The Most Decisive Battle of World War Two Was Fought Before the War Began

“It was not an especially large engagement by the standards of the war that was to start the next day. It produced only around a tenth of the combined German and Russian casualties later suffered at Stalingrad. It was not even a formal battle. In fact, the Japanese still refer to it as an ‘incident.’ Yet it decided World War Two and the fate of nations for at least the next half-century.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—9/3/2012—Journalists are always on the qui vive for the arresting headline and the offbeat story. They mistakenly believe that it interests the reader, whereas in most cases it interests only the writer.

But the story of Khalkhin Gol has to be an exception.

One day—just a single day—before Hitler invaded Poland to start World War Two, the war had already been decided.

On that day, a Soviet army in Mongolia inflicted a crushing defeat on a Japanese Manchurian army near the Halha River, or Khalkhin Gol.

It was not an especially large engagement by the standards of the war that was to start the next day. It produced only around a tenth of the combined German and Russian casualties later suffered at Stalingrad.

It was not even a formal battle. In fact, the Japanese still refer to it as an “incident.”

Yet it decided World War Two and the fate of nations for at least the next half-century.

Stop! That is obviously journalistic overstatement. The war against Hitler was decided by American industrial capacity and Russian blood respectively deployed and spilt from 1941 to 1945.

And if that capacity and that effusion of blood had not been sufficient, the American A-bomb would have finished the job in August 1945.

True enough. But recall that when Hitler launched his invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Japanese did not join him in a westward thrust from Siberia.

Nor did they ever attempt to assist the Germans, though there is no evidence that the racist Hitler greatly solicited their help.

Recall also that Hitler was stopped before the gates of Moscow in December 1941 by a Soviet counteroffensive made possible by the transfer to the west of the Soviet Siberian army.

That transfer was feasible only because Soviet spy Richard Sorge assured Stalin that the Japanese had been so affected by the defeat at Khalkhin Gol that they had no intention of taking on the Russians again.

In 1939, the Japanese warlords were convinced that they needed to take political control of areas rich in primary resources—presumably because of the looming threat of a US trade embargo.

They faced a choice: Attack the Soviets and grab Siberia, thereby securing Manchuria. Or go south and seize the Dutch East Indies, Burma and Malaya.

Khalkhin Gol made up their minds to pursue the southern strategy, even though that meant going to war with America.

Ergo, Khalkhin Gol had the twin result of helping to stop Hitler’s eastward march while convincing the Japanese to take preemptive action against the US by bombing Pearl Harbor.

That makes it a very decisive engagement indeed, absolving this writer (as well as the group of distinguished historians who have been making statements similar to those above for several years) of most, if not all, of the charge of journalistic overstatement.

PS For more on The Battle of Khalkhin Gol: http://siberianlight.net/khalkhin-gol-battle-nomonhan/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol; http://rt.com/news/khalkhin-gol-battle-anniversary/.