(July 1938 - December 1939)
Over the north country whose seas are
frozen
Spring wind blows across
It is time to beat Russia
Rampant for three hundred years.
Mora Ogai, Uta Nikki (Verse Diary)1904
Antecedents
The
Soviet-Japanese relations, officially established in 1925, were characterized
by a tense rivalry and deep suspicion almost throughout the entire 1930s. The
occupation of Northern Manchuria in 1932, which was traditionally regarded as a
territory within the Russian -afterwards Soviet- sphere of influence, brought
the USSR and Japan into direct neighborhood. The Japanese inspired Manchukuo
Empire had about 4,000 km long border with Soviet Union in the east and north,
and about 740 km long border with the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR) in the
west.
The Soviet
Union's position of "strict neutrality" taken during the 18-months
while the Kwantung army's influence was extended to northern, western Manchuria
and the Jehol province (March 1933) was dictated not by any Soviet agreement
with Japanese actions, but rather by the Soviet Union's external isolation and
internal situation, manifested in its relative military weakness in the Far
East. While strengthening the economic and military build-up in the Far East
under the second five-year plan started in 1932, the Soviet Union thought to
appease Japan by offering a non-aggression pact (December 1931). When this
proposal met with rejection from the Japanese side, the Soviet side embarked
upon the course of selling their last asset in Manchuria, the Chinese Eastern
Railway. The negotiations between the Soviet and Manchukuo representatives were
frequently interrupted and not until March 1935 was the purchase agreement
signed.
Just before the
signature of this agreement, the focal point of Soviet-Japanese tension had moved to the Manchukuo-MPR and
Manchukuo-Soviet border. Beginning from the Khalkhin-sume (January 1935)
incident border clashes became frequent along the Manchukuo-MPR frontier. The
three rounds of Manchouli conferences, called to examine Manchukuo-Mongolia
border issues including the Khalkhin-sume, were confronted by the completion of
the Soviet-Mongolian mutual assistance protocol as well as by the
Anti-Comintern Pact between Japan and Germany, and the Manchouli talks were
broken off.
The Kwantung Army’s determination to defend the outer frontier of
Manchukuo in 1938 was a continuation of two decades of Soviet probing and
provocations; and this was one of Japan's reasons to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact
with Germany in 1936. Reinforcements were sent to face the far eastern borders
of the USSR, and the Mongolian Peoples' Republic, since 1936 a client state of
the USSR. The Japanese Kwantung Army drew wrong conclusions from the easy
successes of its first border clashes of 1937. Communist troops were easily
swept from two small islands on the Amur River, on the border of Manchukuo.
Assessment of this easy victory concluded that the Red Army must have serious
logistical problems, related to the long distance between its eastern and
western blocs, despite the USSR's efforts to expand both its rail and road
links in the region, as a Kempeitai intelligence report to the Imperial General
Headquarters report indicates:
|
Despite the great efforts made to remedy the situation and the marked
progress that was achieved, the Soviet Far East still depended on European
Russia for such stable commodities as grain, oil, iron ore and steel.
Operations vary according to the state of locomotives, the degree of skill of
the railway engineers, the availability, in these vast expanses, of coal and
water, and other factors. |
Imperial headquarters’ mistake, and the Kwantung Army command's mistake,
was demonstrated in July 1938, in a hilly area on the eastern border of
Manchukuo, close to Korea, known as Changkuofeng.
The Cassus Belli:
The Changkuofeng Incident, or The Battle of Lake Khasan
The Khunchun
Treaty of 1886 defined the border between China and Russia in eastern
Manchuria, as the ridge tops of a series of mountains and hills near the
Pacific Ocean. Territory on the eastern slopes was Russian and the Chinese
possessed the western. The independence which Manchukuo gained
in 1932 brought about drastic changes in existing administrative boundaries,
thus giving rise to the issue of the border between Manchukuo and its
neighbors. Although talks for demarcation were begun at the time of the
Khalka-Miao Incident in 1935, the talks were fruitless and the actual
demarcation line was left unsettled. Manchukuo`s long undefined borders became a source of friction between the Japanese Empire
and the Soviet Union, and after the
defection of NKVD’s officer Genrikh Lyushkov, one of these clashes, the
Changkuofeng Incident, degenerated into the Soviet-Japanese War.
