NOTES
Introduction
1. Tsuji’s border principles were promulgated as Kwantung Army Operations Order 1488 on April 25, 1939, Japan Defense Agency, Defense Institute, Military History Office, Kanto Gun, I, Tai So Sen Bi: Nomonhan Jiken (Kwantung Army, Vol. I, War Preparations Against the U.S.S.R.: The Nomonhan Incident) (Tokyo: Asa Gumo, Shinbun Sha, 1969), 441 (hereafter cited as JDA, Kanto Gun); Tsuji Masanobu, Nomonhan (Tokyo: Ato Shobo, 1950), 46–47. The full text of Order 1488 in English can be found in U.S. Department of the Army, Forces in the Far East, Japanese Special Studies on Manchuria, XI, Pt. 1, 99–102 (hereafter cited as JSSM).
2. Nihon Kokusai Seiji Gakkai, Taiheiyo Senso, and Genin Kenkyububu, Taiheiyo Senso e no Michi (Road to the Pacific War), vol. IV, Nicchu Senso II (Sino-Japanese War, Part 2), by Hata Ikuhiko, Usui Katsumi, and Tomoyoshi Hirai (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Sha, 1963), 80, 96 (hereafter cited as Hata, Taiheiyo Senso e no Michi).
3. Ibid., 97.
4. Stuart D. Goldman, Soviet-Japanese Conflict and the Outbreak of the Second World War (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 1970).
5. Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki. 1939 god, vol. 22, 2 vols. (Documents on Foreign Policy) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia, 1992) (hereafter cited as DVP).
6. L. Il’ichev et al., eds., God Krizisa 1938–1939 (Year of Crisis, 1938–1939), dokumenty i materialy v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Izd-vo polit. Lit., 1990)(hereafter sited as God Krizisa).
7. A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 God Dokumenty (The Year 1941: Documents) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond Demokratiya, 1998), 2 vols.
8. Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985); and Edward J. Drea, Nomonhan, Japanese-Soviet Tactical Combat, 1939 (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1981).
9. Two Russian writers living abroad have written of this link. Aleksandr M. Nekrich in Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922–1941, ed. and trans. by Gregory L. Freeze (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 113, after emigrating to the United States, offered this brief passage: “The Japanese Army launched a full-scale attack… . Given Japan’s alliance with Germany, the Soviet Union suddenly faced the frightening prospect of fighting a two-front war… . This danger exerted a strong influence on thinking in the Kremlin, especially as tensions over Danzig mounted during the summer of 1939.” Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer and prolific writer living in England, is outspoken in his denunciation of the nonaggression pact and also has a good deal to say about Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol, but his interpretation of the link between these events is off the mark. See especially Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008).
10. See for example, A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961); Sidney Aster, 1939: The Making of the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973); Gerhard Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Geoffrey Roberts, The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Andrew J. Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997); Victor Rothwell, The Origins of the Second World War (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001); Robert Boyce and Joseph A. Maiolo, eds., The Origins of World War Two (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003).
11. P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London: Longman, 1986), 199, contains this sentence: “In 1939, the prospect of a war on two fronts, against Japan in the Far East (where battle was already joined) and Germany in Europe, was certainly unwelcome; and the influence of this simple calculation on the making of the Nazi-Soviet pact should not be underrated.” Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War, 1933–1941 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 133, offers this: “The talks with the Germans that shadowed the negotiations with Britain and France in the late spring and summer of 1939 were guided in no small measure by the lingering concern to outflank the Japanese diplomatically.” A Swiss historian little known in the English-speaking world, Walter Hofer, in his Die Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkrieges (The Outbreak of the Second World War) (Frankfurt, FRG: Fischer, 1960), 82ff., saw the Nomonhan incident as contributing to the Soviet decision for the Nonaggression Pact.
12. Most people outside of Japan and Russia, that is. The Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol conflict is better known in those two countries, although its broader significance is generally overlooked there as well.
Chapter 1: The Legacy of the Past
1. See James W. Morley, The Japanese Thrust into Siberia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957).
2. Japanese companies owned and operated coal mines and oil fields on Northern (Soviet) Sakhalin. These economic concessions were considered significant in Tokyo because of Japan’s lack of mineral resources. Japan’s fishing rights in Russian waters were written into the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth and the annual catch from those waters contributed significantly to the diet of Japan’s rapidly growing population. For a survey of these negotiations, see George A. Lensen, Japanese Recognition of the U.S.S.R.: Soviet-Japanese Relations, 1921–1930 (Tallahassee, Fla.: Diplomatic Press, 1970).
3. The CER was a legacy of Tsarist economic imperialism, which “cut-the-corner” of the Trans-Siberian Railway route by connecting Chita with Vladivostok diagonally across Manchuria.
4. George A. Lensen, The Damned Inheritance: The Soviet Union and the Manchurian Crises, 1924–1935 (Tallahassee, Fla.: Diplomatic Press, 1974).
5. From a speech at the First All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry, February 4, 1931, printed in Pravda, February 5, 1931.
6. Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960), 172.
