Battle of Lake Khasan

Name and etymology

The Russian designation is the Khasan battles (Хасанские бои), also called the 'Lake Khasan Incident'; the Chinese and Japanese designation is the Changkufeng Incident (張鼓峰事件, Chōkohō Jiken), and Japanese sources also use 'Changkufeng Heights Incident'. Chinese sources additionally use the title 张鼓峰之战 for the fighting itself.

Background

After Japan completed the occupation of Manchuria in 1932 and created the puppet state of Manchukuo, the border situation worsened. From 1936 to the outbreak of fighting in July 1938, Japanese and Manchu forces committed 231 violations of the Soviet border, 35 of which escalated into major armed clashes, including 124 land-border violations and 40 airspace intrusions from the start of 1938 alone. Soviet support for China after the Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact of 21 August 1937 was the real cause of Japan's use of force, while the territorial claim over the frontier served as the pretext.

The defection of Genrikh Lyushkov, NKVD chief in the Soviet Far East, to Japan at Hunchun on 13 June 1938 also fed into the confrontation. He handed over intelligence on the poor state of Soviet Far Eastern forces and the purge of army officers, and the NKVD border guards' attempt to restore their standing is a leading explanation for the Soviet forward move.

Course of events

On 6 July 1938 the Japanese Kwantung Army decoded a Soviet message from the Posyet region recommending that Soviet troops secure unoccupied high ground west of Lake Khasan, notably the disputed Changkufeng Heights. Soviet border guards occupied Zaozernaya Hill under orders on the night of 8–9 July and began installing barbed wire and digging trenches. The order was given orally by NKVD first deputy commissar Mikhail Frinovsky and formally recorded as a request from Colonel Kuzma Grebennik, commander of the 59th Border Detachment. On 15 July 1938 a party under Frinovsky, accompanied by sniper Vasily Vinevitin, crossed into Manchurian territory and staged engineering work; when Japanese gendarmes asked them to stop, Vinevitin shot one dead on Frinovsky's personal order, the immediate trigger of the escalation.

On the same day the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Mamoru Shigemitsu, demanded the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from the disputed territory in a protest note; Soviet documents from the 1886 Hunchun Agreement and its attached map were presented to show that Zaozernaya and Bezymyannaya lay on Soviet territory, but on 20 July Japan delivered a further note with an ultimatum demanding evacuation of Soviet troops from 'illegally occupied territory'. The Japanese government's handling was constrained from above: on 20 July Chief of the General Staff Prince Kan'in Kotohito sought imperial approval for the use of Korea Army forces, but the Emperor, citing the absence of government consent and the possibility of full-scale war with the USSR, did not sanction it; War Minister Seishirō Itagaki then forced an audience and reported the need for prompt use of force, but the Emperor, referring to the army's conduct at the outbreak of the Manchurian and China incidents, admonished him not to move a single soldier and again withheld approval. Only on 22 July did the Emperor approve the plan to attack.

A one-sided attribution to the Korea Army does not hold. At first the Japanese Korea Army, assigned to defend the area, disregarded the Soviet advance, but the Kwantung Army, whose administrative jurisdiction overlapped Changkufeng, pushed the Korea Army to take more action because it was suspicious of Soviet intentions; the Korea Army then referred the matter to Tokyo and recommended a formal protest to the Soviet Union. Japanese-language sources record that neither side had previously stationed troops on the Changkufeng summit, and a Chinese-language account records that the Japanese Korea Army headquarters decided from March 1936 not to send troops to the Changkufeng and Shachaofeng area, with the Soviets taking the same measures, leaving the disputed area shelved by both sides.

The fighting began on 29 July 1938. The Japanese 19th Division (commanded by Lieutenant General Suetaka Kamezo) and some Manchukuo units took on the Soviet 39th Rifle Corps under Grigory Shtern (eventually the 32nd, 39th and 40th Rifle Divisions, the 2nd Mechanised Brigade and two tank battalions). On 31 July Colonel Kotoku Sato's 75th Infantry Regiment launched a night sortie and the Japanese seized the heights and dug in. On 2 August Blyukher arrived at Posyet, took over overall command and ordered the 40th Rifle Division to attack without crossing into enemy territory; the hills remained in Japanese hands and in the evening the order came to withdraw from the summit of Pulemyotnaya. The main offensive was launched on 6 August, not 2 August: from 16:00, after the fog lifted, 216 Soviet aircraft bombed Japanese positions, and at 17:00, after a 45-minute artillery preparation, Soviet troops attacked.