Tensions escalated along the Soviet-Manchukuo border when Soviet General
G. S. Lyushkov, a senior officer of the NKVD and the Soviet Frontier Forces,
suddenly defected to the Japanese in June 1938. Genrikh Samoelovich Lyushkov
soared into the Soviet firmament in 1937–38. A ruthless, loyal, experienced
Chekist hatchet man serving Stalin, Yagoda, and Yezhov, he became NKVD
Commissar for Siberia. His fortunes floundered thereafter, provoking recall.
Though he knowingly endangered family, friends, and colleagues, Lyushkov dared
to disobey, fleeing to Japan in June 1938. The reason for Lyushkov's defection
was clear to the Japanese government. He was on Stalin's purge list and he had
fled to the arms of the Japanese to escape the dictator's wrath. Lyushkov
brought with him detailed maps and data that identified all of the Soviet
military dispositions in Siberia. The defecting Russian, in a show of great
cooperation with the Japanese, pinpointed all defense positions maintained by
Russian troops along the Manchurian border, and discussed with the Japanese at
length the internal disorders of the Soviet Union and the ongoing Stalinist
purge.
The incident in question began on 11 July 1938, when units of the well equipped
OKDVA (Special Red Banner Eastern Army) under the instructions of the local
commander, Colonel Grebennik, began fortifying the eastern slopes of the
Changkufeng (Zaozernaya) and Shachaofeng (Bezymyannaya) hills. The Japanese
soon found that barbed wire had been placed by the Soviets on the western
slopes of the hills. They issued protest leaflets to the troops on the hills
and diplomatic protests to Moscow — all of which were ignored. On July 29 a
skirmish between reconnaissance units led to Lt Gen. Suetaka Kamezo’s 19th
Division seizing the two hills. Marshal Blyukher, commander of the OKDVA began
assembling forces for a counter-strike. A hasty divisional strength attack on
August 2 was repulsed by the Japanese. An attack by the 32nd Rifle Division north-east
of Lake Khasan and the 40th Rifle Division from the south-east, was ordered for
August 6. Russian forces heavily outnumbered Japanese forces in tanks and
aircraft: Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo immediately ordered to push
the Russians back across the Tumen river. For the mission the Kwangtung Army
selected forces extracted from the 10th, 28th and 29th Infantry Divisions, the
23rd Tank Regiment, the Botanko Artillery Regiment and the Kwangtung Air
Brigade. In addition to engagements by ground forces, there were several
encounters between units of the Red Air Force and air units of the Japanese
Army up to 1 August, when the Japanese forces returned to their original
station. The battle of Changkuofeng (sometimes called the Battle of Lake Khasan)
appeared to have come to a close.
Although it is not clear with what intention the Soviets fought the
Changkuofeng conflict, it is judged that, as in the case of previous incidents,
the Soviet action was a demonstration of force, in line with the policy of
using force to frustrate the least development of Japanese confidence in its
strength. It is clear that Japan had no reason to start the incident, being
deeply involved in the China Incident. Until today, is no clear why after the
incident, Stalin ordered the hastily attack against Manchukuo. Some evidence
points to the failure of Richard Sorge (German spy in Tokyo working for the
Soviets) to convince Stalin the unlikely of a Japanese attack against Siberia.
Other scholars had showed some evidence that points to the Soviet total lack of
confidence in the Mongolian capacity of defend itself in case of war against
Japan: its border with Manchukuo was obscure and there existed the possibility
of a border war. If Mongolia had fought against Japan alone and lost- it would
have left the Soviet Union with the awesome military might of Japan as it’s
threatening neighbor- something that Stalin wanted to avoid.
When in June 1938 Stalin decided that war with Japan was inevitable, the
Soviet War Ministry dispatched to the sector its ablest commander,
Lieutenant-General Georgi K. Zhukov, later a Marshal of the USSR and Stalin's
most renowned commander in the German war. Zhukov arrived that same
month to find that the Kwantung Army had secured some vital high ground and
quickly concluded his need for reinforcements. The Soviets commenced a massive
deployment effort which doubled the Soviet forces in the Far East. More than 40
infantry, tank and mechanized divisions plus artillery and combat support units
were transferred from the West to the Far East. This monumental effort required
maximum utilization of the Trans-Siberian railroad and 136,000 railroad car
loads to move these assault units to the Far Eastern border areas. During the
peak troop deployments in July, an average of 22-30 trains per day moved Soviet
units under strict secrecy. Surprise was the essential element in the Soviet
offensive plan.
