Sorge generally took a loftily cavalier, officer-class attitude to the ring’s finances. Of much greater concern to him was the growing possibility of a German–Japanese military alliance of far greater scope than the existing, vaguely worded Anti-Comintern Pact. Berlin’s interest in such an alliance was obvious – the possibility of a Soviet attack on Germany would be greatly reduced if Japan were committed to retaliate against Russia’s eastern flank.
Tokyo’s interests were not so clear. The Japanese Army had its eye on conquering not only large swathes of China but also the Soviet Far East. Its most vigorous officers – including the members of the ultra-nationalist Cherry Society, the prime force behind the Manchurian incident and led by War Minister Seishiro Itagaki – applauded Hitler’s expansionism and sympathised with his glorification of the nation, his anti-communism and his contempt for an old world order dominated by the victors of the First World War. Hitler had just humiliated the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, by arrogantly ignoring the assurances they had signed at Munich the previous October in the wake of Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland and annexing the whole of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939. The Japanese Army’s Action Group yearned to do the same in Asia.
Japan’s Imperial Navy had similar expansionist ambitions, but different targets. Japan’s admirals dreamed of dominating the islands’ maritime neighbours, from the Philippines to Malaya and beyond to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies – modern-day Indonesia. Their two main obstacles were the British Royal Navy, operating a force far more powerful than Japan’s from the apparently impregnable base of Singapore, and the US Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Japan’s influential navy minister, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, was adamantly opposed to any alliance that would commit Japan to follow Hitler on to the war path against Britain, France, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union – all while the draining and apparently endless war in China continued. Yonai argued that Japan was heavily dependent on the Dutch, British and Americans for raw materials, meaning that an all-out war would quickly suffocate the Japanese economy. The Japanese Navy preferred to conduct their expansion, if possible, with US and British acquiescence.23
This fundamental clash between the army and navy’s differing visions of empire would dominate Japan’s foreign policy for years – and would only be finally decided on 7 December 1941 with the navy’s dramatic surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet over the German alliance, the battle-lines between Japan’s army and navy were less clear-cut. Even the navy recognised that Germany was Japan’s closest ally in the world, while the USSR was its most likely antagonist. In Tokyo the newly appointed Ambassador Ott did his best to persuade Japan’s civilian government and the navy to sign a closer alliance with Berlin – even though his friend Sorge argued forcefully that Japan would never agree to become Hitler’s puppet in Asia with no advantage to itself.
Over months of negotiations, led in Berlin by General Oshima – the former military attaché who had masterminded the Anti-Comintern Pact, now promoted to Japanese ambassador to Germany – the Japanese Army’s position appeared to have gained the upper hand. The final document, signed on 22 May 1939, was grandiosely dubbed ‘the Pact of Steel’, and committed Germany, Italy and Japan to retaliate against any country which attacked them. Public celebrations were held in Berlin and Tokyo, with crossed Nazi and Japanese flags hung across the streets. At Papa Keitel’s Das Rheingold, a special party was held in honour of the new pact, the bar decorated with swastika flags and the rising sun of Nippon.
In reality, however, Hitler was unsatisfied. After all Japan’s prevar-ications, he did not believe that the Japanese would make truly reliable allies against the Russians. As Hitler would tell his generals later in the year, ‘the Emperor [Hirohito] is the companion piece of the latter Czars. Weak, cowardly, irresolute, he may fall before a revolution. My association with Japan was never popular … Let us think of ourselves as masters and consider these people at best as lacquered half-monkeys, who need to feel the lash.’24 Hitler’s displeasure with the Pact of Steel had set the stage for another alliance, altogether surprising and conducted in complete secrecy, with Stalin himself.
*
There was another reason for Hitler’s disinclination to rely on Tokyo as an effective bulwark against Russia. Japanese troops were once again fighting the Soviets around a barren stretch of the Soviet–Mongolian border – and losing. The ‘Nomonhan incident’, known in Russia as the Battle of Khankin Gol, was a bizarre little conflict that was to have profound consequences for the eventual outcome of the Second World War.
