Chapter CXVI: In the Land of the Black Dragon
Chapter CXVI: In the Land of the Black Dragon
There are two things to bear in mind when considering the Soviet-Japanese border conflict; firstly it was never a purely Soviet-Japanese conflict and secondly it was never really about the actual border. On that basis you could argue the name is somewhat inaccurate, however as we will see the conflict’s complexity did not lend itself to a simpler name. For all the issues with its name its effects would eventually reverberate around the world and, on a much less important point, would provide historians with an excellent example of a self-fulfilling defence scare.
We begin in the not especially auspicious Mongolian People’s Republic, at the time home of the only nation outside of Russia to manage a successful Communist revolution (as opposed to an attempted revolution that merely got all the conspirators killed, which was the best result everyone else had managed). This remarkable achievement was perhaps less due to the determination of the Mongolian proletariat and more to do with a fairly large Corps of Red Army troops. In theory this shared history and the common bond of successful revolution should have made the Soviet Union a valuable ally of Mongolia, in practice the Soviet leadership mainly saw the country as a convenient buffer state and source of troops and resources, that is when they thought of the country at all. The early attempts at Soviet inspired ‘reform’ did not go well in Mongolia, the enforced collectivisation of the late 1920s managed to kill a third of the livestock in the country and anger the population to such an extent the country’s Buddhist lamas were able to launch a popular uprising that took almost two years to suppress. With this background it should be not a surprise that the Soviets other great plan for the country, it's place as a defensive buffer, was treated very warily by Mongolia. After the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria it became more important than ever to Moscow that Mongolia 'co-operate' on the issue of defence, in practice this meant raising a large army (to be placed under Soviet control), allowing Soviet troops to be stationed in the country and generally doing what it was told. To support this effort the Soviets decided to prove that Japan, and their new puppet Manchuria, were indeed a significant threat to Mongolia and, hopefully, getting the policy implemented without another vast uprising. This was not because Stalin was bothered about the policy being unpopular of course, it was that as Mongolia wasn't a populous country to start with there wee concerns that too many revolts and purges wouldn't leave enough Mongolians left to serve in the hoped for army. Thus the 'proof' of the border threat was to be obtained by Soviet agents provoking the border incidents and then blaming it all on Japan, this had the added advantage that the number of incidents could be increased as and when required.
Mongolian Prime Minister Peljidiin Genden. Genden had rapidly risen through the ranks of the Mongolian People’s Party and when, in the aftermath of the popular uprising, most of the upper reaches of the Mongolian government were purged, he was one of the few survivors. With the favour of Stalin he became Prime Minister, but then promptly devoted his efforts to ignoring Stalin, and indeed Soviet policy in general, instead he tried to forge an independent Mongolia, free of all outside influences. As one would expect this was not popular in Moscow and things did not end well for Genden.
By 1936 the Soviets had their ‘Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation’ and Prime Minister Genden had been replaced by a far more pliable leader. Ironically he was not replaced due to his intransigence on signing the treaties but for something far more blatant; publicly insulting Stalin during a diplomatic reception, snatching Stalin's pipe out of his mouth and then smashing it on the ground in front of him. Naturally he was arrested shortly after his return to Mongolia, imprisoned and within the year was dead along with his entire faction, a victim of the Mongolia's third bloody purge in less than four years. With the treaties, and troops, in place the Soviets pulled back their provocatives and waited for the border to calm down. However while the border raids had been staged for Mongolia’s benefit the Japanese army had not been content to merely passively observe; even after the Soviets had stopped initiating incidents the number of border clashes continued to rise. It soon became apparent that Moscow was in fact involved in the very thing they had cynically ‘warned’ Mongolia about – a border war.
Now we come to the truly complicated part of the matter, the involvement (or otherwise) of the Japanese. At the most literal level much of the previous clashes hadn’t been with Japan but with Manchukuo, indeed the provoking troops had generally been Mongolia so the Mongolia-Manchukuo border war was probably a more accurate name for the early stages of the conflict. However, despite its far grander title, the Great Empire of Manchuria was on a much tighter leash than Mongolia and precious little happened in the country without Japanese knowledge and approval. Here again though there must be a qualification, while Manchukuo was a good puppet the puppet masters were far less loyal; just because the local commanders of the Kwantung Army (the Japanese army in Manchuria) knew what was happening was no guarantee that Tokyo did. The question therefore is not why the Japanese government continued, and indeed escalated, the border conflict but why the Kwantung Army did so.