The Soviets successfully deployed 30 divisions to western Manchuria
without Japanese awareness. Deception and surprise was achieved by heavy
reliance upon night movement, utilization of assembly areas far removed from
the border and simple but strict measures such as instructing senior Soviet
officers to not wear rank insignia and to use assumed names. This extraordinary
effort resulted in the Soviet Union's ability to field a very strong force that
gave them a 2.2:1 ratio advantage in men, 4.8:1 in artillery and tanks, and a
2:1 advantage in aircraft, without discovery by the Japanese at the start of
the war. But above all, his army was to show a marked superiority in
intelligence analysis, command, control and communication; and in the end those
abilities was the decisive factor in the war, allowing Zhukov¢s Manchurian Front forces to wipe the Japanese out of
Manchukuo in less than six months.
The Red Army's surprise assault began on 7 August 1938, with a thrust
across the border into western Manchukuo. Zhukov's blitzkrieg combination of armour,
artillery, air support, and infantry, along the Kwangtung Amy's whole front
with the main armored thrust going to the flank. As a result, Zhukov's force
was able to encircle the IJA 28th and 29th Infantry Divisions, and settle down
to a battle of annihilation, grinding both divisions by continuous assault,
while Soviet air fleet was equally successful due to their superior aerial
tactics. General Tojo Hideki, Kwantung Army commander, was now more than ready
for a cease-fire, and in Tokyo political leaders hoped that the Soviet
government would be content with a re-drawing of the disputed borders. But
Stalin had other plans.
The Campaign of Manchukuo
Without so much as a declaration of war, the
Soviet Union launched a large offensive against the Japanese Empire's forces in
Manchuria: Red Army elements from the Russian Far East Army Groups attacked in
two large columns with more than 14 divisions, including several armored
division armed with the T-26S and early models of the T-34. On 8 August,
supported by the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Red Army divided itself in two
invading forces: the Mongolian Force crossed the Mongolia-Manchukuo border and
emerged to threaten Harbin, while the Manchurian Force attacked across the
marshy valleys between the Wanda Mountains and the Amur river. General Tojo
immediately send a message to Tokyo requesting reinforcements and rallied his
forces (the 9th, 12th and 57th Infantry Divisions, the 1st Tank Brigade and the
7th Artillery Command of the Kwangtung Army; and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th,
7th Mix Brigades, 1st Cavarly Brigade, 2nd Cavarly Brigade, Jilin Guard Army,
and the 1st and 2nd Air Units of the Manchukuan Army) to meet the Soviet
onslaught. Simultaneously, the Karafuto Guard troops invaded and conquered the
northern half of Karafuto (Sakhalin) island.
Manchukuo's best weapon was foul weather.
Relentless rain limited Soviet air sorties and turned Manchukuo's few roads to
muck. Soviet tanks striking out of Mongolia managed with considerable
difficulty to cross rivers swollen by the seasonal downpours-only to run out of
fuel when their supply trucks became mired in the Manchurian plain. Whenever
the weather cleared, airdrops supplied the fuel the Red Army needed to drive on
to the Manchukuan cities.
Soviet troops (6th Tank Brigade, 8th
Armored Brigade, 57th Infantry Division, 82nd Infantry Division and 85th
Antiaircraft Brigade) first concentrated on securing a bridgehead across the
Amur, so that they could continue on unimpeded all the way to Harbin, the main
city in central Manchukuo and railroad hub. Several Japanese divisions lied
within the marshes, however, and, despite their inadequate equipment, resisted
fiercely, delaying the Soviets by several days before fighting became too
intense and the Japanese were forced to withdraw across to the opposite bank.
The Da Hingang Mountains and Nuomin river would prove the most inhospitable
obstacle to the Soviet advance, which shielded the city of Qiqihar along the
banks of the Nen. Here the Kwantung Army had deployed their elite divisions as
well as the bulk of their armor; ambushing Soviet infantry in the mountains and
cutting them off from their supplies. As the Soviets advanced on northern
Manchukuo, General Tojo concentrated on creating a series of anti-tank
positions to guard the access to Harbin.