On 8 August units of the 39th Corps and the 118th Rifle Regiment of the 40th Division seized Zaozernaya Hill and began fighting for the Bogomolnaya height; on 9 August the 32nd Rifle Division, supported by artillery, took Bezymyannaya and threw the enemy back across the border, though other accounts place the taking of Bezymyannaya only on 11–12 August, after the ceasefire. The ceasefire terms were agreed on 10 August and hostilities ceased at noon on 11 August, with the Japanese stopping fighting at 13:30 local time the same day.

Examples

Soviet forces numbered about 15,000 servicemen and border guards with 237 artillery pieces, 285 tanks and 1,014 machine guns. Japanese strength is disputed: the Soviet estimate was over 20,000 servicemen with 200 guns and three armoured trains, while the American researcher Alvin D. Coox considered that no fewer than 10,000 Japanese servicemen took part, of whom 7,000–7,300 were in the 19th Division's combat units, a figure excluding artillery personnel attached in the last days.

Soviet armoured losses are recorded differently. Some 354 tanks and assault guns were gathered at Lake Khasan, including 257 T-26 tanks (with 10 KhT-26 flame-throwing tanks), three ST-26 bridge-laying tanks, 81 BT-7 light tanks and 13 SU-5-2 self-propelled guns, yet at least 46 tanks were knocked out (another count gives 45 unoperational, or 80 of which 24 completely destroyed), with another 39 damaged to varying degrees. The experience exposed the vulnerability of lightly armoured T-26 tanks to large-calibre anti-tank rifles and anti-tank artillery, leading to the decision to fit hand-rail antennas on line tanks as well as command tanks and to construction of railway line No. 206 (Baranovsky siding to Posyet).

Contested conduct is also documented. During the Soviet attack a number of commanders, including the commander of the 40th Rifle Division's tank battalion, abandoned their troops, and Soviet attacks were defeated with many casualties owing to poor coordination. Soviet Far Eastern aviation flew 1,028 sorties against Japanese fortifications between 1 and 8 August, and in some cases Soviet aircraft mistakenly used chemical bombs, though eyewitness and participant accounts say the chemical aerial bombs were loaded into a bomber only once, discovered in the air, and dropped into a silted lake to avoid detonating the munitions.

After the battle the USSR instituted a badge for participants, yet the affair did not attract much Western attention, and Japan, at war in Asia, did not count it within the Second World War.

Distinctions

The nearest comparison is the far larger 1939 Battles of Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan). Khasan was a small, localised affair: the Japanese 19th Division plus some Manchukuo units against the Soviet 39th Rifle Corps. After analysing the Khasan result the Japanese engaged the Soviets again at Khalkhin Gol, where the Japanese Sixth Army was defeated, and scholarly assessment of Khasan's military value is disputed, as the Soviet victory cost heavy and conflictingly reported losses.

The legal basis of the frontier dispute also split the parties: the Soviet side grounded the line in the Treaty of Peking and the 1886 Hunchun boundary agreement placing it at the Changkufeng summit, while the Japanese side grounded it in an old Russian General Staff map running east of Lake Khasan and held that even the Hunchun treaty reached only the lake's western shore. The parties divided not only over facts on the ground but over legal positions.

Command structures cannot be used interchangeably either: the sector was defended by the Korea Army, whose administrative jurisdiction overlapped with the Kwantung Army's at Changkufeng, and after the incident the defence of Changkufeng was transferred from the Korea Army to the Kwantung Army on 30 September 1938 by Continental Order No. 215.

Responsibility for escalation is likewise assessed differently. The Japanese international-law scholar Keishirō Irie held that the jointly produced map annexed to the Hunchun boundary treaty ran the boundary between Lake Khasan and the Tumen, so that 'it could not be helped if one said the Japanese army invaded Soviet territory'. English-language sources, by contrast, characterise the affair as an attempted military incursion by Manchukuo into Soviet-claimed and Soviet-controlled territory. After the Second World War, at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, 13 high-ranking Japanese officials were charged with crimes against peace for their roles in initiating hostilities at Lake Khasan.