Khalkhin-Gol (also known as “Nomonhan”), on the border between China and Mongolia, is probably the most important WW2 historical site most people have never heard of: it’s where the Soviet Union defeated Japan in 1939, which changed the course of the war.
Japan and Nazi Germany may have won WW2 were it not for the battles that happened right here during 135 days. Incredibly, this episode of the war is virtually untaught in the West, which shows how self-centered our version of history is.
During WW2 Northeast of China had been invaded and annexed by Japan, transformed into a puppet state called Manchukuo. This place is in the extreme West of this former puppet state (which is now back to being Northeast China), on the border with Mongolia and the former Soviet Union (now the Russian border).
At the time, 1939, Japan’s basic strategy for the war was “Northward Advance” (Hokushin-ron), i.e. seizing Siberia for its resources as far as Lake Baikal.
The USSR obviously begged to differ and Stalin sent General Zhukov, one of his best men (the future Marshal of the Soviet Union) on site to fight the Japanese back.
Long story short, the battles that ensued - with 200,000 soldiers on the battlefield - lasted 135 days and were the earliest large-scale 3-dimensional warfare in military history. It ended in a humiliating Japanese defeat which some Japanese historians call “the greatest defeat in the history of the Japanese army”, with 54,000 casualties (79% of frontline troops, as mentioned below).
The most important consequence of the battles that were fought here is that the Japanese completely shifted their strategy from “Northward Advance” to “Southward Advance”, favoring seizing the resources of Southeast Asia instead of those of Siberia.
Masanobu Tsuji, the Japanese colonel most instrumental in these battles became “the most determined single protagonist in favor of war with the United States” and one of the strongest proponents of the attack on Pearl Harbor inside the Japanese army (according to postwar testimonies), having been traumatized by his experience of fighting the Soviet Union. The US was of course the biggest power the Japanese would have to confront by pursuing the “Southward Advance” strategy since only the US Pacific Fleet stood in the way of seizing the oil-rich Dutch East Indie.
In fact the Khalkhin-Gol battles traumatized the Japanese so much that they didn’t dare fight the Soviet Union again for the remainder of WW2. Even when their ally Nazi Germany opened the Eastern front the Japanese army adopted a resolution “not to intervene in German Soviet war for the time being”, leaving Hitler to fight the Soviet Union on his own, which would ultimately prove to be his demise.
So it’s no exaggeration to say that had the battles here not been fought or had the Japanese won, WW2 would have most likely turned out dramatically different. Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have happened, and Japan would have likely helped Nazi Germany fight the Soviet Union by opening a front to the East.
Khalkhin-Gol may in fact have been the most consequential battles of WW2!
See also: How Japan lost 20,000 men in 11 days to a single Soviet general - The Battle of Khalkhin Gol (1939)
Thank you for the share. What are some good books on history you would recommend?
Which part of history? The Soviet Union in WWII? Even that is a very big topic, so much has been written about it and you may need to be more specific which part of the war you are interested in. It also depends on whose perspective you want:
Western historians will portray the war differently than Soviet historians, and modern Russian historians will again have a different perspective than the Soviets, and different from each other depending on whether you read something written in the 90s (when the Russians were inclined to present their history with a very western and anti-Soviet perspective) or written more recently.
I recently read The Soviet Union in the Second World War (scroll down and you’ll find a PDF download) which came out very recently and it was pretty interesting. Obviously it’s not complete by any means, but it’s a good introduction.
If you want a more western perspective, you could look up some of the books written by David Glantz, such as his When Titans Clashed. In the West he is usually considered the preeminent military historian on the Soviet Union in WWII.
And if you want a Soviet perspective you should look up books written in the Soviet period about the war. You might need to search in Russian to find the best information on that subject because English language sources probably don’t cover Soviet literature very well. This is a question best asked to a native Russian speaker who studied history in Russia.
Thank you very much for the recommendations (WWII eastern fronts/theatres for anglophones here but I am interested generally - I’ve got Carr and Hobsbawm on my to-do reading list)
It is sometimes cognitively taxing to read history by historians from an orientalist perspective (and if it is not orientialist it will still devolve into Great Man Theory and be allergic to historical-materialism) hence the query.
(More recently been listening to the Rest Is History podcast. Fucking. Hell. Listen to their Iran series for a flavour as an example)
If you’re into military history and haven’t seen it yet you should watch the documentary series on the eastern front called “Soviet Storm: WW2 in the East”, I recommended it a couple months back because it’s really good: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9906286
Also feel free to just browse the posts in this history community, you might find some more WWII related material.
Oh that certainly looks interesting - thanks for the tip!