It began on 11 May 1939, when a detachment of cavalry from the pro-Soviet Mongolian People’s Republic numbering between thirty and ninety horsemen entered an area claimed by Japan. They were driven back by a force of Kwangtung Army cavalry. Two days later the Mongolians returned in greater numbers. But this time they were backed by Soviet troops, sent under the terms of a 1936 mutual assistance pact between the Moscow and Ulaanbataar which stipulated that Russian troops could defend their neighbour from aggression – effectively extending the USSR’s defensive border to the southern and eastern edge of Mongolia. The joint Mongolian–Soviet force routed the reconnaissance regiment of the Kwangtung Army’s 23rd Infantry Division sent to repel them, killing 102 men of the Japanese-led force.
From this small beginning, the incident quickly escalated as both the Soviets and the Japanese poured troops and aircraft into the desolate region. By June 1939 the Kwangtung Army had deployed some 30,000 men, while the Soviet Far Eastern Command mobilised its most able young commander, Komkor (Lieutenant-General) Georgy Zhukov, with a force of motorised infantry. The two sides faced off over a mosquito-infested area of quicksands and ravines that surrounded the Khankin-Gol river.
What makes the story of Nomonhan especially curious is that after the previous year’s humiliation at Changkufeng, the Japanese imperial high command strongly opposed fighting another war against the USSR. In the first weeks of the incident Tokyo was in the final stages of the delicate negotiations of its Pact of Steel with the Nazis. And it was clear to the Japanese General Staff in Tokyo that the Kwangtung Army lacked the resources to fight the far more powerful Soviet Army. A year had passed since Lyushkov’s defection, and the Soviet operational and political weaknesses that the defecting general had gleefully revealed had almost certainly been patched up. From the outset of the conflict the generals in Tokyo knew that a war against the Soviets while most of the Japanese Army were heavily engaged in China could only end in a humiliating defeat.
The Nomonhan incident was, in effect, a freelance war begun ‘single-handedly’ (in the words of a subordinate) by the local Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Michitaro Komatsubara. At the outset Komatsubara greatly exaggerated the numbers of Mongol cavalry who had originally crossed the border (he claimed a force of 700), and he personally ordered forces mobilised from Hailar ‘in order to liquidate these enemy forces with all our might’ without the approval of the Kwangtung Army headquarters, let alone the imperial high command.25 Even more bizarrely, Komatsubara’s 23rd Division was not trained as an offensive force. The unit had recently been formed for purposes of border defence and military reconnaissance. Both Komatsubara and his chief of staff, Colonel Ouchi Tsutomu, had spent most of their careers as Japanese intelligence officers. In other words, in combat terms Komatsubara’s division was the Kwangtung Army’s weakest link.
The high command in Tokyo, presented with a war they did not want and could not win, faced the impossible task of trying to keep the conflict as localised as possible while avoiding a catastrophic defeat. The result was a series of bizarre manoeuvres where Japanese successes were deliberately not pushed home for fear of escalating the conflict. On 27 June, for instance, the Japanese Army Air Force’s 2nd Air Brigade struck the Soviet air base at Tamsak-Bulak in Mongolia, scoring a significant victory. But Tokyo promptly ordered the JAAF not to conduct any more air strikes against Soviet airbases.26
In Tokyo,
Sorge tried to make sense of Japan’s convoluted war aims. Colonel Gerhard Matzky, the new German military attaché who had replaced Scholl, told him that his contacts in the Japanese General Staff were being evasive – but he had the impression that the Japanese would go as far as they dared without bringing the whole weight of the Soviet Union down on the Kwangtung Army.27 Ozaki brought the reassuring news from the Breakfast Group that the Japanese government was ‘adopting a policy of solving the problem locally and not expanding it. It does not have any intention of daring an overall war with Russia. Also the general public does not want to have a war with Russia.’28 Miyagi also brought news from his informants, Corporal Koshiro and the aircraft-parts manufacturer Shinotsuka, that while aircraft and tanks were being dispatched to Nomonhan there were no plans for a larger mobilisation of troops from the Japanese home islands.
