Battles of Khalkhin Gol

Course of the fighting

The fighting began on 11 May 1939 when a Mongolian cavalry unit of 70 to 90 men entered the disputed grazing area and was driven back by Manchu cavalry. On 13 May the Mongolians returned in greater numbers, and on 28 May Soviet–Mongolian forces surrounded and destroyed Lieutenant Colonel Azuma's reconnaissance force. After further small clashes, the Japanese attempted a river crossing in July, and on 20 August the Soviet–Mongolian side launched a general offensive.

In the offensive the Soviet–Mongolian force comprised about 57,000 troops, 542 guns and mortars, 498 tanks, 385 armoured cars and 515 combat aircraft, while the Japanese 6th Army grouping numbered over 75,000 with about 500 guns, 182 tanks and 700 aircraft. The Japanese side was numerically larger overall, so the Soviet victory was not a matter of numbers alone. The 6th Army's own counter-offensive was scheduled for 24 August, and the Soviet attack on 20 August pre-empted it. The Soviet wings linked up at Nomonhan on 25 August and trapped the 23rd Infantry Division; a Japanese counterattack to relieve it failed on 26 August and a breakout attempt failed on 27 August. By 31 August Japanese forces on the Mongolian side of the border were destroyed, the last ground fighting ended after 8 September while air battles continued to the cease-fire, and the cease-fire agreed on 15 September took effect the next day at 1:10 pm.

The September cease-fire was not the legal end of the conflict. Separate from it, the affair was settled de jure only in May 1942 by a compromise on the basis of the old map, and it lasted until Japan's surrender in 1945. The border line itself was never settled: the Mongolian side claimed the boundary established by the Qing in 1734 about 20 km east of the Halha river, while Manchukuo and Japan claimed the river itself, based on an imperial Russian 1:84,000 map of 1906 that Japan obtained in 1918.

Losses

Casualty figures differ by source. For the Soviet–Mongolian side, 9,703 dead and missing matches Krivosheev's 2001 edition, but these are irrecoverable losses: adding 15,251 wounded and 701 sick gives total campaign losses of 25,655. For the Japanese side several incompatible figures are attested. Kwantung Army internal records give 8,629 killed and 9,087 injured, excluding the sick; Sixth Army medical data give 7,696 killed and 19,714 total personnel losses; Soviet official claims rose from 29,085 to 52–55,000 and then 61,000; and independent estimates reach up to 45,000 for the Japanese–Manchu grouping. Japanese losses should therefore be given as a contested range rather than a single number.

Related but distinct events

The battle is distinct both from the Khasan fighting of 1938 and from the Soviet–Japanese War of 1945. The Battle of Lake Khasan ran from 29 July to 11 August 1938, was an attempted Manchukuo and Japanese incursion into territory claimed and controlled by the USSR, and was resolved by a diplomatic settlement after Japanese forces occupied the disputed area and withdrew. The Soviet–Japanese War of 1945 began with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria after the declaration of war on Japan on 8 August 1945, led to the toppling of Manchukuo and Mengjiang and to Japan's surrender, and should not be confused with the border conflicts, particularly Khalkhin Gol of May–September 1939. The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed on 13 April 1941, after the defeat at Khalkhin Gol, and should not be attributed to the 1945 war.

Responsibility was addressed at the postwar tribunal. On Soviet initiative the International Military Tribunal for the Far East charged fourteen Japanese with initiating a war of aggression against the Mongolian People's Republic in the Khalkhin-Gol area and with waging war in violation of international law against the USSR; Doihara, Hiranuma and Itagaki were convicted on these charges. The Kwantung Army also acted largely autonomously and escalated without Tokyo's approval, while Tokyo repeatedly forbade escalation.

Victory and repression

Khalkhin Gol was Zhukov's first victory and won him his first Hero of the Soviet Union award, but the fate of decorated commanders alongside him was different. Grigori Shtern and Yakov Smushkevich were arrested by NKVD organs in the summer of 1941 and shot without trial that autumn, and were rehabilitated later. This should not be described as a lawful or judicial execution.

Significance in example

The battle is often cited as the prototype of the double envelopment Zhukov first executed here. Holding the enemy fixed in the centre, secretly massing force in the immediate rear and launching pincer attacks on the wings was very similar to Operation Uranus, which trapped the German army at Stalingrad. In the use of air power, Nomonhan was the first large-scale employment of airpower in a high-intensity battle to obtain a specific military objective, and the first fighter-bomber offensive in Soviet Air Force history. The Soviet command concealed its regrouping by moving only at night, forbidding the bringing of troops into assembly areas by day, conducting reconnaissance in trucks and soldiers' uniforms, simulating tank and aircraft noise with sound installations, and running a false radio and telephone deception programme, which largely neutralised Japanese counter-preparation. Armour was also lopsided: in the July fighting the Japanese committed 92 tanks and armoured cars against 452 on the Soviet–Mongolian side, and the Japanese tank regiments were withdrawn from the battlefield by Kwantung Army order in mid-July after heavy losses. There were also assessments of the victory's cost: Pyotr Grigorenko held that the Red Army entered with a very large advantage in technology, numbers and firepower yet suffered huge losses, which he blamed on poor leadership, and this must be presented as an assessment rather than an undisputed fact.

Strategic consequences

The defeat persuaded Japan to abandon further confrontation with the USSR under the Hokushin-ron, or strike north, doctrine and to turn instead toward Nanshin-ron, or strike south. That reorientation led toward the Dutch East Indies, to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and to United States entry into the war.