By 30 August, the Russians deployed their
artillery regiments along the West bank of the Nen river and opened fire
against the Kwangtung Army. Soviet engineers continually tried to set up barges
and bridges to make it across the river, but these were consistently destroyed
by Japanese artillery shooting. On 14 September, the Imperial Japanese Army
27th , 35th and 110th Infantry Divisions and the 15th Tank Regiment abandoned
the city of Qiqihar and their excellent positions in western Manchukuo and
began retreating. After waiting two days to amass fuel and to ensure that the
Japanese were not setting up a trap, General Budenny, commander of the
Mongolian Force, finally ordered his men to pursue. He didn’t know that the
progress of the Manchurian Force had obligated the Japanese to withdraw to the
city of Harbin to avoid being trapped between the two Soviet Forces, superior
in every aspect to the Kwangtung Army. By 7 October, the two Soviet armies
joined to form the Soviet Combined Force of Manchuria and had pinned General Yamashita Tomoyuki's army in Harbin,
surrounding the city excepting a narrow way to the south. Stalin ordered to
bludgeon the city for further use of its railroad facilities: days became
weeks, and tens of thousands of refugees fled southward. But Yamashita held the
city against all odds, provoking the ire of his political rival General Tojo:
Yamashita was relieved of his command and sent to train colonial troops in
Taiwan. In 12 November, Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi took charge of the IJA
25th Army and of the defense of Harbin.
Soviet troops finally launched a major
offensive against the city on 18 November, with tens of thousands of infantry
leading the way under artillery cover. After several hours of house-to-house
combat the Soviets managed to use their superior numbers and equipment to gain
the advantage, clearing out most of the outskirts after heavy casualties. The
Kwangtung Army retreated to the center of the city, but by 24 November, the
Soviets hoisted the red flag over the City Palace, after the suicide of Field
Marshal Hisaichi.
Fearing that the Red Army would continue
its offensive, a column of reinforcements out of south central Manchukuo moved
to intercept the Soviets near Changchung, a major communication hub necessary
for the continued operation of the Soviet Army. By reinforcing this city with
the survivors of the disaster at Harbin the Imperial HQ had hoped to put a stop
to the Soviet advance: it was the turn of the respective air forces to act. The
greatest air battles yet seen were taking place, with formations of 150-200 war
planes deployed. Soviet anti-aircraft fire was highly effective and the
Japanese airforce barely held its own. Soviet supply lines, however, had been
strained to the breaking point, being that Irkutsk –their main railroad
connection- was over two thousand miles away; the Soviets were forced by
necessity to scale down the scope of their operations and instead limit
themselves to holding down the countryside near Harbin.
Massive Korean resistance that began on
October and continued throughout the country until the end of the war, however,
forced the Kwangtung to send precious units to quell rioters and fight
nationalist and communist partisans; this was other of the reasons that damaged
the Japanese war effort. The Kwantung Army and the Korea colonial
administration organized punitive actions against Korean and Chinese
irregulars, funded and armed by the Soviet Union. Those guerrillas found in the
Soviet Far East and Soviet occupied zones a haven where they could train and
escape after their skirmishes with Japanese and Manchurian troops. They avoided
fighting large battles, instead they channeled great efforts into Communist
indoctrination with the Korean peasantry and reconnoitering. They also sent a
great number of small units, groups and agitator to Korea and Manchukuo to make
preparations for a peasant uprising. The situation in Korea in those days was
threatening: the communist guerrillas of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army
performed some combat operations in northern Korea, and in their most
successful operation, they managed to destroy 22 Japanese planes and two
hangars, and sinking two oil-tankers and fishing boats.
Now in the middle of the horrendous
Manchurian winter, the Japanese IHQ launched a hopefully decisive counter
attack against its foes: several Imperial Japanese Army divisions advanced from
central-eastern China to southern Manchukuo. But unfortunately, general Zhukov
didn’t wait and launched a daring offensive against Changchung: Soviet forces
advanced without delay and, working with Communist Chinese partisans, the
Soviet armies launched an assault across the Japanese lines. While Tojo's
repeated counterattacks yielded several successes and a favorable casualty
rate, the Soviet were in fact gaining ground; they were moving in a good “tank
country”, and any Japanese attempt to stop them encountered stiff resistance.
However, Tojo was not so easily deterred. After careful strategic
consultations, Tojo decided that defending at any cost the city of Changchung
would be the next logical step in keeping the Soviets away from their
endangered Korean colony and the strategically invaluable Liaodong peninsula.
If major points of supply in central Manchuria could not be seized then the
Soviet would be logistically incapable of threatening southern Manchukuo except
by another massive offensive action, made impossible by the weather.
However, by early December, in spite of
staggering Soviet losses, the city of Changchung was in sight. The ensuing
battle was much more brutal than the Battle of Harbin, since the Japanese no
longer had strategically irrelevant land to trade for time. Tojo was forced to
rely on his infantry, and send several divisions into a frontal assault, which
was met by the Soviet troops with their deadly armor. In the ensuing fight, the
Kwangtung Army were revealed to be totally outmatched in both firepower and
quality of armor, and the Soviets inflicted devastating casualties, slicing the
IJA to pieces; and forcing Tojo to call
a retreat to the south.
