlin. We will never know how well Zhukov would have performed, especially in the crucial autumn and winter of 1941 when the Red Army seemed to be disintegrating under the hammer blows of the blitzkrieg, if he had not had the experience at Nomonhan. Also, had he not distinguished himself at Nomonhan, would the relatively young and inexperienced Zhukov have been entrusted with the command of the Moscow front in 1941?

  Although Zhukov may have learned a great deal from his experiences that summer, his superiors in the Soviet High Command overlooked an important and obvious lesson of Nomonhan. Despite Zhukov’s success in employing large independent tank formations and tanks accompanied by mechanized infantry, the Soviet High Command, misapplying experiences from the Spanish Civil War, disbanded its armored divisions and seven mechanized corps and redistributed its tanks among the infantry divisions to serve as infantry support. Not until after it had absorbed the German demonstration of tank warfare in 1940 did the Soviet High Command begin to reconstitute its armored divisions and corps, a process that was still under way when the German invasion struck in 1941.1

  The Red Army’s show of strength at Nomonhan went almost totally unnoticed in the West. The military intelligence community and Western military establishments in general continued to believe that the Red Army was “rotten through and through.” This oversight was due, in part, to the remoteness of the battlefield. There were virtually no foreign military observers at Nomonhan. Also, both sides played down the incident. The Japanese sought to hush up their defeat. Stalin’s negotiating posture that summer with the Anglo-French team and with the Germans would have been weakened if it were apparent that he had a major fight on his hands with the Japanese. Western eyes, meanwhile, were riveted on the Polish crisis and then the outbreak of war in Europe. Nomonhan received scant attention. Then, just a few months after Nomonhan, the miserable performance of the Red Army against Finland, in a conflict much more accessible to Western observers, reconfirmed negative Western opinions of Soviet military capability. Few noted, as did the U.S. military attaché in Moscow, Colonel Raymond Faymonville, that the Soviets, expecting a quick and easy victory against little Finland, had initially relied upon hastily called-up reserve divisions ill equipped for winter fighting. The Red Army, said Faymonville, would be better judged by its performance at Nomonhan. Even in Washington, this assessment made little impression. After the Winter War in Finland, Hitler told his army chief of staff that the Red Army was “a paralytic on crutches.”2 Later that year, he ordered the Wehrmacht to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  In war, defeat is often a better teacher than victory. Defeat highlights error and weakness and spurs remedy. However, since the Nomonhan incident was a limited war, Japan’s defeat also was limited, as was its impact on authorities in Tokyo. Nomonhan did cause the Japanese to revise fundamentally their previous assessment of the Red Army and left the Japanese with a healthy respect for Soviet strength. Shortly after the Nomonhan incident, the Imperial Army abandoned its strategic Plan Eight-B as utterly unfeasible. Soon Kwantung Army adopted a defensive posture toward the Soviet Union.3

  Kwantung Army conducted an official inquiry into the causes of the debacle. The report, submitted on November 29, 1939, was an objective assessment of the Red Army’s superiority in materiel and in firepower and urged an intense Japanese effort to match and surpass the enemy in those categories. The new Kwantung Army leadership, which still faced the Red Army across a three-thousand-mile-long frontier, had been brought back in touch with military reality at least in this limited sense. Ironically, the Army Ministry and AGS, which had been so critical of Kwantung Army�
�s emotional and “unprofessional” conduct during the Nomonhan incident, were unable or unwilling to act on this recommendation. Despite the bitter lesson of Nomonhan, the army leadership continued the time-honored traditions, doctrines, and policies emphasizing the transcendence of spiritual over material factors.4 Two years later the army leadership, still clinging to its outmoded doctrine, would commit Japan to war against the United States, the world’s leading industrial and technological power.

