Nomonhan, 1939

A four-month long war between Great Powers of which you have never heard

A couple of years ago, in a dinner conversation with a Japanese friend, I mentioned that I have never understood the logic of Japan’s attack on the United States. If anything, I thought, it was easier, and perhaps more profitable, for Japan to attack the Soviet Union, as James Burnham and many others expected in the late 1941. My Japanese friend directed me to the book “Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army Victory that Shaped World War II” written by American military historian Stuart D. Goldman (and published by the US Naval Institute).

The book tells the story of two important battles fought in 1938 and 1939 between Imperial Japan (the Kwantung Army which controlled Manchukuo) and the Soviet Union. The two battles are known under the names of principal localities where they were fought: Changkufeng and Nomonhan (Khalkhin Gol in Mongolian), both on the border between Manchukuo, the Japanese-ruled Manchuria, and Mongolia, then in a military and political alliance with the USSR. Three chapters are dedicated to the military analysis of the battles and to the politico-military decision-making, studied over the years by Goldman mostly from the Japanese Imperial Army Headquarters’ archives, memoires of key protagonists, and to a lesser extent from Moscow’s military archives.

In both conflicts, the issue was, technically, the difference in the interpretation of the border demarcation by the Japanese and Soviet sides. But in reality, in both cases, it was just a pretext. The reasons were mutual political incompatibility, suspicion, and “prodding” of the other side to check the power of the antagonist.

Both conflicts began with an attack by the Japanese army of Kwantung, acting largely on its own. Goldman discusses the Japanese tradition of “righteous military insubordination” {gekokujo, “the rule from below”) for which Kwantung Army was famous and which often placed the Imperial Army Headquarters and Japanese government before a fait accompli. In both conflicts, the Soviets won. Nomonhan battle was not a small affair: it lasted four months (May-August 1939), and caused between thirty and fifty thousand casualties (killed and wounded) about equally distributed between Japan and the USSR/Mongolia. (The total however does not include the drafted Chinese, that is, Manchurian soldiers, whose death Japanese “forgot” to count.)

The important part of Goldman’s book is not the description of the military proceedings (although some war buffs might like that part), but political reinterpretation of World War II alliances due in part to the outcome of the two battles. There are two key reinterpretations.

First: Soviet strategy in Europe—the alliance with the Anglo-French or with the Nazi Germany—cannot be looked at within the European context only. The Soviet Union faced two enemies at two ends of the country: Nazi Germany with whom it shared no border, and Japan, with whom it did. Both were ideological enemies, and geostrategic competitors. So what happened in the East influenced what happened in the West, most notably Stalin’s decision to sign the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939.

The second point concerns Japan’s decision to attack the US: the reason my friend suggested to read the book in the first place.

Point No. 1. As we know, Stalin was simultaneously negotiating with Britain and France, and Germany. The standard explanation is that the Western powers, on the one hand, and the USSR, on the other, each looked at the ways to direct German onslaught against the other side. Stalin, by signing the pact with Hitler, shifted German attack against the Western powers, avoided the war with Germany in 1939, took parts of Eastern Europe in the deal, and thus in a strategic sense made the right decision. Goldman agrees with this assessment but adds the Asian component. Members of the anti-Comintern pact (Germany, Japan and Italy) had different objectives in mind. Japan wanted Germany to commit to war against the USSR if Japan was at war with her. But Hitler was less interested (in 1939) to such a war and hence unwilling to commit. Thus, Goldman argues, had Stalin gone with the Western powers, there would be nothing to stop Hittler promising to help Japan—since the Soviet Union would be, by that alliance, already engaged against Germany. But, by siding with Germany, Stalin weakened the links between Japan and Germany, and thus no longer had to fear war, not only in the West (the standard explanation), but also in the East as Japan would not attack without a guarantee of German support (Goldman’s addition).

Perhaps it is best to cite Goldman:

Logic dictates that if Stalin had opted for an antifascist alliance with the Western democracies, he would have run a high risk of a war against Germany. Even if a major Soviet-German war did not erupt, the Red Army would have to be concentrated in the West. That would have driven Germany into an alliance with Japan and might have encouraged Japanese to press home an attack against the vulnerable Soviet Eastern flank. The danger of a two-front war had to be avoided.” (p. 160)

This, of course, is all discussed from the point of view of August 1939. The calculation was upended in June 1941, but was not proven entirely wrong: Japan never attacked the USSR.

Instead, it attacked the United States. Here we come to Goldman geopolitics Point No. 2. The two Japanese defeats in limited conflicts with the USSR resulted in greater appreciation by Japan’s military of the strength of the Red Army (of which the Army Headquarters had initially a very low opinion), lesser political importance of Kwantung (“insubordinate”) military contingent that was also the most gung-ho against the “Russians”, and increased focus on conquering Chuna and defeating Chaing Kai-shek. This in turn, according to Goldman, meant that Japan had to “go South” rather that North. It implied conquest of European colonies run by the countries that were already defeated by Germany (French Indochina and Dutch Indonesia) or were engaged in a death struggle with the Nazis and incapable of defending their Asian possessions (Britain). In a momentous decision, Japan attacked southern Indonesia. It provoked US oil embargo that was bound to cripple Japanese war machine in a matter of months. And that, in turn, made a further attack and control of oil fields of Indonesia and the attack on the US appear reasonable.

Goldman places the little-known conflict between Japan and the USSR as one of the key pieces in the puzzle that the two regimes had to “solve” in 1939-41. It made Stalin’s agreement with Hitler even more attractive, and it fatefully directed Japanese conquest South. Perhaps that Goldman makes, at times, too strong a case for the importune of the Nomonhan war, but the conflict surely deserves much more that the oblivion into which it seems to have been consigned by political historians. Especially so now when the war in Europe is directly connected to geopolitics in Asia. Perhaps one should not have been surprised when several days ago, Chinese foreign minister explicitly linked the outcome of the war in Ukraine to the situation in East Asia.