The winter forced a ceasefire the rest of
December, time that was harnessed by the Japanese government to try to reach an
accord with the Soviet Union. They offered an immediate armistice, and ceding
to the Soviet all the territory they claimed in Manchukuo. However, the Soviet Union Foreign Affairs Commissioner V.
Molotov, informed the Japanese Ambassador Togo that theirs was not an
aggressive war, instead it was a “liberation war” in behalf of the “workers and
peasants” of Manchuria. The reason for the decision: Hitler was now
increasingly threatening to engage France, not Poland, from the European side.
So the Soviet Union decided not lose the opportunity to battle in the Far East,
and expel definitely Japan from the continent.
An special envoy sent to Moscow by the Emperor himself, offered to grant
the Soviet with the entirety of the Manchukuan territory they captured as the
price to stop the current war with Japan. Nonetheless, some documents point to
the increasing independence of the Kwangtung Army command, which had a
disastrous and profound influence on the events leading to the continuation of
the war, deciding which orders to obey despite the Emperor's wish not to
continue the war with the Soviets. It appears that they couldn’t affront the
combination of: the failure of the archaic Japanese tactical and operational
doctrine; their incapacity to learn the more fundamental tactical and
operational lessons of modern war in the climactic disaster in Manchukuo; and
their complete dependence upon "spirit" or courage as a counterweight
to modern firepower. Given such chaos and such a determined and well-organized
foe as Stalin's army, the "blind gallantry" of the ordinary Japanese
soldier could not prevail. Having been swept back almost to Korea with heavy
casualties, the Imperial Japanese Army forced the continuation of the war,
interfering with the negotiations in Tokyo.
From
the Soviet side, Stalin was kept in touch with Japanese deliberations by his
masterspy Richard Sorge, and thus the Soviet Army, better prepared for a winter
war, continued their advance. Zhukov, under Stalin’s orders, didn’t directed
his forces to the South, to Mukden and Dalian; instead, they advanced to Korea,
in order to “liberate” this country too, and dispel any Japanese possibility to
menace the Soviet supremacy over Manchuria in the future. Their armored forces
routed the Kwangtung Army, that was forced to retreat to the mountainous Korean
border with Manchukuo. This terrain wasn’t the appropriate for tank
maneuvering, and the Soviet were forced to relay in their heavy artillery. But
no amount of artillery could dislodge the Japanese from their ferociously
defended entrenchments, and when January came, the Soviets were forced to
abandon plans for a hasty entry into Korea, and content themselves with having
conquered Korea's border highlands.
Meanwhile in Manchuria, the Soviets installed a puppet regimen under the Chinese
communist Wang Man, and they took home everything they could move. They
dismantled steel mills and other industrial plants and used the 16,000 cars and
2,000 locomotives of the confiscated Manchurian railroad to ship their booty to
the Soviet Union. They also captured more than 600,000 military and civilian
Japanese prisoners-most of whom disappeared behind the Soviet border, never to
return home again.
After the negotiations with Moscow failed, due to the interference of
the Kwangtung Army’s staff, the Red Army launched a bold attack across the Yalu
river against the IJA positions in Korea. Red Army forces numbered in excess of
37 divisions of infantry (including 5 armored divisions). The IJA, which had
been bolstered in late months by the IHQ, was well prepared for the engagement,
and consisted of 20 divisions of infantry, several modern tanks and the
well-defended strategic crossing of Dandong. Also, more Japanese troops were
extracted from the Chinese interior, then transported across the Yellow Sea
from Tsingtao on the Shantung Peninsula to Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula,
where they were mustered to combat the Soviet forces in the Manchurian-Korean
border (these forces were transported to Korea later in the year). In the early
days of February, the Soviets launched an attack across the Yalu, seeking to
take the Dandong pass. Artillery and bombs rained down upon the Kwantung Army
defenders for weeks, and the the Soviets finally launched an assault against
the fortress, putting up pontoon bridges across the thawing snow-laden Yalu and
surging across with its armored forces.
