Of all the ‘practice’ wars that preceded the main events of the second world war, including the Spanish civil war and the winter war between Finland and the Soviet Union, the least well known is the four-month war on the Mongolia-Manchurian border between the Soviet Union and Japan that ended in September 1939.

This is not surprising, perhaps, because British attention was (and still is) more focused on Hitler’s invasion of Poland that took place two weeks earlier. Even the participants downplay the importance of a war that took place in a remote corner of Mongolia. Japan refers to it as the Nomonhan Incident while Russia calls it the Battle of Khalkin Gol after the river that runs through the region.

Britain is not famed for its geopolitical interest in Mongolia. But the fate of this country as well as Siberia did briefly occupy the minds of our diplomats, politicians and soldiers from the end of the first world war. Strangely this short war, fought across a river some 6,000 miles from Great Britain would have a significant impact on Britain in the second world war.

But first some background. After Genghis Khan had established a Mongol Empire in 1206, Mongolia briefly ruled the world’s most powerful country, China. His grandson Kublai Khan conquered China in 1271 and the Yuan dynasty (the first non-Han dynasty) ruled an empire that consisted of Mongolia, Korea and southern Siberia. Just shy of 100 years later, in 1368, the Yuan dynasty was overthrown by peasant born Zhu Yanzhang who founded the Ming dynasty. Thereafter Mongolia slunk into somnolent decline. In the 19th century Mongolia was absorbed into the Chinese Empire of the Manchurian Qing dynasty which ruled it as a vassal state.

However, at the beginning of the 20th century Mongolia was sucked into the vortex of global geopolitical instability that featured the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by Sun Yat Sen’s revolution in 1911, the fall of the Russian Imperial family, the Romanovs, in 1917, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, and the collapse of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922.

It is one of the ‘what-ifs’ of history how things might have turned out if Japan had won their 1939 border war in Mongolia. If Japan had decided to focus on the conquest of Mongolia and Siberia rather than China, would the US have ever entered the second world war?

In the chaos, Mongolia launched its bid for freedom. In 1911 a Buddhist theocratic state was established under Bogd Khan, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu (Holy Precious Master), who ruled a country where one in three men were monks – Mongolia had been proselytised by the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism in the 16th century. For the next decade Mongolia slipped in an out of independence during the Zhili-Fengtian wars of the northern warlords and their international backers, which included not only Russia but also Japan, Britain, and America.

The White Russian-Bolshevik wars featured a dubious cast of military chancers, including Nikolai Robert Maximillian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg otherwise known as the ‘Mad Baron’. Born from a family of German aristocrats, he claimed descent from Gengis Khan and dreamt of rebuilding the Mongol empire. To further his ambitions, he entered a dynastic marriage with a Manchurian princess. The Mad Baron, a ferocious bully, antisemite, sadist, mystic and drunkard, was nevertheless a brilliant horseman and cavalry officer. Above all he was known as a fanatical anti-communist who believed, not without reason, that, ‘we are not fighting a political party but a sect of murderers of all contemporary spiritual culture.’

The Mad Baron led a White Russian force determined to restore the Romanovs. First in 1921 he led a White Russian-Mongolian force that restored Bogd Khan to the leadership of an independent Mongolia. For his efforts, Baron Ungern-Sternberg is still commemorated in Mongolia as well as by conservatives in his native Estonia.

However, the Mad Baron’s success was short lived. In August 1921, he was defeated while supporting anti-Soviet forces in Siberia. Captured by the Bolsheviks, he was tried and put in front of a firing squad. Thereafter Bogd Khan ruled under Bolshevik ‘protection’. When this last Jebtsundamba Khutuktu died of cancer – or more likely poisoning – in 1924, he was not replaced. The Soviets consolidated their grip over Mongolia with the establishment of a Communist Mongolian People’s Republic.

The Soviets, both in Mongolia and Siberia, were helped by the withdrawal of the pro-White Russian Siberian expeditionary army that comprised Japanese, American, British, Italian, French, Belgium, Polish, Serb, Rumanian, and Chinese forces, which had landed in Vladivostok in August 1918 to engage the Bolsheviks. Their objectives were hopelessly divided by their nations’ conflicting operational parameters. The western forces had been primarily interested in ‘rescuing’ the Czech legion that was fighting its way out of Russia, and in preventing war material getting into the hands of the yet to be defeated German army. In addition, some, like Churchill, supported an ani-communist crusade.