The Soviets had no such qualms about escalation – thanks to Sorge’s information about the Japanese high command’s fears over widening the war. Zhukov mobilised the Soviet Union’s best tanks and planes for an all-out offensive at Nomonhan. His force included twenty-one crack pilots, every one a Hero of the Soviet Union, who soon gave the Russians air supremacy. Zhukov also assembled a fleet of 2,600 trucks to supply his troops from the nearest railhead at Chita, 748 kilometres away. Branko Vukelić, who visited the front line at Nomonhan as one of a group of foreign journalists taken on a tour by the Japanese Army, reported to Sorge that the Russian Army was performing much better than was being reported in the Japanese newspapers, that the Russians had more heavy guns than the Japanese, and that he saw ‘very many trucks moving behind’ the Soviet lines.29
A Japanese breakthrough around the Bain-Tsagan mountain from 3–5 July was fought to a standstill when Zhukov organised a lightning-fast counterstrike of 450 tanks and armoured cars. Komatsubara ordered another offensive in August, despite knowing that his division was not ready for a major assault. The result was a massacre. By the time Zhukov pressed home his victory at the end of August, nearly 12,000 of the Kwangtung Army’s 23rd Division’s 15,000 men had been killed or wounded, a casualty rate of 80 per cent. Komatsubara’s decision to launch the premature offensive was ‘the worst in history’, according to his subordinate Major Ogi Hiroshi.30
Was Komatsubara simply incompetent – or had the whole Nomonhan incident in fact been orchestrated by Soviet intelligence? There is intriguing – though not conclusive – evidence that Komatsubara could have been a Soviet agent. He had spent much of his early career in Russia, beginning with a year in St Petersburg learning Russian in 1909, returning in 1919 to Moscow as assistant military attaché, and again from 1927–30 as chief military attaché to the Japanese embassy.31 Komatsubara was much given to ‘drinking, debauchery, and profiteering’, according to the Soviet counter-intelligence official who was shadowing him in Moscow when interviewed by Soviet historians in 1983.32 According to this source, the OGPU secret police launched a honeytrap operation to compromise Komatsubara, sending a beautiful female agent to seduce the attaché during a trip to Estonia in 1927.33 Back in Moscow, Komatsubara and another colleague from the embassy got so drunk with this mistress that he lost the keys to the safe in his room – or, more likely, they were stolen by the OGPU’s wily female operative. Komatsubara was ‘ready to agree to anything’ in order to prevent his misbehaviour from being reported to Tokyo.34
The story is plausible, not least because several Japanese diplomats fell victim to similar OGPU honeytrap operations during the same period. Komatsubara’s fellow attaché, Captain Kisaburo Koyanagi of the Japanese Navy, was seduced by the attractive Russian language teacher assigned to him by the Soviet diplomatic service agency. On 3 February 1929, according to the Soviet newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, Koyanagi was hosting one of his allegedly regular sex orgies in his apartment at 44 Novinsky Boulevard. The party ended up in a brawl during which Koyanagi supposedly wounded his pretty teacher with a table knife and then chased her down the corridor where he threw a table and dishes at her.35 Soon after the publication of the article – presumably after Koyanagi’s refusal to bow to OGPU blackmail – the unfortunate attaché committed ritual suicide in his office at the embassy by slashing his own stomach.
What is clear is that after 1927 wherever Komatsubara was posted a stream of misinformation to Tokyo – and leaks to Soviet intelligence – followed. Komatsubara was head of the Japanese special mission in Harbin from 1932–34. The Russian Army’s central archive in Podolsk has detailed information on Japan, China and Manchukuo coinciding exactly with Komatsubara’s posting in Harbin – but very little before or after. In 1933, confidential Japanese telegrams appeared in Moscow exposing Japan’s intention to seize the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Union. And secret material from an unnamed agent includes a chilling presentation given in Harbin in August 1932 by the head of the Russian Department of Tokyo’s General Staff Headquarters on the importance of biological warfare as a potential weapon against the USSR. The report was so alarming that it was personally read by Marshal Tukhachevsky and Stalin.