7. Hugh Borton, Japan’s Modern Century (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), 359.
8. Storry, Modern Japan, 174.
9. Until Japan adopted universal manhood suffrage in 1925, only 5 percent of the male population could vote.
10. Richard Storry, The Double Patriots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 4.
11. Yoshihashi Takehiko, Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 78.
12. Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942). Besides Hamaguchi, Premiers Inukai Tsuyoshii (1932) and Takahashi Korekiyo (1936) were assassinated, as were a number of other cabinet officers and other senior government officials. Even some generals and admirals who dared oppose the ultranationalists were cut down.
13. Fujiwara Akira, “The Role of the Japanese Army,” trans. by Shumpei Okamoto, in Dorothy Borg and Okamoto Shumpei, eds., Pearl Harbor as History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 194.
14. Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 212–13. Moscow rid itself of this embarrassment and potential source of conflict by selling the CER to Japan in 1936.
15. Hata Ikuhiko, Reality and Illusion, The Hidden Crisis Between Japan and the U.S.S.R., 1932–1934 (New York: East Asian Institute of Columbia University, 1967), 3–4.
16. USSR Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki (Documents on Foreign Policy) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1957–), XV (hereafter cited as DVP).
17. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1933 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), III (hereafter cited as FRUS).
18. James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy, National Security, and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 184, 204–5.
&nbs
p; 19. Cited in Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 383.
20. Godfrey E. P. Hertslet, Treaties, Conventions, Etc., Between China and Foreign States, 3rd edition (London: Harrison & Sons, for His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908), I, 27.
21. Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo: 1946–48), 23,006–9 (hereafter cited as IMTFE); Clark Tinch, “Quasi-War Between Japan and the U.S.S.R.,” World Politics 3 (January 1951): 176–77.
22. JSSM, X, 32.
23. Figures for Soviet forces are based on Japanese military intelligence estimates, JSSM, XIII, 32; and Haslam, The Threat from the East, 28. Figures for Japanese forces are from Coox, Nomonhan, 84.
24. For example, the Trans-Siberian Railway bridge at Iman was only four kilometers from Japanese artillery at the border near Hutou. JSSM, XIII, 25.
Chapter 2: The Global Context
1. One notable exception was the Red Army’s illicit cooperation with Weimar Germany’s Versailles-limited army. Soviet Russia also had a nominal ally in the Mongolian People’s Republic, but few others recognized the MPR as an independent state until after the Second World War.
2. The Comintern was established by delegates from thirty-four mostly embryonic Communist parties meeting in Moscow in March 1919. Its avowed goal was to “fight by all available means to overthrow the international bourgeoisie,” spark proletarian revolution, and work for the triumph of socialism and, eventually, communism.
3. The Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, which joined the Comintern in 1924, was also a ruling party. At first, Lenin and Trotsky ran Comintern proceedings themselves, while Grigory Zinoviev, a member of the CPSU’s ruling Politburo, chaired the Comintern Executive Committee. After Lenin’s death in 1924, leadership of the Comintern was caught up in the larger succession struggle. In 1934 Stalin appointed the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov to head the Comintern, a position he held until Stalin dissolved the organization in 1943 as a gesture of friendship to his wartime capitalist allies.
4. Dennis W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870–1939, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), II, 651–58.
5. This interpretation closely follows the analysis of Soviet foreign policy in Adam Ulam’s Expansion and Coexistence (New York: Praeger, 1968).
6. This was a concession to the canny French premier, Pierre Laval. Jane Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951–53) III, 132.
7. VII (Seventh) Congress of the Communist International, Abridged Stenographic Report of Proceedings (in English) (Moscow: 1939), 244.
8. Ibid., 592.
9. World News and Views, April 29, 1939, 488; May 27, 1939, 628.
10. The most extreme formulation of this thesis is in Suvorov’s The Chief Culprit.
11. VII Congress of the Communist International, 240.
12. Ibid., 593.
13. Ibid., 291; International Press Correspondence (London, 1920–1938), October 1935, 1, 489 (hereafter cited as Inprecor).
14. Charles B. McLane, Soviet Policy and the Chinese Communists, 1931–1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 51–60ff.
15. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, 243n.
16. Ibid., 217.
17. The CCP had actually “declared war” on Japan as early as 1932, although at that time the communists’ main base of operations was a thousand miles south of Manchuria.
18. McLane, Soviet Policy and the Chinese Communists, 79–82.
19. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937), III, 827–28 (cited hereafter as FRUS).
20. John Erickson, The Soviet High Command (London: Macmillan, 1962), 449–509.
21. Coox, Nomonhan, 85.
22. Harriet L. Moore, Soviet Far Eastern Policy, 1931–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945), 81–82; Hidaka Noburo, ed., Manchukuo-Soviet Border Issues (Harbin: Manchuria Daily News, 1938); U.S. State Department Archives, Henderson in Moscow to Secretary of State, July 3, 1937, ser. no. 761.94/973.