Meanwhile Japan’s main interest in Mongolia and Siberia, emphasised by its provision of a 72,000 strong force, was to prevent the resurrection of Russian/Soviet power in the region after the collapse of Romanov rule. In this they failed. White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks crumbled and in 1922 Japan was the last foreign power to withdraw its army.

That did not end Japan’s interest in Mongolia and Siberia. As in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, Japan feared growing Soviet power in the east. Its renewed energy under the Bolsheviks was a prospect of grave geopolitical concern. It should be remembered that fear of western expansionism, particularly that of the United States, was the driving force behind the Japanese revolution that inspired the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1869, the so-called Meiji Restoration. Japan’s new government was determined not become a colony or a vassal to a foreign power; in 1939 the Soviet Union seemed a greater threat than the United States.

The geopolitical significance of the Soviet Union’s annexation of Mongolia was most keenly felt by Japan’s Kwantung Army in Korea which had won the right to control the South Manchurian Railway zone after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Later it was fear of the Soviet Union that was the key reason for Japan’s annexation of the whole of Manchuria in 1931 and their subsequent invasion of northern China. With some degree of logic, Japan’s leaders began to fear that unless it took control of a weak Chinese state, the Soviet Union would fill the power vacuum. By 1939 therefore, it was not Chinese and Mongolians troops, but mainly Japanese and Soviet forces, that glared at each other across the borders of Siberia, Mongolia and Manchuria.

Relations had been testy for a while. In 1932 Japan had rejected a Soviet offer of a non-aggression pact. Over the next four years there were over 400 border incidents between the countries. More serious clashes took place in 1937 and in 1938 the Soviets lost 96 tanks and 792 troops at the Battle of Changkufeng (or Lake Khasan). It was a clear Japanese victory. Japanese foreign minister, Sadao Araki went as far as to suggest that, ‘if the Soviets do not cease to annoy us, I shall have to purge Siberia as one cleans a room of flies.’

The following year, in May 1939, following a seemingly innocuous incursion by Mongol horsemen across the Khalkin Gol river, full scale war broke out on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. The Nomonhan Incident/Battle of Khalkin Gol war was a classic border demarcation dispute fought over a worthless piece of land. This time the tables were turned on Japan. In June the arrival of the brilliant tank commander General Georgy Zhukov (of Battle of Stalingrad fame) led to a 500-tank attack which swept back Japanese troops that had crossed the river. As Zhukov noted, ‘Our trump cards were the armoured divisions.’ In aggregate the war cost some 50,000 casualties.

Japanese tanks proved to be no match for Zhukov’s fast-moving BT-7 tanks. Curiously the core technology for the BT-7 and its immediate successor the T-34 was provided by American racing driver, John Walter Christie. Born at River Edge, New Jersey in 1865, George Christie trained as an engineer but first found fame as a racing driver with a revolutionary front wheel driven car that he had designed. In 1905 he became the first American to drive in the French Grand Prix.

After a brief flirtation building fire engines, American engagement in the first world war encouraged Christie to design military vehicles. From 1916 to 1942 Christie designed tanks but never succeeded in selling more than a handful of sample models to the US Army. It was a failure for which the US Ordnance Department would later be much criticised. Christie’s key technological breakthrough came with the development of the M1928 tank, which its inventor believed to be a decade ahead of its time. Its unique suspension system enabled it to travel at 28 mph compared to the 9.9 mph of America’s existing first world war tanks.

Despite the strong backing of General George Patton, who would become America’s most famed tank commander, the US Army failed to capitalise on Christie’s developments. As a US congressman told Patton: ‘This is a wonderful tank, George, no doubt the best I’ve ever seen. But we aren’t about to buy it, you know that. I doubt we would even if it drove up the steps of Capitol Hill full of votes. We just can’t spend money on it.’

Indeed on the eve of the second world war, the American army, with fewer than 100,000 combat troops was smaller than those of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Holland and Belgium. As Henry Stimson, US Secretary of Defence noted:

‘We did not have enough [gun] powder in the whole United States to last the men we now have fighting overseas for anything like a day’s fighting, and what is worse we did not have…the plants or facilities to make it; they had all been destroyed after the last war.’

