In 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria and found themselves with a 3,000-mile common, but loosely defined, border with their most implacable foe. No love was lost between Japan and the new Soviet government. The Japanese and the Western countries quit Russia by 1922, when it was clear that the Communists were victors in the civil war. Constantly shifting alliances convinced the interlopers of the weakness and hopeless divisions among the Russian people. In Siberia the Japanese found a fluid and confusing political scene dominated by ruthless warlords, monarchists, anarchists, and terrorists all vying to be the power in the land.
They actually had in mind annexing the resource-rich territory to their burgeoning empire. Suddenly Japan had become a world power.Īt the close of 1917, in the midst of the Communist revolution that convulsed all of Russia, Japan dispatched over 70,000 troops to Siberia to preserve it from the Bolsheviks– at least that is what they told the rest of the world. Japan as a Budding World PowerĮarly in the 20th century, the two nations had come to blows over Chinese trading rights and fought the brutal Russo-Japanese War that ended in 1905 with the humiliation of Czarist Russia by land and sea. Since the first contacts between the two in the fish-rich, frigid waters north of Japan, there had been mutual distrust and animosity. This was the continuation of a long and bitter rivalry between the two nations. The age old traditional grazing of Mongol horses here in 1939 constituted an intolerable border incursion that brought the Soviet Union and Japan to the brink of all-out war. The Russians called the river, and the battle to come, the Khalkhin-Gol. Manchuria, and therefore Japan, claimed that the Halha River marked the border while the Mongolians and Russians claimed it to be some 30 miles to the east to include Nomonhan. Japan now ruled Manchuria, renaming it Manchukuo, while Mongolia was allied with Soviet Russia. The border between Mongolia and Manchuria was historically ill defined, but the nomadic herdsmen did not really care.
There they pastured their horses as they had always done. In May 1939, Mongolian herdsmen and part-time militia cavalry crossed the Khalkhin Gol, or Halha, River near the village of Nomonhan in Manchurian-claimed territory.
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