Although the tenacious Kwantung Army resistance was cut down in the face
of the Soviet lead armored forces, soon more experienced battalions joined the
fray, veterans of campaigns in China. Heavy casualties in both sides ensued as
the Soviets succeeded in seizing the beaches on the East bank of the Yalu
towards the north of Dandong, just beyond the range of the Kwantung Army’s
heavy artillery. On February 14, the Soviets attacked along the whole line,
stretching over several dozen miles: they attempted to exploit their breach to
the north, pin-wheeling around the Japanese and cutting them off from behind,
thus obligating them to either concede the pass or accept being surrounded. At
Dandong, resistance against the Soviets continued, although the IHQ ordered a
withdrawal of the northern divisions to secondary defensive lines along the
Taedong river, just outside Pyongyang; the retreat had started.
By March, the
main force of the Kwantung Army fortified the Taedong river,
setting up fieldworks and emplacing camouflaged artillery, while becoming engaged by numerous Korean partisan units, who sabotaged
Japanese logistical lines and laid ambushes. In April, twenty-five Soviet
divisions were positioned just to the north of Pyongyang; General Zhukov wasted
no time in preparing another attack on the Japanese's main lines, and followed
through with another assault preceded by an aerial bombardment. The Kwangtung
Army was reinforced by more forces extracted from China, by now numerous enough
to barely garrison the coastal Chinese cities.
Six fortified complexes guarded the
Taedong river and all approaches to Pyongyang. The Red Army launched a huge
attack across the length of the Taedong, mixing their infantry and armored
forces with aerial attacks and hoping to turn the tide of the war through their
sheer numbers. Japanese artillery blasted huge holes into the Soviet line,
slicing through the massed Soviet infantry. The Japanese defenders’ discipline
and bravery weren’t easily overwhelmed by Soviet sheer numerical advantage;
this moment was chosen by the Imperial Government to offer another deal to
Stalin: the surrender of southern Manchukuo to the Soviets in exchange of northern
Korea. Unfortunately, while Stalin was still considering the offer, an
increasingly desperate and scared General Zukhov threw ten of his 43 division
into battle, intending to use them as cannon fodder to run the Japanese out of
munitions or at least soften the Japanese defense to the point that Soviet
mechanized troops could exploit the momentary weakness: this strategy paid off,
and the wary Kwangtung Army found itself at the breaking point.
Lieutenant-General Yoshitsugu Saito, humiliated but determined to rescue what
he could, orchestrated in 2 June a retreat across the Taedong, fighting his way
with immense effort out of the Soviet's grip.
The Soviet wasted no time, and when the
railroad between Changchung and Pyongyang was repaired, in the last days of
July they launched a renewed offensive across the roiling Keijo river in
central Korea, where the IJA had entrenched in depth in and around the Korean
capital of Keijo (today Seoul). As in last year, the Soviet commanders opened
the campaign with first an aerial bombardment and then a frontal armored
assault against the city, but the Kwangtung Army held firm and repulsed the
Soviets repeatedly. But when a large force of Soviet tanks led by a division of
the new T-34/74A slammed into the Japanese lines, the result was the loss of
the Kwangtung Army’s artillery emplacements, and by the end of the month most
of the Kwangtung Army divisions had been forced to retreat to southern Korea.
The Keijo garrison was left behind, without any hope of relieving, just to slow
down the Soviet invasion.
By August 1939, the Red Army continued its
inexorable advance across Korea, laying siege to the important industrial city
of Taiden (today Taejon), which was surrounded by an important industrial zone.
The Soviets were outnumbered as they approached, but they had high morale and
were well supplied. Despite being outnumbered, the Soviet determined to attack,
approaching the Japanese right flank, cutting off the Kwangtung Army defenders
from their supplies. The siege lasted four weeks, during which time the rainy
season started, pouring water onto the two armies. Rather than wait under poor
conditions in the field, Zhukov ordered an assault against Taiden on September
9, and as the soldiers of the Soviet Army surged over their positions,
accompanied by armored brigades, whole divisions of Kwangtung Army troops
simply performed suicidal attacks against their enemies.
The fighting became even more bloody as
the Red and Imperial Armies soldiers clashed in the inner city: Lieutenant-General
Saito Masatoshi desperately tried to hold his crumbling forces intact, but the
Soviet commanders soon determined that the Japanese ranks had been devastated
by repeated outbreaks of cholera and typhus, brought on by the weather and the
unburied dead. After six days of fighting, Lieutenant-General Saito finally
surrendered, turning himself in to General Zhukov. The Kwangtung Army, the
pride of the Imperial Japanese Army and protector of the imperial possessions
in northeast Asia, was destroyed; the standard was burned personally by Zhukov.