Foreign governments were not so lackadaisical about rearmament in the 1930s. Christie’s designs were snapped by Britain for the Cruiser tank which was widely used in the early years of the war in North Africa. More importantly a visiting Soviet delegation spotted the brilliance of Christie’s innovations and purchased two sample tanks, spare parts and technical rights and patents for US $164,000. They were smuggled out of America as a consignment of tractor parts.

On taking Christie’s designs back to the Soviet Union, manufacture of its T-18 tanks was shut down and production of the BT-7, using Christie’s innovations, was done in volumeat the Soviet’s biggest track factory in Kharkov (Ukraine). The experience of this the Soviet-Japanese border war in 1939, with lessons learned from the design flaws that became apparent in the BT-7, led to the development of the famed T-34 of which 84,000 would be built. The T-34 would eventually be used by 39 countries in 23 wars, invasions, and coups.

Most significantly on the eastern front in 1941, it was the T-34 which blunted Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia. Hitler, who had previously declared, ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down’. He would later admit, ‘If I had known about the T-34, I would have delayed invading Russia’. Along with ‘General Winter’, the Christie inspired T-34 was arguably the most important weapon in Russia’s defeat of Germany in the second world war.

A T-34 Soviet tank in Berlin’s Tiergarten district (Getty)

If the development of the T-34 was an important consequence of the Mongolian-Siberian border war in 1939, the geopolitical results were even more consequential. Defeat in Mongolia quashed Japan’s appetite for ‘striking north’ – a priority for powerful sections of the Japanese Army in the 1930s. Led to a large extent by officers trained in Manchuria, the Japanese Army saw the Soviets as its prime enemy.

By contrast the Navy saw Japan’s future battleground as the Pacific Ocean with their prime enemy being the United States. It is one of the ‘what-ifs’ of history how things might have turned out if Japan had won their 1939 border war in Mongolia. If Japan had decided to focus on the conquest of Mongolia and Siberia rather than China, would the US have ever entered the second world war? After all American participation in the second world war was precipitated not in Europe but in Asia. It was Japan’s failure to accede to US demands to withdraw from China that led the US to cut Japan off from international financial as well as the oil production of Standard Oil of California, at that time the world’s biggest producer.

A very real consequence of the Russo-Japanese War in Mongolia and Manchuria in 1939 was that it led in due course to their April 1941 Neutrality Pact that would enable Stalin to concentrate his forces against Germany. This was no mean advantage. Allies benefitted enormously from Russia not having to split its forces between an eastern and western front.

But there were disadvantages that ensued from Japan’s defeat to Russia in the Mongolian border war. The Japanese defeat heightened the complacency of British forces in Singapore and Malaya. If Bolshevik Russia could knock over Japan, surely it would be a breeze for British troops to defeat Emperor Hirohito’s forces? When Japanese forces invaded Malaya (some 40 minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor) the British expectation was that they would be quickly rolled back.

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Churchill had been sure that Japan would not dare to attack the British Empire. Asked by a young British officer as he was sailing back from America after meeting Roosevelt, whether Japan would attack, Churchill replied, ‘No I don’t think so. If they do, they’ll find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.’ When news arrived in Singapore that the Japanese troop transports had arrived off Kota Baru, Governor Sir Thomas Shenton replied to Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival (who would later surrender Singapore to Japan’s Imperial Army commanded by General Tomoyuki Yamashita), ‘Well, I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’

A British resident at the time, Maisie Prout, summed up the zeitgeist of Britain’s Asian colonies thus:

‘We were so sure that the British forces would mop up the Japanese in no time…According to British propaganda, the Japanese were all bow-legged and squinty eyed and they all had very bad teeth… They would be annihilated before they reached Kuala Lumpur.’

It was a complacency regarding Japan’s military capabilities that similarly afflicted the United States forces in Hawaii and the Philippines. Thus, the little-known Mongolian-Manchurian war of 1939 was broadly consequential in both the nature and outcome of the second world war both on the eastern front and in Asia and the Pacific. Furthermore, this obscure border war is another reminder, if one were needed, that the second world war was as much an Asian war as a European war.

WRITTEN BY

Francis Pike

Francis Pike is a historian and author of Hirohito’s War, The Pacific War 1941-1945 and Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II.