23. U.S. State Department Archives, U.S. Consul in Harbin, Manchukuo, Walter A. Adams to Secretary of State, July 6, 1937, ser. no. 893.00 P.R. Harbin/104; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III, 242–43; JSSM, XI, Part 1, 65–67; Coox, Nomonhan, 105.
24. Hata, Taiheiyo Senso e no Michi, 80.
25. Ibid., 80.
26. Ibid., 81; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III, 242–43.
27. Tsuji, Nomanhan, 36.
28. These vessels displaced only 25 tons; their main armament was heavy machine guns.
29. JDA, Kanto Gun, 335.
30. Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III, 243.
31. Ibid., 244–45; Erickson, The Soviet High Command, 468; Coox, Nomonhan, 111.
32. U.S. State Department Archives, U.S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in Moscow to Secretary of State, June 30, 1937, ser. no. 761.9415/1.
33. The Japanese were well aware of the strategic significance of Heihsiatzu Island, and Kwantung Army undertook a serious study of the feasibility of claiming the island. Colonel (then Captain) Nishihara was assigned to conduct monthly reconnaissance of the area, which he did through 1938, disguised as a Manchukuoan border policeman. He found the Soviet defensive positions on the island to be very strong and advised against contesting its ownership. Interview with Nishihara (see note 29, above). This same principle was at issue in the Sino-Soviet battle over Damansky/Chenpao Island in the Ussuri River, which brought the two to the brink of war in March 1969.
34. Haslam, The Threat from the East, 92.
35. Coox, Nomonhan, 119.
36. FRUS, 1937, III, 928; Erickson, The Soviet High Command, 468.
37. U.S. State Department Archives, Loy W. Henderson in Moscow to Secretary of State, September 2, 1937, ser. no. 761.94.983.
38. FRUS, 1937, III, 635–36.
39. Erickson, The Soviet High Command, 490.
40. Conversation described by Sun Fo to Ambassador Bullitt, FRUS, 1938, III, 165.
41. JSSM, XI, Part 3, 193.
42. In 1938 the Soviet Army in the East, commanded by the illustrious Marshal Vasily Blyukher, was given the distinctive name Red Banner Far Eastern Army.
43. Haslam, The Threat from the East, 94.
44. World News and Views, June 26, 1939, 719–20.
45. Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Series D, 13 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949–64), I, 733 (hereafter cited as DGFP).
46. Japanese Foreign Ministry archives, cited in Leonid N. Kutakov, Japanese Foreign Policy on the Eve of the Pacific War, trans. and ed. by George A. Lensen (Tallahassee, Fla.: Diplomatic Press, 1972), 9.
47. Bradford Lee, Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1939 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973), 12.
48. The term “Western democracies” is used here primarily to denote Britain, France, and the United States but also includes the Netherlands, Canada, and others to which the label is appropriate and had significant interests in East Asia.
49. Lee, Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 142.
50. Ibid., 107–8.
51. Ibid., 87, 109.
52. Ibid., 80.
53. August 7, 1937, reported by Anthony Eden in his Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, vol. I, Facing the Dictators, 1923–1938 (London: Cassell, 1962), 456.
54. Lee, Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 106–7.
55. Pierre Laval, as foreign minister, negotiated the Franco-Soviet treaty. Its conclusion in May 1935 helped propel him into the premiership in June.
56. Cited in Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 447.
57. The French General Staff gave this as part of their rationale for postponing the joint staff consultations without which the Franco-Soviet defense pact would remain barren. Keith Eubank, The Origins of World War II (New York: Crowell, 1969), 42.
58. Kutakov, Japanese Foreign
Policy, 1.
59. German Naval Archives, Kr1672/42 geh, U.S. National Archives and Record Service, microfilm reel no. T-79-E.
60. For an account of Soviet policy based on previously secret Soviet documents, see Hugh Ragsdale, The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
61. For example, Sidney Aster, a respected Canadian scholar and no Soviet apologist, concluded, “As long as secret intelligence indicated that Hitler’s next move would be eastwards, it was considered best in London and Paris to ignore the Soviets, and to leave Hitler to deal with them as he saw fit.” Aster, 1939, 153.
62. Here is an example of that rhetoric from June 1938: “The independence of the French nation is seriously threatened by Fascism… . The best guarantee of this independence would be the strengthening of the bonds between France and the Soviet Union… . The Soviet Union can guarantee its national independence. But it would not dream of isolating itself.” Inprecor, June 25, 1938, 763.
63. World News and Views, April 22, 1939, 453.
64. For a convenient summary, see James E. McSherry, Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The Origins of World War II, 1933–1939 (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1968), 99–128.
65. World News and Views, October 29, December 31, 1938; January 7, February 4, March 11, 1939.
66. Ibid., December 3, 1938, 1,235; February 4, 1939, 42.
67. Ibid., April 2, 1938, 402.
68. Letter from Chamberlain to his sister, cited in Aster, 1939, 154–45.
69. DGFP, V, 104–7.
70. Stalin was aware of the German pressure on Poland thanks to a Soviet agent in the German embassy in Warsaw. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 533.
71. Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III, 312.
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