Japan and Russia Building New Ties

Article by Laurie Barber

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Checkmate at the Russian Border: Russia-Japanese Conflict before Pearl Harbour

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Over the north country whose seas are frozen

Spring wind blows across

It is time to beat Russia

Rampant for three hundred years.

Mora Orgai, 1904.

Japan and Russia's mutual enmity was long and bitter. Since the turn of the twentieth century power vacuums in central Asia focused Japan's attention to the north, to mineral rich lands often riven by warlordism and ineffectively governed. The Czarist Russian empire's authority over its far eastern domain was often loose, and local factions were advantaged by St. Petersburg's 10,000 miles distance. In early 1904 Russia's repressive Minister of the Interior, V.K. Plehve, remarked: 'In order to hold back the revolution, we need a small victorious war'.

Manchuria was the likely cockpit, given Russia's and Japan's rivalry for this territory's vast untapped mineral resources. Japan's defeat of China in the war of 1895 and her increased dominance over Korea gave her a sense of Asian destiny. Russia had bullied weakened China into agreeing to the building of the Trans-Siberian railway and had acquired the ice-free Port Arthur, Peking's port, and saw its eastern provinces as a new frontier.

The occasion for the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was Russia's refusal to withdraw its troops from Manchuria following the suppression of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, a withdrawal required by the treaty protocol. Negotiations brought no Czarist back-down, and on 9 February 1904 Japan launched an attack, and mauled the Russian Far Eastern Fleet anchored at Port Arthur. Japan, in this fight, possessed the advantage of a modernized and German trained army of 300,000 field troops, with a reserve of 400,000 trained reservists. Czarist Russia's conscript army in the Far East, ill trained and low in morale, was 80,000 at the beginning of 1904, and was reinforced slowly, to a low maximum of 250,000 in December 1904. The Japanese fleet was superior both in size and in quality. In short, a surprise naval attack, the blockade and siege of Port Arthur, a land victory at Mukden, and the destruction of Russia's Baltic fleet, brought success to Japan and the acquisition of Port Arthur, renamed Vladivostok.

In the west, statesmen and military leaders gasped. The impossible had taken place. For the first time in modern history an Asian military force had soundly whipped the army and navy of a major western imperial power. For the Japanese their 1904 victories over the Russians, particularly the naval Battle of Tsushima, made the year an annus mirabilis. The victor of Tsushima victoriously, and deliberately, returned to Tokyo on the anniversary of the British victory at Trafalgar. Admiral Togo's Nelsonian signal at the outset of the battle was remembered, and flown again from the flagship Akagi on 7 December 1941: "The rise and fall of the Empire depends upon this battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost."

But in 1938 and 1939 Japan faced a vastly different challenge from the Red Army successor to the Czarist armies neo-feudal levies, this time from a USSR, resilient in its Communist motherland defiance of a capitalist world. Japan's military leaders failed to register the Red Army's military competence, forged in the Russian civil war, honed by mutually advantageous assistance from German military experts in the 1920s, and given teeth through the mass production of superior armour, capable bombers and fighters, and up-to-date artillery. Japanese intelligence reported that Stalin's purges of the officer corps and the social dislocation and misery occasioned by the first Five Year Plan, and collectivization of agriculture, had weakened the USSR's capacity to respond to military challenge. They were wrong.

The Kwantung Army determination to test the outer frontier of the USSR in 1938 through to 1940, was a continuation of two decades of probing. The revolutions that brought an end to the Chinese empire in 1911 and to the Russian empire in 1917 had created a strategic vacuum in the Far East that Japan wished to fill. Soon after Lenin's revolution Japanese agents began a "Great Game" in Central Asia, working on Moslem loyalties and pan-Asian opportunities to win support for Japanese hegemony. Philip Snow tells the tale:

By 1919 the Japanese were developing plans to prize the frontier territories away from the grip of both Russia and China. They would set themselves up as the champions of Pan-Turanianism, the doctrine which proclaimed the ethnic solidarity of all the peoples of Turkic or Mongol origin, between Hungary and the Pacific. The effect would be to create for Japan a vast central Asian sphere of influence on the southern fringe of the newly established Soviet Russian state.

In Mongolia, the prize of prizes, Japan subsidised and advised White Russian warlords, until they were neutralised by the Red Army in 1921, the year the Mongolian Peoples' Republic, a client state of the USSR, was formed. The USSR was reactive rather than aggressive in its response to expanding Japan. Russia sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, but made clear that it would brook no interference with its vital Trans-Siberian railroad, the artery that joined the continent and the China Sea. Japan's transformation of Manchuria into its puppet empire of Manchukuo, and Japan's "China Adventure" from 1937, made the USSR wary; a wariness increased by Japan's signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in 1936. Reinforcements began the long 10,000 mile haul to the Far Eastern Borders of the USSR, and into the Mongolian Peoples' Republic, since 1936 a defence partner of the USSR the Red Army was bound to protect.

The Japanese Kwantung Army drew wrong conclusions from the easy successes of its first probes of 1937. Communist troops were easily swept from two small islands on the River Amur, on the border of Manchukuo. Assessment of this easy "victory" concluded that the Red Army must have serious logistical problems, related to the long distance between its eastern and western blocs. Amnon Sella confirms that