Battle of Lake Khasan

Background

Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931–32 put the Kwantung Army and the Soviet Far East face to face along a long, badly marked frontier. At its south-eastern tip, where Manchukuo, Japanese-ruled Korea and the Soviet Union met, a ridge of bare hills rises between the Tumen River and Lake Khasan. Its two summits, Zaozernaya (Changkufeng to the Japanese) and Bezymyannaya (Shachaofeng), look deep into Soviet territory on one side and over the Korean railways and the port of Rajin on the other. The Soviets read the Hunchun protocol of 1886 as putting the border on the crest; the Japanese put it east of the lake.

The Red Army in the Far East was in poor shape. The purges had stripped it of experienced officers: in July 1938 alone four and a half times as many people were purged from the Far Eastern Front as in the previous twelve months. On 13 June the Far East's NKVD chief, Genrikh Lyushkov, defected to the Japanese and told them how weak the Soviet forces were.

On 8–9 July border guards of the 59th (Posyet) Border Detachment occupied Zaozernaya and began digging trenches and stringing wire. Japan demanded their withdrawal on 15 July and was refused; the same day a Japanese gendarme who had approached the hill was shot dead. On 17 July the Korea Army ordered the 19th Division up to the Tumen, but on instructions from the government and the army high command it waited on the river for some ten days, and on 27 July it was told to go home. On 24 July Marshal Blyukher, the Soviet front commander, had sent a commission to the hill, concluded that the border guards had crossed the line, and ordered a trench filled in. Two days later the fighting began anyway.

The armies

The Japanese fought with Lieutenant General Suetaka Kamezō's 19th Division of the Korea Army, on a peacetime footing at about half its war strength; the rifle companies of Colonel Satō Kōtoku's 75th Infantry Regiment, which led, had about 100 men each. Tokyo kept the fight small. It refused Suetaka the reinforcements he asked for, knowing he would use them to strike at vulnerable Soviet positions, and Japanese aircraft took no part. Coox counts at least 10,000 Japanese engaged, 7,000–7,300 of them in the division's combat units; Millett and Murray credit them with 37 guns. A railway ran close behind them, and they placed batteries on islands in the Tumen.

Against them the Far Eastern Front sent the newly formed 39th Rifle Corps: Colonel Bazarov's 40th and Colonel Berzarin's 32nd Rifle Divisions, the 2nd Mechanised Brigade and supporting units, 22,950 men in Krivosheev's count. Tank figures vary from 285 to 354 tanks and self-propelled guns, most of them T-26s with 81 BT-7s and ten flame-throwing tanks. Of some 1,300 aircraft in the Far East, 250 officially took part and 356 in fact, under Pavel Rychagov. The Soviets had a single unpaved road to the battlefield and swampy ground around the lake. Purged and replaced commanders were inexperienced and afraid of initiative, and Blyukher was overburdened: besides the battle he was bringing two military districts to war readiness through a headquarters that by mistake sent army group, army and corps instructions to the 40th Rifle Division.

The battle

29–30 July: Bezymyannaya. Before dawn on 29 July, in fog, up to 150 Japanese, a reinforced company of border gendarmerie with four machine guns, attacked the eleven Soviet border guards on Bezymyannaya. They took the summit for the loss of up to 40 men but were thrown off again by evening when Soviet reinforcements arrived. That night the whole 75th Infantry Regiment crossed the Tumen and assembled near Chiangchunfeng by 07:00 on the 30th. Satō ordered a night attack; Suetaka approved it at 16:00. That evening, Soviet accounts say, a Japanese attack on both hills was beaten off with the help of the 3rd Battalion of the 118th Rifle Regiment.

31 July: the night attack. This is CDB90's Changkufeng–Shachaofeng (256). Satō forbade his men to fire: the secret of a night attack, he told his officers, was a strict ban on firearms and a daring assault, made in darkness after moonset. The 1st Battalion, under Major Nakano, crossed the start line at 23:10 on the 30th, cut two lines of wire by 00:20 and attacked at 01:15. Dogs barked at the second line of wire and about 300 Soviet defenders, with two anti-tank guns, eight heavy machine guns and tanks dug in halfway up the east slope, opened fire. The Japanese pressed on without shooting. Nakano was wounded and later killed, as were three of his four company commanders. At 04:10, after a last hand-to-hand assault on the southern tip of the summit, the defenders gave way and Changkufeng was taken; a company holding Hill 52 near the village of Wofeng had beaten off a Soviet company with tanks during the night. To the north 379 Japanese routed some 300 Soviet troops on Shachaofeng. The Japanese dug in along the crest.