  Furthermore, even after Nomonhan, the army leadership failed to exorcise the spirit of gekokujo, that tendency of local forces and middle-echelon staff officers to try to dominate central authorities. This type of self-righteous insubordination recurred time and again in the Japanese army up to the very moment of surrender in 1945. Nor did Tokyo succeed in cleaning house thoroughly after Nomonhan. While the top level of command in Kwantung Army was forced into retirement, the middle-echelon staff officers were not dealt with so harshly. The very Kwantung Army operations officers who played so central a role in the outbreak and expansion of the Nomonhan incident, after a brief “banishment,” returned like prodigal sons to key posts at Imperial General Headquarters, where they played a significant part in Japan’s decision for war in 1941.5

  Nomonhan and the Road to Pearl Harbor

  The defeat suffered by Kwantung Army at Nomonhan, together with the Stalin-Hitler pact and the outbreak of war in Europe, led to a reorientation of Japanese strategy and foreign policy. The new government headed by the politically inexperienced and unimaginative General Abe Nobuyuki conducted a cautious foreign policy. Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Chungking in western China led to a stalemate in which the Japanese Expeditionary Army might still enjoy military successes against the Chinese nationalist forces, but it had no means to bring the conflict to a satisfactory conclusion and no prospect for victory.

  The China War remained the principal focus of Japan’s energy and attention. However, the policy option of forcibly cutting off Soviet aid to China and of northward expansion into Outer Mongolia and Siberia was discredited in Tokyo by the double defeat in August 1939. The policy of northward expansion never again regained the ascendancy, although it was briefly revived in mid-1941 following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

  Germany’s alliance with the USSR during the Nomonhan incident was perceived in Tokyo as a betrayal and led to a cooling of German-Japanese relations. Japan also backed away from its confrontation with Great Britain over Tientsin. Tokyo recognized the outbreak of the European war as a momentous development that might also alter the East Asian situation, as the First World War had done. The short-lived Abe government (September–December 1939) and its successor, headed by Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa (December 1939–July 1940) adopted a cautious wait-and-see attitude toward the European war. That changed in the summer of 1940 after the German victories in the West.

  With Germany’s conquest of France and the Low Countries and with Britain fighting for its life, Tokyo reassessed the worldwide balance of power. Less than a year after Zhukov effectively barred the way to Japanese expansion northward, Hitler’s victories seemed to open the way to expansion toward the south. Not only were the resource-rich Dutch, French, and British colonies in Southeast Asia tempting targets in themselves, but they might provide a key to the China problem as well. Many Japanese leaders became persuaded that the stalemate in China finally might be broken in Southeast Asia. If the economic and military aid being funneled to Chiang by the Western democracies via Hong Kong, French Indochina, and Burma could be cut off, reasoned some in Tokyo, then perhaps Chiang would abandon his futile resistance. If not, new military operations could be launched against Chiang from Indochina and Burma, in effect turning China’s southern flank. To facilitate her southward advance, Japan took steps to improve relations with Germany and the USSR. Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke brought Japan into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in hopes of neutralizing the United States and concluded a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union to ensure calm in the north.

  Because of the European military situation, only the United States was in a position to check Japan’s southward expansion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared determined to do so and to be confident that he could. If the Manchurian incident and the Stimson Doctrine caused an estrangement in U.S.-Japanese relations, and the China War and U.S. aid to Chiang deepened the resentment on both sides, it was the Japanese decision to move south against the French, British, and Dutch colonies, and Roosevelt’s determination to prevent such a move, that put the two nations on a collision course.