Broadly speaking there were three reasons the conflict escalated; honour, ambition and belief. Honour was the most widely quoted but probably the least important, however there were undoubtedly many junior officers who believed that as the Soviets had attacked a Japanese ‘ally’ and killed IJA ‘advisers’ in the process that their honour demanded they strike back. IJA politics explains the second reason; for the ambitious officer the route to promotion lay through reporting a string of armed clashes (provided of course they ended in Japan’s favour) not the successful maintenance of a quiet and secure border. The final reason was the most interesting, many officers, starting from the Kwantung Army’s commander-in-chief General Kenkichi Ueda downwards, believed a border clash with the Soviet Union was a desirable objective in and off itself. As firm believers in the doctrine of hokushin-ron (Strike North) they were certain that the Soviet Union was the greatest threat facing Japan and thus the clashes were a valuable way to test the strength of the Soviets before the conflict they believed was inevitable.
The Type 96 Light Machine Gun, the Soviet-Japanese border clash would see its first use in combat. For all it’s other interesting features there is one thing that jumps out at most people looking at the Type 96 for the first time; the bayonet fitting. The bayonet was a standard fitting, it was trained with and it did end up being used in combat, though that was as much due to the guns quite woeful reliability as the gunners burning desire to bayonet charge with almost 10kg of gun. Surprisingly for a gun that had ‘borrowed’ so many elements from elsewhere (the fact it looks like a hybrid of a French Hotchkiss and a Czech ZB vz.26 is absolutely no coincidence) the gun’s Achilles heel was entirely home grown – a terrible tendency to jam, a fault that had plagued the Type 96’s predecessor, the Type 11. The Type 96 was intended to fix this defect, however as the actual problem was not actually a designer problem (poor tolerance control in manufacture) the ‘solution’ was to add an oil feeding mechanism to keep the rounds well oiled and so less prone to jamming. It was soon apparent why no-one had previously thought of this innovative design solution – it didn’t work. In fact by making the rounds sticky with oil it made matters far worse, dirt and debris stuck to the rounds and got jammed into the mechanisms of the gun. All this made the Type 96 even less reliable than its predecessor, hence the number of gunners forced into using the bayonet attachment in anger.
With the background established it is now clear why, in early June 1937, Japan and the Soviet Union fought a very large battle over an obscure and unimportant plot of land in the wilds of North Manchuria. The site in question was the area around the Kanchazu Island, a large sand bank that lay on the Amur River in the very north eastern tip of Manchuria. The island and its surrounding neighbours were not important in themselves, however being astride the river they offered the chance to control the flow of river traffic on the Amur. Of course the traffic on that part of the Amur was light and of no real importance to anyone, nevertheless the Island was plausibly important and that was sufficient to provoke a conflict over. Officially the Japanese casus belli for the incident was Soviet misinterpretation of the border, the Amur River marked the Soviet-Manchurian border in the region and Kanchazu lay right in the middle of the river. Specifically the border was not in accordance with those laid down in the Convention of Peking, the relevant portions of which had been signed in 1860 between two powers that no longer technically existed (Imperial Russia and Qing Dynasty China), a fact that in no way seemed to bother the Japanese officers making the argument that Kanchazu was obviously rightful Manchurian territory.
The clash began when troops of the Imperial Japanese Army’s 11th Division occupied and began to fortify Kanchazu Island. As planned this was noticed by the Soviets who despatched a squadron of gunboats from the Amur Flotilla to investigate. This squadron was duly intercepted by a pair of river gunships from the Manchukuoan River Defence Fleet, thus initiating one of the relatively rare naval battles to occur entirely within a river. While the Soviets had numbers their Type 1124 BKA ‘Armoured Cutters’ barely displaced 40 tonnes and mounted only a pair of turrets taken from the T-28 tank. In contrast the river gunships of the Manchukuoan Black Dragon Group (the Amur river being known as the Black Dragon river in Chinese) were 290 tonne ships armed with three 120mm cannons each. The resulting battle was as one-sided as those numbers would suggest, two Soviet gun boats being sunk and the third escaping only because the Manchukuoan’s declined to pursue.