2–5 August: Blyukher's first counterattacks. CDB90's Hill 52–Shachaofeng (257, 2–3 August) is the first Soviet attempt to retake the heights. Two battalions had counterattacked without success on 31 July, and the 40th Rifle Division's 118th and 119th Rifle Regiments and its cavalry regiment came up on 1 August by a single bad road. Blyukher reached Posyet on 2 August, took command and ordered the 40th Division to attack without crossing onto Manchukuoan territory, which ruled out any approach from the flank. After a few air strikes three rifle regiments with a tank regiment attacked with little or no artillery support. Some troops got through the wire to the foot of the hills, but the tanks bogged down in ground their crews were not trained for, and the hills stayed Japanese. On 3 August the political commissar Lev Mekhlis reported Blyukher unfit and Shtern was put in command; the 32nd Rifle Division, the 2nd Mechanised Brigade and the corps artillery came up by 4 August.

6–11 August: the Soviet offensive. CDB90's Changkufeng–Hill 52 (258) is the corps attack. At 16:00 on 6 August, once the fog over the lakes had lifted, 216 aircraft bombed the Japanese positions, and at 17:00, after a 45-minute bombardment, the infantry went in: the 32nd Division with a tank battalion from the north against Bezymyannaya, the 40th Division with tanks from the south-east against Zaozernaya. The tanks suffered heavily; few reached their objectives. A Japanese artillery officer said the Soviets fired more shells in a day than the Japanese in the whole affair. The Japanese counterattacked twelve times on 7 August. Soviet accounts have the 118th Rifle Regiment on Zaozernaya on 8 August and the 32nd Division on Bezymyannaya on the 9th, or only on 11–12 August. The Japanese were pushed back but stayed on the battlefield. On 10 August Ambassador Shigemitsu proposed talks; fighting stopped at 13:30 local time on 11 August, each side to hold its positions of midnight on the 10th. On the crest the two sides were then only four or five metres apart, and their local commanders agreed to pull back 80 metres each.

Aftermath

The Soviets lost about 3,500 killed, missing and wounded, more than twice the official Japanese 1,440, though each side claimed far more than the other admitted. More than 6,500 Soviet soldiers were decorated, 26 as Heroes of the Soviet Union. On 12 and 13 August the two sides fixed their positions and exchanged their dead; the Japanese withdrew from the disputed point, and the frontier was set on the basis of the 1860 treaty.

In private the Red Army was harsher. On 31 August the Main Military Council in Moscow concluded that the Far Eastern Front was badly prepared for war, citing poor roads and communications, broken unit cohesion and too few supply units. The front headquarters was disbanded and Blyukher, who had also been charged with his border commission of 24 July, was removed. He was arrested by the NKVD on 22 October and died in custody on 9 November, probably tortured to death.

The Japanese took their own lessons. Their army studies called the 75th Regiment's attack the most famous Japanese night attack since the Russo-Japanese War, judged Soviet night security poor and Soviet grenades effective, and noted that the battalion had barely enough strength left to take the summit. In 1939, at Khalkhin Gol, the Kwantung Army fought the Red Army on a far larger scale and was beaten. After the war the Tokyo tribunal charged 13 senior Japanese with crimes against peace for starting the fighting at Lake Khasan.

Wargaming it

Lake Khasan gives two very different games on one small ridge. The night of 30–31 July suits company and battalion skirmish rules: one Japanese battalion forbidden to fire, wire to cut in the dark, dogs that can raise the alarm, about 300 defenders with machine guns and tanks dug in as pillboxes on a front barely 300 m wide and 300 m deep. Visibility of about ten metres, morale and the timing of Soviet reinforcements decide it. The attacker must take the summit before dawn and before Soviet trucks and tanks arrive from Shachaofeng; the referee can keep the Japanese ignorant of how many positions remain.

The August fighting is a regimental or divisional game at about an hour a turn. The Soviets have the numbers, the tanks, the aircraft and the guns, but come up one road along the lake shore, are forbidden to cross the border to outflank the hills, and must attack up steep, bare slopes from marshy ground. The Japanese have trenches, anti-tank guns, artillery on the Tumen islands and no air cover. Command friction is the Soviet player's real enemy: delays from fog, artillery not ready, units arriving late. Rules that let the Soviets attack piecemeal will reproduce 2 August.

What ifs: Blyukher allowed to cross the border and turn the ridge from Manchukuo; Tokyo releasing Suetaka's reinforcements or its aircraft; the ceasefire coming a day later or earlier.

Maps and pictures