A week passed as the Japanese prisoners were forced to reconstruct the railroad
to Keijo, and when that was finished, General Zhukov struck south, intending on
seizing the city of Fusan (today Pusan), the last possible Imperial foothold in
Korea.
After the fall of Taiden, the Japanese
government ordered the approximately 220,000 Japanese residents of the Liaotung
peninsula to evacuate Manchurian territory and embark in Dalian to Shanghai or
Kagoshima, while the military personnel, concentrated in the peninsula for a
counteroffensive which never materialized, was transferred to southern Korea to
help in the defense of Fusan. In this point the Japanese government proposed a
new plan to Stalin, this time they proposed to divide Korea all along the 35
parallel, thus keeping a Korean buffer between Japan and the Communist.
However, the recent events in Europe, the most important the German invasion of
Poland, made Stalin extremely nervous and he wished nothing but end the war
against Japan for good.
After a grueling march, in 15 October the
Soviet forces finally approached Taikyu (today Taegu), the nominal capital of
Korea and also a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants. The Soviet army
found itself confronted by a significantly numerically superior Japanese force
armed with the new Chi-nu tank: after a brief consultation with his advisors,
General Zhukov ordered his army to fortify and wait for reinforcements. The
casualty estimates in engaging such a large force in a brutal street battle
inside a city were too high for Zhukov's liking. Split between literally
obeying his orders and following competent military reason, Zhukov ordered his
forces to commence a five kilometer withdrawal to bring them out of the range
of Japanese artillery. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant-General Sakai Naoji,
considering keeping of their city more important than the most likely suicidal
pursuit of the enemy, held back.
But in 20 October Stalin ordered to
commence an immediate attack and take in the city. Unbeknownst to the Soviet
soldiers, though, the Japanese had reinforced Korea with troops coming from
China and southern Manchukuo. On 23 October, General Zhukov ordered a full
scale assault. With armor in the lead supported by a heavy aerial and artillery
bombardment and even cavalry pulling in the flanks, the Japanese were forced to
withdraw into the confines of their city to protect against the vicious
firepower of the enemy. The Soviet pursued them and soon were caught up in brutal
street fighting., then they managed to break the defenses of the city's
periphery, but after that were thrown back in a rout as the Japanese infantry,
outnumbering the entire Soviet force by nearly three to one, smashed through
their enemy's lines with extreme success, forcing an stalemate. However, when
in the first weeks of November, the railroad between Taikyu and Keijo was able
to transport enough fresh troops and materiel, and the Soviet armies continued
their attacks against the city, renewing their efforts with powerful
reinforcements out of Siberia. They continued their attack throughout the
entire month, which time the Soviets suffered heavy casualties, but they were
able to take the city in 2 December; the Soviet treated the POW as they did in
Taiden, and then continued advancing toward Fusan (today Pusan).
By now any coherence in the IJA was lost:
without concerted logistical support and replacement units the Japanese
resistance had no real hope of success - it was merely meant to inflict a maximum
of damage to the enemy, while trying to keep control of the rebellious Korean
population and evacuate Japanese civilians to the Imperial homeland. But the
situation in Japan was not static: in the last days of August, the IJN
orchestrated a coup d¢etat against the Army leaders in Tokyo,
negotiated with the Kuomingtang party the withdrawal of Japanese forces in China, and after realizing that Korea was irremediably
lost, negotiated, first with Stalin, and after he refused, directly with
Zhukov, the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Korea. Zhukov, in spite of
personal risk, accepted to ignore the Japanese until 15 December, if not for
humanity, at least for his incapacity to bring enough troops to siege Fusan.
This time was used by the IJN to transfer most of the military units still
deployed in Korea and thousands of Japanese civilians to Japan. By 15 December
Zhukov renewed his advance against Fusan, and in 29 December, he took Fusan
almost without resistance, thus ending the Soviet-Japanese War.
Usually the historians overlook the naval side on the war, mostly due to
its brevity. In the first weeks of the conflict, the Imperial Japanese Navy
attacked Soviet naval bases all along the Siberian coast, while the IJN air
forces launch a devastator attack over the Soviet Pacific fleet in Vladivostok.
Although the original plan included a naval assisted amphibious assault on
Vladivostok, the city itself was never attacked. This was a carrier operation
and therefore the Soviet units was proven no match for the IJN: the
technological, doctrinal and numerical advantage was decisively in favor of
Japan, with all of the major Japanese warships fast and very heavily armed, and
a powerful and efficient naval air service that included ten modern carriers,
with 3,000 aircraft and 3500 pilots, as well as deadly efficient bomber and
torpedo-carrying squadrons based on land. Even when some Soviet units escaped
to the Okhotsk Sea, they where hunted and sunken in the next few weeks.
