A treaty of mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and the MPR had been signed in 1936. To ensure the protection of that vital artery, the Soviets had established the puppet Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) in Outer Mongolia. Outer Mongolia was the key to strategic control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The lifeline of the Soviet position in the Far East and Siberia was the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which served as the only link between those regions and European Russia. In the summer of 1938, a major clash erupted at Lake Khasan, 70 miles southwest of Vladivostok at the intersection of the Manchukuoan, Korean and Soviet borders, leaving the Soviets in possession of the ground. Incidents along the 3,000 miles of ill-defined border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union numbered in the hundreds from 1932 on. About 450 Soviet pilots and technicians and 225 Soviet warplanes were soon sent to China.
A treaty concluded between Josef Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government in 1937 furnished Soviet financial and military aid to the Chinese. That, along with the Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 between Germany and Japan, alarmed the Soviet Union. In 1937, the Japanese invaded China, seizing Shanghai and Nanking. Japan resumed its imperial march in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The consolidation of the Communist regime, however, compelled a reluctant Japan to withdraw from those territories in 1922. In 1918, following the disintegration of the tsarist empire, the Japanese army occupied Russia’s far eastern provinces and parts of Siberia. Their conflicting ambitions sparked the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, which ended in a stunning victory for Japan in 1905.
The decline of the Chinese empire had whetted the territorial appetites of its neighbors, and the expanding empires of Russia and Japan collided in Korea and Manchuria. Cordier, originally published in the July 2003 issue of World War II magazine.įrom May through September 1939, the Soviet Union and Japan waged hard-fought battles on the wind-swept deserts along the border of eastern Mongolia. World War II: Soviet and Japanese Forces Battle at Khalkhin Gol Closeīy Sherwood S.
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