While the Soviets brought up troops in response, they did not actually attack the new outpost; Moscow had no desire for an active front in the Far East and had far better control over her army in the region, the magnificently named Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army, than Tokyo had over the Kwantung Army. This was graphically demonstrated when the commander of the IJA 11th Division, the quite fanatically anti-communist General Hayao Tada, ordered his men across the Amur to seize the north bank of the river. Quite aside from being a rampant escalation, and one entirely unjustified by even the most creative of treaty interpretations, this was an unfortunate choice for the general from a purely military perspective. The flood plain of the Amur was flat, wide and in mid-summer very dry. Perfect conditions for armoured warfare, a fact not lost on the Soviet commander who counter-attacked with the T-26s of the 2nd Mechanised Brigade. To counter this escalation the IJA deployed their own tanks, the grandly titled 1st Tank Corps sallied forth to meet the Soviets. If this sounds like a numerically mismatched battle that’s because it was, though not in the way the unit names implied; the Japanese Corps could barely muster 100 Type 89 I-Go ‘medium’ tanks and a dozen Type 94 tankettes while the Soviet Brigade had almost 250 T-26s. This was bad enough for the IJA tankers, worse was the qualitative disadvantage they faced. While both tanks were notionally infantry tanks, and so slow and armoured against machine gun fire but nothing more, where the Type 89 had a low velocity (if large calibre) 57mm gun, the T-26s mounted the far more potent 45mm 20K mod. The result of which was a T-26 was able to kill a Type 89 at almost double the distance a Type 89 could hope to threaten a T-26, combined with the superior armoured doctrine of the Soviets and the clash went much as one would expect.
The few Japanese survivors of the clash of tanks retreated back to the river and the cover of their artillery and the river gunships. By this stage, some 10 days after the initial occupation of the islands, Tokyo had finally found out about what was going on, though this was mainly due to the loud and vigorous protests of the Soviet ambassador rather than the Kwantung Army actually admitting to their actions. The Japanese foreign ministry frantically worked to arrange a cease-fire while the Army investigated quite what had been going on in Manchuria. The diplomats succeeded in short order, the Soviets had no real desire to take the matter further as they felt, somewhat over-confidently, that this defeat would deter future clashes, in contrast it took quite some time, and many personal ‘interviews’, for the Army to learn the truth, or at least a close approximation to it. Shamed that almost a quarter of Japan’s medium tank force had been lost in one battle much of the hokushin-ron faction were forced into silence, it being apparent that the Soviets were not the inferior push-over they had been portrayed as. Their rivals in the Strike South faction were quick to take advantage, loudly and publicly making their case, little caring that while such words were for domestic consumption Tokyo was not the only capital to hear them.
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Notes:
Apologies for missing the promised weekend date, I got somewhat distracted with the details on this one. From the top the Mongolian facts are all OTL, collectivisation did go that badly and (surprisingly) the incident with Genden and Stalin's pipe is apparently true.
The Type 96 machine gun did have a bayonet as standard and, because it kept jamming, IJA troops did actually bayonet charge with it. Just not very quickly.
Onto the clash, there was an actual incident at Kanchazu island in June/July 1937, however this didn't escalate as Tokyo found out earlier and the IJA was somewhat more restrained. TTL as there has been no 2-26 coup there has been no grand re-shuffling of units in North Manchuria so the 11th IJA division and General Tada are still in place on the border. This is a big change as Tada was spectacularly anti-communist, to the point he tried to negotiate a peace deal with the Chinese on the basis of them working together to defeat Mao and the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly no-one else in the Japanese Army agreed, very surprisingly he didn't get killed for saying this and survived the war. After losing a quarter of Japan's tanks he may not survive this time around.
Up next - The other Pacific powers notice that Japan is talking an awful lot about the New Order in East Asia, something which doesn't seem to leave much room for any power that isn't Japan.
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