After destroying the Soviet fleet, the Special Naval Landing Forces launched an
amphibious operation against Nikolaievsk, a Soviet port in the mouth of the
Amur river, and then the IJN deported 100.000 Soviet citizens that colonized
northern Karafuto since the previous Russo-Japanese War, transporting them to
that port. After the war, Japan kept the northern half of the island as war
booty, and this action has eschewed the possibility of a peace treaty between
the two nations.
* * *
Despite its brevity, the war between
the Japanese Empire and the Soviet Union had enormous geopolitical consequences
that affected the whole world. Japan was expulsed from continental Asia, and
its influential place was taken by the Soviet Union. The
communist guerrillas in northern China and Korea took the place of the Manchukuan
government and the Japanese colonial administration. Since then this countries
have been under Communist tyrannies, that has manage to keep them isolated and
impoverished.
In
January 1939 Japan had an army of 51 active divisions and 133 air squadrons: a
well trained, well-armed modern army of over 1 million men, backed by 2 million
trained reservists. By the end of the war, there wasn’t an army or an air force
to speak of. Before the war, Japan had a colonial empire in northeast Asia, at
the end of the war Taiwan was its only remaining colony. The ferocity of the fight and the
lost of its colonies caused the economic ruin of Japan, and it took the
emergency measures of the Imperial Rule Committee and an entire decade
to stabilize it. But the hardships of those years popularized socialist and
communist organizations in Japan, and the I.R.C. was forced to enact the Great Reform, in order to avoid a communist
revolution that would have turned Japan in another Soviet client state.
Japan acquired during the war the
northern half of Karafuto, claimed until 1996 by the Soviet Union; and the
islands of Matsushima, Takeshima and Saishu, until today claimed by Korea. These
border disputes and memories of the war had kept relations between Japan and
her communist neighbors hostile.
Also, the Japanese orientation
towards Northeast Asia was finished, and forced Japan to take a more pragmatic
stance towards Taiwan and its Pacific Mandates. The former
became an independent republic in 1960, and the latter became the Nan-yo Gunto Special Prefecture. Japan
turned its attention to the South, where oil, rice and rubber could be found,
and this interest culminated with the Merdeka War and the independence of
Indonesia.
The defeat of Japan leave the way
open to communist expansionism in China, but fortunately the Soviet-German War, won enough time to China
to boost its defenses with British and Japanese help. This coincidence of
interest convinced Tokyo and London to form an alliance in 1944, that with some
minor modification continued until 1971.
Japanese advanced weapons research
was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long
riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was unable to
close the technological gap with the Soviet Union. When the I.R.C. took over
the government, saw the necessity of develop weapon system and technologies
that could serve to deter the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., both with industrial and
technological level still unsurpassed by Japan. The small area and lack of
resources of the Imperial Homeland has convinced all the post war governments
of the impossibility to surpass them in the “total output” field, and
therefore, had funded the military industries with the expectative to surpass
–or at least equal- its foes in the technological field. This concentration in
technology allowed Japan to gain an indisputable economic advantage over its Asian
neighbors, and today is the most influential Asian country in the world stage.
One positive consequence that wasn’t
evident until almost twenty years after the war was the transformation of the
dysfunctional Imperial Army of the 1930s, into a promising nationalist army, as
it was in the late nineteenth century under Yamagata. The army split into
cliques and factions returned to be a unified army again. Another positive
consequence was the elimination of the machinations of the various factions in
Tokyo who often seemed to have followed completely contradictory strategies.
Today, the military institutions serves as an unified
force under civil control.
* * *
In recent years, the confidence of the Japanese in the future and in
their own strength has grew, principally by the demise of the Soviet Union and
the spreading Japanese influence in the world stage. This feeling has
popularized the historical period of the Soviet-Japanese War, and many people
had wondered what would happen if Japan had prevailed, combining its might with
the German war machine. The most common opinion is that Japan might have carved
itself a thinly populated and easily defensible empire in the north of the
Asian mainland. Such an empire might have included Siberia, Mongolia, Turkestan
and as much of north China as the Japanese armies were able to digest. No European colonies would have been touched,
the Pacific and South East Asia would not have become a hotbed of international
tensions, and the U.S. would have had no reason to interfere in Japanese
affairs, as they do today.