  In July 1941 the Japanese army occupied southern Indochina. The Roosevelt administration responded by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and imposing an embargo on all oil and gasoline exports to Japan. Britain followed suit. Japan had virtually no domestic oil production; nearly 80 percent of its oil imports came from the United States. Virtually all major sources of oil accessible to Japan at that time were controlled by the Anglo-Americans and their friends and allies. Japan’s military leaders feared that, with their limited oil reserves, the embargo would force them to curtail military operations in less than a year. That was what Roosevelt and his advisers were counting on—that the embargo would compel Japan to halt its aggression in China. In Tokyo, however, that was intolerable. Japan’s military and political leaders alike would not be brought to their knees by the American oil embargo. And there was one major source of oil that was within their reach. The Dutch East Indies—modern day Indonesia—was a major oil producer. The Netherlands had already been conquered by Germany; only a weak Dutch force held the fort in the East Indies. But the Japanese believed that the United States would not acquiesce in their seizure of the Dutch East Indies. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, based in Hawaii, stood in the way. This was the underlying reason for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  America’s industrial strength dwarfed Japan’s in some estimates by a factor of 10:1. Imperial General Headquarters concluded that the only chance for success against the United States lay in a sudden attack that crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the outset. This would enable Japan to seize the resource-rich areas in the south, build a powerful defense perimeter, and then negotiate a settlement with Washington that would allow the Americans to defend their true vital interests—which were imperiled by Nazi domination of Europe. This was the reason for Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

  Because of the huge disparity between U.S. and Japanese military/industrial potential, and with the Japanese army stuck in a seemingly interminable war in China, Roosevelt and his advisers did not believe that Tokyo would be foolish enough to attack the United States. That, they felt, would be not only stupid, but suicidal. What they feared in Washington was a Japanese move against the vulnerable French, Dutch, and British possessions. Although the Japanese believed America would fight to prevent Japan from taking them, Roosevelt was not at all sure he could win U.S. public support and congressional approval for going to war with Japan to defend European colonial holdings in Asia. What Roosevelt dreaded in early December 1941 was further Japanese aggression in Southeast Asia. That is why America was surprised at Pearl Harbor.

  Japan’s decision to expand southward, as we have seen, was the result of many factors: the search for a solution to the stalemate in China, the quest for economic security (including, but not limited to, oil), Japan’s sense of “manifest destiny,” the desire to lead a pan-Asian expulsion of Caucasian imperialists, unbridled militarism, and army-navy rivalry. Another factor, often underestimated or ignored in Western assessments of the coming of the Pacific War, was the Nomonhan incident.

  Most Japanese studies agree that the lesson learned by Kwantung Army at Nomonhan made a deep impression and figured prominently in deflecting Japanese expansion from a northward to a southward course.6 After the impressive show of Soviet strength at Nomonhan, the south appeared to be the path of least resistance—even after factoring in the danger of war with the United States. It is not inevit
able that Japan’s military leaders would have made that assessment if there had been no showdown at Nomonhan, or if that confrontation had ended differently.

  This question is especially pertinent in the context of mid-1941, when the final decisions were made in Tokyo. By then, it was acknowledged by Japanese leaders that further expansion to the south probably meant war with the United States and Great Britain, a risky undertaking at best. Just then the whole question was thrown open again by Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. In three months German armies plunged more deeply into the heart of Russia than they had in three years from 1914 to 1917. Whole Soviet armies were being destroyed or captured en masse; more than a half-million Soviet troops were lost at Kiev alone. Ukraine lay open, Leningrad was besieged, and German armies were marching on Moscow. The Soviet regime appeared to be disintegrating under Nazi hammer blows. By early autumn, some Western military experts were predicting the collapse of Soviet military resistance within a matter of weeks.

  Again Japan’s leaders were compelled to choose between the northern and southern paths, between war with the Soviet Union and war with the United States. Which course held the greater promise, the lesser risk? Berlin urged Tokyo to change course and attack and seize the Soviet Far East—and to do it soon, while Germany still needed Japanese assistance. By implication, there might be less booty for Japan if the Soviet Union capitulated before Japan entered the fray.7 The provisions of the Tripartite Pact did not obligate Japan to join in the war against the USSR. The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941, of course, specifically ruled out such action. But the German blandishments and the German victories were seductive. On July 1 Joachim von Ribbentrop cabled Foreign Minister Matsuoka that “the impending collapse of Russia’s main military power and thereby presumably of the Bolshevik regime itself offers the Japanese the unique opportunity” to seize the Soviet Far East and keep going. “The goal of these operations,” said Ribbentrop, “should be to have the Japanese Army in its march to the west meet the Germany troops advancing to the east halfway even before the cold season sets in.”8