Komatsubara may very well have been put ‘on the hook’, as Soviet intelligence jargon has it, in Moscow and passed information from Harbin. However, what is lacking in the espionage case against Komatsubara as a Soviet proxy at Nomonhan is any paper trail in the Soviet archives suggesting that he had any controller or direct contact with Soviet intelligence during his time as commander of the 23rd Division in Manchuria. Nor is there any evidence of any Kremlin discussions about provoking a Japanese attack. It is intriguing to speculate that the Nomonhan incident was a brainchild of Stalin’s and effected by a senior agent in the Japanese Army. A short victorious war, provoked by Japan and won decisively by the USSR, was precisely what Stalin needed to cauterise Japanese ambitions to invade the Soviet Union. But the case, for the time being, remains unproven.36
The now-forgotten war at Nomonhan was to have profound repercussions. The battle won Georgy Zhukov the first (of four) decorations as Hero of the Soviet Union. The Soviets lost some 9,703 killed and missing at Nomonhan – but gained valuable lessons in the concentrated use of airpower against enemy armour.37 The battle experience of the units which fought the Japanese would be put to good use when Stalin mobilised these Siberian troops in the crucial defence of Moscow in November 1941. And Zhukov himself would use the tactics he had honed at Nomonhan – holding the enemy fixed in the centre, building up an undetected mass force in the immediate rear area, and then launching a pincer attack on the wings to trap the enemy – to surround the German 6th Army at the Battle of Stalingrad.38
More important was the effect the engagement had in Tokyo. The humiliation of the Kwangtung Army strengthened the hand of the ‘South Strike’ Group – led by the navy – who argued for Japan to attack its Asian neighbours and leave the USSR alone. The Japanese reluctance to risk another trouncing at the hands of the Red Army would become a major factor in the outcome of the coming world war.
14
Ribbentrop–Molotov
‘There are only three great statesmen in the world: Stalin, myself, and Mussolini’1
Adolf Hitler
On 24 August 1939 news came across the wire that took Sorge, the German embassy and the Japanese government by complete surprise: Hitler had concluded a non-aggression pact with his arch-enemy Stalin. The talks between the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his newly appointed Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov had been held in absolutely secrecy. The Nazi–Soviet pact came as a shock even to Ambassador Ott. To Sorge – and for communists around the world – Stalin’s decision to do a deal with the devil was a profound and inexplicable betrayal.
It had been clear since spring of that year that a major European war, and probably a world war, was imminent. But exactly who the full cast of combatants would be remained an open question, and would remain so until the end of 1941. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, in violation of the Munich Agreement, he stood revealed as an aggressor and a liar. On 31
March, Neville Chamberlain pledged to support Poland in the event of an invasion. Britain and France also began urgent talks with Stalin to secure the USSR’s support against Hitler. At the same time the Nationalist Japanese press began clamouring for a full military alliance with Germany against Britain, France and the USSR. Which side would Stalin choose?
The idea that the Soviet Union would choose an alliance with fascism rather than stand alongside the Western democracies seemed inconceivable to devoted communists around the world. Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of the USA, scoffed just months before the pact that there was ‘as much chance of [a Nazi–Soviet] agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the Chamber of Commerce’.2
And yet the advantages of an alliance for both Hitler and Stalin were clear. Hitler needed to cover his eastern border in order to leave his armies free to conquer Western Europe. Hitler had once hoped that the Pact of Steel with Japan, threatening Russia’s own Far Eastern provinces, would be enough to keep Stalin in check. But the Japanese failure at Nomonhan convinced Hitler that more direct measures were needed to keep Russia out of the war – namely, a direct deal with his counterpart in the Kremlin. ‘I have decided to go with Stalin,’ Hitler told his generals on 22 August. ‘On the whole, there are only three great statesmen in the world: Stalin, myself, and Mussolini.’3
An Impeccable Spy Page 26
