Battle of Halhin Gol
The Battle of Halhin Gol, sometimes spelled Khalkhin Gol and alternately known as the Nomonhan Incident in Japan, was the decisive engagement of the undeclared war between the Soviet Union and Japan in 1939. The battle convinced the Japanese high command that war with the Soviet Union would be futile, and hence decisively swung opinion from the strike north faction to the strike south, who argued that Japan should capture the Pacific islands and southeast Asia. This set the stage for the attack against Pearl Harbor, two and a half years later. It was also the first victory won by the famed Soviet general Georgy Zhukov.At this time Manchuria was a client state of Japan, known as Manchukuo. The Japanese maintained that the border between the two states was the Halha River (also known in Russian as the Halhin Gol, or the Khalkhin Gol), while the Mongolians and their Russian allies maintained that it ran some 16 kilometres/10 miles east of the river, just east of Nomonhan village.
The incident began on 11 May 1939 when a Mongolian cavalry unit of some 70-90 men entered the disputed area in search of grazing for their horses, and encountered Manchukuoan cavalry who drove them out of the disputed territory. Two days later the Mongolian force returned and the Manchukoans were unable to evict them.
At this point the Japanese Guandong Army became involved -- a reconnaissance unit under Lt. Col. Azuma Yaozo was sent to engage the Mongolians on 14 May, but they retreated west of the river with few losses. Joseph Stalin ordered STAVKA, the Red Army's high command, to develop a plan for a counterstrike against the Japanese. To lead the attack, Zhukov, a young officer of promise who had escaped Stalin's disastrous purges of a few years earlier, was chosen.
The Mongolians and Soviets continued to build up forces in the area, and the Azuma force returned a week later. This time the Japanese forces were surrounded by superior numbers of Soviet and Mongolian infantry and tanks, and over 28-29 May the Azuma force was destroyed, suffering 8 officers and 97 men killed and one officer and 33 men wounded, for a total of 63% casualties. Despite this bloody defeat, the Guangdong Army was inclined to treat the engagement as a draw, and the area as not being worth the expenditure of any more Japanese blood.
Throughout June, however, there were continuing reports of Soviet and Mongolian activity on both sides of the river near Nomonhan, and small-scale attacks on isolated Manchukoan units. At the end of the month the local Guandong Army commander, Lt. General Komatsubara, was given permission to "expel the invaders". The Japanese operation started on 1 July and was initially successful in crossing the Halha river. However, by the evening of 3 July the attack stalled and the Soviet forces, led by Zhukov, threw the Japanese back over the river. The front then stabilized with only minor actions for the summer.
Finally, in mid-August, Zhukov decided it was time to break the stalemate. He deployed approximately 50,000 Russian and Mongolian troops of the 57th Special Corps to defend the east bank of the Halhin Gol River, then crossed the river on August 20 to attack the elite Japanese with three infantry divisions (70,000 men in all), massed artillery, a tank brigade, and the best planes of the Red Air Force.
Japanese doctrine at the time was for front-line troops to hold their positions with high rates of fire, and await relief actions from the rear. While very successful against the lightly armed Chinese forces, the Soviet tanks turned the tables on them entirely, and the front lines were cut off. Two complete divisions were surrounded while the other forces were scattered. On August 27, the Japanese attempted to break out of the encirclement, but failed. When the surrounded forces refused to surrender, Zhukov wiped them out with artillery and air attacks. The battle ended August 31 with the complete destruction of the Japanese forces.
Following the battle, the Red Army attacked what remained of the Japanese forces and drove them back into Manchukuo. On September 16, the Japanese asked for a cease-fire and later signed a treaty in which they agreed to abide by the existing border.
Of the 30,000 troops on the Japanese side, 8440 were killed and 8766 wounded. The Red Army committed 57,000 infantry, 498 tanks, and 346 armoured cars to the battle, and claimed total losses (killed and wounded) of 9284 men. After the collapse of Soviet Union documents about the battle changed the numbers considerably, the actual number of losses in the battle was 23,926, of whom 6,831 killed, 1,143 reported missing, 15,952 wounded. While the Red Army did win the battle, it was not a one sided battle as previously believed.
Although this engagement is little-known in the West, it was to have profound implications for the future conduct of the Second World War. The incident convinced the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo that the policy of the "strike north" faction (which wanted to seize Siberia as far as Lake Baikal, for its resources) was untenable as the Red Army was too strong; instead the "strike south" faction which wanted to seize the resources of South East Asia and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) gained the ascendancy, and the policy was put into effect, leading directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The Russians' masterspy Richard Sorge was able to alert the Soviet government to this change of policy, which allowed the Red Army to transfer 45 divisions from the Far East to the defence of Moscow in the winter of 1941-42 and turn the tide of the war in Europe.
External link
Combined Arms Research Library (U.S. Army) paper on the battle, analyses the struggle in great detail.